Category: Analytics

Interview KXEN Bruno Delahaye

In my continuing coverage of KXEN, the plucky company that has managed to revolutionize analytics automation and social network analysis- Here is an interview with KXEN’s Vice President Bruno Delahaye.

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Ajay – What is the best feature you like in KXEN. – both   as a company and as a product.

Bruno- Well actually what I like the most about KXEN is the will to make a difference. This is true at different levels of course: each individual within the company is trying to make things happen. For employees at KXEN this is not just a job: they want to change the game! The product side is naturally cascading from this. We are not simply recoding existing algorithms like some of our competitors are doing, instead we are looking in every domain of predictive and descriptive analytics where we can deliver higher value to our customers. When customers, thanks to the automation we provide, come back to us stating that they manage to increase their modeling productivity by 10 or even 50 compared to their previous modeling process we really think that what we provide is changing the game. Also, the fact that we have well over 500 customers globally today is proving that our customers recognize this as well!

Ajay : What areas has KXEN been most suitable for ? Biggest success story so far.
Bruno- KXEN has been very successful for 2 types of customers. We have been very successful in companies with mature Data Mining practices, companies that have realized that they need to move from a fully hand crafted approach to a more industrialized one in order to answer business requirements. As an example, lots of large companies run 10s of marketing campaigns per month and actually use data mining for only 1 or 2 at best… once organizations have understood the power of Data Mining they certainly want to target each campaign. Only KXEN can provide the level of automation required for this. On the other side, new data mining users (either new companies or new departments in a company) are also very eager to use KXEN. The learning curve with KXEN is so quick that it enables them to use their existing team (the ones that are aware of the business issues) and make them run within few days successful churn management programs or rebuild their customer segmentation in a reliable manner.

If you were expecting figures here, some Vodafone entities are claiming that they reduce churn in some customer segments by more than 10% by implementing KXEN. Unicredit in Austria mentioned that due to KXEN they gained an additional 50m€ per season….as you can guess the success of our customers always brighten our days.

Ajay : What areas would you rather not recommend KXEN? What other software would you recommend in those cases ?

Bruno- Well, I would recommend to use KXEN in every area of course, nevertheless where we have been less successful so far is with companies where time pressure to deliver analysis is lower. Basically, research departments tend to use more softwares like SAS EM or SPSS Clementine that are more methods/algorithms oriented rather than results oriented.

Ajay : What is the biggest challenge you have faced while introducing KXEN to a wider audience.
Bruno- The bigger challenge we have is in building domain expertise, it is indeed very difficult to build knowledge of our teams at the same time in Customer Lifecycle Analytics, in HRM, SCM… that is where building a confident relationship with the customer is so important. We have to prove to our prospect very early in the discussions that with KXEN they will make significant steps forward! This is also where our partner are so important to us. KXEN works with international as well as local partners with specific expertise to help our customers make the best possible use of the KXEN Data mining software to insure a high and fast ROI.

Ajay -Do you think the text mining as well as the Data Fusion approach can work for online web analytics, search engines or ad targeting?

Bruno- The data fusion approach is certainly one that makes sense for online web analytics. Analyzing the sequence of events rather than just taking into account whether an event occurs is actually a very powerful way to predict customer behavior or in this case the next click or the next action that is going to be made. I am not in this case claiming that everything has to be real-time as this could be the cause of the creation of weak or even unreliable/non stable models. Instead what we recommend our customer to do is to split the learning part that can be made off-line from the deployment that needs to be done real-time.

Ajay- Describe the relationships of KXEN with other members of the business intelligence community in terms of alliances.

Bruno- KXEN is a very good complement to BI vendors. We are actually partnering with several Data warehouse Vendors. For Data warehouse, the equation is quite simple they allow customers to structure and store the data but to provide real ROI, solutions need to be plugged on top of them. Setting a Data warehouse if you do not use the stored data is just another cost, what KXEN does is enabling to take advantage of the data asset to build customer segments that you will use to define your marketing mix, or simply target your customer either for cross-selling, up-selling or retention/loyalty purposes. The same is valid for credit scoring, fraud detection….

Case Study- Assume I have 50000 leads daily on a Car buying website. How would KXEN help me in scoring the model (as compared to other online based scoring solutions). Is it technically possible for me to install KXEN on Windows/ Other instances in remote computing like Amazon EC2 and not a server sitting somewhere.

