Tag: business intelligence

Interview Jill Dyche Baseline Consulting

Here is an interview with Jill Dyche, co-Founder Baseline Consulting and one of the best Business Intelligence consultants and analysts. Her writing is read by huge portion of the industry and has influenced many paradigms.She is also Author of e-Data, The CRM Handbook, and Customer Data Integration: Reaching a Single Version of the Truth.

BI tools are not recommended when they’re the first topic in a BI discussion.

Jill Dyche, Baseline Consulting

Ajay- What approximate Return of Investment would you give to various vendors within Business Intelligence?

Jill- You don’t kid around do you, Ajay? In general the answer has everything to do with the problem BI is solving for a company. For instance, we’re working on deploying operational BI at a retailer right now. This new program is giving people in the stores more power to make decisions about promotions and in-store events. The projected ROI is $300,000 per store per year—and the retailer has over 1000 stores. In another example, we’re working with an HMO client on a master data management project that helps it reconcile patient data across hospitals, clinics, pharmacies, and home health care. The ROI could be life-saving. So, as they say in the Visa commercials: Priceless.

Ajay- What is impact of third party cloud storage and processing do you think will be there on Business Intelligence consulting?

Jill- There’s a lot of buzz about cloud storage for BI, most of it is coming from the VC community at this point, not from our clients. The trouble with that is that BI systems really need control over their storage. There are companies out there—check out a product called RainStor—that do BI storage in the cloud very well, and are optimized for it. But most “cloud” environments geared to BI are really just hosted offerings that provide clients with infrastructure and processing resources that they don’t have in-house.  Where the cloud really has benefits is when it provides significant processing power to companies that can’t build it easily themselves.

Ajay- What are the top writing tips would you give to young struggling business bloggers especially in this recession.

Jill- I’d advise bloggers to write like they talk, a standard admonishment by many a professor of Business Writing. So much of today’s business writing—especially in blogs—is stilted, overly-formal, and pedantic. I don’t care if your grammar is accurate; if your writing sounds like the Monroe Doctrine, no one will read it. (Just give me one quote from the Monroe Doctrine. See what I mean?) Don’t use the word “leverage” when you can use the word “use.” Be genuine and conversational. And avoid clichés like the plague.

Ajay-  How would you convince young people especially women to join more science careers. Describe your own career journey.

Jill- As much as we need those role models in science, high-tech, and math careers, I’d tell them to only embrace it if they really love it. My career path to high-tech was unconventional and unintentional. I started as a technical writer specializing in relational databases just as they were getting hot. One thing I know for sure is if you want to learn about something interesting, be willing to roll up your sleeves and work with it. My technical writing about databases, and then data warehouses, led to some pretty interesting client work.

Sure I’ve coded SQL in my career, and optimized some pretty hairy WHERE clauses. But the bigger issue is applying that work to business problems. Actually I’m grateful that I wasn’t a very good programmer. I’d still be waiting for that infinite loop to finish running.

Ajay- What are the areas within an enterprise where implementation of BI leads to the most gains. And when are BI tools not recommended?

Jill- The best opportunities for BI are for supporting business growth. And that typically means BI used by sales and marketing. Who’s the next customer and what will they buy? It’s answers to questions like these that can set a company apart competitively and contribute to both the top and bottom lines.

Not to be too heretical, but to answer your second question: BI tools are not recommended when they’re the first topic in a BI discussion. We’ve had several “Don’t go into the light” conversations with clients lately where they are prematurely looking at BI tools rather than examining their overall BI readiness. Companies need to be honest about their development processes, existing skill sets, and their data and platform infrastructures before they start phoning up data visualization vendors. Unfortunately, many people engage BI software vendors way before they’re ready.

Ajay- You and your partner Evan wrote what was really the first book on Master Data Management. But you’d been in the BI and data warehousing world before that. Why MDM?

Jill- We just kept watching what our clients couldn’t pull off with their data warehouses. We saw the effort they were going through to enforce business rules through ETL, and what they were trying to do to match records across different source systems. We also saw the amount of manual effort that went into things like handling survivor records, which leads to a series of conversations about data ownership.

Our book (Customer Data Integration: Reaching a Single Version of the Truth, Wiley) has as much to do with data management and data governance as it does with CDI and MDM. As Evan recently said in his presentation at the TDWI MDM Insight event, “You can’t master your data until you manage your data.” We really believe that, and our clients are starting to put it into practice too.

Ajay- Why did you and Evan choose to focus on customer master data (CDI) rather than a more general book on MDM?

