Tag: enterprise software

Why Cloud?

Here are some reasons why cloud computing is very helpful to small business owners like me- and can be very helpful to even bigger people.

1) Infrastructure Overhead becomes zero

– I need NOT invest in secure powerbackups (like a big battery for electricity power-outs-true in India), data disaster management (read raid), software licensing compliance.

All this is done for me by infrastructure providers like Google and Amazon.

For simple office productivity, I type on Google Docs that auto-saves my data,writing on cloud. I need not backup- Google does it for me.  Ditto for presentations and spreadsheets. Amazon gets me the latest Window software installed whenever I logon- I need not be  bothered by software contracts (read bug fixes and patches) any more.

2) Renting Hardware by the hour- A small business owner cannot invest too much in computing hardware (or software). The pay as you use makes sense for them. I could never afford a 8 cores desktop with 25 gb RAM- but I sure can rent and use it to bid for heavier data projects that I would have had to let go in the past.

3) Renting software by the hour- You may have bought your last PC for all time

An example- A windows micro instance costs you 3 cents per hour on Amazon. If you take a mathematical look at upgrading your PC to latest Windows, buying more and more upgraded desktops just to keep up, those costs would exceed 3 cents per hour. For Unix, it is 2 cents per hour, and those softwares (like Red Hat Linux and Ubuntu have increasingly been design friendly even for non techie users)

Some other software companies especially in enterprise software plan to and already offer paid machine images that basically adds their software layer on top of the OS and you can rent software for the hour.

It does not make sense for customers to effectively subsidize golf tournaments, rock concerts, conference networks by their own money- as they can rent software by the hour and switch to pay per use.

People especially SME consultants, academics and students and cost conscious customers – in Analytics would love to see a world where they could say run SAS Enterprise Miner for 10 dollars a hour for two hours to build a data mining model on 25 gb RAM, rather than hurt their pockets and profitability in Annual license models. Ditto for SPSS, JMP, KXEN, Revolution R, Oracle Data Mining (already available on Amazon) , SAP (??), WPS ( on cloud ???? ) . It’s the economy, stupid.

Corporates have realized that cutting down on Hardware and software expenses is more preferable to cutting down people. Would you rather fire people in your own team to buy that big HP or Dell or IBM Server (effectively subsidizing jobs in those companies). IF you had to choose between an annual license renewal for your analytics software TO renting software by the hour and using those savings for better benefits for your employees, what makes business sense for you to invest in.

Goodbye annual license fees.  Welcome brave new world.

IBM SPSS 19: Marketing Analytics and RFM

What is RFM Analysis?

Recency Frequency Monetization is basically a technique to classify your entire customer list. You may be a retail player with thousands of customers or a enterprise software seller with only two dozen customers.

RFM Analysis can help you cut through and focus on the real customer that drives your profit.

As per Wikipedia–

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RFM

RFM is a method used for analyzing customer behavior and defining market segments. It is commonly used in database marketing and direct marketing and has received particular attention in retail.

RFM stands for

  • Recency – How recently a customer has purchased?
  • Frequency – How often he purchases?
  • Monetary Value – How much does he spend?

To create an RFM analysis, one creates categories for each attribute. For instance, the Recency attribute might be broken into three categories: customers with purchases within the last 90 days; between 91 and 365 days; and longer than 365 days. Such categories may be arrived at by applying business rules, or using a data mining technique, such asCHAID, to find meaningful breaks.

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Even if you dont know what or how to do a RFM, see below for an easy to do way.

I just got myself an evaluation copy of a fully loaded IBM SPSS 19 Module and did some RFM Analysis on some data- the way SPSS recent version is it makes it very very useful even to non statistical tool- but an extremely useful one to a business or marketing user.

Here are some screenshots to describe the features.

1) A simple dashboard to show functionality (with room for improvement for visual appeal)

2) Simple Intuitive design to inputting data3) Some options in creating marketing scorecards4) Easy to understand features for a business audiences

rather than pseudo techie jargon5) Note the clean design of the GUI in specifying data input type6) Again multiple options to export results in a very user friendly manner with options to customize business report7) Graphical output conveniently pasted inside a word document rather than a jumble of images. Auto generated options for customized standard graphs.8) An attractive heatmap to represent monetization for customers. Note the effect that a scale of color shades have in visual representation of data.9) Comparative plots placed side by side with easy to understand explanation (in the output word doc not shown here)10) Auto generated scores attached to data table to enhance usage. 

