Results tagged “analytics” from Boulder BI Brain Trust Blog

John Santaferraro is Director of Marketing Communications and Industry Marketing for HP and a long time industry leader has many friends in the industry and thats clearly illustrated by todays turnout at the BBBT. In attendance here in Boulder Claudia Imhoff, Lisa Reeves, Holli Arnett, Shawn Rogers, Richard Hackathorn, Dave Imhoff, Merv Adrian, Mark Madsen, Colin White, Steve Dine, Ron Powell and by phone Neil Raden, Jos Von Dongen, Dave Stoddard, Ronald Damhof, Mike Furguson and Mike Brooks. An awesome turnout for a great guy! John kicked things off covering the 3 pillars of the HP BI Solution strategy. 

Wow! big turn out this morning, representatives from the BBBT are tuning in from France, The Netherlands, UK and South Africa not to mention 14 of us here in Boulder and the US. Rick Glick VP of Technology and Architecture and Kim Stanick VP of Marketing have joined us today to help bring us up to date on the new things around ParAccel. For those of you not familiar with ParAccel they are a columnar based MPP database for data warehousing and analytics. 

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 BBBT pondered the past and future of the British firm, Kognitio, which has deep roots into the database community. In 1992 ex-Teradata people formed WhiteCross Systems, which merged with Kognitio in 2005. It currently employs over 70 persons at Bracknell, UK, building a group in Chicago to serve the US market, and has over 30 customers across several industries, like finance, retail, and telecom. We were briefed by Sean Jackson, VP Marketing, John Thompson, EVP and General Manager of US, and Roger Gaskell, Chief Technology Officer.

The focus is high-performance analytics at a low cost. The scalable MMP architecture executes on any collection of x86 blade servers under Linux interconnected with TCP/IP. There is no indexing and no materialized aggregations. The system is said to perform well with high data volumes and high workload concurrency.

A distinctive of Kognitio is that they have a full SQL functional row-oriented database engine that achieves good performance with complex query processing. This runs contrary to industry wisdom that only column-oriented engines can achieve such performance. The magic comes from: spreading data evenly across many nodes, extensive use of in-memory processing, generation of x86 machine code for query processing, mature cost-based optimizer, and smart pipelining of temp data among the nodes. The pipelining reminded me of the old Y-bus unleashed.

Another distinctive of Kognitio is that they have three ways of delivering their product/service. First, they licence their database as a normal software product. Second, they will sell a complete appliance as a hardware/software bundle. And third, they offer data warehousing as a service, hosted in their own data center and third-party data centers.

Now that is flexibility! Check them out! These brits have more to offer than Newcastle Brown.

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!

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