Jill- There were two reasons. The first one was because other master data domains like product and location have their own unique sets of definitions and rules. Even though these domains also need MDM, they’re different and the details around implementing them and choosing vendor products to enable them are different. The second reason was that the vast majority of our clients started their MDM programs with customer data. One of Baseline’s longest legacies is enabling the proverbial “360-degree view” of customers. It’s what we knew.

Ajay- What’s surprised you most about your CDI/MDM clients?

Jill- The extent to which they use CDI and MDM as the context for bringing IT and the business closer together. You’d think BI would be ideal for that, and it is. But it’s interesting how MDM lets companies strip back a lot of the tool discussions and just focus on the raw conversations about definitions and rules for business data. Business people get why data is so important, and IT can help guide them in conversations about streamlining data quality and management. Companies like Dell have used MDM for nothing less than business alignment.

Ajay- Any plan to visit India and China for giving lectures?

Jill- I just turned down a trip to China this fall because I had a schedule conflict, which I’m really bummed about. Far as India is concerned, nothing yet but if you’re looking for houseguests let me know.(Ajay- sure I have a big brand new house just ready- and if I visit USA may I be a house guest too?)

About Jill Dyche-

Jill blogs at http://www.jilldyche.com/. where she takes the perpetual challenge of business-IT alignment head on in her trenchant, irreverent style.

Jill Dyché is a partner and co-founder of Baseline Consulting. Her role at Baseline is a combination of best-practice expert, industry gadfly, key client advisor, and all-around thought leader. She is responsible for key client strategies and market analysis in the areas of data governance, business intelligence, master data management, and customer relationship management. Jill counsels boards of directors on the strategic importance of their information investments.

Author

Jill is the author of three books on the business value of IT. Jill’s first book, e-Data (Addison Wesley, 2000) has been published in eight languages. She is a contributor to Impossible Data Warehouse Situations: Solutions from the Experts (Addison Wesley, 2002), and her book, The CRM Handbook (Addison Wesley, 2002), is the bestseller on the topic.

Jill’s work has been featured in major publications such as Computerworld, Information Week, CIO Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Tribune and Newsweek.com. Jill’s latest book, Customer Data Integration (John Wiley and Sons, 2006) was co-authored with Baseline partner Evan Levy, and shows the business breakthroughs achieved with integrated customer data.

Industry Expert

Jill is a featured speaker at industry conferences, university programs, and vendor events. She serves as a judge for several IT best practice awards. She is a member of the Society of Information Management and Women in Technology, a faculty member of TDWI, and serves as a co-chair for the MDM Insight conference. Jill is a columnist for DM Review, and a blogger for BeyeNETWORK and Baseline Consulting.

Interview Alison Bolen SAS.com

My biggest editing soapbox right now is to encourage brevity. We’re so used to writing white papers, brochures and magazine articles that the concept of throwing down 200 words on a topic from your day is a very foreign exercise. –

 

Alison Bolen  Editor-in-Chief sascom

Here is an interview with Alison Bolen the editor-in-chief of SAScom , online magazaine of the SAS Institute. Alison talks of the challenges in maintaining several of the topmost expertise blogs on SAS ,Business Analytics and Business Intelligence.

Ajay- Describe your career in the technology writing and publishing area. What advice would you give to young Web publishers and content producers just entering the job market in this recession? Describe your journey within SAS.

Alison- I started at SAS in 1999 as a summer student working as a contributing editor for SAS Communications magazine. Before the end of the year, I came on full time and soon transitioned to writing and editing for the Web. At that time, we were just developing the strategy for the customer support site and e-newsletters. As the first editor for the SAS Tech Report, I led marketing efforts that brought in 15,000 opt-in subscribers within six months. A year later, I switched to writing and editing customer success stories, which I enjoyed doing until I took on the role of Editor-in-Chief for sascom® magazine in 2006. We started our blogging program in 2007, and I’ve been actively involved in coaching SAS bloggers for the past two years.

Outside of SAS, I’ve written for Southwest Hydrology Magazine, the Arizona Daily Star and other regional papers. My bachelor’s degree is in magazine journalism and my master’s degree is in technical and business communications.

If you’re just beginning your career as a writer, start a blog and stick with it. There’s no better way to get daily writing practice, learn the basics of search engine optimization and start to understand what works online.

Ajay www.SAS.com/Blogs has many, many blogs by experts, RSS feeds and even covers the annual SAS conference with video content. In terms of social media adaptation, what prompts you to stay ahead of the competition in ensuring marketing and technical communications for brand awareness?