Note here I am evaluating RFM as a marketing technique (which is well known) but also the GUI of IBM SPSS 19 Marketing Analytics. It is simple, and yet powerful into turning what used to be a purely statistical software for nerds into a beautiful easy to implement tool for business users.

So what else can you do in Marketing Analytics with SPSS 19.

IBM SPSS Direct Marketing

The Direct Marketing add-on option allows organizations to ensure their marketing programs are as effective as possible, through techniques specifically designed for direct marketing, including:

• RFM Analysis. This technique identifies existing customers who are most likely to respond to a new offer.

• Cluster Analysis. This is an exploratory tool designed to reveal natural groupings (or clusters) within your data. For example, it can identify different groups of customers based on various demographic and purchasing characteristics.

• Prospect Profiles. This technique uses results from a previous or test campaign to create descriptive profiles. You can use the profiles to target specific groups of contacts in future campaigns.

• Postal Code Response Rates. This technique uses results from a previous campaign to calculate postal code response rates. Those rates can be used to target specific postal codes in future campaigns.

• Propensity to Purchase. This technique uses results from a test mailing or previous campaign to generate propensity scores. The scores indicate which contacts are most likely to respond.

• Control Package Test. This technique compares marketing campaigns to see if there is a significant difference in effectiveness for different packages or offers.

Click here to find out more about Direct Marketing.

Red Hat worth 7.8 Billion now

I was searching for a Linux install of Revolution’s latest enterprise version, but it seems version 4 will be available on Red Hat Enterprise Linux only by Decemebr 2010. Also even though Revolution once opted for co branding with Canonical’s Karmic Koala, they seem to have ignored Ubuntu from the Enterprise version of Revolution R.

http://www.revolutionanalytics.com/why-revolution-r/which-r-is-right-for-me.php

Base R Revolution R Community Revolution R Enterprise
Buy Now
Target Use Open Source Product Evaluation & Simple Prototyping Business, Research & Academics
Software
100% Compatible with R language X X X
Certified for Stability X X
Command-Line Programming X X X
Getting Started Guide X X
Performance & Scalability
Analyze larger data sets with 64-bit RAM X X
Optimized for Multi-processor workstations X X
Multi-threaded Math libraries X X
Parallel Programming (Single Workstation) X X
Out-of-the-Box Cluster-Ready X
“Big Data” Analysis
Terabyte-Class File Structures X
Specialized “Big Data” Algorithms X
Integrated Web Services
Scalable Web Services Platform X*
User Interface
Visual IDE X
Comprehensive Data Analysis GUI X*
Technical Support
Discussion Forums X X X
Online Support Mailing List Forum X
Email Support X
Phone Support X
Support for Base & Recommended R Packages X X X
Authorized Training & Consulting X
Platforms
Single User X X X
Multi-User Server X X
32-bit Windows X X X
64-bit Windows X X
Mac OS X X X
Ubuntu Linux X X
Red Hat Enterprise Linux X
Cloud-Ready X

and though the page on RED HAT’s Partner page for Revolution seems old/not so updated

https://www.redhat.com/wapps/partnerlocator/web/home.html;#productId=188

, I was still curious to see what the buzz about Red Hat is all about.

And one of the answers is Red Hat is now a 7.8 Billion Dollar Company.

http://www.redhat.com/about/news/prarchive/2010/Q2_2011.html

Red Hat Reports Second Quarter Results

  • Revenue of $220 million, up 20% from the prior year
  • GAAP operating income up 24%, non-GAAP operating income up 25% from the prior year
  • Deferred revenue of $650 million, up 12% from the prior year

RALEIGH, NC – Sept 22, 2010 – Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced financial results for its fiscal year 2011 second quarter ended August 31, 2010.

