The Predictive Analytics Conference (http://www.predictiveanalyticsworld.com/ ) starts today in Hotel Nikko ,San Francisco . A whole who’s who of analytics experts is gathering there including SAS,SPSS ,SAP, Click Forensics ,Acxiom ,Amazon, Google and a big R user conference as well. It is really really huge so stay tuned for some exciting announcements happening there.
Here 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
Here is a follow up article to the SAS vs. R articles by Ashlee V of the NYT.
The SAS Institute has borrowed a page from Sesame Street. It is now sponsoring the letter ‘R.’
Last month, I wrote an article about the rising popularity of the R programming language. The open-source software has turned into a favorite piece of technology for statisticians and other people looking to pull insights out of data.
On several levels, R represents a threat to SAS, which is the largest seller of commercial statistics software. Students at universities now learn R alongside SAS. In addition, the open-source nature of R allows the software to be tweaked at a pace that is hard for a commercial software maker to match.
All told, surging interest in the free R language could affect sales of SAS software, which can sell for thousands of dollars. Rather than running from the threat, SAS appears ready to try to understand R by adopting a more active role in its development.
You can read more at http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/02/16/sas-warms-to-open-source-one-letter-at-a-time/ or even by clicking on the Bits RSS feed in the sidebar on www.decisionstats.com
Ajay –
Note SAS is only opening up the SAS/IML product to integrate R’s matrix language capabilities. The base SAS software seems to be still not integrated with R and so is the statistics module SAS/Stat (SAS Institute sells in add on modules based on functionality and prices accordingly).
Many third party sources like http://www.minequest.com have created interfaces from Base SAS to R – they are priced at around 50 $ a piece.
An additional threat to SAS’s dominance is from the WPS software from a UK based company , World Programming http://www.teamwpc.co.uk/home (which has an alliance with IBM) . WPS software can read , and write in SAS language and read and write SAS datasets as well, and is priced at 660 $ almost one tenth of SAS Institute’s licenses.
The recession is also forcing many large license holders of statistical software (like Banks and Financial Services) to seek discounts and alternatives. SAS Institute remains the industry leader in analytics software after almost 35 years of dominance.
However this is a nice first step and it would be interesting to see follow up steps from SAS Institute rivals .
We can all go on our respective open source and closed source jets now.
comments from Anne H. Milley, director for technology product marketing at SAS, who relegated R to a limited role.
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.”
June Dershewitz
One of World’s Leading and Well Known Authority on Web Analytics
1) What’s the latest trend you see in Online Analytics over the next year and next three to five years.
I strongly believe that web analytics is on its way to becoming business analytics. In the early days we were solely focused on analyzing clickstream data, but in recent years we’ve relaxed our definition of web analytics to include things like voice of customer
and offline outcome data and multivariate testing. More and more I hear people talking about how online customer interaction fits in with the overall goals of the business rather than as an isolated island of activity. In the future I think we’ll see less of a distinction
between traditional business intelligence and what we currently consider to be the separate field of web analytics.
2) Tell us how you came in this field of work, and what factors made
you succeed.
I entered the field of web analytics in 1999. Like many people who got their start at that time, it happened totally by chance. I had applied for a job as a web developer, but the interviewer thought I’d be perfect for another open position – as a web analyst. I took it just to see what it was like. Here it is a decade later and I’m still in web analytics – so I guess you could say it worked out.
Why is web analytics is a natural match for me? Well, I’ve always felt quite comfortable
A great book for R graphics is here. Its especially useful for people who are new into R and or using graphical function primarily.
http://www.stat.auckland.ac.nz/~paul/RGraphics/chapter2.html
This is a good textbook till the new edition November 2008 release of Bob Munchien’s R for SAS and SPSS Users (http://www.springer.com/statistics/computational/book/978-0-387-09417-5 )
The existing free copy is at http://oit.utk.edu/scc/RforSAS&SPSSusers.pdf
1) What prompted you take a career in science, and what has been the reason you stuck to it, and been a success in it ?
I was doing mathematics for fun at a very young age when my friends were interested in sports, cars and movies. When I finished my master, I was approached by one of the professors to pursue a PhD program. It was in statistics (image analysis, bayesian clustering), and I thought that choosing statistics rather than number theory or numerical analysis would increase my chances of getting a job after presenting my thesis. At that time, my favorite subject was indeed number theory – I was even published in J. of Number Theory. After earning my PhD, I moved to Cambridge, then North Carolina, then the Internet industry – with a very interesting detour into finance and risk management / fraud detection between 2002 and 2005.
2) AnalyticBridge is the world’s largest network for analytic professionals ? What prompted you to build it, what were the critical milestones, and what is your vision for it ?
It is a convergence of multiple factors. The feeling that the startup I was involved with at that time wasn’t doing well, the fact that I had a large network (thanks in part to LinkedIn) and that I discovered Ning.com (while browsing recruiter networks) on February 16th, 2008 – the date AnalyticBridge was born. I decided to create and grow AnalyticBridge very fast, both through networking, quality content, and significant paid advertising. I hope that within 5 years it will be five times bigger in terms of members, and even more profitable
I was doing mathematics for fun at a very young age when my friends were interested in sports, cars and movies. When I finished my master, I was approached by one of the professors to pursue a PhD program. It was in statistics (image analysis, bayesian clustering), and I thought that choosing statistics rather than number theory or numerical analysis would increase my chances of getting a job after presenting my thesis. At that time, my favorite subject was indeed number theory – I was even published in J. of Number Theory. After earning my PhD, I moved to Cambridge, then North Carolina, then the Internet industry – with a very interesting detour into finance and risk management / fraud detection between 2002 and 2005.
2) AnalyticBridge is the world’s largest network for analytic professionals ? What prompted you to build it, what were the critical milestones, and what is your vision for it ?
It is a convergence of multiple factors. The feeling that the startup I was involved with at that time wasn’t doing well, the fact that I had a large network (thanks in part to LinkedIn) and that I discovered Ning.com (while browsing recruiter networks) on February 16th, 2008 – the date AnalyticBridge was born. I decided to create and grow AnalyticBridge very fast, both through networking, quality content, and significant paid advertising. I hope that within 5 years it will be five times bigger in terms of members, and even more profitable
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