Results tagged “Business Intelligence” from Boulder BI Brain Trust Blog

Beautiful morning here in Boulder warm and sunny. Glad to have QlikTech here today. Anthony Deighton Senior VP of Products and Chief Strategist, Neil Florio Director of Marketing, John Trigg Global Product Manager joined us by phone. (Shame they were too busy to attend in person) and Brian Walh Sr. Sales Engineer and Tony Setter District Manager from the Denver market attended in person and seemed to enjoy meeting everyone.

The company was founded in 1993 and according to IDC was the world's fastest-growing BI Vendor in 2006, they have 11,400+ customers, 500,000+ users in 95 countries. 800 global partners. QlikTech aims to fill the need around simplicity and OLAP style powered reporting. They leverage in-memory technology coupled with processor power to drive performance. By storing the atomic data in memory calculating and aggregating on the fly. Many of the views are stored so they can be reused for others that ask the same questions of the system.

Development, Deployment Analysis and Collaboration are the steps that the QlikView solution takes and enables the user to control. The Analysis and Collaboration side is very easy to use and intuitive. Offers a wide range of dashboard options and configurations. The solution provides aggressive data compression so that everyone who is hitting the data can hit it at the same time. Version 9 of QlikView has real-time capabilities to make sure your data is up to the minute.

The Development and Deployment side of the solution is easier to use than many solutions I've seen but it still requires IT to get involved. I can see why the Data Admin's would like QlikView for how fast and easy it is to get data into the solutions and to leverage it. As the data becomes easier to get to the QlikTech solutions will need a governance side to control data, access and to insure that the users see data the same way. The deployment side is nice, you can deploy on mobile, cloud, On-premise or laptop.


You can find some very nice demo's on QlikView at http://demo.qlikview.com/

Now after 12+ years, Corda is here, strong, profitable, and growing.  Even more impressive, Corda is still innovating and they present more agile than earlier stage competitors.  At the core is a suite of tools that focus on visualizing business data from a variety of sources and delivering results to a broad range of platforms from browsers to mobile devices.  In fact, they will soon be announcing a dedicated iPhone application, around the “Corda Mobile” concept.  This application will deliver dashboard views specially designed for these devices (and the prototypes look good).     

Corda builds on top of existing BI architectures and BI applications (fill in the blank with all the B--- words in the space, and more…).  It was commented that part of what they do makes them like a web application framework for BI delivery, focused mainly on a dashboard style visualizations.  Those who commented, all agreed. 

As a company they have a solid customer base.  And in today’s economy, what is even more important is the well hedged portfolio of industries from private (transportation, retail, online business, telecommunications, banks, financial institutions, oil & gas, and manufacturing) as well as government (education, aerospace, federal agencies, state and local entities).  The list also includes international clients.  As a final note, they also partner with other companies in the space to expand their reach.

My concern with this model is the same as my concern with all players in this space (see the LyzaSoft blog entry).  How do we validate the data that we source - and more importantly - how do we reconcile the transformations (integrations, calculations, etc.) that we apply to this data?  Starting with my EDW focus, and further encouraged by the renewed focus on risk and compliance in 2009, I am concerned that our integrated data sources are directly traceable, that all transformations are auditable, and that the organization has a clear understanding of the data elements that they are working with (common and clear understanding of technical and business metadata, concise business glossary or MDM references, and generally a enterprise-wide common understanding of key business terms and metrics). 

In the end - and Corda (in delivering the dashboards and other end-user visualizations) is clearly the “end” of the BI framework - the result sets we are visualizing are presented to help us make decisions.  And these decisions are more and more “enterprise-wide” with cross-functional teams collaborating in the process.  While the user-defined flexibility (“easy”) is fantastic, the results need to be reconcilable, auditable, and comply with appropriate data governance initiatives.  Especially today. 

Of course dealing with this issue is not the sole responsibility of the tool, but as always, the responsibility lies with the broader “people, process and tools” mix.  For Corda, they do provide capabilities to capture, pool and present relevant metadata.  The charge for the rest of us, and the organization, is to manage the “people and process” components of these initiatives.

LyzaSoft is a compelling tool for an Analyst.  Placing the power to source data, visually transform it, and analyze it squarely in the hands of the analytical user.  Several user profiles were identified ranging from business analysts to more technical problem solvers.  LyzaSoft is a powerful tool for these users - and unlike the often free-form toolsets of the rogue analyst, it actually provides for traceability (as in auditable, repeatable, etc.). 

To be clear, I want this tool on my desktop.  With that being said, I think it is important to discuss the inevitable disclaimers.  Not anything to do with the tool itself, but rather concerning the deployment of this tool in your organization.  As we have heard perhaps too many times - with great power comes great responsibility.  Since LyzaSoft can exist outside of your enterprise data warehousing team and outside of your IT operations, the inherent risks relate to centralized controls, QA, data governance, and other procedural components that aim to assure consistent information exchange.  LyzaSoft is much less of a culprit in this arena (given the innate traceability) but the risks are not entirely alleviated.  And in fact, it will be difficult to manage the intersection of this tool with your enterprise metadata or your MDM initiatives.  These concerns however do nothing to sway me from my first point - I want this tool on my desktop.