What do you think are the basics of setting up a social media presence for a company, regardless of size?

Alison- Social media excites me because you can cut through the clutter and be real. Our new business forecasting blog by Michael Gilliland is a good example. Teaching people how to forecast better is his top priority, not selling software. Our overarching goal for the blogging program is similar: to share and develop expertise.

We’re big advocates of aligning your social media presence with existing marketing goals. We have a few grass-roots teams interested in social media, and we have a director-level Marketing 2.0 Council that our Social Media Manager Dave Thomas leads to determine broad guidelines and strategies. But the overarching concept is to look at the goals of your individual marketing campaigns first, and then determine which social media channels might help you reach those goals.

Most of all, take off your marketing hat when you enter the blog, network or forum. Social media consists of individuals, for the most part, and not companies, so be sure to offer value as a colleague and build relationships.

Ajay- I noticed that SAS.com/ Blogs are almost ad free – even of SAS products – apart from a simple banner of the company. Was this a deliberate decision, and if so, why?

Alison- Yes, most of the SAS blogs were intentionally created to help establish the individual blogger’s expertise – not to promote SAS products or services. One positive side effect is that SAS – by extension – builds credibility as well. But we really do see the blogs as a place to discuss concepts and ideas more than products and tools.

Ajay- What distinguishes good writers on blogs from bad writers on blogs? How about some tips for technical blog writing and especially editing (since many writers need editors more than they realize)?

Alison- The best blog writers know how to simplify and explain even the most mundane, everyday processes. This is true of personal and technical blog writing. If you can look at your life or your work and see what piece of it others would find interesting or want to know more about – and then know how to describe that sliver of yourself clearly – you have what it takes to be a good blogger. Chris Hemedinger does this well on The SAS Dummy blog.

My biggest editing soapbox right now is to encourage brevity. We’re so used to writing white papers, brochures and magazine articles at SAS that the concept of throwing down 200 words on a random topic from your day is a very foreign exercise. You have to learn how to edit your day – not just your writing – to find those topics and distill those thoughts into quick snippets that keep readers interested. And don’t forget it’s okay to have fun!

Ajay- I balance one blog, small consulting assignments and being a stay-at-home dad for an 18-month old. How easy is it for you to balance being editor of sascom, given the huge content your sites create, and three kids? Does working for SAS and its employee-friendly reputation help you do so?

Alison- I couldn’t balance work and kids without a whole lot of help from friends and family, that’s for sure. And the employee-friendly benefits help too. The biggest benefit is the cultural mindset, though, not any individual policy. My boss and my boss’ boss are both working mothers, and they’re balancing the same types of schedules. There’s an understanding about finding a healthy work-life balance that permeates SAS from top to bottom.

Ajay- As a social media consultant it is a weekly struggle for me to convince companies to discontinue registration for normal content (but keep it for special events), use a lot more video tutorials and share content freely across the Web. Above all, convincing busy senior managers to start writing a blog or an article is an exercise in diplomacy itself. How do you convince senior managers to devote time to content creation?

Alison- In a lot of areas, the content is already being created for analyst presentations, press interviews and consulting briefs. It’s really a matter of understanding how to take those existing materials and re-present them in a more personal voice. Not everyone can – or should – do it. You have to decide if you have the voice for it and whether or not it will bring you value beyond what you’re getting through your existing channels.

Ajay- Any plans to visit India and have a SAS India blogathon?

Alison- Alas, not this year.

Maybe I will visit Cary,NC then 🙂


Bio:
Alison Bolen is the Editor of sascom magazine and the sascom voices blog, where SAS experts publish their thoughts on popular and emerging business and technology trends worldwide. Since starting at SAS in 1999, Alison has edited print publications, Web sites, e-newsletters, customer success stories and blogs.

Alison holds a bachelor’s degree in magazine journalism from Ohio University and a master’s degree in technical writing from North Carolina State University.

1) Describe your career in the technology writing and publishing area. What advice would you give to young Web publishers and content producers just entering the job market in this recession? Describe your journey within SAS.

I started at SAS in 1999 as a summer student working as a contributing editor for SAS Communications magazine. Before the end of the year, I came on full time and soon transitioned to writing and editing for the Web. At that time, we were just developing the strategy for the customer support site and e-newsletters. As the first editor for the SAS Tech Report, I led marketing efforts that brought in 15,000 opt-in subscribers within six months. A year later, I switched to writing and editing customer success stories, which I enjoyed doing until I took on the role of Editor-in-Chief for sascom® magazine in 2006. We started our blogging program in 2007, and I’ve been actively involved in coaching SAS bloggers for the past two years.

