Category: Interviews

Interview Françoise Soulie Fogelman, KXEN

This week KXEN launched it’s social network analysis tool thus gaining a unique edge in being the first to launch social network tools for analytics. Having worked with KXEN as an analyst for scoring model- I am aware of the remarkable innovations they bring to their premium products. In an exclusive interview ,KXEN’s Vice President for  Strategic Business Development, Françoise Soulie Fogelman agreed to share some light on this remarkable new development in statistical software development.

 

Ajay – Françoise, how does the Social Network Analysis module helps model building for marketing professionals.

Françoise- KXEN Social network Analysis module (KSN) helps build models which take into account interactions between customers. This is done in 3 stages :

  • The data describing interactions is used to build a social network structure (actually, usually various social network structures are built in one pass through the data). You can explore your network to understand better the behavior of a given customer and what is happening around him.
  • From each social network structure, a set of attributes is automatically built by KSN for each node: it could be number of neighbors, average value of a given customer attribute among neighbors … Actually, you can have statistics on anything you have loaded into the system as customer node decoration. Usually, you’ll generate at this stage a few tens of social attributes per social network structure.
  • You then join these social attributes to the existing customer attributes. After that, you build your model as usual.

Ajay – But how does the KSN module work and which mathematical technique is it based on (or is it just addition of extra variables). Are there any proprietary patents that KXEN have filed in this field (both automated modeling as well as social network analysis).

Françoise- The KSN module uses (for extracting social attributes) graph theory. KXEN has not filed a patent in relation with KSN.

Ajay – There are many modeling software but very few which involve social network analysis though many companies have expressed interest in this. What are the present rivals to KSN module specifically in software and who do you think the future rivals will be?

Françoise- There are many software tools, but when it comes to the ability to handle very large graphs, not very many are left. We consider that our only real competitor today is SAS who has an offer for Social network Analysis, but this product is specifically targeted for fraud in bank and insurance. There are also companies positioned in Telco, usually offering a consulting service, built around an internal product. We think our solution is unique in its ability to handle very large volumes (we’re talking here more than 40 M nodes and 300 M links) and to address all industry domains. As usual, we offer a tool which is an exploratory tool, giving the customer the ability to produce by himself as many models as he wants.

Ajay – Who would be the typical customer or potential clients for KSN module? In which domains would this module be not so relevant? Are there any specific case studies that you can point out?

Françoise- This is a first version, so we do not really know yet who the typical customer will be and cannot point yet to case studies. However, Telco operators have expressed a very strong interest and we already have a Telco customer with whom we’ve worked on marketing projects. So our first case studies will most certainly come from Telco. We are working on some research projects in the retail space. We think that banks (for fraud), social sites, blogs sites and forums will be our next customers. The sector where I do not see (yet?) a potential is manufacturing industries.

Ajay – How would privacy concerns of customers be addressed with the kind of social network analysis that KSN can now offer to marketers.

Françoise- KXEN offers a tool to build models and is not concerned with the problem of collecting, storing and exploiting data: this is KXEN customer’s responsibility. Depending upon the country, there are various jurisdictions protecting the storage and use of data and those will naturally apply to building and analyzing Social Networks. However, in the case of Social Network Analysis the issue of “ethical” use will be more sensitive.

Ajay –What kind of hardware solutions go best with KXEN’s software. What are the other BI vendors that your offerings best complement with.

Françoise – KXEN software in general and KSN in particular, run on any platform. When using KSN to build decent size graphs (with tens of millions of nodes and hundreds of millions of links for example), 64 bits architecture is required. A recent survey of KXEN customers show that the BI suites used by our customers are mostly MicroStrategy and Business Objects (SAP). We also like very much to mention Advizor Solutions which offers data visualization software already embedding KXEN technology.

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?

Françoise –Of course, our data fusion approach can be very well suited for online web analytics and ad targeting (we have a number of partners that either are already using KXEN for this purpose or developing applications in these domains using KXEN technology). We would be more cautious for search engines per se.

Ajay –Are there any plans for offering KXEN products as a Service (like Salesforce.com) instead of the server based approach?

Françoise – We do not have yet plans to offer KXEN products as a service yet, but, again, we have partners such as Kognitio that offers analytics platforms embedding KXEN.

 

Brief Biography-

 

Françoise Soulie Fogelman is responsible for leading KXEN business development, identifying new business opportunities for KXEN and working with Product development, Sales and Marketing to help promote KXEN’s offer. She is also in charge of managing KXEN’s University Program.

Ms Soulie Fogelman has over 30 years of experience in data mining and CRM both from an academic and a business perspective. Prior to KXEN, she directed the first French research team on Neural Networks at Paris 11 University where she was a CS Professor. She then co-founded Mimetics, a start-up that processes and sells development environment, optical character recognition (OCR) products and services using neural network technology, and became its Chief Scientific Officer. After that she started the Data Mining and CRM group at Atos Origin and, most recently, she created and managed the CRM Agency for Business & Decision, a French IS company specialized in Business Intelligence and CRM.