The key difference, I believe, is that with KXEN you will indeed be able to do this even if you are not a data mining expert, if you want to use the results of yesterday’s campaigns to rebuild a model and if you can only afford to spend 10 minutes on this task every day. At the end of the day what we allow our users is to answer their business questions within the time frame they have rather than trying to convince them that they do not really need to do so many analysis for their business to run successfully

Ajay- And that was Bruno, VP, EMEA, KXEN. His profile can be seen here

http://www.linkedin.com/in/brunodelahaye

Bruno Delahaye manages KXEN’s operations for Continental Europe, Middle East, Africa and South America at KXEN. He is responsible for identifying and managing key partnership opportunities and developing the overall strategy for new partnerships.

For more on KXEN please go to http://www.kxen.com, you may need to regsiter to download their properietary white papers on Structural Risk Management or Text Mining.

Conflict of Interest Disclaimer-I am a consultant to KXEN as a social media consultant. Chairman Roger Hadaad was one of the first Chairman of a major corporation to agree to give interview to this small blog.

Mergers and Acqusitions: Analyzing them

Valuation of future cash flows is an inexact science- too often it relies either on flat historical numbers (we grew by 5% last year so next year we will grow by 10%)

To add to the fun is the agency conflict, manager’s priorities (in terms of stock options encashment) is different from owner’s priorities.

These are some ways you can track companies for analysis-

1) Make a Google Alert on Company Name

2) Track if there is sudden and sustained spike in activity – it may be that company may be on road show seeking like minded partners, investors or mergers.

3) Watch for sudden drop in news alerts- it may mean radio silence or company may be in negotiations

4) Watch how company starts behaving with traditional antagonists…….

The easiest word thrown in the melee is ethics, copyright violations or payments delayed.

I am pasting an extract by a noted and renowned analyst in the business intelligence field-

Curt Monash

His Professional opinion on SAP

SAP’s NetWeaver Business Warehouse software will soon run natively on Teradata’s database for high-end data warehousing and BI (business intelligence), the vendors announced Monday.

SAP and its BusinessObjects BI subsidiary already had partnerships and product integrations with Teradata. But the vendors’ many joint customers have been clamoring for more, and native Business Warehouse support is the answer, said Tim Lang, vice president of product management for Business Objects.

SAP expects the new capability to enter beta testing in the fourth quarter of this year, with general availability in the first quarter of 2010, according to a spokesman.

Under the partnership, SAP will be handling first-line support, according to Lang. Pricing was not available.

The announcement drew a skeptical response from analyst Curt Monash of Monash Research, who questioned how deeply SAP will be committed to selling its customers on Teradata versus rival platforms.

“Business Objects has long been an extremely important partner for Teradata. But SAP’s most important DBMS partner is and will long be IBM, simply because [IBM] DB2 is not Oracle,” Monash said.”

Credit-

http://www.infoworld.com/d/data-management/sap-and-teradata-deepen-data-warehousing-ties-088

and here are some words from Curt Monash’s personal views on SAP

Typical nonsense from SAP

Below, essentially in its entirety, is an e-mail I just received from SAP, today, January 3. (Emphasis mine.)

Thank you for attending SAPs 4th Annual Analyst Summit in Las Vegas. We hope you found the time to be valuable. To ensure that we continue meeting your informational needs, please take a few moments to complete our online survey by using the link below. We ask that you please complete the survey before December 20. We look forward to receiving your feedback.

What makes this typical piece of SAP over-organization particularly amusing is that I didn’t actually attend the event. I was planning to, but after considerable effort I think I finally made it clear to VP of Analyst Relations Don Bulmer that I was fed up with being lied to* by him and his colleagues. In connection with that, we came to a mutual agreement, as it were, that I wouldn’t go.

*and lied about

Obviously, administrative ineptitude and dishonesty are two very different matters, united only by the fact that they both are characteristics of SAP, particularly its analyst relations group. Having said that, I should hasten to add that there are plenty of people at SAP I still trust. If Peter Zencke or Lothar Schubert tells me something, I expect it to be true. And it’s not just Germans; I feel the same way about Dan Rosenberg or Andrew Cabanski-Dunning, to name just a couple non-German SAP guys.

But I have to say this — both SAP’s ethics and its internal business processes are sufficiently screwed up as to cast doubt on SAP’s qualifications to “run the world’s best-run businesses.”

Source:

http://www.monashreport.com/2007/01/03/sap-nonsense-ethics/

Journalism ethics off course makes sure that journalists don’t get renumerance or have to compulsorily declare benefits openly.This is not true for online journalism as it is still evolving.

