Tag: business intelligence

Open Source's worst enemy is itself not Microsoft/SAS/SAP/Oracle

The decision of quality open source makers to offer their software at bargain basement prices even to enterprise customers who are used to pay prices many times more-pricing is the reason open source software is taking a long time to command respect in enterprise software.

I hate to be the messenger who brings the bad news to my open source brethren-

but their worst nightmare is not the actions of their proprietary competitors like Oracle, SAP, SAS, Microsoft ( they hate each other even more than open source )

nor the collective marketing tactics which are textbook like (but referred as Fear Uncertainty Doubt by those outside that golden quartet)- it is their own communities and their own cheap pricing.

It is community action which prevents them from offering their software by ridiculously low bargain basement prices. James Dixon, head geek and founder at Pentaho has a point when he says traditional metrics like revenue need o be adjusted for this impact in his article at http://jamesdixon.wordpress.com/2010/11/02/comparing-open-source-and-proprietary-software-markets/

But James, why offer software to enterprise customers at one tenth the next competitor- one reason is open source companies more often than not compete more with their free community version software than with big proprietary packages.

Communities including academics are used to free- hey how about paying say 1$ for each download.

There are two million R users- if say even 50 % of them  paid 1 $ as a lifetime license fee- you could sponsor enough new packages than twenty years of Google Summer of Code does right now.

Secondly, this pricing can easily be adjusted by shifting the licensing to say free for businesses less than 2 people (even for the enhanced corporate software version not just the plain vanilla community software thus further increasing the spread of the plain vanilla versions)- for businesses from 10 to 20 people offer a six month trial rather than one month trial.

– but adjust the pricing to much more realistic levels compared to competing software. Make enterprise software pay a real value.

That’s the only way to earn respect. as well as a few dollars more.

As for SAS, it is time it started ridiculing Python now that it has accepted R.

Python is even MORE powerful than R in some use cases for stat computing

Dixon’s Pentaho and the Jaspersoft/ Revolution combo are nice _ I tested both Jasper and Pentaho thanks to these remarks this week 🙂  (see slides at http://www.jaspersoft.com/sites/default/files/downloads/events/Analytics%20-Jaspersoft-SEP2010.pdf or http://www.revolutionanalytics.com/news-events/free-webinars/2010/deploying-r/index.php )

Pentaho and Jasper do give good great graphics in BI (Graphical display in BI is not a SAS forte though probably I dont know how much they cross sell JMP to BI customers- probably too much JMP is another division syndrome there)

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Jim Goodnight on Open Source- and why he is right -sigh

Logo Open Source Initiative
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Jim Goodnight – grand old man and Godfather of the Cosa Nostra of the BI/Database Analytics software industry said recently on open source in BI (btw R is generally termed in business analytics and NOT business intelligence software so these remarks were more apt to Pentaho and Jaspersoft )

Asked whether open source BI and data integration software from the likes of Jaspersoft, Pentaho and Talend is a growing threat, [Goodnight] said: “We haven’t noticed that a lot. Most of our companies need industrial strength software that has been tested, put through every possible scenario or failure to make sure everything works correctly.”

quotes from Jim Goodnight are courtesy Jason’s  story here:
http://www.cbronline.com/news/sas-ceo-says-cep-open-source-and-cloud-bi-have-limited-appeal

and the Pentaho follow-up reaction is here

http://bi.cbronline.com/news/pentaho-fires-back-across-sas-bows-over-limited-open-source-appeal

 

 

While you can rage and screech- here is the reality in terms of market share-

From Merv Adrian-‘s excellent article on market shares in BI

http://www.enterpriseirregulars.com/22444/decoding-bi-market-share-numbers-%E2%80%93-play-sudoku-with-analysts/

The first, labeled BI Platforms, is drawn fromGartner Market Share Analysis: Business Intelligence, Analytics and Performance Management Software, Worldwide, 2009, published May 2010 , and Gartner Dataquest Market Share: Business Intelligence, Analytics and Performance Management Software, Worldwide, 2009.

and

Advanced Analytics category.

and 

so whats the performance of Talend, Pentaho and Jaspersoft

From http://www.dbms2.com/category/products-and-vendors/talend/

It seems that Talend’s revenue was somewhat shy of $10 million in 2008.

and Talend itself says

http://www.talend.com/press/Talend-Announces-Record-2009-and-Continues-Growth-in-the-New-Year.php

Additional 2009 highlights include:

  • Achieved record revenue, more then doubling from 2008. The fourth quarter of 2009 was Talend’s tenth consecutive quarter of growth.
  • Grew customer base by 140% to over 1,000 customers, up from 420 at the end of 2008. Of these new customers, over 50% are Fortune 1000 companies.
  • Total downloads reached seven million, with over 300,000 users of the open source products.
  • Talend doubled its staff, increasing to 200 global employees. Continuing this trend, Talend has already hired 15 people in 2010 to support its rapid growth.

now for Jaspersoft numbers

http://www.dbms2.com/2008/09/14/jaspersoft-numbers/

Highlights include:

  • Revenue run rate in the double-digit millions.
  • 40% sequential growth most recent quarter. (I didn’t ask whether there was any reason to suspect seasonality.)
  • 130% annual revenue growth run rate.
  • “Not quite” profitable.
  • Several hundred commercial subscribers, at an average of $25K annually per, including >100 in Europe.
  • 9,000 paying customers of some kind.
  • 100,000+ total deployments, “very conservatively,” counting OEMs as one deployment each and not double-counting for OEMs’ customers. (Nick said Business Objects quotes 45,000 deployments by the same standards.)
  • 70% of revenue from the mid-market, defined as $100 million – $1 billion revenue. 30% from bigger enterprises. (Hmm. That begs a couple of questions, such as where OEM revenue comes in, and whether <$100 million enterprises were truly a negligible part of revenue.)

and for Pentaho numbers-

http://www.dbms2.com/2009/01/27/introduction-to-pentaho/

and http://www.monash.com/uploads/Pentaho-January-2009.pdf

suggests there are far far away from the top 5-6 vendors in BI

and a special mention  for postgreSQL– which is a non Profit but is seriously denting Oracle/MySQL

http://www.postgresql.org/about/

Limit Value
Maximum Database Size Unlimited
Maximum Table Size 32 TB
Maximum Row Size 1.6 TB
Maximum Field Size 1 GB
Maximum Rows per Table Unlimited
Maximum Columns per Table 250 – 1600 depending on column types
Maximum Indexes per Table Unlimited

and leading vendor is EnterpriseDB which is again IBM-partnering as well as IBM funded

http://www.sramanamitra.com/2009/05/18/enterprise-db/

and

http://www.enterprisedb.com/company/news_events/press_releases/2010_21.do

suggest it is still in early stages.

————————————————————–

So what do we conclude-

1) There is a complete lack of transparency in open source BI market shares as almost all these companies are privately held and do not disclose revenues.

2) What may be a pure play open source company may actually be a company funded by a big BI vendor (like Revolution Analytics is funded among others by Intel-Microsoft) and EnterpriseDB has IBM as an investor.MySQL and Sun of course are bought by Oracle

The degree of control by proprietary vendors on open source vendors is still not disclosed- whether they are holding a stake for strategic reasons or otherwise.

3) None of the Open Source Vendors are even close to a 1 Billion dollar revenue number.

Jim Goodnight is pointing out market reality when he says he has not seen much impact (in terms of market share). As for the rest of his remarks, well he’s got a job to do as CEO and thats talk up his company and trash the competition- which he as been doing for 3 decades and unlikely to change now unless there is severe market share impact. Unless you expect him to notice companies less than 5% of his size in revenue.

Related Articles

http://www.cbronline.com/news/sas-ceo-says-cep-open-source-and-cloud-bi-have-limited-appeal

http://bi.cbronline.com/news/pentaho-fires-back-across-sas-bows-over-limited-open-source-appeal

 

Scoring SAS and SPSS Models in the cloud

Outline of a cloud containing text 'The Cloud'
Image via Wikipedia

An announcement from Zementis and Predixion Software– about using cloud computing for scoring models using PMML. Note R has a PMML package as well which is used by Rattle, data mining GUI for exporting models.

Source- http://www.marketwatch.com/story/predixion-software-introduces-new-product-to-run-sas-and-spss-predictive-models-in-the-cloud-2010-10-19?reflink=MW_news_stmp

——————————————————————————————————–

ALISO VIEJO, Calif., Oct 19, 2010 (BUSINESS WIRE) — Predixion Software today introduced Predixion PMML Connexion(TM), an interface that provides Predixion Insight(TM), the company’s low-cost, self-service in the cloud predictive analytics solution, direct and seamless access to SAS, SPSS (IBM) and other predictive models for use by Predixion Insight customers. Predixion PMML Connexion enables companies to leverage their significant investments in legacy predictive analytics solutions at a fraction of the cost of conventional licensing and maintenance fees.