Ms Soulie Fogelman holds a master’s degree in mathematics from Ecole Normale Superieure and a PhD in Computer Science from University of Grenoble. She was advisor to over 20 PhD on data mining, has authored more than 100 scientific papers and books and has been an invited speaker to many academic and business events.

 

   ( Ajay – So it seems like an interesting software and with the marketing avenues for social networking growing, and analytics modelers exploring the last bit of data for incremental field – this is an area where we can be sure of new developments soon. I wonder what the response from other analytics vendors including open source developers would be as this does seem a promising area for statistical modelling as well as analysis. What do you think ?? Can I search all data from Twitter , Facebook ,search results on Indeed .com and Linkedin and add it to your credit profile for creating a better propensity model .. 🙂 Will the credit or marketing behavior scores of your friends affect your propensity and thus the telecom ads you see while surfing … …)

Interview –Jon Peck SPSS

JonPeck

 

I was in the middle of interviewing people as well as helping the good people in my new role as a community evangelist at Smart Data Collective when I got a LinkedIn Request to join the SDC group  from Jon Peck .

SPSS Inc. is a leading worldwide provider of predictive analytics software and solutions. Founded in 1968, today SPSS has more than 250,000 customers worldwide, served by more than 1,200 employees in 60 countries .Now Jon is a legendary SPSS figure and a great teacher in this field .I asked him for an interview he readily agreed.

Jon Peck is a Principal Software Engineer and Technical Advisor at SPSS. He has been working with SPSS since 1983  and in the interview he talks from the breadth of his perspective and experience on things in analytics and at SPSS .

Ajay – Describe your career journey from college to today. What advice would you give to young students seeking to be hedge fund managers rather than scientists.  What are the basic things that a science education can help students with , in your opinion ?

Jon– After graduating from college with a B.A. in math, I earned a Ph. D in Economics, specializing in econometrics, and taught at a top American university for 13 years in the Economics and Statistics Departments and the School of Organization and Management.  Working in an academic environment all that time was a great opportunity to grow intellectually.  I was increasingly drawn to computing and eventually decided to join a statistical software company.  There were only two substantial ones at the time.  After a lot of thought, I joined SPSS as it seemed to be the more interesting place and one where I would be able to work in a wider variety of areas.  That was over 25 years ago!  Now I have some opportunities to teach and speak again as well as working in development, which I enjoy a lot.

I still believe in getting a broad liberal arts education along with as much quantitative training as possible.  Being able to work in very different areas has been a big asset for me.  Most people will have multiple careers, so preparing broadly is the most important career thing you can do.  As for hedge fund jobs – if there are any left, I’d say not to be starry-eyed about the money.  If you don’t choose a career that really interests you, you won’t be very successful anyway. Do what you love – subject to earning a living.

Math and scientific reasoning skills are preparation for working in many areas as well as being helpful in making the many decisions with quantitative aspects in life.  Math, especially, provides a foundation useful in many areas.  The recently announced program in the UK to improve general understanding of probability illustrates some practical value.

Ajay- What are SPSS’s contribution to Open Source software . What ,if you can disclose are any plans for further increasing that involvement.

Jon-  I wish I could talk about SPSS future plans, but I can’t.  However, the company is committed to continuing its efforts in Python and R.  By opening up the SPSS technology with these open source technologies, we are able to expand what we and our users can do.  At the same time, we can make R more attractive through nicer output and simpler syntax and taking away much of the pain.  One of the things I love about this approach is how quickly and easily new things can be produced and distributed this way compared to the traditional development cycle.  I wrote about productivity and Python recently on my blog at insideout.spss.com.

Ajay – How happy is the SPSS developer community with Python . Are there any other languages that you are considering in the future.

Jon- Many in the SPSS user community were more used to packaged procedures than to programming (except in the area of data transformations).  So Python, first, and then R were a shock.  But the benefits are so large that we have had an excellent response to both the Python and R technologies.  Some have mastered the technology and have been very successful and have made contributions back to the SPSS community.  Others are consumers of this technology, especially through our custom dialogs and extension commands that eliminate the need to learn Python or R in order to use programs in these languages.  Python is an outstanding language.  It is easy to get started with it, but it has very sophisticated features.  It has fewer dark corners than any other language I know.  While there are a few other more popular languages, Python popularity has been steadily growing, especially in the scientific and statistical communities.  But we already have support for three high-level languages, and if there is enough demand, we’ll do more.

Some of our partners prefer to use the lower-level C language interfaces we offer.  That’s fine, too.  We’re not Python zealots (well, maybe, I am).  Python, as a scripting language, isn’t as fast as a compiled language.  For many purposes this does not matter, and Python itself is written in C.  I recently wrote a Python module for TURF analysis.  The computations are simple but computationally explosive, so I was worried that it would be too slow to be useful.   It turned out to be pretty fast because of the way I could use some of Python’s built-in data structures and algorithms.  And the popular numPy and SciPy scientific and numerical libraries are written in C.

Users who would not think of themselves as developers sometimes find that a small Python effort can automate manual work with big time and accuracy improvements.  I got a note recently from a user who said, "I got it to work, and this is FANTASTIC! It will save me a lot of time in my survey analysis work."

