Results tagged “Data warehouse” from Boulder BI Brain Trust Blog

Michael Whitehead CEO and Founder, Mark Budzinski VP & GM USA, Chuck Kelley Senior Data Warehouse Architect and our good friend Scott Humphrey from Humphrey Strategic Communications have joined us in Boulder today and the BI Trust is present in force with members from South Africa, Netherlands, UK and the USA all attending today. A little background on WhereScape, the company started in 2004 they have 350 clients and the largest concentration is US based firms which speaks well of a New Zealand based company.The mantra at WhereScape drives the creation of their software.

"Pinned to the wall in our founder's office is an old piece of paper.  It's faded and tatty, but for us at WhereScape it's a kind of manifesto.

Scribbled on this paper are the four things that WhereScape founder Michael Whitehead said he never wanted to hear again from a customer..."

One of the compelling advantages to a product like WhereScape is its ability to to do rapid delivery, "rapid marting" or even throw away data marts. The ability to prototype as your needs evolve is generally a costly and time consuming effort that a solution like WhereScape can produce positive ROI on its first project. While it wasn't necessarily designed for prototyping its a great advantage of the product. Bottom line WhereScape is designed to build data warehouses faster than the competition.

During the demo I felt the interface was quite intuitive and simple especially for a data warehouse professional. It offers built in best practices and a ton of built in time savings suggestions and guidelines. But as most DW experts will want is the opportunity to write SQL from scratch and add custom rules and processes. It tracks changes and creates documentation automatically on the fly. (by the way its big fun watching an expert like Chuck Kelley run a demo like this he's way smarter than me!)

The need to consolidate DW's, create new versions, support evolving BI needs, support new applications are all valid reasons to look at a solution like WhereScape the power is in the speed and ease of use.

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.