Total revenue for the quarter was $219.8 million, an increase of 20% from the year ago quarter. Subscription revenue for the quarter was $186.2 million, up 19% year-over-year.

and the stock goes zoom 48 % up for the year

http://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&chvs=maximized&chdeh=0&chfdeh=0&chdet=1285505944359&chddm=98141&chls=IntervalBasedLine&cmpto=INDEXDJX:.DJI;NASDAQ:ORCL;NASDAQ:MSFT;NYSE:IBM&cmptdms=0;0;0;0&q=NYSE:RHT&ntsp=0

(Note to Google- please put the URL shortener on Google Finance as well)

The software is also reasonably priced starting from 80$ onwards.

https://www.redhat.com/apps/store/desktop/

Basic Subscription

Web support, 2 business day response, unlimited incidents
1 Year
$80
Multi-OS with Basic SubscriptionWeb support, 2 business day response, unlimited incidents
1 Year
$120
Workstation with Basic Subscription
Web support, 2 business day response, unlimited incidents
1 Year
$179
Workstation and Multi-OS with Basic Subscription
Web support, 2 business day response, unlimited incidents
1 Year
$219
Workstation with Standard Subscription
Business Hours phone support, web support, unlimited incidents
1 Year
$299
Workstation and Multi-OS with Standard Subscription
Business Hours phone support, web support, unlimited incidents
1 Year
$339
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That should be a good enough case for open source as a business model.




KXEN Update

Update from a very good data mining software company, KXEN –

  1. Longtime Chairman and founder Roger Haddad is retiring but would be a Board Member. See his interview with Decisionstats here https://decisionstats.wordpress.com/2009/01/05/interview-roger-haddad-founder-of-kxen-automated-modeling-software/ (note images were hidden due to migration from .com to .wordpress.com )
  2. New Members of Leadership are as-
John Ball, CEOJohn Ball
Chief Executive Officer

John Ball brings 20 years of experience in enterprise software, deep expertise in business intelligence and CRM applications, and a proven track record of success driving rapid growth at highly innovative companies.

Prior to joining KXEN, Mr. Ball served in several executive roles at salesforce.com, the leading provider of SaaS applications. Most recently, John served as VP & General Manager, Analytics and Reporting Products, where he spearheaded salesforce.com’s foray into CRM analytics and business intelligence. John also served as VP & General Manager, Service and Support Applications at salesforce.com, where he successfully grew the business to become the second largest and fastest growing product line at salesforce.com. Before salesforce.com, Ball was founder and CEO of Netonomy, the leading provider of customer self-service solutions for the telecommunications industry. Ball also held a number of executive roles at Business Objects, including General Manager, Web Products, where delivered to market the first 3 versions of WebIntelligence. Ball has a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Georgia Tech and a master’s degree in electric

I hope John atleast helps build a KXEN Force.com application- there are only 2 data mining apps there on App Exchange. Also on the wish list  more social media presence, a Web SaaS/Amazon API for KXEN, greater presence in American/Asian conferences, and a solution for SME’s (which cannot afford the premium pricing of the flagship solution. An alliance with bigger BI vendors like Oracle, SAP or IBM  for selling the great social network analysis.

Bill Russell as Non Executive Chairman-

Bill Russell as Non-executive Chairman of the Board, effective July 16 2010. Russell has 30 years of operational experience in enterprise software, with a special focus on business intelligence, analytics, and databases.Russell held a number of senior-level positions in his more than 20 years at Hewlett-Packard, including Vice President and General Manager of the multi-billion dollar Enterprise Systems Group. He has served as Non-executive Chairman of the Board for Sylantro Systems Corporation, webMethods Inc., and Network Physics, Inc. and has served as a board director for Cognos Inc. In addition to KXEN, Russell currently serves on the boards of Saba, PROS Holdings Inc., Global 360, ParAccel Inc., and B.T. Mancini Company.

Xavier Haffreingue as senior vice president, worldwide professional services and solutions.
He has almost 20 years of international enterprise software experience gained in the CRM, BI, Web and database sectors. Haffreingue joins KXEN from software provider Axway where he was VP global support operations. Prior to Axway, he held various leadership roles in the software industry, including VP self service solutions at Comverse Technologies and VP professional services and support at Netonomy, where he successfully delivered multi-million dollar projects across Europe, Asia-Pacific and Africa. Before that he was with Business Objects and Sybase, where he ran support and services in southern Europe managing over 2,500 customers in more than 20 countries.