Ajay- What are the areas where SPSS is not a good fit for using. What areas suit SPSS software the most compared to other solutions.

Jon- SPSS Statistics, the product,  is not a database.  Our strength is in applying analytical methods to data for model building, prediction, and insight.  Although SPSS Statistics is used in a wide variety of areas, we focus first on people data and think of that first when planning and designing new features.  SPSS Statistics and other SPSS products all work well with databases, and we have solutions for deploying analytics into production systems, but we’re not going to do your payroll.  One thing that was a surprise to me a few years ago is that we have a significant number of users who use SPSS Statistics as a basic reporting product but don’t do any inferential statistics.  They find that they can do customized reporting – often using the Custom Tables module – very quickly.  With Version 17, they can also do fancier and dynamic output formatting without resorting to script writing or manual editing, which is proving very attractive.

Ajay- Are there any plans for SPSS to use Software as a Service Model . Any plans to use advances in remote and cloud computing for SPSS ?

Jon- We are certainly looking at cloud computing.  The biggest challenge is being able to put things in the cloud that will be robust and reliable.

Ajay- What are SPSS’s Asia plans ? Which
country has the maximum penetration of SPSS in terms of usage.

Jon- SPSS, the company, has long been strong in Japan, and Taiwan, and Korea is also strong.  China is increasingly important, of course.  We have a large data center in Singapore.  Although India has a strong, long, history in statistical methodology, it is a much less well-developed market for us.  We have a presence there, but I don’t know the numbers. (Ajay – SPSS has been one of my first experiences in statistical software when I came up with it at my business school in 2001. In India SPSS has been very active with academia licensing and it introduced us to the nice and easy menu driven features of SPSS.)

Biography – Jon earned his Ph. D. from Yale University and taught econometrics and statistics there for 13 years before joining SPSS.

Jon joined the SPSS company in 1983 and worked on many aspects of the very first SPSS DOS product, including writing the first C code that SPSS ever shipped. Among the features he has designed are OMS (the Output Management System), the Visual Bander, Define Variable Properties, ALTER TYPE, Unicode support, and the Date and Time Wizard. Jon is the author of many of the modules on Developer Central. He is an active cyclist and hiker.

Jon Peck blogs on  SPSS Inside-Out.

Interview- BI Dashboards dMINE Sanjay Patel

If you have ever felt frustrated in  knowing business metrics in your or your client organization, negotiated with a host of either legacy applications that don’t talk to each other or good solutions that cost more than the benefit they bring – a young man from India has a solution for you. With a total implementation time range of 1-6 weeks and costs to as low as 10,000 USD for Enterprise WIDE implementation , Dmine promises to shake things up. Here is an interview with the co founder of this startup.

 

Ajay- Describe your career journey. What advice would you give to  new entrepreneurs in this recession.

Sanjay- Geared with an M. Tech from BITS Pilani, and MBA from Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management, Mumbai, in 2000 I teamed up with Praveen Wicliff and  ventured to start our own  Product company with a focus to deliver critical enterprise solutions  and the company has now grown to a strong team of 100 innovative minds. My current mission is to make Icicle a strong leader in business driven Software Products across all segments with the best of the delivery capabilities.
Recession is a trying time for most people and this is one phase which brings out the best in everyone as most of the innovative solutions are floated during this phase. My only suggestion would be to move from emotional connect with customers to direct tangible benefits, stay focussed on cash flow, aim high, set your goals & targets and never give up on any of these. Even in the darkest moments, find the faith to keep going.

Ajay- One more Dashboard Solution. How is dMine different from it’s competitors. What are the principal competitors.

Sanjay- If you just plainly look at dMine you would see that dMine is just another Dashboard solution but what makes dMine different from all other competitive products is its intuitiveness and User friendly features which help even the Business users to use the product most effectively.

dMine_logo_72dpi_11032008

dMine is positioned as a product for Business Users and not for IT team. Unlike other Dashboard or BI products dMine can create Dashboards in just 3 easy steps:

1- IT team connects to Data-sources & Creates Business Views

2- Users can create Dashboards & Charts with dMine’s Intuitive interface

3- Users can share Dashboards & schedule Emails in PDF or PPT

The potent combination of best-of-class looking Comprehensive Graphical and Analytical reports, Easier representation and Interpretation of Key Business Data, Integrates data from multiple systems on a single chart and / or Dashboard for real-time Analysis, all these, with minimized IT overheads is a unique proposition from us. See dMine-in-action on  www.dminebi.com and you will know the difference.

Ajay- What is the area where dMine would not be suited for dashboards.Suppose I have data for 200,000 rows x 40 columns – would dMine work for me .

Sanjay-
dMine is positioned as a pure Dashboard product that does not implement a complete BI stack which requires to work on Transactional Data to create cubes and universe.

We look beyond Data warehouses and Datamarts and emphasize on summarized data to deliver key business performance metrics with high focus on Data Visualization.

The idea here is to target the Business Executives who would see these Dashboards and they are not interested in Transactional Data but the overall performance hence the summarized Data.

Here the summarized Data could be in the form of any RDBMS Database, Flat Files, Spreadsheets, Analytics output, Cubes or Universe. We Support almost 16 Database vendors in the market starting from as small as MS Access to as big as DB2.

