10 Questions with Bruce Armstrong, CEO Kickfire

When you talk with a person who has worked for successful companies and spent time as a venture capitalist sitting on multiple boards, you tend to actively listen to the stories and glean what insight you can. When I spoke with Bruce Armstrong, CEO of Kickfire, it was such a conversation.

Bruce is looking to take Kickfire and disrupt the data warehouse market. Their product, as Bruce put it, helps bridge MySQL (which doesn't understand data warehousing) with data warehousing (which doesn't understand open source). He is now in the midst of a David and Goliath battle with Teradata -- his former employer.

Question: Hi Bruce. Care to describe this battle with Teradata?

Answer: Actually, Tom, we believe the battle is less with Teradata’s existing high-end data warehouse business and more for the vast, under-served data warehouse “mass” market out there. As such, we don’t plan on taking the battle directly to Teradata or anyone else, but rather create a new market by providing affordable, easy-to-deploy data warehouse and data mart appliances for the mass market. The mass market for data warehousing includes rapidly growing small & medium businesses as well as departments in larger organizations who simply can’t afford either their own Teradata machine or in a lot of cases even the charge-backs from central IT to time share on a Teradata machine. So, we hope to be complementary to Teradata, but realize there may be some skirmishes for budget dollars in the market today!

Question: You started as employee #16 at Teradata who boasts Walmart as a customer. Was that your start that brought you to running Kickfire today?

Answer: Yes, I was at Teradata for 15 years, Tom. I worked my way up from programmer to President after we went public and were acquired by NCR/AT&T. I spent almost 10 years in the field working with customers – including Walmart – so I developed a pretty good idea of what they are looking for at the high end. After Teradata, I was GM of the Server Group at Sybase where one of the products I launched was Sybase IQ, the first column-store database on the market. Later, I was EVP of Sales & Marketing at Broadbase – the second column-store database on the market and a pioneer of data marts. Since then, I have been involved in doing due diligence for a lot of the data warehouse startups, including Netezza, Greenplum, and Vertica.

Question: What did you learn from Teradata back then that you are applying to Kickfire today?

Answer: While I learned many things at Teradata that are applicable to Kickfire, the key concept for me was just how different the data warehousing high end is from the mass market. At the high end, once you’re able to break into the market with a new approach, it quickly becomes less about technology and more about services and support. Large customers just simply demand more hand holding. In the mass market, it’s just the opposite. Customers in the mass market expect the product to be highly packaged – easy to buy, install, and manage. They simply can’t afford lots of services and support, so the product needs to deliver high performance in a plug-and-play way.

Question: You have years of history in the data warehouse industry. Care to explain what makes you think the data warehouse industry needs changing?

Answer: While I believe every sector of the data warehouse market is looking for more performance, faster deployments, and lower cost, our goal at Kickfire is not necessarily to change the data warehouse industry but rather to enable more people in the market to take advantage of the benefits that come from data warehousing. Again, we’re going after an under-served market with rapidly growing small and medium sized businesses and departments in enterprises that simply can’t afford Teradata or Netezza. The change that’s required to enable the mass market is to get high-end performance out of a mass-market machine. Kickfire achieves this through our patented parallel-processing SQL chip. In a single chip, we are able to get the performance of dozens of general purpose CPUs. So, in the same way that NVIDIA has radically changed the dynamics of the graphics industry by encoding the graphics processing language in silicon, Kickfire has the same opportunity in the data warehouse industry.

Question: There have been recent acquisitions. Sun purchased MySQL. Then Oracle purchased Sun. Should the MySQL community be concerned?

Answer: We do not think so. We believe that with Solaris, Java, and MySQL, Oracle now has the kind of assets they will need to truly make Microsoft worry. With MySQL, Oracle will finally be able to undercut Microsoft as well as to dominate the high end in databases. As such, we think Oracle is going to continue to invest in MySQL. In fact, Oracle has already proven to be a good steward for InnoDB, the most popular MySQL storage engine they bought several years ago.

Question: About Kickfire, how does this chip technology bridge MySQL with data warehousing?

Answer: MySQL has become the de facto standard for online businesses by virtue of its open source business model and the fact that it has increasingly become production-ready for transaction processing applications. For data warehousing applications, though, MySQL remains very primitive. As such, customers struggle with database volumes as small as 50GB when it comes to reporting and analytics. The primary technical issue with MySQL regarding data warehousing is that MySQL does not have any query parallelization capabilities. This is where Kickfire comes in: using MySQL’s pluggable storage engine API, Kickfire takes over a query from MySQL and provides parallel-processing with the SQL chip allowing queries to run 10x – 1000x faster.

Question: Are you getting any response from the MySQL or data warehouse communities? Are they seeing potential benefit?

Answer: Yes! We have a large and rapidly growing pipeline of opportunities in the MySQL community. One of our early customers, Mamasource, has been using MySQL for years to drive their online community website. However, when it came to analyzing the clickstream data about their community in order to improve the user experience and increase ad revenue, MySQL hit the wall at less than 30GB of data. With Kickfire, Mamasource is now able to run their queries on average 20x faster and up to 600x faster for complex queries. More importantly, Mamasource can now scale their data warehouse to over 300GB, which allows them to increase from just one month of data to a full year.

Question: It's hard to ignore Microsoft. How does Microsoft with SQL Server fit in the Kickfire world view?

Answer: Microsoft and Oracle are the predominant databases in the mass market today. As MySQL continues to penetrate the market (at a rate of 70,000 downloads a day, by the way), Kickfire will be brought into more and more Microsoft and Oracle shops. As such, one could imagine us building more specific features to co-exist with those databases in addition to MySQL.

Question: You spent time as a Venture Capitalist. We won't hold that against you but what are your take-aways from being a VC?

Answer: My time as a venture capitalist was really more about board work than investing. As an operator, the VC firm I was with was interested in my ability to help identify interesting spaces, provide input on business plans and teams, and then work with portfolio companies from a board perspective in order to help generate value for shareholders. A lot of what I did was to dive deep into each function (sales, marketing, development, etc) of the portfolio companies and provide input to the boards (including the CEO’s) on where things could improve. Having served on 20+ boards, I got a pretty good idea of what works and what doesn’t work in start-ups and rapidly growing companies. The lessons I learned were really quite simple:

1. make sure you have a big market opportunity;
2. understand very clearly who your customer is and why they should buy from you;
3. build a very high quality product;
4. regularly assess your market position and look for ways to change the game in your favor;
5. don’t be afraid to tell the truth about the business – there’s always more than one way to create a market leader.

Question: It’s been a pleasure talking with you Bruce. Do you have any additional links or information about Kickfire you want to share?

Answer: Thank you – the pleasure’s all mine. Please come visit us at www.kickfire.com!

10 Questions with Mark Windrim

The "data warehouse for anyone who needs it" has gone open source.  I previously talked with Miriam Tuerk, Infobright’s CEO, when the company launched.  Recently I spoke with Mark Windrim, VP of Community for Infobright, who is at the helm promoting their open source data warehouse, Infobright Community Edition (ICE).  Mark, as I discovered, has a history of spearheading initiatives from their infancy.

In the 90s, Mark started a community called MAGIC while working at Apple Computer. MAGIC grew quickly into one of the largest ISPs serving the Toronto, Canada region. At that time MAGIC was the largest Macintosh user group in the world. He left to join Newstar Technologies in 1996 (where he met Miriam). Newstar evolved and became BCE Emergis.

Now his focus is set squarely on building an open source community for Infobright. It won't be easy. Starting a community in an established company with an existing product - a paid product at that – can be even more challenging.

Question: So Mark, let's get right to it. Why did Infobright decide to go open source?