Outside of SAS, I’ve written for Southwest Hydrology Magazine, the Arizona Daily Star and other regional papers. My bachelor’s degree is in magazine journalism and my master’s degree is in technical and business communications.

If you’re just beginning your career as a writer, start a blog and stick with it. There’s no better way to get daily writing practice, learn the basics of search engine optimization and start to understand what works online.
2) SAS.com/Blogs has many, many blogs by experts, RSS feeds and even covers the annual SAS conference with video content. In terms of social media adaptation, what prompts you to stay ahead of the competition in ensuring marketing and technical communications for brand awareness?

What do you think are the basics of setting up a social media presence for a company, regardless of size?

Social media excites me because you can cut through the clutter and be real. Our new business forecasting blog by Michael Gilliland is a good example. Teaching people how to forecast better is his top priority, not selling software. Our overarching goal for the blogging program is similar: to share and develop expertise.

We’re big advocates of aligning your social media presence with existing marketing goals. We have a few grass-roots teams interested in social media, and we have a director-level Marketing 2.0 Council that our Social Media Manager Dave Thomas leads to determine broad guidelines and strategies. But the overarching concept is to look at the goals of your individual marketing campaigns first, and then determine which social media channels might help you reach those goals.

Most of all, take off your marketing hat when you enter the blog, network or forum. Social media consists of individuals, for the most part, and not companies, so be sure to offer value as a colleague and build relationships.


3) I noticed that SAS.com/ Blogs are almost ad free – even of SAS products – apart from a simple banner of the company. Was this a deliberate decision, and if so, why?

Yes, most of the SAS blogs were intentionally created to help establish the individual blogger’s expertise – not to promote SAS products or services. One positive side effect is that SAS – by extension – builds credibility as well. But we really do see the blogs as a place to discuss concepts and ideas more than products and tools.
4) What distinguishes good writers on blogs from bad writers on blogs? How about some tips for technical blog writing and especially editing (since many writers need editors more than they realize)?

The best blog writers know how to simplify and explain even the most mundane, everyday processes. This is true of personal and technical blog writing. If you can look at your life or your work and see what piece of it others would find interesting or want to know more about – and then know how to describe that sliver of yourself clearly – you have what it takes to be a good blogger. Chris Hemedinger does this well on The SAS Dummy blog.

My biggest editing soapbox right now is to encourage brevity. We’re so used to writing white papers, brochures and magazine articles at SAS that the concept of throwing down 200 words on a random topic from your day is a very foreign exercise. You have to learn how to edit your day – not just your writing – to find those topics and distill those thoughts into quick snippets that keep readers interested. And don’t forget it’s okay to have fun!
5) I balance one blog, small consulting assignments and being a stay-at-home dad for an 18-month old. How easy is it for you to balance being editor of sascom, given the huge content your sites create, and three kids? Does working for SAS and its employee-friendly reputation help you do so?

I couldn’t balance work and kids without a whole lot of help from friends and family, that’s for sure. And the employee-friendly benefits help too. The biggest benefit is the cultural mindset, though, not any individual policy. My boss and my boss’ boss are both working mothers, and they’re balancing the same types of schedules. There’s an understanding about finding a healthy work-life balance that permeates SAS from top to bottom.

6) As a social media consultant it is a weekly struggle for me to convince companies to discontinue registration for normal content (but keep it for special events), use a lot more video tutorials and share content freely across the Web. Above all, convincing busy senior managers to start writing a blog or an article is an exercise in diplomacy itself. How do you convince senior managers to devote time to content creation?

In a lot of areas, the content is already being created for analyst presentations, press interviews and consulting briefs. It’s really a matter of understanding how to take those existing materials and re-present them in a more personal voice. Not everyone can – or should – do it. You have to decide if you have the voice for it and whether or not it will bring you value beyond what you’re getting through your existing channels.

7) Any plans to visit India and have a SAS India blogathon?

Alas, not this year.

KXEN Case Studies : Financial Sector

Here are the summaries of some excellent success stories that KXEN has achieved working with partners in the financial world over the years.

Fraud Modeling- Disbank (acquired by Fortis) Turkey

1. Dısbank increased the number of identified fraudulent applications by 200% from 7 to 21 per day.

2.More than 50 fraudsters using counterfeit cards at merchant locations or fraudulent applications have been arrested after April 2004 when the fraud modeling system was set.


