Ward's Blog

My nearly twenty year perspective on BI

Are you selling or implementing products from major vendors but still not getting the information you need ?

Did you know that’s been a common complaint for nearly twenty years, back when BI was just taking shape. 

If you've been holding your breath waiting for something to come, I suggest you stop.  Nothing's coming from that direction. They’ve even forgotten that’s what the problem is.  Their big claim (now) is: if you can share something, then that's BI.  In other words, take what you get, share it, and be happy. Oh yes, and their prices went up 10% again this year.

BI companies gave up trying to innovate on data analysis long ago. Their core data analysis, their raison d’etre, was history and people forgot to ask it of them. Founding teams were decimated by mainstreamers and stock option funded early retirement (except for a few workaholics, no names mentioned). 

But then, this year it happened again, on a more gargantuan scale. The mainstream were eaten by the mainstream.   Large players were aquired by larger players. 

Is this the decay of a market, live and real-time?  I think yes. 

Why? Once a market loses it’s core focus two times over, that's gotta be the death knell.

When I googled to see what other people thought, somebody with as long a history in BI as I have popped up with an insightful blog. He seems to agree with me, albeit based on different observations in a blog posting of his. See Dave Kellogg's Blog on the subject.

So, what comes now?  The underbellies of the giants are exposed. They’ve lost their focus, and even if they didn't, they long ago put their innovation in the closet or out to pasture.

But the pendulum swings, the time of innovation is arriving.  Am I sounding like a Lord of the Rings narrator?

What’s the driving force?  The answer: Customer demand!  Customers haven't forgotten they need data analysis!  What's the point in "sharing" data if it isn't yet processed enough? Sharing unprocessed data just makes more work, and introduces risk and expense to any workflow.

Innovative customers, the ones who want to win in their own market, are tired of this not getting the data processing (aka information) they need.

Sooner or later they'll recognize it ain't coming from the big guys.  They'll look outside the box and find the technology providers who are innovators.  

Quoted in an article by Antone Gonsalves in Intelligent Enterprise, the research firm Gartner says:

Five emerging,technologies will be instrumental in making it easier to build and consume analytical applications with less involvement from IT staff, a research firm says.

The technologies expected to breakdown today's hurdles to wider adoption of business intelligence include interactive visualization, in-memory analytics, search integrated with BI, software as a service and service-oriented architecture, Gartner said in a report released this week. These innovations will be in a position by 2012 to take BI well beyond the 15% to 20% of businesspeople using it aggressively today.

nextanalytics is one of those categories: in-memory analytics.  Notably, Gartner also said:

"In-memory analytics is emerging as an alternative to IT staff building aggregate and summary tables to optimize BI on disc-based data storage, a scenario that impedes rather than foster self-service BI, Gartner said. With in-memory analytics, IT staff doesn't have to build a performance layer for business users. Also driving the trend is falling memory prices and the prevalence of 64-bit computing. "

We think we do a pretty good job of in-memory analtyics.  If this is an emerging technology, then we're "stoked!" 

In general, all this summarizes great news for the BI industry. It means not only us, but there are all sorts of startups who base their offering on innovation waiting to be discovered.  I think we're getting back to the exciting times of 1991.

ward yaternick is the Founder and CTO of nextanalytics corporation

Ward's Appeal To Developers:  Are you entrepreneurial ? What do you want in a package?

I think I know what you want, but I'd like to hear it from you (if you can spare the time). 

Do you need:

1. low cost and easy entry.  I know you can’t or won’t spend a lot of money to get started. 
2. simple, clear examples. But there are different learning styles, so you need a wide variety.
3. somewhere to go to get advice and answers to my questions, preferably online. 

And, if you need to perform analytic data processing, cheaper and easier than if you did it yourself, then, please, take a look at my product.

And, feel free to tell me about yours, here, in this blog.  I promise to go check it out!

Our philosophy on open source

We’ve adopted an un-conventional approach to open source, not that it seems there is any convention to open source.  I'd call it disruptive, but how can you disrupt a disruptive technology?

In the beginning, we designed our software in two tiers.  (more than that really, but for the purpose of open-source, two is a good number ...)

Tier 1 Open Source

By shipping it in tiers, we are intentionally avoiding overwhelming you with details.  If all you need is a custom user interface or to create a web service, then tier 1 is all you need to look at and learn (somewhat).

Tier 1 is what everyone needs.   It delivers the benefits of open source. Tier 1 is enough code to interface the product to an application or environment.   Tier 1 code is released as open as we can imagine i.e. "released to the public domain" with no encumbrances.  

Tier 1 achieves the open source goals of taking our company out of the critical path for system and application enhancements and upgrades.   Being able to read the code (and change it) means answers to questions are fast and, if you don’t like the answer, you have the option to change it.

We like it when people modify our Tier 1 code. We encourage it, we'll train you to do it. 

This extends all the way to the open-source.  We want to make your programming and customization experience as easy and efficiient as possible.  We go so far as to deliver it in Microsoft Visual Studio (for the Windows version) or Netbeans 6 (for the java version) format.   

When we've gone to look for source code, we often find they in-comprehensible and tedious to get to the point where you could do anything.   We're different, our projects are understandable and we actually you encourage you to customize them and we’ll even answer your questions about the source code in our support forums!

In fact, one step further: If you make something that's marketable, we'll help you sell it! 

Are we a services business?

Our primary source of revenue is product, NOT services. 

We make our entire product easy to download and explore and experiment with because we want you to like the product. 

Tier 2 Open Source

The next tier, tier 2, is the rest of the source code, the analytic engine.   We do not distribute this as freely or widespread.  Why would you want it?   If you have a good reason, then approach us.  If you’re just curious, well, no thanks.  We do allow the source code to go out, but we have to have a business relationship with you (that means money changes hands, in our direction.).

By keeping tier 2 close to us,  we can ensure good quality release management practices  and the kinds of innovation that take our software in the direction we want to see it taken. We believe that’s what’s in best long run interests for our customers.

(Ward Yaternick is the Founder and CTO of nextanalytics corp.)

The Secret Sauce of nextanalytics (updated April 14 2008)

by Ward Yaternick

Where does nextanalytics fit in the BI foodchain?