David Guercio  as senior vice president, Americas field operations. Guercio brings to the role more than 25 years experience of building and managing high-achieving sales teams in the data mining, business intelligence and CRM markets. Guercio comes to KXEN from product lifecycle management vendor Centric Software, where he was EVP sales and client services. Prior to Centric, he was SVP worldwide sales and client services at Inxight Software, where he was also Chairman and CEO of the company’s Federal Systems Group, a subsidiary of Inxight that saw success in the US Federal Government intelligence market. The success in sales growth and penetration into the federal government led to the acquisition of Inxight by Business Objects in 2007, where Guercio then led the Inxight sales organization until Business Objects was acquired by SAP. Guercio was also a key member of the management team and a co-founder at Neovista, an early pioneer in data mining and predictive analytics. Additionally, he held the positions of director of sales and VP of professional services at Metaphor Computer Systems, one of the first data extraction solutions companies, which was acquired by IBM. During his career, Guercio also held executive positions at Resonate and SiGen.

3) Venture Capital funding to fund expansion-

It has closed $8 million in series D funding to further accelerate its growth and international expansion. The round was led by NextStage and included participation from existing investors XAnge Capital, Sofinnova Ventures, Saints Capital and Motorola Ventures.

This was done after John Ball had joined as CEO.

4) Continued kudos from analysts and customers for it’s technical excellence.

KXEN was named a leader in predictive analytics and data mining by Forrester Research (1) and was rated highest for commercial deployments of social network analytics by Frost & Sullivan (2)

Also it became an alliance partner of Accenture- which is also a prominent SAS partner as well.

In Database Optimization-

In KXEN V5.1, a new data manipulation module (ADM) is provided in conjunction with scoring to optimize database workloads and provide full in-database model deployment. Some leading data mining vendors are only now beginning to offer this kind of functionality, and then with only one or two selected databases, giving KXEN a more than five-year head start. Some other vendors are only offering generic SQL generation, not optimized for each database, and do not provide the wealth of possible outputs for their scoring equations: For example, real operational applications require not only to generate scores, but decision probabilities, error bars, individual input contributions – used to derive reasons of decision and more, which are available in KXEN in-database scoring modules.

Since 2005, KXEN has leveraged databases as the data manipulation engine for analytical dataset generation. In 2008, the ADM (Analytical Data Management) module delivered a major enhancement by providing a very easy to use data manipulation environment with unmatched productivity and efficiency. ADM works as a generator of optimized database-specific SQL code and comes with an integrated layer for the management of meta-data for analytics.

KXEN Modeling Factory- (similar to SAS’s recent product Rapid Predictive Modeler http://www.sas.com/resources/product-brief/rapid-predictive-modeler-brief.pdf and http://jtonedm.com/2010/09/02/first-look-rapid-predictive-modeler/)

KXEN Modeling Factory (KMF) has been designed to automate the development and maintenance of predictive analytics-intensive systems, especially systems that include large numbers of models, vast amounts of data or require frequent model refreshes. Information about each project and model is monitored and disseminated to ensure complete management and oversight and to facilitate continual improvement in business performance.

Main Functions

Schedule: creation of the Analytic Data Set (ADS), setup of how and when to score, setup of when and how to perform model retraining and refreshes …

Report: Monitormodel execution over time, Track changes in model quality over time, see how useful one variable is by considering its multiple instance in models …

Notification: Rather than having to wade through pages of event logs, KMF Department allows users to manage by exception through notifications.

Other products from KXEN have been covered here before https://decisionstats.wordpress.com/tag/kxen/ , including Structural Risk Minimization- https://decisionstats.wordpress.com/2009/04/27/kxen-automated-regression-modeling/

Thats all for the KXEN update- all the best to the new management team and a splendid job done by Roger Haddad in creating what is France and Europe’s best known data mining company.