Curt Monash is the grand daddy of all Business Intelligence Journalists- he has been doing this and seen it all since 1981 ( I was 4 years old then).

Almost incorruptible and therefore much respected his Monash report remains closely watched.

Some techniques to thwart Business Intelligence journalists is off course tactics of

1) Fear

2) Uncertainity

3) Doubt

by planting false leaks, or favoring more pliable journalists than the ones who ask difficult questions.

Another way is to use Search Engine Optimization so the Google search is rendered ineffective for diificult journalists for people to read them.

Why did I start this thread?

Well it seems the Business Intelligence world is coming to a round of consolidations and mergers. So will the trend of mega vendors first mentioned by M Fauschette here lead to a trend of mega journalist agencies as well- like a Fox News for all business intelligence journalists to report and get a share of the booty.

The Business Intelligence companies have long viewed analyst relationships as an unnecessary and uncontrollable marketing channel which they would like to see evolve.

Television Ratings can be manipulated for advertising similarly can you manipulate views, page views, clicks on a website for website advertisement.The catch is Google Trends may just give you the actual picture, but you can lie low by choosing not to submit or ping google during initial days and then we the website is big enough in terms of viewers or contributing bloggers can then safely ping Google as the momentum would be inertial in terms of getting bigger and bigger.

http://www.mfauscette.com/software_technology_partn/2009/05/the-emergence-of-the-mega-tech-vendor-economy.html

Here are some facts as per companies-

1) For SAS Institute

a) WPS is launching its Desktop software which enables SAS language users to migrate seamlessly at 1/10 th of the cost of SAS Base and SAS Stat. It will include Proc Reg and Proc Logistic in this and have a huge documentation.

b) R – open source software is increasingly powerful to manipulate data. SAS/IML tried offering a peace hand but they would need to reconcile with the GPL conditions for R- so if it is a plugin the source code is open and so on

c)  Inference of R may be acquired by SAS to get a limited liability stake in a R based user platform.

d) Traditional Rival SPSS ( the two have dunked it out in analytics since 40 years) has a much better GUI and launched a revamped brand PASW. They are no longer distracted with a lawsuit which curiously accused them of stock manipulation and were found innocent.

e) Jim Goodnight has been dominating the industry since 1975 and has managed to stay private despite three recessions and huge inducements ( a wise miove given the mess in the markets in 2008). After Jim who will lead SAS with as much wisdom is an open question. Jim has refused Microsoft some years back, and is still very much in command despite being isolated in terms of industry alliances he remains respected. Pressure on him to rush into a merger would may just backfire.

f) The politics of envy- SAS is hated by many analytics people just as in some corners people hate America- it is because it is number 1, and been there too long.Did you mention anti-trust investigations . Well WPS is based out of UK and the European Union takes competition much more seriously.

g) Long time grudges – SAS is disliked despite its substantial R and D investments, the care it takes of its employees, and local community. Naturally people who are excluded or were excluded at some point of time have resentments.

h) SAS ambitions in Business Intelligence where curiously it is not that expensive and is actually more efficient than other players. The recent salvo fired by Jim Davis declaring business analytics as better than business intelligence- a remark much resented by cricket loving  British journalist, Peter J Thomas

http://peterthomas.wordpress.com/category/business-intelligence/sas-bi-ba-controversy/

Intellectuals can carry huge grudges for decades ( Newton and Liebnitz) or Me with people who delay my interviews.

Teradata

1) Teradata has been a big partner with both SAS and SAP. It has also been losing ground recently in the same scenario SAS will shortly face.

It was also spun off in 2007-8 by the parent company NCR

http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/infosphere/against-the-flow-ncr-unacquires-teradata-13842

So will SAS buy Teradata

Will SAP Buy Teradata

Will SAS merge with Teradata and acquired by SAP while reaching a compromise with both WPS and R Project.

Will SAS call the bluff, make sincere efforts with the GPL and academic community to reconcile, give away multiple SAS Base and SAS Stat licenses in colleges and universities (like Asia, India, China) by expanding their academic program globally, start offering more coverage to JMP at a reduced price, make a trust for succession.

I dont know. All I know is I like writing code and poetry. Any code that gets the job done.

Any poem that I want to write ( see scribd books on the right)

Saving Sergei Sergeivich

One of the most brilliant mathematics students of all time was a person named Sergey Brin. Today at 36 years old, and more billions than he ever cares for- he should ponder his mother’s wish for him to see him complete his Phd is more important or is his own indispensability to Google. The Google share price having fallen by 50 % over the past one year, what more could it fall.

