Shawn Rogers: May 2009 Archives

Bill Baker, CTO and Blake Cahill, SVP Marketing are here bright and early this morning to present Visible Technologies to a packed house here at the Boulder BI Brain Trust. At its simplest Visible is a SaaS based listening tool for companies to monitor the world of social networking to watch brand and gauge sentiment towards topics. The value is how a company then forms a strategy around the ability so see this conversation. Visible has collected 230M conversations and it grows by 1M a day they are running over 13 terabytes today with dramatic growth. I write a lot about my frustration with companies like United and Sears if these companies were actually dedicated to customer service and success they would engage solutions like Visible offers to learn how we all feel about them.

The technology side of Visible is interesting from the unstructured to structured side of things. I wonder when these types of solutions will be integrated into the world of conventional business intelligence solutions. They would add a ton of value to just about any business. The Visible SaaS platform offers a great feature called a response vault allowing a company to create approved and consistent response to issues uncovered in the social world. The solution is a comprehensive suite of solutions that provide layers of tools that enable a company to effectively manage and participate in the social graph of their brand. They focus on four main areas - Listen & Learn, Analyze & Understand, Engage, Integrate as mentioned it covers all the needs around this business challenge.

The suite is user friendly, well designed and seems to offer a deep array of the tools needed to help create success around the challenge of hearing and participating in the social conversation.

Bill Hewitt, President & CEO, Winston Chen, VP Strategy & Business Development and Stephen Pace, Sales Solutions Engineer joined us here in Boulder today to brief the "brain trust" on Kalido. Good news from them company at 100+ employees, 275+ implementations in 100 countries.

One of the Kalido value propositions is that they help IT and Business bridge the gap when it comes to the traditional IT driven model building. Their modeling tool does a solid job of speeding up what would otherwise be a long and arduous task. The interface makes it easier for both sides to address the governance issues, collaborate, and automate the overall process.

Its great to see that Kalido has made investments into domain specific features and expertise.  They have specialized features in place for Consumer Packaged Goods, Pharmaceutical, Insurance and Financial Services,
Manufacturing & Heavy Assets.

I've been briefed by Kalido many times and I still have to say that the best part is the demonstration of the software. I think they should lead with it and then follow up with the PowerPoint details. The biggest value that jumps out every time is how easy it is to use. The modeling tool is very easy to understand even if your a business person. You can clearly see the way it bridges the gap between the geeks and the executives.

Overall my impression of Kalido remains very positive. The core competencies include dual focus on the Data Warehouse with Governed DW and BI solutions along with Master Data Management solutions that focus on Master data and reference data governance solutions. The data modeling tool is a great cornerstone to these and really makes Kalido different from many others in the market.