Note- Source – http://www.kxen.com


Open Source Business Intelligence: Pentaho and Jaspersoft

Here are two products that are used widely for Business Intelligence_ They are open source and both have free preview.

Jaspersoft-For the Enterprise version click on the screenshot while for the free community version you can go to

http://jasperforge.org/projects/jasperserver

Interestingly (and not surprisingly) Revolution Analytics is teaming up with Jaspersoft to use R for reporting along with the Jaspersoft BI stack.

ADVANCED ANALYTICS ON DEMAND IN APPLICATIONS, IN DASHBOARDS, AND ON THE WEB

FREE WEBINAR WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 22ND @9AM PACIFIC

DEPLOYING R: ADVANCED ANALYTICS ON DEMAND IN APPLICATIONS, IN DASHBOARDS, AND ON THE WEB

A JOINT WEBINAR FROM REVOLUTION ANALYTICS AND JASPERSOFT

Date: Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Time: 9:00am PDT (12:00pm EDT; 4:00pm GMT)
Presenters: David Smith, Vice President of Marketing, Revolution Analytics
Andrew Lampitt, Senior Director of Technology Alliances, Jaspersoft
Matthew Dahlman, Business Development Engineer, Jaspersoft
Registration: Click here to register now!

R is a popular and powerful system for creating custom data analysis, statistical models, and data visualizations. But how can you make the results of these R-based computations easily accessible to others? A PhD statistician could use R directly to run the forecasting model on the latest sales data, and email a report on request, but then the process is just going to have to be repeated again next month, even if the model hasn’t changed. Wouldn’t it be better to empower the Sales manager to run the model on demand from within the BI application she already uses—daily, even!—and free up the statistician to build newer, better models for others?

In this webinar, David Smith (VP of Marketing, Revolution Analytics) will introduce the new “RevoDeployR” Web Services framework for Revolution R Enterprise, which is designed to make it easy to integrate dynamic R-based computations into applications for business users. RevoDeployR empowers data analysts working in R to publish R scripts to a server-based installation of Revolution R Enterprise. Application developers can then use the RevoDeployR Web Services API to securely and scalably integrate the results of these scripts into any application, without needing to learn the R language. With RevoDeployR, authorized users of hosted or cloud-based interactive Web applications, desktop applications such as Microsoft Excel, and BI applications like Jaspersoft can all benefit from on-demand analytics and visualizations developed by expert R users.

To demonstrate the power of deploying R-based computations to business users, Andrew Lampitt will introduce Jaspersoft commercial open source business intelligence, the world’s most widely used BI software. In a live demonstration, Matt Dahlman will show how to supercharge the BI process by combining Jaspersoft and Revolution R Enterprise, giving business users on-demand access to advanced forecasts and visualizations developed by expert analysts.

Click here to register for the webinar.

Speaker Biographies:

David Smith is the Vice President of Marketing at Revolution Analytics, the leading commercial provider of software and support for the open source “R” statistical computing language. David is the co-author (with Bill Venables) of the official R manual An Introduction to R. He is also the editor of Revolutions (http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com), the leading blog focused on “R” language, and one of the originating developers of ESS: Emacs Speaks Statistics. You can follow David on Twitter as @revodavid.

Andrew Lampitt is Senior Director of Technology Alliances at Jaspersoft. Andrew is responsible for strategic initiatives and partnerships including cloud business intelligence, advanced analytics, and analytic databases. Prior to Jaspersoft, Andrew held other business positions with Sunopsis (Oracle), Business Objects (SAP), and Sybase (SAP). Andrew earned a BS in engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.

Matthew Dahlman is Jaspersoft’s Business Development Engineer, responsible for technical aspects of technology alliances and regional business development. Matt has held a wide range of technical positions including quality assurance, pre-sales, and technical evangelism with enterprise software companies including Sybase, Netonomy (Comverse), and Sunopsis (Oracle). Matt earned a BA in mathematics from Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota.


The second widely used BI stack in open source is Pentaho.

You can download it here to evaluate it or click on screenshot to read more at

http://community.pentaho.com/

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pentaho/files/Business%20Intelligence%20Server/

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