Richard Hackathorn: February 2009 Archives

ChartSearch presented an overview of their company and product, with Chris Modzelewski, founder and CEO presiding. Chris summed up his product as the "Google for Data". Tagline is "better leverage available data throughout the enterprise". Chris has been working on product for three years and started in April to talk with clients. He has eight beta customers in pilot projects, some of which are close to production applications with ChartSearch.

The company is targeting enterprise IT shops and OEM partnerships with data providers and software analysis vendors. He is currently focusing on the latter with the ability to brand ChartSearch for those providers/vendors using Java web services.

Chris emphasized that his product complements (not replaces) traditional BI tools by extending data analytics to nontechnical business users.

Depending on data complexity, installation requires anywhere from two days to two weeks. In collaboration with the IT group, the relevant metadata is specified in the Data Search Markup Language (DSML) and is used to drive the search procedures and chart generation.

Chris gave a great demo of ChartSearch. It has nice features for translating confusing requests from a business user into precise queries to the database. It generates multiple interpretations, ranked in order of relevance, according to a confidential algorithm .
They are working with eight beta customers in pilot projects. The challenge will be to move them from pilot to production and start some revenue flowing to ChartSearch.

We ended with an in-dpeth discussion of business strategies about whether Chris should focus on partnering with SaaS vendors. Since these vendors already have defined the metadata level, the ChartSearch could be an easy enhancement for those SaaS tools.

ChartSearch is a company to watch as it matures its product and grows its customer base. It is a likely evolutionary step for traditional BI tools in furthering the pervasiveness of analytics throughout the enterprise.  

Actuate Corporation give us an update on their products and future trends, along with their new initiative into sustainability analytics. Presenting Nobby Akiha, Senior Vice President of Marketing, Kapil Kedar, Product Marketing Manager, Jeff Morris, Director, Product Marketing, and Mark Gamble, Senior Technical Marketing Manager.

The company is headquartered in San Mateo and has 4,400 customers across finance services (ouch!), government, health care, education and utilities. They generated $131M during FY08, of which $40M in licenses and $70M in maintenance. This is down from $141M the prior year.

Akiha gave an overview of the company, using this key slide showed the spectrum of products and services from Actuate. The lower left is BIRT (the plain free open-source version) that can be used by corporations or by software developers to offer commercial products. Next to the right, BIRT can be enhanced with Flash widgets, a for-fee product. Then to the right, Actuate offers the usual departmental and enterprise software.