Ajay- What is the pricing strategy of dMine . Any other products or complements that you are thing about. Name some customer case studies or big wins.

Sanjay- dMine pricing strategy is very simple and is based keeping in mind that the product can be used by customers in the SME/SMB segment or even at the Enterprise level.

Currently we are offering dMine in two forms

  • firstly On-Premise and
  • second one as a Hosted service.

In an on-premise version, dMine has a Product License fee and per user license fees issued separately.

At additional cost you can have loads of Add-on goodies catering to various needs of the customers. All the cost mentioned above are just one time.

The Hosted version, is on a monthly subscription model where the cost is decided based on the various parameters like the usage of Bandwidth, Server configuration, Disk space etc. Very soon we will be enabled to the Amazon cloud service.

Typically for an on-premise version a smaller implementation just at a corporate level with Dashboard access to only few top executives would cost anywhere between 10,000 USD to 16,000 USD plus the implementation cost which is on actuals plus Applicable taxes.

For larger implementation like for e.g in BFSI segment where you need to roll-out user licenses to all the branch managers in addition to the top executives the total User licenses goes to a few 100 licenses. Usually the implementation period is as low as a week and not more than 6 weeks.

Few of the Customers using dMine are some of the Marketing Analytics companies that use the product for submitting the final report of their Marketing / Customer Analysis to their end customers.

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Case Study – Summary

We recently implemented dMine at a leading FM Radio channel to monitor the performance across its radio stations spread all over India.

The client being a major player in the media and communication space has to constantly monitor all their stations for their entire  operations like Revenues from sponsors, Peak and Non-Peak time Inventory & Sales, Market Share & Channel Ranking, P&L, Forecasts and other critical informations.

Currently the client uses multiple Applications for supporting these business functions which capture data in different databases and sources. The MIS-reports were manually created by extracting data from multiple sources in spreadsheets. These spreadsheets are distributed among the management, with a turn around time of about 15 days.

The dMine solution implemented, collates information from multiple data sources like ERP and Sales systems including lots of Spreadsheets. More than 70 Metrics (KPI’s) and Analytics are defined for the Client and now the management has access to these information whenever they require.

All these metrics are identified as critical and are categorized under 5 Dashboards  – Organizational KPI, Financial Dashboard, Sales Dashboard, Market Share
& Metrics Dashboard and Operational Dashboard. The Metrics are parameterized and drill-downs allows the management to get the source of issue/problem rapidly.

The implementation of dMine Business Dashboard product helped the client in effectively monitoring business operations, KPIs, and organizational performance.Making actionable and Real-time information available on-demand for the decision Makers and Operational Managers, has also helped in taking any timely critical business decisions, all these while minimizing IT overhead cost. The short implementation time lines also allows the users to see the benefits quite quickly and achieve the ROI within 1 to 3 months time. The detailed case study is readily available for your reference at our website www.dminebi.com .

Ajay-  Do you read or write blogs. What do you think about the Web 2.0 paradigm for social and community marketing.

Sanjay –I do read and write lots of blogs and am myself a member with quite a few groups that share interest in the virtual community. Web 2.0 provides a platform of many-to-many communications and in its social sense is based on the principles of collaboration & sharing, information & content putting social interaction at heart of it all.

A recent study by Fox Interactive Media reveals that 40% of social network users rely on social media outlets to learn more about brands and products. Whether you’re a freelancer promoting your own brand or part of a company, social media marketing is an essential component of an integrated campaign. If you are looking to startup new business, launch a new product & services or even expand your presence you cannot miss-out on the eMarketing process focusing on three prong strategy i.e. social networking sites, your own website, and the blogosphere these will help empower your brand and positively convey your message.

Ajay – Sanjay Patel is an experienced entrepreneur with Icicle Technologies and the Dmine dashboard is currently winning rave reviews ( see http://www.dminebi.com/ibm-nominates-icicle-as-isv-on-ibm-smart-business-platform/ ) . Here’s wishing luck to Mr Patel for the summarized data dashboard that can be a game changer at www.dminebi.com.

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Interview with Anne Milley, SAS II

Anne Milley is director of product marketing, SAS Institute . In part 2 of the interview Anne talks of immigration in technology areas, open source networks ,how she misses coding and software as a service especially SAS Institute’s offering . She also reveals some preview on SAS ‘s involvement with R and mentions cloud computing.

Anne_Milley

Ajay – Labor arbitrage outsourcing versus virtual teams located globally. What is the SAS Inst position and your opinion on this. What do you feel about the recent debate on HB1 visas and job cuts. How many jobs if at all is SAS planning to cut in 2009-2010.

Anne – SAS is a global company, with customers in more than 100 countries around the world.  We hire employees in these countries to help us better serve our global customers.  Our workforce decisions are based on our business needs.  We also employ virtual teams–the feedback and insights from our global workforce help us improve and develop new products to meet the evolving needs of our customers.  (As someone who works from her home office in Connecticut, I am a fan of virtual teaming!)  We see these approaches as complementary.