A large Bank on the U.S. East Coast

1.Response Modeling

Previously it took the modeling group four weeks to build one model with several hundred variables, using traditional modeling tools. KXEN took one hour for the same problem and doubled the lift in the top decile because it included variables that had not been used for this business question before.

2.Data Quality

Building a Cross/Up-sell Model for a direct marketing campaign to high net worth customers, the modelers needed four weeks using 1500 variables. Again it took one hour with KXEN, which uncovered significant problems with some of the top predictive variables. Further investigation proved that these problems were created in the data merge of the mail file and response file, creating several “perfect” predictors. The model was re-run, removing these variables, and immediately put into production.

Le Crédit Lyonnais

1.Around 160 score models now built annually – compared to around 10 previously – for 130 direct marketing campaigns.
2.KXEN software has allowed LCL to drive up response rates, leading to more value-added services for customers.

Finansbank, Turkey

1.Within 4 months of starting the project to combat dormancy using KXEN’s solution, the bank had successfully reactivated half its previously dormant customers as per Kunter Kutluay, Finansbank Director of Marketing and Risk Analytics.

Bank Austria Creditanstalt , Austria

1.Some 4.5 terabytes of data are held in the bank’s operational systems, with a further 2 terabytes archived. Analytical models created in KXEN are automatically fed through the bank’s scoring engine in batches weekly
or monthly depending on the schema.

“But we are looking at a success rate of target customer deals in the area of three to five per cent with KXEN.
Before that, it was one per cent or less. ”
Werner Widhalm, Head of the Customer Knowledge Management Unit.

Barclays

1.Barclays’ Teradata warehouse holds information on some 14 million active customers, with data
on many different aspects of customer behaviour. Previously, analysts had to manually whittle down several thousand fields of data to a core of only a few hundred to fit the limitations of the modelling process. Now, all of the variables can be fed straight into the predictive model.

Summary– KXEN has achieved tremendous response in all aspects of data modelling in financial sector where time in building, deploying and analyzing model is much more crucial than many other sectors. I would be following this with other case studies on other KXEN successes across multiple domains.

Source – http://www.kxen.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=220&Itemid=786

Disclaimer- I am a social media consultant for KXEN.

Interview Jim Davis SAS Institute

Here is an interview with Jim Davis, SAS Institute SVP and Chief Marketing Officer.

Traditional business intelligence (BI) as we know it is outdated and insufficient-

davis_jim

Jim Davis, SAS Institute..

Ajay -Please describe your career in science to your present position. What advice would you give to young science graduates in this recession? What advice would you give to entrepreneurs in these challenging economic times?
Jim – After earning a degree in computer science from North Carolina State University, I embarked on a career path that ultimately brought me to SAS and my role as senior VP and CMO. Along the way I’ve worked in software development, newspaper and magazine publishing and IT operations. In 1994, I joined SAS, where I worked my way up the ranks from enterprise computing strategist focused on IT issues to program manager for data warehousing to director of product strategy, VP of marketing and now CMO. It’s been an interesting path.

My advice to new graduates embarking on a career is to leave no stone unturned in your search, particularly in this economy, but also consider adding to your skill set. A local example here in the Research Triangle area is at N.C. State University’s Institute for Advanced Analytics, which offers a master’s degree that combines business and analytical skills. These skills are very much in demand. SAS CEO Jim Goodnight helped establish this 10-month degree program where the first 23 graduating all found solid jobs within four months at an average salary of $81,000. Many of this year’s class, facing the worst economy since the Great Depression, have already found jobs. For entrepreneurs today, my advice is simple: make absolutely sure you’re creating a product or service that people want. And especially given the challenging economic environment, resolve to improve your decision making. Regardless of industry or company size, business decisions need to be based on facts, on data, on science. Not on hunches and guesswork. Business analytics can help here.

Ajay – What are some of the biggest challenges that you have faced and tackled as a marketing person for software? What continues to your biggest focus area for this year?

Jim – Among the biggest challenges that the SAS marketing team has worked to overcome is the perception that analytical software – advanced forecasting, optimization and data mining technologies – are way too complex, difficult to use, and only useful to a small band of highly trained statisticians and other quantitative experts, or “quants.” With lots of hard work, we’ve been able to show the marketplace that powerful tools are available in business solutions designed to solve industry issues.

The biggest marketing challenge now is showing the market how SAS offers unique value with its broad and integrated technologies. The industry terminology is confusing with some companies selling Business Intelligence tools that when you scratch the surface are limited to reporting and query operations. Other SAS competitors only provide data integration software, and still others offer analytics. SAS is the only vendor offering an integrated portfolio of these three very important technologies, as well as cross-industry and industry-specific intelligent applications. This combination, which we and others are calling Business Analytics, is a very powerful set of capabilities. Our challenge is to demonstrate the real value of our comprehensive portfolio. We’ll get there but we have some work to do.