So how do we balance our Analysts need for speed (and autonomy, control, flexibility, etc.) with the organizational need for standardization, controls, consistent data exchange and an enterprise view of data?  After all, we don’t want to take a step backwards and end up in the board room yet again with numbers that don’t match.  I submit that the answer is in how we incorporate this tool into the organization.  Analysts can, and should, be empowered to get their jobs done - and LyzaSoft will fit nicely in their tool bag.  But perhaps the product of this tool should be solely for the Analysts own consumption and, in general, not published or distributed to the broader pool of business users.  That is of course, as long as I am one of the Analysts that has the tool…

The July 25 meeting of BBBT focused on DataFlux. Presenting were Dan Soceanu, Product Marketing Manager, and Joe Rademacher, Senior Solutions engineer.

DataFlux is a leading provider of data quality (DQ) tools since 1997. Acquiring by SAS in 2000, they are operated as a separate subsidiary. Their competitors tend to be the high-end DQ vendors, such as IBM, Trillium, Informatica, and SAP Business Objects. The recent Gartner magic quadrant for DQ (6/4/08) moved DataFlux to the highest rating on Completeness of Vision, especially when compared with IBM. Anyone know why?

The business motivation for DataFlux customer is in three areas: risk mitigation, revenue optimization, and cost control. Joe shared that, when they are asked for help, it is usually for a specific problem, rather than a long-term strategy. He used a Data Governance Maturity Model to explain the real world trauma that most corporations go through in their struggle with DQ. View Maturity Model image here

The challenge is to respond to immediate biz problems while building infrastructure and especially evolve into a full data governance environment. The approach is to take the core DQ functions and package them into 'accelerators', which are services (SOA) that can be incorporated into other processes. Then, the accelerators form the base for their Master Data Mgt solution that is a complete bungle of data models and cleansing algorithms for products, customers, supplier and so on.

Reflection... DataFlux continues to be well positioned in a biz hot spot having preceived value to low-tech executive. In other words, dirty data costs real money! Their evolution from core DQ to accelerator services to MDM solution illustrates a decade of in-the-trenches experiences with tough customer situations. The challenge will be for DataFlux to evolve the next step into Data Governance (DG). Joe observed that customers usually consider DQ and DG to be separate issues. It seems to me that DQ and DG are tightly intertwined.

Ken Rudin, the CEO of LucidEra, presented to the Boulder BI Brain Trust last Friday, May 2, and what a presentatin it was. I certainly learned a lot about Software as a Service (SaaS) or the on-demand model for business intelligence. Is this fact or fiction? There can be no doubt that the on-demand model is alive and well. Good customer traction, funding from the VC community, innovative offerings -- all spell a good business model.

Some interesting tidbits from the presentation:

1. Ken emphasized that LucidEra is NOT a BI company. Sounds strange at first but he went on to explain that his customers are not IT implementers - they are sales or marketing VPs, directors, managers -- business users in other words. If his sales people comes in waving the BI flag, talking about data, reports, queries, etc., they would immediately get shuttled off to the IT department. Instead, their conversations focus on managing performance, tracking sales effectiveness, or monitoring revenue generation activities - these are what is important to the business, not terabytes of storage or whether the solution is MPP or not...

2. The core values of LucidEra come from this new way of thinking. The first one is Simplicity. Most BI environments are quite complex. Ken likens them (tongue firmly in cheek of course) to building a nuclear reactor just to get electricity. The on demand model removes all the complexity of gathering the data, integerating it, cleaning it up, and storing it from the customer. Now they can simply focus on the analysis of their buisness. The second value is Customer Adoption. The on-demand model by its nature must be very sensitive to the adoption of their services in the customer's business community. If the business community is not using their services, then they will not resubscribe to them - end of story. LucidEra works hard to demonstrate to their customers how they can benefit by usng more of the capabilities. Since they know exactly what services are being used, by whom, and how often, they have great insight into the customer's adoption of them. They also get immediate feedback regarding how easy their services are to use, what features are useful, and what features are not. The third value for LucidEra is Analytic Innovation - their sales model as mentioned is very different from the traditional on-premises one. Rather than focus on a complex and tool-based IT sale, LucidEra emphasizes a simple and solutions-based sale. The final value they embrace is Customer Success -- the bottom line is that they get immediate feedback in terms of the successful usage of their products by their customers. No usage equates to no subscrition. Hence their sensitivity and focus on customer success.