The issue of the H-1B visa is a different discussion entirely.  H-1B visas, although capped, permit US employers to bring foreign employees in “specialty occupations” into this country.   The better question, though, is what is necessitating the need for H-1B visas.  We would submit that the reason the U.S. has to look outside its borders for highly qualified technical workers is because we are not producing a sufficient number of workers with the right skill sets to meet U.S. demand.  In turn, that means that our educational system is not producing students interested or qualified to pursue the STEM (science, technology, engineering or mathematics) professions (either at a K-12 or post-secondary level), or developing the workforce improvement programs that may allow workers to pursue these “specialty occupations.”  Further, any discussion about H-1B visas (or any other type of visa) should include a more comprehensive review of our nation’s immigration policies—are they working, are they not working, how or why are they, are we able to limit illegal immigration and if not, why not, etc.

I am not aware of any planned job cuts at SAS.  In fact, I am aware of a few groups which are actively hiring.

Ajay- What open source softwares have SAS Institute worked in the past and it continues to support financially as well as technologically.  Any exciting product releases in 2009-2010 that you can tell us about.

Anne- Open source software provides many options and benefits.  We see many (SAS included) embracing open source for different things.  Our software runs on Linux and we use some open-source tools in development. There are different aspects of open source software in developing SAS software:

-Development with open source tools such as Eclipse, Ant, NAnt, JUnit, etc. to build, test, and package our software

-Using open source software in our products; examples include Apache/Jakarta products such as the Apache Web Server.

-Developing open source software, making changes to an open source codebase, and optionally contributing that source back to the open source project, to adapt an open source project for use in a SAS product or for internal use. Example: Eclipse.

And we plan to do more with open source in the future.  The first step of SAS integrating with R will be shown at SAS Global Forum coming up in DC later this month.  Other announcements for new offerings are also planned at this event. 

Ajay- What do you feel about adopting Software as a service for any of  SAS Institute’s products. Any new initiatives from SAS on the cloud computing front especially in terms of helping customers cut down on hardware costs.

Anne- SAS Solutions OnDemand, the division which oversees the infrastructure and support of all our hosted offerings, is expanding in this rapidly growing market.  SAS Solutions OnDemand Drug Development was our first SaaS offering announced in January.  Additional news on new hosted offerings will be announced at SAS Global Forum later this month.  SAS doesn’t currently offer any external cloud computing options, but we’re actively looking at this area.

Ajay– Which software do you personally find best to write code into and why. Do you miss writing code, if so why ?

Anne- In my current role, I have limited opportunity to write code.  At times, I do miss the logical thought process coding forces you to adopt (to do the job as elegantly as possible).  I had the opportunity to do a long-term assignment at a major financial services company in the UK last year and did get to use some SAS and JMP, including a little JSL (JMP scripting language).  There’s nothing like real-world, noisy, messy data to make you thankful for the power of writing code!  Even though I don’t write code on a regular basis, I am happy to see continued investment in the languages SAS provides—among the most recent, the addition of an algebraic optimization modeling language in our SAS/OR module contained within the SAS language as “PROC OPTMODEL.”

I have great respect for people who invest in learning (or even getting exposure to) more than one language and who appreciate the strengths of different languages for certain tasks and applications.

Ajay- It is great to see passionate people at work on both sides of the open source as well as packaged software teams- and even better for them to collaborate once in a while.Most of our work is based on scientists who came before us (especially in math theory).

Ultimately we are all just students of science anyway.

SAS Global Forum –http://support.sas.com/events/sasglobalforum/2009/

Annual event of SAS language practitioners.SAS language consists of data step and proc steps for input and output thus simplifying syntax for users.

SAS Institute – The leader of analytics software since 1970’s , it grew out of the North Carolina University, and provides jobs to thousands of people. The world’s largest privately held company, admired for it’s huge investments in Research and Development and criticized for its premium price  on packaged software solutions.A recent entrant in corporate users who are willing to support R language.

Interview – Anne Milley, SAS Part 1

Anne Milley has been a part of SAS Institute’s core strategy team.

She was in the news recently with an article by the legendary Ashlee Vance in the Bits Blog of  New York Times http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/16/sas-warms-to-open-source-one-letter-at-a-time/

In the article,  Ms. Milley said, “I think it addresses a niche market for high-end data analysts that want free, readily available code. We have customers who build engines for aircraft. I am happy they are not using freeware when I get on a jet.”

To her credit, Ms. Milley addressed some of the critical comments head-on in a subsequent blog post.

This sparked my curiosity in knowing Anne ,and her perspective more than just a single line quote and here is an interview. This is part 1 of the interview . Anne_Milley

Ajay -Describe your career journey , both out of and in SAS Institute. What advice would you give to young high school students to pursue careers in science. Do you think careers in science are as rewarding as other careers.