Ajay -It is rare to find a major software company that has zero involvement with open source movement (or as I call it with peer-reviewed code). Could you name some of SAS Institute’s contribution to open source? What could be further plans to enhance this position with the global community of scientists?

Jim – SAS does support open source and open standards too. Open standards typically guide open source implementations (e.g., the OASIS work is guiding some of the work in Eclipse Cosmos, some of the JCP standards guide the Tomcat implementation, etc.).

Some examples of SAS’s contributions to open source and open standards include:

Apache Software Foundation – a senior SAS developer has been a committer on multiple releases of the Apache Tomcat project, and has also acted as Release Coordinator.

Eclipse Foundation — SAS developers were among the early adopters of Eclipse. One senior SAS developer wrote a tutorial whitepaper on using Eclipse RCP, and was named “Top Ambassador” in the 2006 Eclipse Community Awards. Another is a committer on the Eclipse Web Tools project. A third proposed and led Eclipse’s Albireo project. SAS is a participant in the Eclipse Cosmos project, with three R&D employees as committers. Finally, SAS’ Rich Main served on the board of directors of the Eclipse Foundation from 2003 to 2006, helping write the Eclipse Bylaws, Development Process, Membership Agreement, Intellectual Property Policy and Public License.

Java Community Process — SAS has been a Java licensee partner since 1997 and has been active in the Java Community Process. SAS has participated in approximately 25 Java Specification Requests spanning both J2SE and J2EE technology. Rich Main of SAS also served on the JCP Executive Committee from 2005 through 2008.

OASIS — A senior SAS developer serves as secretary of the OASIS Solution Deployment Descriptor (SDD) Technical Committee. In total, six SAS employees serve on this committee.

XML for Analysis — SAS co-sponsored XML for Analysis standard with Microsoft and Hyperion.

Others — A small SAS team developed Cobertura, an open source coverage analysis tool for Java. SAS (through our database access team) is one of the top corporate contributors to Firebird, an open source relational database. Another developer contributes to Slide WebDav. We’ve had people work on HtmlUnit (another testing framework) and FreeBSD.

In addition, there are dozens if not hundreds of contributed bug reports, fixes/patches from SAS developers using open source software. SAS will continue to expand our work with and contribute to open-source tools and communities.

For example, we know a number of our customers use R as well as SAS. So we decided to make it easier for them to access R by making it available in the SAS environment. Our first interface to R, which enables users to integrate R functionality with IML or SAS programs, will be in an upcoming version of SAS/IML Studio later this summer. We’re also working on an R interface that can be surfaced in the SAS server or via other SAS clients.

Ajay – What is business intelligence, and business analytics as per you? SAS is the first IT vendor that comes in the non sponsored link when I search for “business intelligence’ in Google. How well do you think the SAS Business Intelligence Platform rates across platforms from SAP, Oracle , IBM and Microsoft.

Jim – Traditional business intelligence (BI) as we know it is outdated and insufficient.

The term BI has been stretched and widened to encapsulate a lot of different techniques, tools and technologies since it was first coined decades ago. Essentially, BI has always been about information delivery, be it in static rows and columns, graphical representations of information, or the modern and hyper-interactive dashboard with dials and widgets.

BI technologies have also evolved to include intuitive ad-hoc query and analysis with the ability to drill down into the details within context. All of these capabilities are great for reacting to business problems after they have occurred. But businesses face diverse and complex problems, global competition grows exponentially, and increasingly restrictive regulations are just around the corner. They need to anticipate and manage change, drive sustainable growth and track performance.

Now they also have to operate in the midst of a ruinous global credit and liquidity crisis. Reactionary decision making is just not working. Now more than ever, progressive organizations are looking to leverage the power of analytics, specifically business analytics. Why? Real business value comes from capitalizing on all available information assets and selecting the best outcome based on every possible scenario.

Proactive evidence-based decisions – not just information delivery – should drive informed decisions. That is business analytics and that is what SAS provides its customers.

Businesses require robust data integration, data quality, data and text mining, predictive modeling, forecasting and optimization technologies to anticipate what might happen, avoid undesired outcomes and course correct.

These capabilities need to be in synch and integrated from the ground up rather than cobbled together through acquisitions. More importantly, they cannot be part of a monolithic platform that requires 2-3 years before any real value is derived.