Answer: As you may know, Infobright built its technology underneath MySQL so we have always had open source roots. Open source has always been part of our plan. In terms of timing, we wanted to prove out our technology with early customers before releasing an open source version. We wanted to make sure it was highly scalable, easy to download and implement, and robust - not an immature project. We see a large untapped opportunity in the market to bring an ultra low-cost, easy-to-use data warehouse to many companies who don’t have the big budgets and resources needed to implement traditional solutions. Open source is the best way to enable them to try it.

Question: What does your community ecosystem look like today?

Answer: We’ve got our main infobright.org site that contains information about ICE. It supports a Wiki and forums where users can mingle and get support directly from Infobright and other community members. We have a great relationship with MySQL/Sun and continue to work closely with them in supporting the open source data warehousing community with ICE. Additionally, we are building partnerships with many organizations. Today, those partners include Pentaho, Jaspersoft and Talend, and we work with their communities in addition to our own.

Infobright also started to build out our integration communities through relationships with OpenBI in Chicago and Lincube in Stockholm, Sweden. Many more are to come. Both OpenBI and Lincube have extensive experience in implementing BI Solutions with open source offerings.

Question: What is the planned direction for your new open source community over the next few years?

Answer: We will be adding a great deal of educational content about data warehousing. The Infobright software itself will be enhanced and updated on a monthly basis. Since the ICE launch, we have already added a 32-bit version of the product and a new release has been posted to the community.

The goal is to create an environment where people can go to be introduced to data warehousing, as well as receive help both from Infobright and the community itself. We’ve begun offering free webinars as an introduction to data warehousing, and the response (and attendance, I might add) has been very good. Many of our community members are turning to us because their current platform is no longer able to meet their requirements, and they’re starting to build data warehouses as a result. Normally that is a very expensive proposition but open source, and ICE, has made it available to the masses. We want to be that go-to location when individuals and businesses need to know how to build these systems.

Infobright will also be adding content about implementing an open source data warehouse through support of our partners. We’re already moving down that path and recently announced an open source bundle with Jaspersoft. Shortly you will see more of this as we try and make the on ramp to open source data warehousing as easy as possible.

Question: What challenges have you encountered starting an open source model within a company selling a paid product?

Answer: We had to engage the entire Infobright team in the vision of a different kind of company. Everyone’s job was going to change in some way and the venture would only be successful with 100 percent employee participation. To be honest, that education process was fairly complex. We implemented a comprehensive plan for the entire company over six months to ensure that everyone was on the same page, and that we had everything absolutely ready. We also researched other open source projects – both successful and unsuccessful ones to understand the best practices of open source. Those learnings have impacted everyone in some manner and through them we have developed guidelines for all to follow.

Question: Infobright's open source database was released in September 2008. So far, what has been the response?

Answer: Response to Infobright’s open source announcement has been incredible! Immediately after launch it became apparent that the community wanted a 32-bit version of ICE, even though we had previously thought that the software needed more memory in the form of a 64-bit version. We responded immediately by offering a 32-bit version, and it quickly became the hottest download on the site. Infobright is also receiving reports from community members that they are using ICE in ways that we never would have thought was a great fit for us, but the sheer volume of people using the platform is giving us some fantastic new insights into where we need to focus our future efforts. I don’t think there is a day that goes by where there isn’t an “oh wow” comment coming from a community member that loves ICE. Now the community is asking us for Windows support, so you’ll be seeing that coming down the pipe shortly.

Question: How has the open source initiative affected Infobright as a company?

Answer: As I mentioned earlier, the way we do virtually everything has changed. Infobright.org community members commenting on code, or recommending new features, has a direct impact on our product roadmap. With many more people using Infobright’s software, we are discovering new ways people can benefit from its use not previously considered. For example, we are now looking into use cases that didn’t make sense to us six months ago - such exploration is a direct result of community members having an impact on the organization. From a business perspective, the last six weeks has been a hockey stick in terms of number of new customers and revenue. By the end of Q1, we expect to have surpassed most, if not all, of our competitors in terms of number of customers using our product. And more users result in a better product – we aspire to deliver the best product in the market!

Question: Has the direction of Infobright changed as a result of being an active part of the open source community?

Answer: Yes, absolutely. The expectations of the open source user are different than that of the commercial one. The open source user demands from a technical perspective are very high – you can’t hide issues and weaknesses; your bug list is entirely public. They’re doing a phenomenal amount of testing and performance stress testing. All these insights benefit every part of Infobright as we add new features to ICE. Such feedback is even changing the types of webinars we present, which user groups on which we focus, and what features we add to the product. We also closely monitor a variety of metrics in order to determine the best ways to support the Infobright.org community.

Question: There is probably the value proposition of lower cost, less implementation time, and less maintenance effort. However, can an organization really run an enterprise-wide data warehouse on open source?

Answer: Every aspect of a data warehouse infrastructure can utilize open source technologies. A company can utilize Linux as the operating system and integrate with open source ETL tools like Talend or Kettle (Pentaho). Many open source platforms will use their own home grown ETL processes built upon Python, Perl, or Ruby (or C/C++, for that matter). The data warehouse can be built upon ICE, and users can use BI tools like Jaspersoft or Pentaho. Support is readily available for purchase or for free through community forums. Every one of these platforms is extremely robust and stable. There is no reason that an organization could not run their data warehouse using open source technologies.

And businesses are recognizing this. Open source BI is a fact of life in enterprises across industry. A recent Gartner survey highlighted that by the end of this year 69 percent of enterprises surveyed either plan to have implemented and be using open source databases. And in the area of BI tools, the number is 34 percent (a 100 percent growth over the previous year). These statistics were gathered before the recent economic downturn. Now, companies are even more pressed to find the fastest and most cost effective way to deliver BI and data warehousing solutiuons to their businesses – and that way is open source.

Question: What is the benefit to your partners and developers of being a part of Infobright's open source community?

Answer: In addition to the obvious and huge benefit to end users, the data warehouse is a key enabler of many enterprise applications. As such, our partners and developers will be able to achieve great benefits to their businesses and products thru integration with Infobright. Now organizations can accelerate their business by reducing the cost and time required for the data warehouse component and focusing their value on the application. Additionally, our partners and developers not only support our community, but they cross pollinate each other’s communities as well. With open source, there is much more willingness among partners to support each other.

Question: It’s been a pleasure talking with you Mark. Do you have any additional links or information about Infobright's open source community you want to share?

Answer: We really encourage people to get involved in our forums (www.infobright.org/Forums). There is a vast amount of information about ICE available there and we really appreciate reports on how people are using ICE. We’d also encourage people to look at Pentaho, Jaspersoft and Talend.

10 Questions with Glen Rabie

Being in the finance industry may seem boring to many but in Glen Rabie's case it gave him a unique perspective on the challenges a large financial company was having with their information.

Then a life changing event inspired him to become an innovative entrepreneur. Glen founded a company called Yellowfin where they are all about making it easy for people to get access to information.

Question 1: Hi Glen. So what motivated you to do something about improving the BI industry?

Answer: The light went on whilst working on a large data warehouse project for a global financial institution. The project, budgeted at $30M, only rolled out 300 licenses of the BI tool to an organization of 50,000 employees. This is where we saw the opportunity. Reduce the complexity and cost of deploying BI so that every person that needs access to data and analysis, to do their job effectively, can do so.

Question 2: Let's talk about the market. You had an interesting take on the recent acquisitions of Cognos, BO, and Hyperion. What should we expect to see from them with innovations?

Answer: The acquisitions and the high multipliers paid for them put the new owners in a delicate situation. Their primary concern will be to generate a return on their investment, which to do so will mean that additional investment in those products is likely to be stymied. What we have seen since the acquisitions is a greater focus on rationalization of product set rather than news of product improvements. I think this is what we can continue to expect in the short to medium term.