Anne-

Originally, I wanted to major in international business to leverage my German (which is now waning from lack of use!).  I found the marketing and management classes at the time provided little practical value and happily ended up switching to the college of social science in the economics department, where I was challenged with several quantitative courses and encouraged to always have an analytical perspective.  In school, I was exposed to BASIC, SPSS, SHAZAM, and SAS.  Once I began my thesis (bank failure prediction models and the term structure of interest rates) and started working, it was SAS that served as the best software investment, both in banking (Federal Home Loan Bank of Dallas) and in retail (7-Eleven Corp.).  After 5+ years in Dallas, my husband wanted to move back to New England and SAS happened to be opening an office at the time.  From there, I enjoyed a few years as a pre-sales technical consultant, many years in analytical product management, and most recently in product marketing.  All the while, it has been a great motivating factor to work with so many talented people focused on solving problems, revealing opportunities and doing things better—both within and outside of SAS.

For high school and college students, I urge them to invest in studying some math and science, no matter the career they’re pursuing.  Whether they are interested in banking/finance, medicine and the life sciences, engineering or other fields, courses that will help them explore and analyze data, and come up with new approaches, new solutions, new advances based on a more scientific approach will pay off.

Course work in statistics, operations research, computer science and others will help hone skills for today’s data- and analytics-driven world.  One example of this idea in action:  North Carolina State University’s (NCSU) Institute for Advanced Analytics is seeing a huge increase in interest.  Its first graduating class last year saw higher average salaries than other graduate programs and multiple job offers per graduate.  Why?  Because there is still a huge demand for graduates with the ability to manipulate and analyze data in order to make better, more informed decisions.  I personally think careers in math and science are especially rewarding, but we need many diverse skills to make the world go round :o)

Ajay- Big corporations versus Startups. Where do you think is the balance between being big in terms of stability and size and being swift and nimble in terms of speed of product roll outs. What are the advantages and disadvantages of being a big corporation in a fast changing technology field.

Anne-

Ever a balancing act, with continuous learning along the way.  The advantage of being big (and privately held) is that you can be more long-term-oriented.  The challenge with fast-changing technology is to know where to best invest.  While others may go to market faster with new capabilities, we seek to provide superior implementations (we invest in ‘R’ (Research) AND ‘D’ (Development), making capabilities available on a number of platforms. 

In today’s economy, I think the big vs. small comparison is becoming less and less relevant.  Big corporations need to be agile and innovative, like their smaller rivals.  And small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) need to use the same techniques and technologies as the “big boys.”

First, on the big side, I’ll use an example of which I’m very familiar:  At SAS, a company founded more than 30 years ago as an entrepreneurial venture, we’ve certainly changed over the decades.  SAS started out in a small office with a handful of people.  It’s now a global company with hundreds of offices and thousands of employees around the world.  Yet one thing that has not changed for SAS in all this time:  a laser-like focus on the customer.  This has been the key to SAS’ success and uninterrupted growth .Not really a “secret sauce.” Just a simple yet profound approach: listen carefully to your customers and their changing needs, and innovate, develop and adapt based on these needs.

Of course, being large has its advantages:  we have more ideas from more people, and creativity and innovation knows no borders.  From Sydney to Warsaw, São Paulo to Singapore, Shanghai to Heidelberg, SAS employees work closely with customers to meet their business needs today and in the future.

SAS provides the stability and proven success that businesses look for, particularly in troubled economic times.  Being large and privately held enables SAS to grow when others are cutting back, and continue to invest in R&D at a high rate – 22% of revenues in 2008.

Yet with our annual subscription licensing model, SAS cannot rest on its laurels.  Each year, customers vote with their checkbooks:  if SAS provided them with business benefits, results and a positive ROI, they renew; if not, they can walk away.  Happily for SAS, the overwhelming majority of customers keep coming back.  But the licensing model keeps SAS on its toes, customer-focused, and always listening and innovating based on customer feedback.

As for SMBs, they are rapidly adopting the technologies used by large companies – such as business analytics – to compete in the global economy.  Two examples of this:

BGF Industries is a manufacturer of high-tech fabrics used in jet fighters, bullet-proof vests, movie-theater screens and surfboards, based in Greensboro, NC. BGF turned to SAS business analytics to help it deal with foreign competition.  BGF created a cost-effective, easy-to-use early-warning system that helps it track quality and productivity.  Per BGF, data is now available in minutes instead of hours.  And in the business world, this speed can be the difference between success and failure.  Per Bobby Hull, a BGF systems analyst: “The early-warning system we built with SAS allowed us to go from nothing to everything.  SAS allows us to focus away from clerical tasks to focus on the quality and process side of the job. Because of SAS, we’re never more than three clicks away from finding an answer.”

For Los Angeles-based The Wine House, installing a SAS-powered
inventory-management system helped it discover nearly $400,000 in “lost” inventory sitting on warehouse shelves.  For an SMB with annual sales of $20 million, that was a major find.  Business analytics helps it to compete with major retail and grocery chains.  Per Bill Knight, owner of The Wine House: “The first day the SAS application was live, we identified approximately 1,000 cases of wine that had not moved in over a year. That’s significant cash tied up in inventory.  We had a huge sale to blow it out, and just in time, because in today’s economy, we would be choking on that inventory.”

So regardless of size, businesses must remain agile, listen to their customers, and use technologies like business analytics to make sense of and derive value from their data – whether on the quality of surfboard covers or the number of cases of Oregon Pinot Noir in stock.