The announcement was made at the Predictive Analytics World conference in Washington, D.C. where Predixion also announced a strategic partnership with Zementis, Inc., a market leader in PMML-based solutions. Zementis is exhibiting in Booth #P2.

The Predictive Model Markup Language (PMML) standard allows for true interoperability, offering a mature standard for moving predictive models seamlessly between platforms. Predixion has fully integrated this PMML functionality into Predixion Insight, meaning Predixion Insight users can now effortlessly import PMML-based predictive models, enabling information workers to score the models in the cloud from anywhere and publish reports using Microsoft Excel(R) and SharePoint(R). In addition, models can also be written back into SAS, SPSS and other platforms for a truly collaborative, interoperable solution.

“Predixion’s investment in this PMML interface makes perfect business sense as the lion’s share of the models in existence today are created by the SAS and SPSS platforms, creating compelling opportunity to leverage existing investments in predictive and statistical models on a low-cost cloud predictive analytics platform that can be fed with enterprise, line of business and cloud-based data,” said Mike Ferguson, CEO of Intelligent Business Strategies, a leading analyst and consulting firm specializing in the areas of business intelligence and enterprise business integration. “In this economy, Predixion’s low-cost, self-service predictive analytics solutions might be welcome relief to IT organizations chartered with quickly adding additional applications while at the same time cutting costs and staffing.”

“We are pleased to be partnering with Zementis, truly a PMML market leader and innovator,” said Predixion CEO Simon Arkell. “To allow any SAS or SPSS customer to immediately score any of their predictive models in the cloud from within Predixion Insight, compare those models to those created by Predixion Insight, and share the results within Excel and Sharepoint is an exciting step forward for the industry. SAS and SPSS customers are fed up with the high prices they must pay for their business users just to access reports generated by highly skilled PhDs who are burdened by performing routine tasks and thus have become a massive bottleneck. That frustration is now a thing of the past because any information worker can now unlock the power of predictive analytics without relying on experts — for a fraction of the cost and from anywhere they can connect to the cloud,” Arkell said.

Dr. Michael Zeller, Zementis CEO, added, “Our mission is to significantly shorten the time-to-market for predictive models in any industry. We are excited to be contributing to Predixion’s self-service, cloud-based predictive analytics solution set.”

About Predixion Software

Predixion Software develops and markets collaborative predictive analytics solutions in the public and private cloud. Predixion enables self-service predictive analytics, allowing customers to use and analyze large amounts of data to make actionable decisions, all within the familiar environment of Excel and PowerPivot. Predixion customers are achieving immediate results across a multitude of industries including: retail, finance, healthcare, marketing, telecommunications and insurance/risk management.

Predixion Software is headquartered in Aliso Viejo, California with development offices in Redmond, Washington. The company has venture capital backing from established investors including DFJ Frontier, Miramar Venture Partners and Palomar Ventures. For more information please contact us at 949-330-6540, or visit us atwww.predixionsoftware.com.

About Zementis

Zementis, Inc. is a leading software company focused on the operational deployment and integration of predictive analytics and data mining solutions. Its ADAPA(R) decision engine successfully bridges the gap between science and engineering. ADAPA(R) was designed from the ground up to benefit from open standards and to significantly shorten the time-to-market for predictive models in any industry. For more information, please visit www.zementis.com.

 

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Bruno Aziza, Microsoft Global BI Lead joins PAW Keynote

By Richard Wheeler (Zephyris) 2007. Lambda rep...
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An interesting development, Bruno Aziza, Director, Worldwide Strategy Lead, Business Intelligence, Microsoft has joined Predictive Analytics World as a keynote speaker.

http://www.predictiveanalyticsworld.com/dc/2010/agenda.php#day2-2

Keynote
Predictive Analytics and Business Performance

In this session, Bruno Aziza will discuss the challenges organizations face with Analytics and Performance. This participative session will provide first-hand accounts from Fortune 500 companies who are winning by building accountability, intelligence, and informed decision-making into their organizational DNA.

Speaker: Bruno Aziza, Director, Worldwide Strategy Lead, Business Intelligence, Microsoft

Some info about Mr Aziza,

http://www.predictiveanalyticsworld.com/dc/2010/speakers.php#aziza

Bruno Aziza, Director, Worldwide Strategy Lead, Business Intelligence,Microsoft

Bruno AzizaBruno Aziza is a recognized authority on Strategy Execution, Business Intelligence and Information Management. He is the co-author of best-selling book, “Drive Business Performance: Enabling a Culture of Intelligent Execution” and a Fellow at the Advanced Performance Institute, a world-leading and independent advisory group specialized in organizational performance. Drs. Kaplan & Norton, of Balanced Scorecard fame, praise Aziza for moving “the field of performance management forward in important new directions.”

