Author: Ajay Ohri

http://about.me/ajayohri

Webfocus RStat: Pervasive BI using R

Here is a great reporting and BI tool from Information Builders  and uses the Rattle R GUI ( covered earlier here http://www.decisionstats.com/2009/01/13/interview-dr-graham-williams/).

So if you are looking for generation next reporting solution here is one called WebFocus RStat.

Citation:

http://www.informationbuilders.com/products/webfocus/predictivemodeling.html

Predict the Future and Make Effective Decisions Today

Traditional reporting solutions provide a clear picture of past occurrences, but have little power to shed light on the future. The ability to anticipate and prepare for upcoming events can greatly impact the decisions that need to be made today.

WebFOCUS RStat is the market’s first fully-integrated business intelligence and data mining environment, seamlessly bridging the gap between backward and forward-facing views of business operations. With WebFOCUS RStat, companies can easily and cost-effectively deploy predictive models as intuitive scoring applications. So business users at all levels can make decisions based on accurate, validated future predictions, instead of relying on gut instinct alone.

WebFOCUS RStat provides a single platform for BI, data modeling, and scoring. This eliminates the need to purchase and maintain multiple tools, and frees analysts and other statisticians from spending countless hours extracting and querying data. At the same time, it reduces costs, simplifies maintenance, and optimizes IT resources.

But, the greatest benefit WebFOCUS RStat offers is significantly increased accuracy. With the R engine – a powerful and flexible open source statistical programming language – as its underlying analysis tool, WebFOCUS RStat can deliver results that are consistent, complete, and correct – every time.

WebFOCUS RStat provides:

  • A single tool, fully integrated with Developer Studio and WebFOCUS Reporting Servers with access to over 300 data sources, for both BI developers and data miners
  • Comprehensive data exploration, descriptive statistics, and interactive graphs
  • In-depth data visualization and transformation
  • Hypothesis testing, clustering, and correlation analysis

Other key WebFOCUS RStat features include:

  • The ability to build and export models for prediction and classification
  • Comprehensive model evaluation

Incidently the parent company which is based in Tennessee has some interesting numbers-

http://www.informationbuilders.com/about_us/index.html

Company At A Glance
  • $300 million in revenue
  • Over 30 years of experience
  • More than 1,400 employees
  • Over 12,000 customers
  • Over 350 business partners
  • 47 offices and 26 worldwide distributors
  • Rapid application creation through easy incorporation of scoring routines into WebFOCUS reports

See Also-

http://www.informationbuilders.com/cgi-shell/press/intpr/f_intpr.pl?intpr_code=06_03_08_rstat

http://rattle.togaware.com/

Poem: The Fine Print

did you read the fine print
when you signed your life away
or did you believe them badly
when they said your life was good to give today

did all the drums, the ribbons and the music
tilt your head to emotion away from fact
and did the inherent absurdity of it all
was swallowed by you intact

for as the world spins tilted
around the bright unforgiving sun
words in a language built to deceive
mask the coming pain below the frosting of fun

deception is the game here
and an unwilling player you have to be
fool them or be fooled in turn
reality is spotless for you to see

what old promises where tokens of love
it is all cash and carry now
as willed in your destiny from above

and even though eyes grow misty
by potential of what could be
you keep one eye on the rolling ball
lest more surprises it brings to see

Social Network Analysis: Using R

Here is a great video and slides on doing statistical network analysis using R. It is by Drew Conway from NYU.

Social Network Analysis in R from Drew Conway on Vimeo.

Tennessee Rain

 
Clear rain falls  with a straight steady hum
On green Tennessee woods like a muted drum
 
The skies as if painted by a great gray brush
All around silence as in heavenly hush
 
Long ago long miles ahead
I left my home to earn my bread
 
Dusty lanes domestic remind with a nostalgic pang
Creating almost a deep throat tasteful tang
 
Tennessee rain so beautiful and forlorn
So exciting and yet reminds me I’m alone

Friday Poem: Live Music in Austin

Ok the events in the following poem really happened when I visited Austin, Texas for a business visit, and thanks to the Austin Post ( a new media Austin based site) for publishing it.

austin_post

And you can read the rest at http://www.austinpost.org/content/live-music-sixth-street-austin-poetry

If you like poetry, live music, Austin  ….

Buying SAS Institute

At risk of annoying a lot of friendly people, I am going to ask an old question and try and answer it quantitatively.