3) SAS Institute has been the de-facto leader in both market volume share as well as market value share in the field of data analytics. What are some of the factors do you think have contributed to this enduring success. What have been the principal challengers over the years.(Any comments on the challenge from SAS language software WPS please ??)

At SAS, we seek to provide a complete environment for analytics—from data collection, data manipulation, data exploration, data analysis, deployment of results – and the means to manage that whole process.  Competition comes in many forms and it pushes us to keep delivering value.  For me, one thing that sets SAS apart from other vendors is that we care so deeply about the quality of results.  Our Technical Support, Education and consulting services organizations really do partner with customers to help them achieve the best results.  That kind of commitment is deep in the DNA of SAS’ culture.

The good thing about competition is that it forces you to re-examine your value proposition and rethink your business strategy.  Customers value attributes of their analytics infrastructure in varying degrees— speed, quality, support, flexibility, ease of migration, backward and forward compatibility, etc.  Often there are options to trump any one or a subset of these and when that aligns with the customers’ priorities of what they value, they will vote with their pocketbooks.  For some customers with tight batch-processing windows, speed trumps everything.  In tests conducted by Merrill Consultants, an MXG program running on WPS runs significantly longer, consumes more CPU time and requires more memory than the same MXG program hosted on its native SAS platform.

While it’s easy to get caught up in fast-changing technology, one has to also consider history.  Some programming languages come and go; others have stood the test of time.  Even the use of different flavors of analysis ebbs and flows.  For instance, when data mining was all the rage almost a decade ago, many asked the very good question, “Why so much excitement about analyzing so much opportunistic data when design of experiments offers so much more?”  Finally, experimental design is being more readily adopted in areas like marketing.

At the end of the day, innovation is the only sustainable competitive advantage.  As noted above in question 2, SAS has remained firmly committed to customer-driven innovation.  And SAS has “stuck to its knitting” with respect to analytics.  A while back, SAS used to stand for “Statistical Analysis System.” If not literally, then philosophically, Analytics remains our middle name.

(Ajay- to be continued)

 

ND_FilmingContinuing with the Slumdog Millionaire celebrations in India , we have an interview here at DecisionStats with an up and coming intense Indian film maker. Nitin Dash is a creative film maker based out of India. He has created movies like the science fiction movie “ Formula 69” , short videos like “500” (see below) . He gave up a corporate career after 5 tears of corporate experience and after studying at the renowned  Indian Institute of Management, Lucknow to pursue his creative side. Here in a candid interview , Nitin discusses the things that motivate him and passes some tips for home movie making. Coming from a person that has 200,000 plus views on his YouTube video , it is nifty and useful advice.

 

Ajay – What has been your educational and career journey so far . 

Nitin- Finished my MBA from IIML in 2000. Worked for 5 years in the corporate media sector.. Did a short 6- month course in filmmaking from New York in  2005. Started my own film production company  Filmkaar Productions.. www.filmkaar.com

Ajay – What inspires your art. What are the key things that made you decide to take a leap into movie direction from the corporate world.

Nitin – I find inspiration from people around me. A common man , his life and the simple conflicts and challenges that make it interesting..
I felt that the corporate world was stifling my creativity and the work was very operational and mundane. I had some friends from Jamia mass comm.. school. We got together and started making short films over the weekend. After a few months I decided that film making is my calling in life.

Ajay – I have a Sony hand camera and I would like to be Steven Spielberg while shooting my son’s videos. Comment please. Give me 5 bullet points or tips.

Nitin –  The following links would help you.

www.video101course.com
www.cybercollege.com

Learn windows moviemaker. It is a very simple to learn and easy to use software and already installed on PC’s with windows xp / vista

Ajay- How effective do you think is viral marketing . What paradigm changes do you think have Web 2.0 ,blogs, YouTube brought about in the traditional content business.

Nitin- Viral marketing is very effective, but the content has to be right. Getting a good
content that turns into a viral is very difficult and most of the times unpredictable. Web 2.0 has given access to people to express their creativity and share it with the world.

Ajay-What do you think about the  casting couch as a director ? 1 line comment please

Nitin- It’s unofficial term for networking in the film industry.

Ajay- What has been your most successful movie- short film. Which short movie do you like the most and why ?

Nitin-http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35u0J4p26Fg
A magical tale about a young boy who finds a solution for Global Warming from a monk in the mountains. I like the simplicity of the story and the beautiful location it is shot in.

Ajay- Well there is no telling when Nitin would bring home an Oscar , but you can preview a short 2 minute video by him. Its called 500 and describes how different people would spend Rs 500 if they found it. Simple and powerful on the ways money moves us in different ways-and the social disparities in India shining.

 

 Filmkaar Productions has been set up to promote thought provoking cinema.To create entertaining films that are socially relevant. Engaging films that can transform minds.Our mission is to make ‘Extraordinary films with Ordinary people’. Visit them at www.filmkaar.com

Interview- Endre Domiczi

imageHere is an interview with a client and partner of mine, Mr. Endre Domiczi of Sevana Oy (www.sevana.fi) .

Sevana is a Finland based company which creates excellent software and analytics  products and their latest release is their automated audio quality product. Existing releases have been a shopping cart analyzer which does wonderful automated market basket analysis.