They must be part of an agile framework that enables an organization to address its most critical business issues now and then add new functionality over time. A business analytics framework — like the one SAS provides — enables strategic business decisions that optimize performance across an organization.

Ajay – For 4 decades SAS Institute created, nurtured and sustained the SAS language, often paying from its pocket for conferences, papers. Till today SAS Language code on your website is free and accessible to all without a registration unlike other software companies. What do you have to say about third party SAS language compilers like “Carolina” and “WPS”

Jim – There is no doubt that much of the power and flexibility behind our framework for business analytics is derived from our SAS language. At its core, the Base SAS language offers an easy-to-learn syntax and hundreds of language elements, pre-built SAS procedures and re-usable functions. Our focus on listening and adapting to customer’s changing needs has helped us, over the years, to sustain and continuously improve the SAS language and the SAS products that leverage it.

Competition comes in many forms and it pushes us to innovate and keep delivering value for our customers. Language compilers or code interpreters like Carolina and WPS are no exception.

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.

As Anne Milley, SAS’ director of technology product marketing, told DecisionStats this March, customers have varied and specific requirements for their analytics infrastructure. Desired attributes include speed, quality, support, backward and forward compatibility, and others. Certain customers only care about one or two of these attributes, other customers care about more. With our broad and deep analytics portfolio, SAS can uniquely provide the analytics infrastructure that meets a customer’s specific requirements, whether for one or many key attributes. Because of this, an overwhelming majority vote with their pocketbooks to select or retain SAS.

For example, as Anne noted, 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.

At SAS, we provide a complete environment for analytics — from data collection, manipulation, exploration and analysis to the deployment of results. One example of our continuous innovation, and where we are devoting R&D and sales resources, is the SAS In-Database Processing Initiative. Through in-database analytics, customers can move computational tasks (e.g., SAS code, SQL) to execute inside a database. This streamlines the analytic data preparation, model development and scoring processes. Customers needing to leverage their investments in mixed workload relational database platforms will benefit from this SAS initiative. It will help them accelerate their business processes and drive decisions with greater confidence and efficiency.

Ajay – Are you going to move closer for an acquisition? Or be acquired? Which among the existing BI vendors are you most comfortable with in synergy of products and philosophy?

Jim –SAS is in an enviable position as the largest independent provider of business intelligence (BI) software, and the leader in the rapidly emerging field of business analytics, which combines BI with data integration and advanced analytics. We have no plans, nor have had any talks regarding SAS being acquired.

As for SAS acquiring another company, we continuously look for technologies complementary to our wide and deep lineup of business analytics solutions, many of which are targeted at the specific needs of industries ranging from banking, insurance and pharma to healthcare, telecom, manufacturing and government.

Last year, SAS made two acquisitions, IDeaS Revenue Optimization, the premier provider of advanced revenue-management and optimization software for the hospitality industry, and Teragram, a leader in natural language processing and advanced linguistic technology. IDeaS delivers to SAS and our hotel and hospitality customers software sold as a service that meets a critical need in this industry. Teragram’s exciting technology has enhanced SAS’ own robust text mining offerings.

Ajay – Jim Goodnight is a legend in philanthropy, inventions, and as a business leader (obviously he has a fine team supporting him). Who will be the next Jim         Goodnight ?

Jim – I think Jim Goodnight best addressed the question of succession plans at SAS best a few years ago when he noted that the business world often places undue emphasis on the CEO and forgets about the CTO, CMO, CFO and other senior leaders who play a key role in any company’s success. SAS has a very strong executive management team that runs a two billion-dollar software company very effectively. If a “next Jim Goodnight” is needed in the future, SAS will be ready and will continue to provide our customers with the business analytics software they need.

Biography-

Jim Davis, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer for SAS, is responsible for providing strategic direction for SAS products, solutions and services and presenting the SAS brand worldwide. He helped develop the Information Evolution Model and co-authored “Information Revolution: Using the information Evolution Model to Grow your Business.” By outlining how information is managed and used as a corporate asset, the model enables organizations to evaluate their management of information objectively, providing a framework for making improvements necessary to compete in today’s global arena.

s285_sas100k_130w SAS (www.sas.com) is the leader in business analytics software and services, and the largest independent vendor in the business intelligence market. Through innovative solutions delivered within an integrated framework, SAS helps customers at more than 45,000 sites improve performance and deliver value by making better decisions faster. Since 1976 SAS has been giving customers around the world The Power to Know®.