Aziza’s work has been featured in publications across North America, Europe and Asia such as Business Finance magazine, Intelligent Enterprise, CRM magazine and others.

Aziza has held management positions at Apple Inc., Business Objects (SAP), AppStream(Symantec) and Decathlon SA. He currently works on Microsoft Business Intelligence go-to-market strategy and execution for partners, services, sales and marketing. Aziza lives in Seattle with his family and enjoys sports and travelling.

He regularly provides views on leadership and performance on the SuccessFactors thought leader Network , the CIO Network and Forbes Magazine. Aziza is the host ofBizIntelligence.TV – a leading weekly show on Business Intelligence and Analytics. An award-winning speaker, Aziza frequently keynotes international events and has shared the stage with executives and thought leaders such as Dr. Kaplan. Aziza’s biggest crowd to date is 5,000 people.

Follow or contact Bruno via:
•Twitter @ http://twitter.com/brunoaziza
•Facebook @ http://tinyurl.com/bruno-on-facebook
•Linkedin @ http://www.linkedin.com/in/brunoaziza
•YouTube @ http://tinyurl.com/bruno-on-tv
•Kindle blog @ http://tinyurl.com/culture-blog
•Forbes blog @ http://tinyurl.com/culture-blog

That makes it an interesting Pow Wow between the big players at the conference Oracle,SAP, IBM, SAS and now MS –all seem to be there.

Truly a Predictive Analytics World.

 

Which software do we buy? -It depends

Software (novel)
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Often I am asked by clients, friends and industry colleagues on the suitability or unsuitability of particular software for analytical needs.  My answer is mostly-

It depends on-

1) Cost of Type 1 error in purchase decision versus Type 2 error in Purchase Decision. (forgive me if I mix up Type 1 with Type 2 error- I do have some weird childhood learning disabilities which crop up now and then)

Here I define Type 1 error as paying more for a software when there were equivalent functionalities available at lower price, or buying components you do need , like SPSS Trends (when only SPSS Base is required) or SAS ETS, when only SAS/Stat would do.

The first kind is of course due to the presence of free tools with GUI like R, R Commander and Deducer (Rattle does have a 500$ commercial version).

The emergence of software vendors like WPS (for SAS language aficionados) which offer similar functionality as Base SAS, as well as the increasing convergence of business analytics (read predictive analytics), business intelligence (read reporting) has led to somewhat brand clutter in which all softwares promise to do everything at all different prices- though they all have specific strengths and weakness. To add to this, there are comparatively fewer business analytics independent analysts than say independent business intelligence analysts.

2) Type 2 Error- In this case the opportunity cost of delayed projects, business models , or lower accuracy – consequences of buying a lower priced software which had lesser functionality than you required.

To compound the magnitude of error 2, you are probably in some kind of vendor lock-in, your software budget is over because of buying too much or inappropriate software and hardware, and still you could do with some added help in business analytics. The fear of making a business critical error is a substantial reason why open source software have to work harder at proving them competent. This is because writing great software is not enough, we need great marketing to sell it, and great customer support to sustain it.

As Business Decisions are decisions made in the constraints of time, information and money- I will try to create a software purchase matrix based on my knowledge of known softwares (and unknown strengths and weakness), pricing (versus budgets), and ranges of data handling. I will add in basically an optimum approach based on known constraints, and add in flexibility for unknown operational constraints.

I will restrain this matrix to analytics software, though you could certainly extend it to other classes of enterprise software including big data databases, infrastructure and computing.

Noted Assumptions- 1) I am vendor neutral and do not suffer from subjective bias or affection for particular software (based on conferences, books, relationships,consulting etc)

2) All software have bugs so all need customer support.

3) All software have particular advantages , strengths and weakness in terms of functionality.

4) Cost includes total cost of ownership and opportunity cost of business analytics enabled decision.

5) All software marketing people will praise their own software- sometimes over-selling and mis-selling product bundles.

Software compared are SPSS, KXEN, R,SAS, WPS, Revolution R, SQL Server,  and various flavors and sub components within this. Optimized approach will include parallel programming, cloud computing, hardware costs, and dependent software costs.

