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Richard Hackathorn: August 2010 Archives

MicroStrategy Focuses on Enterprise Analytics

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MS logo.pngMicroStrategy presents today with Dan Kerzner, Senior VP for Mobile, and Doug Chope, Director of Product Management, as a business and technology strategies. Founded in 1989, MicroStrategy has been in the top vendors of enterprise BI tool suites. However, they have maintained their independence, having over a million business users of their product, 2,100 employees of which 20% are R&D. FY2009 revenue was $337M. $200M in cash with no debt. Several slides gave an overview of their customer base, which is quite extensive and worldwide.

We had an interesting discussion as to why MicroStrategy does not want to be acquired. Dan and Doug stressed their open systems strategy is best for their customers, since it gives customers the choice to move among a variety of alternative vendors for database, security, browsers, etc. An example of a customer who transitioned from Oracle to Teradata and was able to move several thousand MicroStrategy reports in three days. However, the bottom line is that Michael Saylor, Founder and CEO, owns 60% of the stock. So like SAS with Dr. Goodnight, MicroStrategy future will be determined by its founder, rather than a diverse Board of Directors.

MS dimension.pngDoug outlined the dimensions that their product line spans, across user scale, security, BI styles, data scale, distributed teams, and application quantity. Click on figure to the right to enlarge. Note the five styles of BI as: enterprise reporting, OLAP analysis, scorecards/dashboards, advanced analysis, and alerts/proactive notification ...all from a single unified architecture.

Doug continued with mobile BI apps as a new paradigm for BI analytics. They are seeing rapid transformation of using mobile apps in their customers. I downloaded the iPhone app for MicroStrategy - free with several nice demos. Doug made the point that there is one billion persons having PCs but there is five billion persons...implying that there is a huge leverage to drive costs down for smart phones. As BI display device, future value will come from integrating new functionality like: GPS location-aware, multi-touch (tap, pinch, swipe), sensors (accelerometer, speech, barcodes), and data capture via photos.

Good discussion on collaborative BI relative to MicroStrategy. And good demos of dashboards. See this set of demos here.

My Take... MicroStrategy is an oldie and a goodie! It is amazing that for 22 years they have endured and prospered and remained in the top 5 BI analytic vendors. They continue to be strong on innovation with cool technologies relevant to large corporations.

Pervasive Embeds new Data Integration Features

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Pervasive logo.pngPervasive Software is presenting with Mike Hoskins, CTO, Pervasive Software and General Manager, Integration Products, and Alison Raffalovich, Director of Pervasive DI Gartner Quad.pngCorporate Marketing and Communications.Not a classic DW vendor, but they have been a data integration vendor for 27 years. They started with Btrieve (now called Pervasive PSQL) and Data Junction (now called Pervasive Data Integrator) product. The company employs 240 persons with $47M revenue in 2010, 38 profitable quarters, and $40M in cash. Pervasive is shifting its business model from perpetual licenses to subscriptions. In the recent (November 2009) magic quadrant for Data Integration, Pervasive rubs shoulder with many of the big vendors. Click on figure for larger image.

Pervasive sources.jpgMike started with their data integration. As noted by @Rick345, Mike argued that "Pervasive has the ability to design and deploy anywhere... connect to everything and solve for every integration pattern". There is an explosion of data sources, such as Amazon Relational Data, plus application interfaces, such as SAS. See the figure for the spectrum of their universal connectivity. Mike continued with overview of their Data Profiler, Integration Hub, Data MatchMerge, and Data Quality. Mike mused, "The pending data avalanche is going to kill many of the traditional data integration infrastructures".

Pervasive DataRush Arch.pngUnder NDA, Mike outlined their future plans as a "complete redesign and recoding" of the current offerings. The new business development areas are Data Rush, Business Xchange, DataSolutions, and the Pervasive DataCloud. The Pervasive Data Rush is targeting the Big Data problem, such as those in a Hadoop environment. The architecture for Data Rush has a rich assortment of analytic modules, as shown in the figure. Mike sketches the future as "aggressive use of parallelism to leverage multi-core servers with in-the-small thread-level coding."

When discussing their cloud solutions, Mike is hearing from Pervasive customers, "Our internal IT group is terrible, hard to work with, unresponsive and unsympathetic to our problems". Hence, ease to deploy solutions, like the Pervasive DataCloud, would be of value.

My Take...

Pervasive has come a long way over 28 years since the Btrieve days. They have low visibility in the BI/DW market primarily because of the traditional OEM embedded product channel. As a financial stable company, they are moving ahead into new independent business ventures, capitalizing on the global business needs for data integration.
   

 

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