Ajay – What has been your career journey so far ? What advice would you
give to a fresh science graduate entering the market in today’s
recession .

Endre – About my career journey 

After receiving an MSc in Electronic Engineering my first job was maintenance of the Soviet "clone" of an IBM/360 computer (I still remember some of the Russian language terminology).While doing post graduate studies (got something that would be called today Tech.Lic. in Data Communication) I was offered a job by one of the professors in a research institute. Through the research institute I got a chance to work on a nuclear powerplant simulator in Finland as a Hungarian ex-pat (important, because Tsernobyl happened in the meanwhile).

I specified and implemented the mainframe side of the communication between a VAX/VMS mainframe and several PDP’s  (I’m still proud that later on someone who saw my part of the system, written in 1986, said that it was object-oriented, but the language was Fortran 🙂

One of the jobs enjoyed most was at Fiskars Power electronics. I could design the Hardware and write all software for a microcontroller-based intelligent display of a UPS (uninterruptable (or unpredictable?) power supply), which communicated with the UPS via the power line (around 1988-89).

Then 6 years at Nokia and 5 years at Nokia Research Center, where I got more familiar with object-orientation.A brief stop at Rational, followed by lecturing at the Helsinki Technical University for about 3 years (concurrent programming; UML-related topics). Somewhere in the meantime a (or rather THE) company has been founded, where I still work.

Here is the answer to the "advice" part

My advice would be – if we were speaking of a bright graduate – that his decision to start establishing contacts with potential employers during his studies and to lay down the foundations of his professional network was very wise, and now he should start using his contacts.

Finding a good position on the labor market, or a place on the IT market with a product or idea involves a certain amount of luck but also planning and conscious self management, the sooner career starters realize this the better.

Ajay – What are the key things that you have worked with in terms of technologies.

Endre- To my opinion it’s always a matter of people rather than anything else,
because people create technologies and people use technologies.

I believe that the key technologies we worked with are the way our company is organized and managed, the way our employees treat working with us and of course that state-of-the-art products (no matter what actual technology we have in mind: C, .NET, Delphi, PHP, Java etc), which our employees develop for our customers.

Two major examples are existing product providing automated audio quality measurement and analysis and the tool to mine and manage association rules in high data volumes that we expect to release QI 2009. Both are unique on the market as technology/science wise as well as functionality wise.

Ajay- What is the most creative product that has been released or is going to be released by your company.

Endre- I would mention the same two analytical products:

Automated audio/voice quality estimation is already released and we are searching and negotiating with companies to partner on its dissemination and integration to voice quality and quality of service test solutions.

All information about scientific approach, technology, tests and benefits is available from our web site (www.sevana.fi) partly freely and partly under NDA.We also put big hopes for the association rules mining system, which we develop trying to take into account needs of statisticians and marketing/sales analysts as well as typical demands in various industries: retail, wholesale, maintenance. I would like to give special thanks to Mr. Ajay Ohri whom we were consulting with about the features of such product and its market applications and demand. ( Ajay- Pleasure is mine)

Ajay-  Outsourcing has taken off really well in Poland and Romania. What
are the best known success stories of outsourcing that you can tell
of.What are the best known success stories of outsourcing that you can tell of.

Endre- Well, outsourcing may have different faces – it can be a big success and a
big failure or even a failure with a face of success. I believe that success story for software outsourcing is any company that has established a well operating and profitable company in any country, where doing software outsourcing makes sense.

I also believe that we have a good concept for software outsourcing projects as well, providing onshore software development at offshore prices in Finland.

We have our own know-how in order to make it possible.

Ajay- What do you think about the open source versus proprietary software debate. What is scenario in your local market ( across parts of the country ) regarding this.

Endre– Open source gives the freedom to the “evolution” of applications and services.

It can spare you from reinventing the wheel. I forgot the source, but some famous computer scientist said something like: if programmers read more they would have to write less (code)One can argue that in case of open source one doesn’t easily find a bug-fix if her/his problem is not "mainstream".

However, even in proprietary software the vendor has priorities (often market-driven) and if your wallet is not thick enough and you are at the end of the list you’ll have to wait. And fixing, making a workaround, on your own is much more difficult.

Ajay – What are the intellectual property rights conditions as well as language facilities for Russian software companies ? What is the best way to contact local Russian companies for a software contract.

Endre- Protecting intellectual property rights is a reasonable issue in Russia and a lot of effort is put to improve the situation by the government and business, however I believe that the same challenges can be found in any other country: if your IPRs are broken for instance by your outsourcing company, would you really be able to afford court trial? I am sure not every company would be able to afford it no matter where we have IPR violation: in Russia, Romania, Poland or India.

I think the best way is to try to contact individuals first, because in Russia for instance there are a lot of highly qualified people who would rather try to establish their own
business than trying to be highly recognized by local outsourcing companies. We’ll be happy to assist in providing connections to the Russian software compan
ies and individuals.

 

Disclaimer- Ajay- I advise Sevana on Web 2.0 initiatives .See more on their products at http://wordpress.sevana.fi/ and http://sevana.fi