Question 3: Has Cognos, BO, and Hyperion already won the BI tools market? Is there room for new products?

Answer: The top 5 players only own 70% of the market. This compared with most IT markets, such as the database market, can be considered to be highly disaggregated. As for the remaining 30% this is the growing segment. The BI landscape is changing from the traditional high cost but smaller power user deployments to mass deployments. I do not believe that BO, Cognos or Hyperion have the business model to support this change, both in terms of pricing and deployment complexity. It is this which is creating the new opportunity for vendors of easy to deploy, price scalable and browser based solutions.

Question 4: Interesting that BI doesn't have a gorilla in the market. How does that affect our customers?

Answer: In reality BI tools are a critical piece of IT infrastructure. Making a strategic choice is crucial since not all BI tools are a fit for all business scenarios. Without a Gorilla in the market I think it forces customers to evaluate solutions and make business / technical decisions based on their needs. If a gorilla exists then there is a tendency towards ‘me to’ buying behavior. So the current state of play is actually good for customers.

Question 5: You think that BI is complicated but is making the tools easier to use the solution?

Answer: It is part of the solution. There are aspects that will continue to be challenging – not matter the size of deployment you still have to invest in the design of and build the back end processes to support front end analysis. So in terms of ROI the more users of your BI solution the better. Having easy to use tools that can be rolled out with little to no training to many, who then in turn utilize the BI infrastructure to drive business benefit is key. This is where Yellowfin focuses its efforts – it is not just about being easier to use per se, but also easier to deploy (via a browser), easier to administer and manage security etc.

Question 6: The BI industry promotes methodology for an enterprise view and consolidating across the enterprise (e.g. customers across marketing, sales, finance). Does this make sense for the management team?

Answer: Yes and No. The reality is that even in Global organizations Senior Management and the executive team are primarily responsible for and remunerated on their performance within their area of the business. Consolidating data, such as a single view of the customer may have little to no actionable impact for these Managers (Great for analytical Marketing and Customer relationship Managers).

However, for management having a single consolidated view of business performance is critical. The data may exist in data silos but the delivery and presentation may well be consolidated to provide a global view of the organization. This is a large distinction – consolidation of data versus consolidation of presentation.

Question 7: Where are you positioning Yellowfin in the market?

Answer: Yellowfin is positioned as a viable alternative to the traditional vendors – Cognos, Business Objects, Hyperion etc. Our focus though is purely on the presentation layer. We are not building a BI stack. There are plenty of great specialized BI components for ETL, Budgeting and Forecasting which is not our area of specialization. So for we are driven by developing very easy to use presentation layer which can be deployed for 100s and 1000’s of users. It is in this space that we excel.

Question 8: Should learning to use a BI system be as quick and simple as, say, CRM or even Google?

Answer: Yes – for too long there has been this aura surrounding BI that it is a hugely complex undertaking, but let’s be honest with ourselves – when it boils down to it BI is just charts and tables. Well Ok maybe a bit more complex but the mind set has to change, from being a hugely difficult task to making it easy. End users are becoming more analytical and demanding greater access to data - going forward embedded BI applications are going to be seamless to the end user. They will use these tools almost without being aware of them. For companies are not going to have the time or the capability to train the vast majority of day-to-day users in how to use their BI tools – they will have to be easy and intuitive to use.

Question 9: Where do you envision the BI market going over the next 5 or even 10 years?

Answer: he biggest change in the BI market will be the emergence and dominance of Embedded BI. BI as a standalone application is going to be a very small segment of the market.

Embedded BI is needed to support the 1000’s of organizational information stakeholders. Process oriented workers and customers want access to BI at the point when they need it to complete their tasks within the application that they are using for transactional purposes – they do not want to access an alternate application for their reports and data. It is this area of embedded BI that is really going to make BI pervasive, bite size, tailored to the business process and rich in collaborative functionality.

Question 10: Excellent talking with you Glen. Do you have any additional links or information about Yellowfin you want to share?

Answer: Thanks Tom, it’s been a pleasure. If you want to find out more then go to www.yellowfin.bi.

10 Questions with Simon Tucker and Ron Dimon

Before the Strategy Maps, metric stop lights, and planning/forecasting models, organizations focus on setting their strategy. Of course the meaning of strategy means something different for every organization (Mintzberg's 5P's of Strategy).

However having a formal process is key. Even more important is executing on the strategy. While talking with Simon Tucker (CEO) and Ron Dimon (COO) of Business Foundation, they share how they work directly with senior executives using a tangible, interactive methodology to help management execute on their strategy.

And these guys have experience to share previously holding senior level mgmt positions at CSG, Adaytum, Hyperion and Deloitte. So I want to share their insights because I believe they are onto something that can help many organizations.

Question 1: Hi Simon and Ron. Why do you feel organizations need the Business Foundation methodology?

Answer: Hi Tom, thanks for taking the time to talk with us. Many organizations, in our experience, have a major disconnect between their strategic objectives and what they actually measure, monitor, and plan for. They need a way to see what the true drivers of value are, spread-out across the entire enterprise. They’re tired of all the information silos they’ve built and use us to help them create and validate a roadmap to bring together the people, processes and technologies that will deliver improved performance.

Question 2: How does your previous experience at Deloitte and Hyperion support executive teams when discussing strategy?

Answer: Our company has experience dealing with C-level executives across almost every industry: from Retail, Manufacturing, and High-Tech through Non-Profits, Higher Ed, and Government. And it’s very interesting – even though strategies are certainly tied to industries, we’ve found identical problems across all industries, including things like lack of visibility into areas of the business that matter, a lack of understanding how pulling a lever in one area of the business affects outcomes in another area, and one of the big ones, not having a common business language which hinders making repeatable, fact-based decisions.

Question 3: Do organization need help bridging the gap between business and IT, seriously?

Answer: We hear it all the time! IT uses us to drive-out requirements from business functions (Marketing, Sales, Operations, HR, and so on) since we’re able to have the strategy & business conversation, and the business functions use us to help IT understand their problems and the impact those problems have on performance and results. There is much debate these days about the alignment gap between IT and the business; there are dozens of books that try to address this gap (“I.T. Wars” by Scott, “The IT Value Stack” by McCormack, and “Geek Gap” by Pfleging to name just a few). A lot of people talk about it, we actually have a proven methodology to bridge the gap.

We become IT’s “True North” – the long-term solution vision into which they are implementing short term initiatives, and each of our recommendations is validated and justified by the sponsoring business unit, so the entire business has a common solution vision (not one for IT and one Marketing and one for HR and so on).

Question 4: Would you agree, executing on strategy should include processes AND technology?

Answer: Definitely. In fact, when we connect strategy to execution, we focus on the intersection of people (and their role in the organization), process, technology, and data. We also add another dimension of strategic ‘enablers’ to the conversation. This includes the concepts of depth (how far down into the details do you need visibility), horizontal alignment (among the business functions), accountability, and compliance.

Question 5: Without giving away your corporate IP, how do you have conversations on strategy with senior executives? Any special tools?

Answer: That's what makes us unique. In two hours, with no PowerPoint, no laptops or projectors, we have a very rigorous interaction with one or two executives at a time (sometimes we can make three work). The interaction is a business conversation that takes what's already in the executive’s head, his or her unique perspective on the business and what drives value, and puts it all onto one sheet of paper. The 'special tool' is the sheet of paper. We start with our Periodic Table of Business™ database (with over 1,500 KPIs, metrics, measures, and processes – organized by industry and business function) which generates a baseline picture of the business as a matrix: functions and layers. We then tailor the sheet to fit the individual client before we get into the first meeting. So the executive sees their company laid out in a way that makes documenting what’s in their head very simple. And it invariably leads to new insights for the executive. We even had one CEO tell us "it was like being on the psychiatrist’s couch for 2-hours!"