3. This lead to the last topic I wanted to cover -- Ken is very excited about LucidEra developing an online community of users so they can help each other. He commented that people don't know what they don't know. A community that discusses how they use their analytic services can educate each other and overcome this lack of knowledge. Ken wants LucidEra to be the catalyst for this. A worthy ideal indeed.

 If you want to hear more about these and other topics, please listen to the podcast I did with Ken. You can find it here.

 

Until next time... this is Claudia Imhoff.

Goodbye and good business!

Andy Palmer Co-Founder and Omer Trajman Field Engineer are here this morning. I've been waiting a long time for this one. Vertica has gotten lots of mainstream press from the weekly tech publications to the Wall Street Journal. They have taken their time coming to market but get tons of attention because Michael Stonebraker is a Co-Founder along with Andy.

They have put a very strong executive team together past Oracle, Ingres, DB2, Informix and Teradata executives. Vertica is an Analytic Database, has shared nothing column architecture, can be deployed in an appliance configuration, software only or in a cloud. My first surprise, today they have 50 paying clients that include Verizon, Tick-Store, JPMorgan, Comcast and Vonage. I'd love to give you performance details but so far I can't mention any due to NDA restrictions. They have been so quite with their marketing I wasn't aware they had such good traction.

Surprise number two is they are positioning themselves as a cost leader in the space and believe they are much less expensive than other companies offering solutions in the space. One of the other areas they are bringing value is time to implement where they feel they are much faster to production than others. Much of the technology behind the system was built from scratch and brings together features that have been in the market for a long time. Column Store Architecture, Compression, Query Optimized storage, high Availability, Concurrent load and query, simple DB design, scalable hardware. The value point here is that unlike others who add these features along the way the Vertica system was designed from the ground up to incorporate all of them.

Surprise number three, performance is not what they hang their hat on they focus more on solving the specific issues presented by the customer. Surprise number four, they have extremely cool technology built in at the record level that does make them different than other columnar database vendors.

This was a fun BBBT, Claudia Imhoff, Richard Hackathorn, Dan Linstedt, John Myers, Kym Wootton and Lu Kroeger were all in attendance. Thanks Andy and Omer.

Kim Stanick VP Marketing and Barry Zane CTO of Paracell are briefing the group today. The underlying theme is "its about time". I agree it is all about the time, time is what drives the need for analytics and time is critical to the value of analytics. The days of waiting 60 hours for a query result are well past us now. ParAccel is addressing the issue and sees the value in solving the time problem. ParAccel bring the following architectural highlights to the time problem.

• Fully Transactional DBMS
• Columnar Orientation
• Adaptive compression
• Shared-nothing, MPP design
• Parallel Loader
• High Availability w/performance
• CPU-based optimization
• tightly-coupled grid protocol

Interesting news from the briefing include their recent success with TPC-H benchmarks. Hitting the top of the list in runs for 100GB, 300GB and 1TB this past October. The interesting part for me isn't just the speed but the cost factor, further proof that appliances can impact your analytics from a hard cost perspective. The result of the benchmark puts the scaled queries per hour cost at $4.57 with the ParAccel solution versus the previous records from other companies that cost between $25 to as high as $60 per query hour.

Another great session today with a large turn out from the Boulder BI Brain Trust members.In attendance Ron Powell, Claudia Imhoff, Hans Hultgren, Richard Hackathorn, Lowell Fryman, Holli Arnett, Mike Brooks, Joyce Montanari, Lu Kroeger, John Myers, Steve Dine.

Kathleen Schaub VP of Marketing, Neil McGovern Strategy Worldwide Marketing, Lisa Hopkins Director, Product Marketing, Phil Bowermaster Worldwide Product Marketing Manager and Joydeep Das Sr. Product Manager all joined us here in Boulder for an in depth briefing of Sybase technology and solutions.

If you haven't looked at Sybase recently you probably should. If your suffering from a high level of query complexity, ad hoc queries, concurrent users, performance criticality and data volume issues Sybase might just be the answer for you.  Riding the wave of their first  +1bil dollar year and 70% license growth in 2007. They seem laser focused on performing in the areas of  reporting services, advanced analytics, enabling their clients to offer analytics as a service and real-time analytics.

This type of focus puts Sybase in the cross hairs of some pretty solid competitors as well as upstarts like the data warehouse appliance players and other who use compression, in memory and columnar processing. Sybase differentiates in the arena of concurrent users and price giving them a leg up in many circumstances.

I heard a lot of good things from Sybase today but I was especially impressed with their efforts in the real-time arena. The Sybase real-time analytics platform is very interesting. The ability for the solution to stream data into the system and feed both an in memory database providing real-time data analysis while it feeds the back side of the system in 10 second intervals to provide historical data available for further analysis is highly valuable for the financial services world and others in need of real-time analytics. They are early to market with this application and still have some tweaks to the process coming down the pike so look for great things from them in this space.

Overall, the time spent with Sybase was insightful and valuable. Thanks for coming to see us.

Shawn