An year or two is all it takes, and with his genetic tendency to Alzheimer’s disease – time is running out for Sergey Brin to leave the board room for the classrooms he left one decade ago. If Google cannot take one year without him, then Google is not as stable as we think.

What if Einstein started opening startups, or Fermi decided joining Board room was important than theorems- Where would we all be ?

In any case, this is a Facebook cause –

http://apps.facebook.com/causes/281925/8347178

Sergey Brin Needs to Finish his Phd 

Bringing back the most brilliant math scientist  in our generation  for other causes

Positions

1. Non Abusive
2. Scientific Debate
3. Science versus Commerce
4. Should a brilliant scientist be seduced by money?
5. If all teachers become businessmen, what will happen to the children

Edit
Category:
Public Advocacy – Philanthropy Volunteerism and Public Benefit
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Also see Mr Brin’s academic paper-

http://infolab.stanford.edu/pub/papers/google.pdf

SugarCRM : The Cloud is Open

http://www.sugarcrm.com/crm/products/editions.html

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Pour some sugar on the cloud, and wish you could ask aloud-

can I be small, cut my costs and still have a CRM – The Answer is Ahem-

SUGARCRM

 

Coming up (Technical Review)

An open source and better Search Engine

Search Engines are difficult subjects to talk about – there are multiple experts and there are multiple vendors from Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Cuil and there are newer innovations like Cosmix -Blended Search and there are Wiki Search (Including the Digg bar and same features introduced in Google now). Content itself has exploded from websites in 1999 to websites, blog posts, RSS feeds, tweets, Facebook profiles, online communities, voice, podcast and video. Quantitative measures to measure, index and rank the new types of content require that the algorithms behind search be made open source but with strict creative commons licensing and using third party developers to create search algorithm extensions.

This idea seems difficulty to implement but it has been there and done before. No one creates Palo Alto like research labs anymore- all scientist and researchers have to first sign away “copy"cat”rights before beginning their research.

The year 2009 is different from the year 1999, and PageRank is no longer a maths based algol- it is a marketing brand. Time for the Stanford dropouts to go back to school and get some more math and some less marketing (and less pranks on Wolfram please) in their search engine. And Paul Allen who created the building in Stanford where the Google algol was first thought, he needs to spend some Bills and venture fund a new wave of innovation in search engines. Is this wishful thinking? Maybe. I just need a better search engine than Google right now.- Perhaps Herr Schmidt take some time from viewing mountains in Mountain View and measure customer satisfaction instead of just measuring market share in non competitive and likely to face anti trust scrutiny in US and Europe very soon. So better give some of the ranking algol features open so all websites implement the SEO tactics magically revealed and create a better world wide web- thus negating the information asymmetry in a closed source search engine.

iBi – Business Intelligence Applications on the iPhone

From the press release at QlikTech at http://www.qlikview.com/Contents.aspx?id=9836

They actually end up promoting Oracle’s mobile BI app even though they are trying to bash it up.

QlikTech, the world’s fastest-growing Business Intelligence (BI) company, today announced the immediate availability of QlikView for iPhone, the very first truly interactive mobile BI app built specifically for the iPhone. Unlike Oracle’s mobile BI offering that features a rigid interface and limited functionality, QlikView for iPhone fully leverages iPhone’s multitouch and GPS features to deliver QlikView’s renowned, industry-defining interactive capabilities. The result is a groundbreaking app that puts the power of sophisticated, real-time business answers in the hands of mobile users worldwide. It can be downloaded for free from Apple’s Mobile App Store on iTunes.

Product Highlights:

  • Interactive – click through line items on a list box or chart to get to answers, going deep into regional or product data.
  • Coverflow –flip through relevant business analysis, make a new selection and those changes are instantly reflected throughout.
  • GPS-enabled – automatically delivers local customer sales, service or inventory data as reps approach a customer or supplier facility.
  • Feature-rich – use Search, Bookmark and Shake to Erase

Smarter, Faster, Real-Time Interactive Analysis
Mobile professionals need access to comprehensive, real-time information, not static reports that lack detail from offerings like Oracle’s mobile BI tool. With QlikView for iPhone, salespeople can drill deep into accounts and get granular, up-to-the minute answers and analysis that help them do their job better. From specific customer or product data, down to a single SKU or employee name, QlikView for iPhone gets users what they need, the moment they need it.