Question 6: Can you help explain why there are so many acronyms for performance management (i.e. BPM, EPM, CPM, xPM)?

Answer: Lee Geishecker of AMR Research coined the term "Corporate Performance Management" in 2001 when she was with Gartner. It was the confluence of business planning with reporting, business intelligence, balanced scorecards and other areas. Hyperion, right after the Arbor acquisition, adopted this concept by bringing together their analytic applications (planning and financial consolidation) with their OLAP engine (Essbase) and later Business Intelligence (from the Brio acquisition). They chose the term "Business Performance Management" to extend the concept out of head-office ("corporate") and into the lines of business. It's a bit unfortunate that there was confusion between that BPM and the existing Business Process Management acronym. Cognos was hot on Hyperion’s heels and kept Gartner's CPM acronym. From there evolved Deloitte's IPM (Integrated Performance Management) and others. Today Oracle and SAP have decided on Enterprise Performance Management to extend the scope even further. To avoid the confusion, we’ve been calling it xPM, the "x" can be any letter you want – the acronym isn’t as important as the value proposition of end-to-end management of performance and getting from strategy to sustainable, predictable execution.

Question 7: Would you say "what-if" modeling is part of Business Intelligence or do you see "what-if" analysis done differently in organizations?

Answer: Business Intelligence has traditionally meant operational and financial monitoring and analysis. xPM (or EPM, BPM, CPM if you like) includes the "what if" modeling component and blends it with BI. So now what matters is that you can model an infinite number of scenarios (what happens to cross-sell and cash flow if I divest this business? What happens to customer acquisition rate if I invest more in sales training?). We see some organizations limited in their what-if modeling and analysis by their systems – some use their ERP for this and get stopped very quickly. This is where xPM on top of ERP makes sense.

But even more importantly, are they modeling and analyzing the right things in the first place? Companies should be modeling and analyzing the key drivers of the business that can deliver the most material margin, revenue, cash flow, market share, or whatever their strategic imperatives dictate.

Question 8: I've seen many organizations with planning cycles that execute on the plan but don't take the time to reforecast. I think you would call this the opposite of "The Learning Organization"?

Answer: Close. It goes beyond re-forecasting. We think organizational learning happens when you not only go back and re-forecast (and/or use a rolling forecast), but you also capture the underlying drivers that caused the shortfall or exceeding of the target. Then make sure those drivers are plugged into your models along with the assumptions and constraints for each driver. Making your models smarter and connecting them to your plans and forecasts gives you better predictability (forecast accuracy, for example) in the business.

Question 9: Would you recommend your methodology for high growth industries and organizations that constantly go through change for competitive adjustments?

Answer: Yes, certainly. The companies that get the most value from our method are those that want to make sure they're measuring, monitoring and planning for things that can have the most impact in their business. They want to leverage their investments in IT, ERP, and performance management systems. They want a way to prioritize initiatives that are in line with their strategy. It's always about the right balance. For high-growth industries, it’s about the balance between expanding scope, geographies, and markets without sacrificing quality, margin, and cash flow. For companies that need to be agile enough to respond to competitive pressures, it's about the balance between innovation (pricing, product, and business model innovation) and standardization (in processes, systems, and brand).

We also recommend our method for organizations that are facing increased pressure from the recent economic downturn. You may not be immune to changes in the economy, but you can strive to outperform your competitors. So are you modeling price and price mix? Are you forecasting average selling price? Are you performing profitability analysis by customer and product? And of all your IT initiatives, which should have the highest priority?

Question 10: Excellent talking with you both Simon and Ron. Do you have any additional links or information about Business Foundation you want to share?

Answer: Thanks for taking an interest in our company, Tom. Readers can find out about us at Business Foundation and can read about our take on xPM, strategy to execution, IT/business alignment, and other topics on our blog (http://businessfoundation.typepad.com/).

10 Questions for Miriam Tuerk

It has been said by many, including Gartner and Forrester, that the next big innovation for BI & DW will most likely come from the data warehouse side. Sure Visualization is a hot topic lately but the "pain points" for many clients are on the back-end.

After speaking with Miriam for a few minutes, she mentioned their tool produces results from "three billion rows of data and resolved queries in seconds". So she caught my attention. And when Miriam Tuerk, CEO of Infobright, mentions a client roster of the likes of the Royal Bank of Canada, Xerox, and TradeDoubler, you know they are onto something.

Our conversation continued as we discussed Infobright's innovative solution, which I'm sharing with you.

Question 1: Hi Miriam, let’s start with your statement “Research shows that the volume of the world's data approximately doubles every three years... 92% of new information is stored on hard-disks." Do you think Infobright can help organizations analyze data faster in a more flexible way?

Answer: We have proved it at our customer sites. Our customers have wrestled with the problem of how to extract valuable information from the huge volume of data they collect. They know, as we do, that being able to quickly access key information about their business or their customers can be the difference between business success and business failure. That is why recent studies confirm that Business Intelligence is the #1 investment area for CIO’s today. Infobright designed an analytic data warehouse solution from the ground up specifically designed to provide fast answers to ad hoc, complex analytic queries without burdening IT with lengthy, resource-intensive projects.

Question 2: Okay, let's get right to the heart of Infobright's business. Why do I need your DW solution when I know I can already build dimensional models, cubes, reports, etc?

Answer: Three reasons – time, money, and the unknown. Given enough time and money, IT can develop a system perfectly designed to answer any question quickly – as long as they know the question. In today’s changing business world, however, business people don’t know in advance all of the questions they will need answers to in the future. They want the answers today, but most systems require a lot of manual work on the part of IT and database administrators to set up and maintain environments each time the business users want to perform new and different analytics on their business. Today, providing fast access to massive amounts of data requires a lot of IT resources and time. Infobright’s solution eliminates all of that work by IT, and doesn’t require buying lots of servers and storage as other products do. Instead, we developed a simple but very powerful solution that provides business users access to all of the data they need to get fast answers to unpredictable questions.

Question 3: How did you and Infobright get started? Was it a grass-roots entrepreneurial effort?

Answer: Infobright was born out of pioneering work done by a group of internationally recognized mathematicians in the emerging science of Rough Set Mathematics. They realized that they could use information about the data itself to quickly provide answers to complex queries, rather than require IT to do extensive work up front or rely on brute force from massive amounts of hardware. Seeing the benefits of this approach, RBC Capital and Flybridge Capital Partners (formerly IDG Ventures) funded the company and brought in an experienced management team to turn raw technology into industry-leading products and services. Over the past year we have expanded the capabilities of our software while growing our customer base and establishing Infobright as an emerging player in the market. For example, Infobright is the first analytic data warehouse provider to be named a MySQL Certified Storage Engine Partner. The combination of Infobright’s solution and MySQL provides organizations an analytic data warehouse that delivers unprecedented scalability, performance and ease-of-use.

Question 4: Where do you envision the DW market going, especially with recent consolidation of BI vendors?

Answer: In the “old” days – the 1990s, which is really not so long ago – smaller volumes of data, smaller and less diverse sets of users, fewer subject areas and simpler queries, allowed vendors to recommend one data warehouse solution to meet all of the business needs of the users. Just like hardware, where once we only had only the mainframe, the market is evolving and maturing such that there is no longer a “one-stop shopping” solution to meet the BI needs of businesses today. There are really two different types of workload in a data warehouse:

1. One requirement is where you have a lot of users running the same query over and over. An example would be if you had a customer data warehouse being used to support a call center for a cell phone company. Every time a customer calls in, the customer profile is pulled from the data warehouse. This is a repetitive OLTP-like query and for this a highly designed and engineered system, optimized and tuned for the specific and repetitive queries are the best solution.