To be continued-

 

 

 

 

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BI Software

Here is the brand new release from Jaspersoft at a groovy price of 9000$. Somebody stop these guys!

It’s a great company to watch for buyouts as well- given their expertise in REPORTING and clientele- especially for anyone looking to im prove thier standing in both open source world and reporting software branding.

From AOL owned Arrogantion’s site http://www.crunchbase.com/company/jaspersoft

 

Total $24.5M
Series D, 8/07 1
Scale Venture Partners
SAP Ventures
Doll Capital Management
Partech International
Morgenthaler Ventures		 $12M
Unattributed, 12/08 2
Adams Street Partners
Red Hat
Morgenthaler Ventures
Doll Capital Management
Partech International

 

 

The news-

Announcing JasperReports Server Professional

More Resources

Webinar: Introducing JasperReports Server Professional

Thursday October 14

In this live webinar, learn how a new solution from Jaspersoft combines the world’s favorite reporting server with powerful, mature report server functionality—for about 80% less.

  • Date: Thu, Oct 14
  • Time: 10:00 AM PDT
  • Duration: 60 minutes

The World’s Most Powerful and Affordable Reporting Server

Limited Time Introductory Offer: Starting from $9,000 (restrictions apply)

JasperReports Server is the recommended product for organizations requiring an affordable reporting solution for interactive, operational, and production-based reporting. Deployed as a standalone reporting server or integrated inside another application, JasperReports Server is a flexible, powerful, interactive reporting environment for small or large enterprises.

Powered by the world’s most popular reporting tools in JasperReports and iReport, developers and users can take advantage of more interactivity, security, and scheduling of their reports.

Key Benefits:

  • Affordable: Unlimited reports for unlimited users starting at $9,000
  • Powerful: Report scheduling and distribution to 1,000s of users on a single server
  • Flexible: Web service architecture simplifies application integration
  • Secure: Centralized repository authenticates report access
  • Interactive: Easy to interact, self-serve parameterized-based reports
  • Visual appeal: Flash-based charts and maps engage users and enhance applications
  • Open: Access to any data source including relational, XML, Hibernate, EJB, POJO, and custom

or just watch the 5 min video-

 

Speaking of videos -here is a great video on BI from good ol Tennessee-a great 27 min tutorial on BI for newbies

 

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Clustering Business Analysts and Industry Analysts

In my interactions with the world at large (mostly online) in the ways of data, statistics and analytics- I come across people who like to call themselves analysts.

As per me, there are 4 kinds of analysts principally,

1) Corporate Analysts- They work for a particular software company. As per them their product is great and infallible, their code has no bugs, and last zillion customer case studies all got a big benefit by buying their software.

They are very good at writing software code themselves, unfortunately this expertise is restricted to Microsoft Outlook (emails) and MS Powerpoint ( presentations). No they are more like salesmen than analysts, but as Arthur Miller said ” All salesmen (person) are dreamers. When the dream dies, the salesman (person) dies (read transfers to bigger job at a rival company)

2) Third -Party Independent Analsyst- The main reason they are third party is they can not be tolerated in a normal corporate culture, their spouse can barely stand them for more than 2 hours a day, and their Intelligence is not matched by their emotional maturity. Alas, after turning independent analysts, they realize they are actually more dependent to people than before, and they quickly polish their behaviour to praise who ever is sponsoring their webinar,  white paper , newsletter, or flying them to junkets. They are more of boutique consultants, but they used to be quite nifty at writing code, when younger, so they call themselves independent and “Noted Industry Analyst”

3) Researcher Analysts- They mostly scrape info from press releases which are mostly written by a hapless overworked communications team thrown at a task at last moment. They get into one hour call with who ever is the press or industry/analyst  relations honcho is- turn the press release into bullet points, and publish on the blog. They call this as research Analysts and give it away for free (but actually couldnt get anyone to pay for it for last 4 years). Couldnt write code if their life depended on it, but usually will find transformation and expert somehwere in their resume/about me web page. May have co -authored a book, which would have gotten them a F for plagiarism had they submitted it as a thesis.

4) Analytical Analysts- They are mostly buried deep within organizational bureaucracies if corporate, or within partnerships if they are independent. Understand coding, innovation (or creativity). Not very aggressive at networking unless provoked by an absolute idiot belonging to first three classes of industry analyst. Prefer to read Atlas Shrugged than argue on business semantics.

Next time you see an industry expert- you know which cluster to classify them 😉

Image Citation-

http://gapingvoidgallery.com/