“We comprehensively surveyed the BI mobile landscape and it was clear all previous attempts at addressing user needs failed miserably,” said Anthony Deighton, SVP Product, QlikTech.   “Just posting a static report on a mobile screen, as Oracle’s solution does, may be marginally helpful, but creates a tremendously frustrating user experience, leaving no opportunity to interact with the data. With QlikView for iPhone, users get a mobile view of a relevant data subset, as well as access to the specific answers they seek. This interactive dynamic is the only way to truly fulfill the promise of mobile BI.”

The Only Mobile BI Tool with Multitouch, Coverflow and GPS Integration
QlikView for iPhone takes full advantage of the iPhone’s native interface. The entire application is multitouch driven with complete implementation of the iPhone finger gestures users are accustomed to. Simple finger-swipes and finger-pinches enable users to select, interact and drill down into data. And to clear selections, all users have to do is shake the device. Apple’s popular 3-D Coverflow feature is also enabled, allowing users to “flip” through analyses in the same way they would through album covers and artists in iTunes. Real-time data changes are also instantly reflected in every Coverflow chart.

And here is the actual Oracle application

http://www.oracle.com/appserver/business-intelligence/business-indicators.html

Enhance Productivity for Mobile Business Users
Oracle Business Indicators is the first in a series of business applications for delivering Oracle business information to the Apple iPhone. The application provides mobile business users with real-time, secure access to business performance information on one of the industry’s most exciting and engaging mobile devices – Apple iPhone.

Oracle Business Indicators allows users to view and interact with Oracle Business Intelligence (BI) Applications that include financial, human resources, supply chain, and customer relationship management analytics, as well as analytical alerts generated by Oracle Delivers, an integrated component of Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition Plus (OBIEE). Leveraging full advantage of the Apple iPhone mobile platform, Oracle Business Indicators is built as a native application to offer highly intuitive and flexible features including browse, search, and favorites for a superior overall end user experience.

BENEFITS
* Pre-defined business indicators-Pre-built metrics and reports include financial, human resources, supply chain, and customer relationship management analytics.
* Timely alerts on exception conditions-Enables the mobile user to review alerts generated by conditions pre-defined in Oracle Delivers. A user can select an alert entry and immediately review an associated analytic report.
* Superior user experience-Offers a highly intuitive user interface for browsing, searching, and locating business performance metrics.
* Robust security-Based on the same user security model as Oracle BI Applications. Also supports Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption technology.

SAS commits $70 million to Cloud Computing

From the official SAS website

http://www.sas.com/news/preleases/CCF2009.html

SAS to build $70 million cloud computing facility

New cloud computing facility will support needed data-intensive customer solutions

CARY, NC  (Mar. 19, 2009)  –  SAS, the leader in business analytics software and services, announces today it is building a 38,000-square-foot cloud computing facility to provide the additional data-handling capacity needed to expand SAS’ OnDemand offerings and hosted solutions.

As the need for hosted solutions grows, new research and development jobs will be generated at SAS’ Cary, N.C., world headquarters, where the majority of R&D employees (more than 1,400) are located.

“This project is proof that, despite the down economy, SAS continues to grow and innovate,” said Jim Goodnight, CEO of SAS. “The growing demand by our customers for hosted solutions has given us this opportunity to invest even further in North Carolina and the Cary community.”

In keeping with SAS’ commitment to protecting the environment, the facility will be built to Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standards for water and energy conservation. The sustainable construction methods encourage recycling of materials, similar to the Executive Briefing Center under construction on the Cary campus. SAS’ first LEED building, SAS Canada’s headquarters in Toronto, opened in April 2006.

In keeping with LEED standards, about 60 percent of the project’s construction and equipment spending will be in North Carolina.  Approximately 1,000 people will be involved in its design and construction.

The facility will include two 10,000-square-foot server farms. Server Farm 1 is anticipated to be on-line mid-2010 and support growth for three to five years.  Server Farm 2 will be constructed as a shell and will be populated with mechanical and electrical infrastructure once Server Farm 1 reaches 80 percent capacity.  The facility will be built on SAS’ Cary campus.

Apparently SAS Institute believes in creating jobs ( and thousands of them) during the recession ! Jim clearly is in top intellectual shape despite his err vintage. Imagine with just a browser and you could be crunching billions of bytes of data sitting from a beach in Goa! Thankfully they did not believe the hot air that McKinsey put out on cloud computing (read here http://smartdatacollective.com/Home/17942 )