2. A second requirement for data warehousing is analytics. Here, marketing, finance, sales, compliance, risk management, operations groups in companies are performing ad hoc, changing and unknown queries such as:

• “How did our 2007 Christmas sales campaign perform as compared to our 2006 campaign? Was the customer retention higher – did more of those customers buy the value-add services?” or


• “Let’s do a trend analysis understanding why there are more mortgage defaults in this area than previously – lets run a trend analysis of the last 12 months versus the last five years. Can we identify any indicators that would allow us to re-estimate/extrapolate what the defaults will be thru the end of 2008?”

These parts of the business use the data warehouse to design marketing and sales campaigns, to understand what the risk, compliance and security issues may be – and use that to operate and manage the business. Today, IT needs to assign resources and do manual work in support of all of these queries. And every day the business has new or different queries, IT must do more work. Business users need to have a “Google-like” experience for this type of data warehouse workload. They need to be able to just run the query against the data warehouse without manual intervention of IT.

This is the really big, hidden story in BI, that the growing analytic requirement is causing IT to drown under the workload it requires. They need a way to make things simpler and really change how things are run. Some technology companies are delivering value by consolidating platforms and creating integrated solutions. We have chosen to focus on the analytic use case and deliver the only product in the market that effectively solves that problem.

Question 5: What are the benefits of Brighthouse for an organization or manager looking for information?

Answer: Brighthouse delivers fast response to ad hoc, complex analytical queries across a large volume of data. It does so without requiring IT to spend time and effort to create new schemas, create indices or partition data. It is also lowers total cost of ownership through industry-leading compression that significantly reduces the amount of storage needed to support all this data. Business users get the answers they need quickly, and IT can meet high service levels with minimal effort or cost.

Question 6: You mentioned the phrase, "use the intelligence of the data." Can you share what you mean by that?

Answer: When data is loaded into the Brighthouse system, it is tightly compressed and stored in “data packs.” The Knowledge Grid automatically creates a highly compact set of metadata, which stores information about the relationship between packs and statistical information about the contents.

When a query is initiated, Brighthouse searches the grid to intelligently decide which data packs, if any, are required to resolve the query. The Knowledge Grid is created on-the-fly, dramatically increasing data load times, and eliminating the need for specialized data partitioning and indexing.

Question 7: So, what about competitors, like BI appliances, database vendors, and such? Are you taking data warehousing one step further?

Answer: The fact that there have been new entrants into the market in recent years is a clear indication that current technologies do not meet the needs of the business today. They are also an indication of high demand across a very broad spectrum of new requirements. Traditional solutions are very expensive, take a lot of time to build, and in fact, are not well suited to support the analytic queries of the business. That is why IT struggles to keep up with the demand of the business users. Many of the newer products on the market are very good at what they are designed to do – provide very fast query performance to predictable queries – but are not designed for ad hoc, unpredictable complex queries. What’s more, they all require substantial work on the part of database administrators and IT to implement and maintain.

Infobright’s solution is markedly different – it is incredibly simple to implement and maintain. Rather than extract-transform-load data, our solution is Load and Go. No new schemas, no index creation, no data partitioning. Brighthouse is simple, powerful and extremely cost effective – the best solution if you need fast answers to evolving business questions.

Question 8: How can your Brighthouse product fit within an existing BI/DW solution? Or is it better to use your product at the beginning of designing a new BI system?

Answer: When we built our product strategy, this was a very important question for us. Organizations have invested millions into their existing data warehouses and BI infrastructure. Offering a solution that leverages those investments and works within that environment was key to us and is a big part of our go-forward product road map. Brighthouse is very well suited to be added to an existing data warehouse environment. Because of our “just load it and go” capability, you can re-use all of the data modeling, ETL, and BI reports that you have already built. Many of our customers have large data warehouses already, but they aren’t able to support business users requests for ad hoc queries due to its performance impact on other users or high cost. In that case, they’ll implement Brighthouse as a complementary warehouse to provide the services their business users need.

In other cases, Brighthouse is implemented as the sole data warehouse for the company.

Question 9: During our call, you mention several amazing results seen by clients. Care to share some of those with readers?

Answer: I’d be glad to. A good example is the use of our technology in support of online advertising. Companies that advertise online want to track how well marketing campaigns are attracting their target audiences as well as detailed ROI of these campaigns. The marketing analytics providers depend on being able to rapidly run complex, ad hoc queries against huge amounts of click stream data and provide this to their customers.

Using Brighthouse, one digital marketer found that it could load 3.2 billion rows of data at an average rate of more than 300,000 rows per second! Brighthouse also compressed all-important fact tables at a ratio of 40:1 – meaning that 40 GB of raw data resulted in only 1 GB of storage, leading to huge savings in storage costs as well as improved performance.

Another user—a company that manages major online customer loyalty and incentive programs—found that Brighthouse returned query results 15 times faster than an existing solution. Brighthouse also surpassed this solution’s ability to compress data, reducing the footprint of fact tables some 35 to 43:1.

Question 10: Excellent talking with you Miriam. Do you have any additional links or information about Infobright you want to share?

Answer: For your readers who are looking for more information about what is new in data warehousing, we have an excellent white paper on our web site written by Claudia Imhoff, a well known expert in the field. Those people interested in finding out more about Brighthouse can also find additional information on our web site at http://www.infobright.com/, or contact us at any time via email at info@infobright.com.

10 Questions with Steven Schneider

I work in an industry where the potential to provide value to a customer is great; and equally great is the potential for new innovations in technology and business models. Steven Schneider is doing both - innovating within the BI industry and providing value to customers. He does this as President of OnDemandIQ Inc by using their unique SaaS BI approach and unlocking the data companies have in a valuable way.

Sending your data to an external company to be properly hosted and delivered securely back to your employees is just one benefit. Steven shares 10 more excellent reasons to utilize SaaS BI for your organization.

1. Question: What really differentiates OnDemandIQ from other SaaS BI companies?
   
   Answer: First, ease of use. Second, we provide a low cost of entry.
   
   The primary users of our system are business users that have very basic needs – reports with real-time data, a dashboard that tracks the 4-5 metrics they care about, and some drill down/analysis capabilities. While we have more sophisticated capabilities and configurations, these can all be hidden by the administrator so as not to overwhelm the end user. There is one client we are working with for example that was able to setup their data feed, add their users, create 4-5 frequently accessed reports and a full graphical dashboard for their management team in just a few days. Before, they had an analyst that was manually creating these types of reports every time they were needed.
   
   Our application also has a low cost of entry – with per-user pricing and base subscriptions starting at just a few hundred dollars a month. This allows organizations to start small before making substantial investments.


2. Question: How do you help clients use BI to become more competitive themselves?
   
   Answer: In a general sense it is all about unlocking the information contained in the data they already have. Now that is a pretty general claim – but what is different about our approach is that we focus on getting the information to the person on the front line that can change their behavior or take action. All too often BI implementations give analysts the capabilities to really dig into the data, but something becomes lost on the way to the person that does something with it.


3. Question: It is a well known challenge/goal to have BI proliferated throughout an organization. How are you being successful in this area?
   
   Answer: In my experience these types of initiatives often fail because they try to do too much – envisioning that all of their business end-users want all of the complex slicing and dicing capabilities. What we’ve found is that in many cases, the end-users want to look at very specific metrics and/or slices of information, and they don’t want to hunt around to try and find it.
   
   We’ve had a lot of success with sales organizations in giving each user a pre-configured dashboard that reflects the metrics they care about – the ones they are paid on, and a set of 4-5 reports that they need to do their job. Everything is pre-set and configured for them so they can get in, get the information they need, and get out.