Who can buy SAS institute?

Graph from-http://www.sas.com/news/preleases/2008Financials.html

SAS_revenue_lores

As you can see from the graph (note the post 2001-2004 period) – which is a nice smoothed curve, textbook normal distribution on the left side, SAS Institute grew during the tough economic year of 2008 to show slowed but firm revenue growth. However if you use the same price/revenue multiple as for the SPSS acquisition ( 1.2 billion/ 300 million (2008) revenues) – that would put a price of 9.2 USD billion on SAS Institute.

Who has that kind of money? Well it seems the usual suspects are-

1) HP- from http://h30261.www3.hp.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=71087&p=irol-IRHome

and

Click to access HewlettPackard_2008_AR.pdf

Cash and cash equivalents on 12.851 Billion USD as on April 30, 2009.

2) Oracle- Oracle would be hard pressed to integrate both Sun and SAS in the same year, but may have financial leverage to do both.

from http://www.oracle.com/corporate/investor_relations/earnings/4q09-pressrelease-june.pdf

Fiscal year 2009
GAAP revenues were up 4% to $23.3 billion, while annual GAAP net income was up 1% to $5.6
billion.  Total GAAP new software license revenues for the year were down 5% to $7.1 billion.
GAAP software license updates and product support revenues were up 14% to $11.8 billion.
GAAP operating income was up 6% to $8.3 billion, and GAAP operating margins were up 80
basis points to 36% in fiscal year 2009.

3) IBM -from ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/annualreport/2008/2008_ibm_financials.pdf

Cash on hand was 12.7 Billion USD as on 31 Dec 2008, and the company repurchased it’s own stock in 2008

In the current economic environment growth can come through acquisitions of newer clients ( not much) or new companies. IBM has capabilities to acquire BOTH SPSS and SAS Institute and merge the strong R and D facilities.

IBM 2008

4) SAP – from http://www.sap.com/germany/about/investor/reports/gb2008/en/our-results/finances.html

various sources of loan capital:

profit after income taxes for 2008 was slightly lower than for the previous year, we increased cash flows from operating activities 12% to € 2,158 million (2007: € 1,932 million) through efficient management of working capital.

  • To finance the acquisition of Business Objects, we entered into an agreement for a credit facility that was originally for € 5 billion and is repayable by December 31, 2009 (amount outstanding on December 31, 2008: € 2.3 billion). We did not draw the full € 5 billion available under the facility because we paid part of the purchase price from available cash.
  • To increase financial flexibility, in November 2004 we obtained a € 1 billion syndicated credit facility through an international group of banks. We already had other lines of credit in place; the new line was arranged to provide additional financial flexibility. As in the previous year, we did not draw on this facility during the year.
  • At the end of 2008, the other, bilateral lines of credit available to SAP AG totaled approximately € 597 million (2007: € 599 million). We did not draw on these facilities during 2008 or 2007. Several subsidiaries in the SAP Group had credit lines in their local currency. These totaled € 52 million (2007: € 44 million), for which SAP AG was guarantor. At the end of the year, the subsidiaries had drawn € 21 million under these facilities (2007: € 27 million).

Given these cash positions it seems that almost everyone can buy SAS Institute if and this is a big IF- someone sells it. Microsoft which some years allegedly tried and lost at acquiring Yahoo ( only to realize huge savings!) and SAS, would be also another suitor for SAS- and Google also has the financial and operating synergies with the best text mining capabilities could also act as a white knight in merging it’s Google Applications and Enterprise solutions ( especially the cloud based OS and cloud based productivity suite) with SAS Institute. I personally would favor a Google- SAS Institute joint venture on enterprise software solely based on the common history and shared values ( Note Google has dual ownership stock including class A and class B shares)

Who is John Galt ?

Another option could be using the Google Way and for SAS Institute to go for dual ownership IPO, with class A shares for the common public and class B shares for the founders and executives. A substantial endowment to colleges and universities can also be expected in the future, given the philanthropic tradition of SAS Institute owners and executives. Also could SAS try and buy SPSS- it would lead to synergies in both software ( with the SPSS GUI) as well as new clients. At the very minimum it would boost the valuation of other stock in this sector as well make SPSS more realistic valued.

So who will buy SAS Institute?

I don’ know 🙂 and I am just brushing off my half a decade old financial valuation skills here