Arthur Ritchie President and CEO of Sand Technology along with Linda Ahrens VP Global Alliances and Marketing are here in Boulder this morning. Sand is a software solution that is designed to keep ALL OF YOUR DATA in an instant near line, high-performance system that allows highly scalable analytics.
Arthur kicked things off discussing the The "Humpty Dumpty" enterprise data warehouse and challenging us with new ways to look at BI. Anyone who believes in a single version of the truth is crazy dictator according to Art and the point he makes is that the believing in the notion of "Single Version of the Truth" is the core of what restricts us from learning and deriving value from business intelligence. Art believes that what you really have is a series of boundary conditions and this is where the value can be found. The challenge is building a system that gives you comprehensive view and access to these boundary conditions. Along with preconceived ideas around the single version of the truth analytics are generally throttled or disabled because systems can't support exploratory business intelligence the IT team steps in to stop long queries or at best backlogs them. Sand sees these two areas as the niche where they can deliver great value to the enterprise.The ability to drill to the detail level on any and all data.
Sand/DNA solution sits between the Operating Systems collecting atomic level data before its transformed and loaded into the EDW. The DNA product also denormalizes the atomic data so that a user can understand and see what is available. The Sand/DNA Access solution sits on the top side of the EDW providing a platform to access the atomic level information that normally can't be retrieved from and EDW. This supports data mining, predictive analytics. As I listen to Art I was starting to think they are much like an analytic appliance but the difference is that the appliances can't or don't crunch atomic level data and can't support 100's of users at one time.
The ability to store atomic level information not only supports interesting BI and predictive analytic opportunities but it also severs as a great source for the auditing and data governance initiatives that many companies are attempting to solve. Additionally the ability not to load detail/atomic data in the EDW will reduce the cost involved with the system and eliminate some of the strain power users are already putting on the system.
It was a fun session, Thanks Art and Linda for joining us today!