4. Question: What do you see as the biggest hurdle for SaaS BI or even simply the BI industry?
   
   Answer: A major hurdle for BI SaaS vendors is that BI is in some way or another, inherently custom. It only really works when integrated with the data, typically from multiple sources, that a company generates. Many of the traditional BI software vendors really just sell toolkits that I.T. departments and/or consultants use to construct a solution. SaaS vendors are really just now trying to find the right mix of static software vs. consulting customizations.
   
   For the BI space as a whole, the threat from existing players is really cannibalization. The small-mid market has been, for the most part, ignored by major players because the licensing price point necessary to serve this market is too low and would threaten the business from their existing customers. With gaining popularity of SaaS catering to this market at a reasonable price point, there will be a growing threat from smaller companies, in particular SaaS.


5. Question: What made you start on this business endeavor?
   
   Answer: We started as a consulting company to the life sciences industry – and what we saw was that sales representatives were overwhelmed with data from different systems, covering different time periods, etc. We saw a real opportunity to distill data from multiple places into actionable information that sales representatives could actually use.


6. Question: What are three significant benefits SaaS BI and hence onDemandIQ provides customers over traditional BI?
   
   Answer:
   
   
   • Easy to Use & Setup
   
   
   • Low entry point with limited risk
   
   
   • Few I.T. requirements


7. Question: Are companies concerned about hosting their data outside the firewall? How do you address concerns in this area?
   
   Answer: This is usually less of an issue than you would expect. Many of the companies that come to us are already distributing information to business users in various geographies, so the data is already out there in excel spreadsheets on laptops, personal databases and on emails. Having the data hosted in a security facility with proper authentication, access logging, and encryption is a step in the right direction.


8. Question: You mention wanting to meet "80% out of the box". Care to explain?
   
   Answer: We provide many of the high-value BI capabilities that small-mid sized companies desire – such as ad-hoc reporting, dashboards, and simple analytics out of the box. We have a generic, flexible data model for data such as sales transactions, accounts, and activities that can model many different types of data sets and provide a whole host of custom metrics. Most of our clients are sales organizations, retail, or manufacturing.
   
   While taking this more generic approach allows us to offer a more cost-effective and easy to setup solution to a wide range of customers, it does mean that we might not be a fit for clients with very specific and unique needs.


9. Question: Where do you see onDemandIQ going into the future with the SaaS model?
   
   Answer: I think for us, and for the industry as a whole, you will see a blending of the lines between what is software and what is service. In most cases the ‘Problem’ that BI is solving is a lack of access to information and that requires two parts – access and analysis. While we address the first part of the problem, we only partially solve the analysis piece by providing tools that people can use. There is still a missing piece that requires a human element for more sophisticated analysis.
   
   For example, for clients in the Life Sciences vertical we have taken on the role of an outsourced analyst function, providing services in the areas of forecasting, compensation, and more advanced analytics. It is all about solving the problem, and the mechanics really don’t matter.


10. Question: Excellent talking with you Steven. Do you have any additional links or information about onDemandIQ you want to share?
    
    Answer: Sure – I’d suggest the following links:
    
    Article: Hosted BI: New Options for Small-Medium Businesses
    
    OnDemandIQ: http://www.ondemandiq.com/

10 Questions with Aaron Burnett

Software as a Service (SaaS) is a serious strategy and business model for software leaders like Sales Force.com and Sharp Analytics. Saas for business intelligence is expanding and breaking traditional assumptions about the industry.

SaaS means.... You don't need hardware. No need to install software. Much better ROI and less up front costs.

Now take this one step further by removing the intensive effort of building a traditional ETL layer – the layer that moves and translates information from your systems to a data warehouse.

Now what if you could accomplish SaaS for BI without that ETL layer?

When I came across Seatab Software, I was skeptical. However, their unique, innovative approach may dramatically change the way business intelligence is delivered for organizations and employees.

I spoke with Aaron Burnett, VP of Marketing for SeaTab, one morning about what they are doing that is breaking our traditional thinking about BI.

1. Question: Good morning Aaron. Let’s start with what makes you and SeaTab passionate about BI? Tell us how SeaTab got its start.
   
   Answer: From its founding in 1998, SeaTab Software has been dedicated to provided SaaS business intelligence solutions. The company’s founder (Ching Wan) spent years leading deployments of massive data warehouses and complex BI solutions as a Data Warehouse Practice Lead for Cambridge Technology Partners. Through his experience, it became clear to Ching that then-available data warehouse and BI solutions were failing many of the customers who needed them. Too often, customers spent millions of dollars and months or even years of work, only to find that the inflexibility of the solution they deployed precluded the analysis they needed, relegated BI to the hands of a few “power users” and wedded them to large internal support costs or expensive and ongoing professional services fees.
   
   Ching’s realization that, “there is a better way” marked the genesis of SeaTab and our SaaS business intelligence solutions. Our mission, then and today, is around providing every end user who needs it with the full power of business intelligence and enabling these users to create the custom/personalized BI environment that best suits their needs – all without requiring extensive IT support. We’re also dedicated to providing solutions that can be rapidly deployed (we deploy in 30 days on average) and preserve ongoing operational flexibility (additional data sources, changes in underlying business operations, etc). Again, the focus here is to provide these capabilities without requiring extensive IT support or outside professional services.
   
   The more than 12,000 companies using our solutions gives some indication of our success at delivering on our mission.



2. Question: You mentioned SeaTab is being a "quiet success.” What did you mean by this?
   
   Answer: One of the amazing things about SeaTab is that, until October of 2006, the company had no formal marketing function. Our customers are consistently passionate about the value our BI solutions have provided and created a great, informal network of SeaTab “evangelists.” As a result, new customers came to us almost exclusively through word-of-mouth.
   
   In the last year, SeaTab has experienced significant growth, with staff expanding from eight to 25 employees and sales increasing more than four-fold so far. In addition, we obviously now have a formal marketing function!



3. Question: Word of mouth can be quite effective marketing. So what is behind the dramatic difference with SeaTab’s approach, no ETL or dimensional models?
   
   Answer: In the main, dimensional models were created to overcome the inability of relational databases to support analytical queries. We knew from the start that a powerful SaaS BI solution couldn’t be built on a relational database. And by not relying on a relational database, we also don’t have to create and rely on dimensional models (cubes). As I know you understand, this has opened tremendous avenues of both operational and analytical freedom—for our customers and for us.
   
   In a similar fashion, formal ETL tools and processes are required to support the physical data structures inherent in the relational database/dimensional model world. Again, we don’t employ physical data structures. We use logical modeling instead. Therefore, no physical data structures and no formal ETL. That’s not to say that we don’t have to model the data at all, we do. But we do it only once (when we first deploy) and we work with data in its original, “denormalized” structure.
   
   By the way, we also deliver query response times that are typically much faster than those delivered by conventional BI solutions. That’s also helped our word-of-mouth marketing!



4. Question: I have found that BI isn't always pervasive throughout an organization. The information and tools are used by a small percentage of employees. You're trying to change this?
   
   Answer: SeaTab’s technology puts the full power of BI in the hands of every user. This means every user has the ability to create custom reports, scorecards, KPI’s, dashboards and even custom calculations without requiring IT involvement. Part of the reason we can do this gets back to the data modeling approach I described in answer to your previous question. Because we store all customer data in a single, unified table and don’t have to build subject area cubes or adhere to dimensional models, we can easily provide end-users with the kind of analytical freedom such end-user access and control necessitates.
   
   Some of this also has to do with ease of use. Our user interface is intuitive and requires very little training. In fact, training typically requires fewer than 30 minutes, and in many instances is accomplished virtually via WebEx or a recorded training session.
   
   We’re typically deployed both broadly and deeply within our customer organizations. For example, Car Toys, a leading specialty retailer of mobile electronics and wireless services has more than 1,200 users ranging from the CFO and CEO (who stays logged in all day) to hundreds of seasonal retail employees who use PivotLink OnDemand as an integral part of the company’s ordering and provisioning processes.