Interview:Richard Schultz , CEO REvolution Computing

Here is an interview with the CEO of REvolution Computing, Richard Schultz. Mr. Schultz offers his perspectives on aspects of the open source, predictive analytics, cloud computing as well his vision for R Commercial.

Note from Ajay-As I blogged previously, commercial establishments now have an option to use R commercially with a full service contract and all guarantees which they expect and get from existing analytics software vendors.

Ajay -Linux has not really succeeded in capturing Windows /Desktop Operating market. What are the technical and business reasons that you think R will succeed in analytics desktop software market.

Richard- To start, Linux was never really targeted at the Windows desktop market, but rather at deseating proprietary Unix deployments (particularly in finance), which it did quite successfully.  This is a similar trend to what we’re seeing in the R world – it’s not that R is generally replacing Excel, for instance.  In addition, with the large and growing base of both users and contributors, the vibrancy of the R community has taken on a life of its own.

As to R and Windows, two things are worth noting:

1. Microsoft has moved rapidly to embrace R and REvolution for that matter.

2. Windows is still the predominate operating system in large commercial enterprises. Because we deploy R on multiprocessors, which are now common on all computers including those pre-loaded with Windows, REvolution R is very much at home in both Windows, Mac, and Linux environments.

Ajay- What are the biggest challenges to Revolution Computing while explaining R Pro to users of traditional statistics softwares. What are the biggest advantages?

Richard- The biggest challenge is getting the word out that there now exists validated and supported R products designed for commercial use. But that’s changing rapidly, as your own interest in REvolution Computing demonstrates. Our biggest advantages are several:

1. we are focused on building a close and collegial relationship with the open source R community;

2. our company has a deep history in super computing and parallelization;

3. with, by Intel’s estimate, over 1 million R users and growing, there is a large community eager to adapt our products as its members advance their careers in the business and research worlds.

Ajay- Which softwares do you think will be affected the most by R’s spread across colleges and companies. What do you believe will be their strategies to compete.


Richard – I want to be politic here. Let me say that the programming software likely most affected by the rise of R is probably proprietary.

We see many opportunities to partner and leverage the strengths of REvolution’s products specifically – high performance, handling of large data, validation, IDE / user interface.

Ajay- How do you intend to incorporate the cloud computing and Software as a Service Model for R Pro. When , if at all, do you think it be possible  for a person to simply upload a zipped csv file, work on a remote cloud computer for analytics and forecasting, and just pay for the hired software,hardware,bandwidth.

Richard – We were thinking of something based on the Ohri framework.  ;-). ( Ajay- Touché!)

In fact, we have deployed, and are deploying cloud-based REvolution R for clients, and it’s something we expect to evolve as those technologies evolve.


Ajay- Asian countries have huge demand for analytics, and are more price conscious on softwares. What would your strategy to sell in Asia /China and India be.

Richard – Open source can be a tremendous win for users in Asia / China / India.  The upfront costs are low, the technology is leading-edge, and there is a distribution network for support.  REvolution has partners, and is continuing to build its partner network to be able to reach these markets.  We expect to accelerate our efforts in these regions toward the end of 2009.

Ajay- What has been the story so far for your career. What prompted you to join/start Revolution Computing. What would be the advice you would give to young science graduates in today’s recession.

Richard – My own background is in computer science, business… and music. Through school I held various positions at IBM, and after graduate school, I worked at Dunn & Bradsteet in a product management role and developed a taste for entrepreneurship. I’ve started two companies so far, MetaServer, a business intelligence middleware company that catered to the insurance industry, and REvolution Computing. Today, MetaServer is part of Oracle. And I continue to play music – guitar and piano. One of these days we’ll get a REvolution Computing band together.

My advice to young science graduates is the same recession or no: follow your enthusiasms; find a passion outside of work like playing music; master open source program languages because that is the future and the future is here.

About Richard Schultz –Chief Executive Officer,REvolution Computing

Richard guides REvolution’s long-range business strategy and leads the company’s teams on a daily basis. His experience developing and growing Business Intelligence software companies includes founding and leading Metaserver, Inc., now a part of Oracle, from inception to sale. Richard has been named Innovator of the Year by Business New Haven; served on the board of the Connecticut Venture Group; and been the keynote speaker for CIO Forum and other technology industry events.  A graduate of Washington University with degrees in Computer Science, Business and Music, Richard also holds a Masters degree in Computer Science from the State University of New York at Stonybrook and has held senior positions at Dunn and Bradstreet and IBM.

Ajay -REvolution Computing has been a leader in this field and going by the latest product launch –well you can try it yourself and see from here http://www.revolution-computing.com