5. Question: Let’s talk about companies who have benefited from your approach and PivotLink OnDemand. Car Toys CIO, Tom Lockwood, said, "[SeaTab was] the best and most important IT investment Car Toys ever made." Care to explain Tom’s quote?
   
   Answer: Sure. Our deployment with Car Toys is a great example of the kind of operational flexibility I referred to earlier.
   
   In addition to 50 company-owned retail locations, Car Toys operates more than 350 kiosks selling wireless services within major retail locations in the U.S. Maintaining onsite inventory levels for all of these locations is a monumental task. To address this need, we integrated PivotLink OnDemand with Car Toys’ ERP system. Now PivotLink OnDemand continuously monitors sales activity and inventory levels, automatically triggering orders to replenish inventory at any of the company’s 400 retail locations.
   
   Lockwood (Car Toys’ CIO) says the following, “Without this system, it would take an army to calculate and manage our inventory orders. Now we're automatically generating thousands of purchase orders every week instead of undertaking this monumental task manually."



6. Question: Talking about ROI, CIO’s and companies building BI systems want to know the TCO and ROI. Can the PivotLink tool show decent Total Cost of Ownership and Return on Investment numbers?
   
   Answer: Actually, our TCO and ROI numbers are pretty stunning. I’ll give you two examples, the first from an ROI-driven study of one of our customers that IDC conducted and the second from facts another of our customers has provided to a number of interested reporters.
   
   EXAMPLE #1: SeaTab provides enterprise-wide business intelligence for Zones, Inc., $600 million/year, publicly traded, multi-channel retailer of more than 150,000 name-brand information technology products. More than 400 of Zones’ 650 total employees use PivotLink OnDemand on a daily basis – from CEO to customer care representative. More than the three-plus years since our deployment, these employees collectively have created more than 4,700 custom reports. And yet, Zones estimates their total internal support cost for PivotLink OnDemand at $25K (20 percent of one IT staff member’s time). In addition, IDC documented a payback period of just 42 days on their purchase of PivotLink OnDemand and found a 50 percent increase in sales productivity.
   
   EXAMPLE #2: REI is a billion dollar retailer as the leading provider of quality outdoor gear. We provide REI with business intelligence solutions including merchandising, inventory management and sales. REI’s own internal assessment of the ROI PivotLink OnDemand brings includes:
   
   • 9 percent increase in topline sales
   
   
   • 1.6 percent increase in profit
   
   
   • 2 percent increase of in-stock performance


7. Question: With your approach and your tool, PivotLink, can you really keep up with the on-going changes within a business and the volumes of information an organization captures?
   
   Answer: Absolutely. Ongoing operational flexibility and an ability to rapidly integrate and accommodate changes in business operations are strengths in our solution. Because we don’t have to build physical data structures (data cubes), we also don’t have to tear down those structures when business operations change or when new data sources need to be integrated. Such events are trivial for us.



8. Question: Now for a competitor question. If you had to pick the top 2 items of what sets you apart from the competition, what would those be?
   
   Answer: I would have to say,
   
   1. End-user access and control.
   
   
   2. Powerful BI performance at an unexpectedly low price. We provide price performance economics that no one in the marketplace can match.



9. Question: And now for the future vision of SeaTab. Where do you see yourselves going in the market, and what is your biggest hurdle?
   
   Answer: We see ourselves as being the dominant SaaS player for the mid-market. Our biggest hurdle is overcoming the preconceived notions of how difficult and expensive BI implementations are.



10. Question: It was excellent to talk with you Aaron and hearing about your innovative approach to BI. To wrap this up, you mentioned you would have articles and stories for our readers. Can you send me links about SeaTab you want to share?
    
    Answer: Thank you as well Tom. It was also good to meet with you.
    
    SeaTab Web site:
    http://www.seatab.com/
    
    IDC Report:
    Link to an IDC report that outlines how multi-channel retailer Zones, Inc. (http://www.zones.com/site/home/index.html), achieved a 50 percent increase in sales productivity and ROI of 1,065 percent by implementing SeaTab Software's PivotLink SaaS (Software as a Service) Business Intelligence solution.http://www.seatab.com/dnn/Default.aspx?tabid=140
    
    News Articles:
    Multi-channel Merchant:
    Resource Guide: Business Intelligence Solutions
    http://multichannelmerchant.com/crosschannel/metrics/resource_guide_business/index.html
    CRM Buyer:
    Web Services on Steroids
    http://www.crmbuyer.com/story/56304.html
    
    STORES Magazine:
    Smooth Sailing; Anchor Blue unlocks its database with help from SeaTab Software
    http://www.stores.org/archives/2007/2/edit13.asp

10 Questions for Michael Matrick

When you bring together former senior leaders from some of the leading BI vendors, you'll probably find them creating innovative, Web 2.0 products with a fresh new approach to a common problem. When customers need, almost demand, that they gain immediate value from their existing BI system, 90 Degree Software has a unique collaborative approach for building reports and dashboards that I haven't seen in any other product.

When I was given a demonstration of what their tools could do, I had to share this with you. So I spoke with Michael Matrick, co-founder and President, about what they are doing over at 90 Degree Software up in Vancouver, BC Canada (which is the host city of the next Winter Olympics 2010).

1. Question: So what made you think the industry needed another reporting product?
   
   Answer: The industry was in need of change. We believed that reporting products have had little innovation in the past number of years. It seems that the vendors are more interested in selling servers and BI platforms versus focusing on the actual users. Reporting is the most critical element of a BI solution. If the users can’t adapt to the reporting solution, the solution will end up failing. I will add that it was our customers and partners who we’ve worked with over the past decade that helped us to realize that change was mandatory, someone needed to step up and introduce innovation.


2. Question: You and others left some of the biggest BI vendors to be entrepreneurs competing in the same field. Where did you come from and what's your edge?
   
   Answer: I think we all feel fortunate having had the opportunity to work for such large BI organizations (Crystal - BOBJ, Cognos and Microsoft) and gain the experience we did. Collectively as a company, we have over 100 years of BI experience. This includes - product development, sales & marketing and executive leadership. It was this experience that’s given us the opportunity to bring to market a much better way of reporting. I myself started my career with the early Crystal and ended it with Microsoft. In between there was a stint in where I ran a BI services company, focused on developing BI solutions. Lots of good times!


3. Question: What does your product solve for customers?
   
   Answer: Simply put - We developed Radius⁹⁰ for people who create reports. Creators and users of reports are driven to use tools that are either too complex or too simple in nature (meaning not enough). In between there is a large opportunity to bring to market a reporting solution that works to benefit both users, using a single, clean and consistent interface. Radius⁹⁰, I’m happy to note is doing just this. We have brought to market the first Officetm based reporting solution.


4. Question: Typical BI software puts report builders in the IT department. What is different with Radius⁹⁰? Who can, or should, be using Radius⁹⁰?
   
   Answer: Yes…and this is the problem. Radius⁹⁰ provides a consistent designer that looks and feels just like Office. We all spend our days creating documents, spreadsheets or PowerPoint’s…why do we need to learn a new user interface to create a report. Creating a report should maintain the same work flows and behave just as any other Office product. People who create or consume reports are Office users. With this, organizations can lower their costs by reducing training costs and time to create reports.


5. Question: When you mentioned that management uses Radius⁹⁰ like "lego blocks", what did you mean by that?
   
   Answer: Ahh…yes. Radius⁹⁰ has a very unique feature called “Radius⁹⁰ Library.” Radius⁹⁰ provides users with this ability to decompose their reports or reports of others so that these report components (fragments) can then be used to construct new reports. This feature is a real blockbuster, as it enables people to assemble reporting using existing content (data connections, queries, parameters, charts, tables, matrices, etc…). to some they may say – so…think about it. Do you like recreating the same report more than once, just to tweak it or customize it for someone…I would guess the answer would be no. This is where we can realize that too much time is spent copying reports only to recreate the same report a different way. Now think about it – doing it that way means…managing 2, 3, 4, 5, 100 different reports. What happens when a change needs to occur? Using the library, users can reuse report content and leverage our semantic engine to offer version controls and centralized management. This means, IT can own the data and take the risk out of the equation for their users. Business or power users can simply leverage these existing report components and feel confident knowing that the data is accurate. For those who understand “RAD” (rapid application development) this will make a lot of sense.


6. Question: So a management team could collaborate to come up with their monthly management reports?
   
   Answer: Yes. The library is a key collaborative feature of Radius⁹⁰. Management can search their library or the library of others and pull together a business view/perspective without ever having to know anything about SQL or anything of that nature. They know they want a sales pipeline chart by sales person. This fragment of information already exists so why not repurpose this information. Users like managers or others always think of what they want then try to build it. Usually they hand the request off, only to be disappointed by the results as it didn’t meet their requirement. Interpretation is usually what breaks down during this process.


7. Question: For those technology-minded, what sets Radius⁹⁰ apart from all the other proprietary products?
   
   Answer: It’s a Rapid Application Development environment for building reports. Radius⁹⁰ provides a rich semantic layer that allows for report content to be tagged and reused, making report creation faster. I don’t know any technically minded report designers who don’t love this feature. Radius⁹⁰ also provides an extensibility model that allows developers to build report templates / theme’s, which we call report “add-ins.” This allows developers to integrate their LOB application right into the report designer. Not a runtime version of a report viewer. We are talking about a fully functioning reporting solution, leveraging your application logic giving the users the ability to customize or personalize reports.


8. Question: Microsoft's published RDL (Report Definition Language) is good for customers, why?
   
   Answer: I believe so. The days of managed report formats or vendor controlled binaries are over. We’ve seemed to make such changes in all other software manors – for example, XML – why not with report formats? Users are looking for more open standard approaches to data storage, specifically file formats. Microsoft RDL provides an open report format that empowers organizations like us to roll out feature rich solutions without having to manage the format. Microsoft makes this format available as part of their SQL Server offering meaning customers get a scalable BI reporting platform that they can make available to enterprise customers. We feel fortunate to have the relationships with Microsoft that we do, allowing us to participate in early adopter panels, forums allowing us to prepare for any changes.


9. Question: What does the future have in store for 90 Degree Software?
   
   Answer: To become the new report designer of choice for all report developers, users and consumers. It’s bold but definitely possible.


10. Question: Where can others find out about 90 Degree Software?
    
    Answer: You can find more information from our website 90 Degree Software. As well, we had a booth at Convergence 2007 – San Diego – we were the hit of the show. We’ll be at the Microsoft BI conference in May and the WW Partner Conference in July, please come check us out!

10 Questions for Chuck Sharp

Chuck Sharp is co-founder and CEO for Sharp Analytics, a company with a unique Business Intelligence offering. I came across this company when looking for innovative, entrepreneurial leaders within the BI industry (all you can eat bi).

The way Chuck sees BI is different than most; he is forward thinking and creating a path that could be the beginning of the next big wave of innovation for BI. So I talked with him to find out what this was all about.

1. Question: Tell us why you started Sharp Analytics? Where did this business come from?
   
   Answer: I come from a marketing background. Christian Faulconer, the other co-founder, comes from an IT and datawarehouse background. As co-workers in another organization, we discussed the difficulty in bridging the natural gap between IT and business users, especially in the areas of marketing and customer relationship management. Those discussions led us to create our own company.


2. Question: When you were a marketer, who were some of the more interesting companies or projects you worked with?
   
   Answer: I actually consider myself a marketer first and a technologist second. Our success to date at Sharp Analytics has been that we are domain experts in marketing and we understand what data and data sources are needed to create a valuable BI solution for marketers.
   
   When I worked for Hallmark I was asked to create the database marketing strategy for their online customers. During that time I learned how great data insight can create meaningful marketing programs. We found out that we had just a few thousand customers driving over 30 percent of our business. We decided to send them a customized holiday card that was hand signed by ever member of our department. This personal touch created great word of mouth advertising for Hallmark.com and increased more customer loyalty.


3. Question: You obviously saw a need in the market for something different. So where do you see the BI industry going?
   
   Answer: Business Intelligence needs to break down the walls between organizations within a company, and the walls between a company and its suppliers, distributors and customers. SaaS can leverage the power of web services and SOA to bring together those parties.


4. Question: What makes Sharp Analytics innovative and different from the typical arrangement of BI vendors with consultants?
   
   Answer: Traditional BI vendors and their consultants offer a solution that:
   
   
   
   1. requires significant licensing, human resources, and training costs to maintain
   
   
   2. is often stagnant, solving problems that existed at one point in time.
   
   As a result, unless there is extremely strong commitment on the side of the customer, the solution is either hard to support or hard to commit to in the first place.
   
   We allow customers to focus on their core business areas, while letting us deliver, support, and evolve a BI solution without any of the previously mentioned drawbacks. Because we have all of the tools and staff already in place, we can deliver that solution in a matter of weeks rather than months.
   
   Another differentiator is that we provide ongoing analysis and custom reporting for our customers as part of the deal. Each customer has a dedicated analyst to support the evolving business needs.

5. Question: “Start with the end in mind.” When we spoke what did you mean by that?
   
   Answer: The first step in any BI project is to identify the business objectives and key performance metrics. Tools and technology should be out of the picture at that point. Once we understand those objectives and metrics, we can pick the right tools and reports to meet those needs.


6. Question: Rob Ashe, Cognos CEO, says “only 20% of users actually access data through BI”. Is Sharp Analytics another BI company that only delivers to analyst-types that make up 20% of a company?
   
   Answer: One of my team members just wrote a blog entry on this exact topic:
   http://blog.sharpanalytics.com/?p=16. It is a constant challenge to make BI relevant to the other 80%. The key is to improve the ROI for a user – meaning the return on the investment of clicking on a link, typing a username and password, and navigating to a report. We are experimenting with push technology, as well as continually developing new content.


7. Question: If you were to take sides, do you see yourselves as translators for the business or do you support internal IT departments?
   
   Answer: Our goal is to deliver for the business. Answer their key questions; respond within 24-hours to their questions. Of course, IT departments are our partner in delivering that solution since our solution depends on a dependable source of data from the customer. We find that most IT departments are anxious to build nice reports, but when you talk to them about the resource-intensive effort of integrating and cleansing data from multiple sources, they are happy to have our assistance.


8. Question: What kind of benefits are clients gaining from using the SaaS model and specifically the way Sharp Analytics offers SaaS?
   
   Answer: BI requires a specialized set of employee skills and an expensive set of tools. Many companies aren’t ready to make that commitment in a serious way, and are unhappy with the results when they try to do it on the cheap. The SaaS model allows us to become very good at BI, hire great people and give them an endless supply of interesting projects.


9. Question: Do you see the SaaS model growing within the Business Intelligence industry?
   
   Answer: There will probably always be some companies that are uncomfortable with dealing with external service providers. These may be the same companies that also decline to contract out their custodial or telecom services. But SaaS is going to appeal to an increasing portion of the market. And we are not just talking about the small and mid-size companies. Fortune 500 corporations often become so large that the IT and business organizations act as different companies, opening up a gap that we can help to fill.


10. Question: If someone wanted to know more about Sharp Analytics, where should they go?
    
    Answer: www.SharpAnalytics.com and blog.SharpAnalytics.com
    
    An additional way people can learn about what we do is to look at some of our online demos at our website. These will really show you how we make complex data easy to understand for non technical business users.