The Internet has brought the general concept of time-sharing back into popularity. Expensive corporate server farms costing millions can host thousands of customers all sharing the same common resources. As with the early serial terminals, websites operate primarily in bursts of activity followed by periods of idle time. This bursting nature permits the service to be used by many website customers at once, and none of them notice any delays in communications until the servers start to get very busy.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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)
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.”
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
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.
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.)
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.
If you use Windows for your stats computing and your data is in a database (probably true for almost all corporate business analysts) R 2.12 has provided a unique procedural hitch for you NO BINARIES for packages used till now to read from these databases.
The Readme notes of the release say-
Packages related to many database system must be linked to the exact
version of the database system the user has installed, hence it does
not make sense to provide binaries for packages
RMySQL, ROracle, ROracleUI, RPostgreSQL
although it is possible to install such packages from sources by
install.packages('packagename', type='source')
after reading the manual 'R Installation and Administration'.
So how to connect to Databases if the Windows Binary is not available-
So how to connect to PostgreSQL and MySQL databases.
Fortunately the RpgSQL package is still available for PostgreSQL
Using the RpgSQL package
library(RpgSQL)
#creating a connection
con <- dbConnect(pgSQL(), user = "postgres", password = "XXXX",dbname="postgres")
#writing a table from a R Dataset
dbWriteTable(con, "BOD", BOD)
# table names are lower cased unless double quoted. Here we write a Select SQL query
dbGetQuery(con, 'select * from "BOD"')
#disconnecting the connection
dbDisconnect(con)
You can also use RODBC package for connecting to your PostgreSQL database but you need to configure your ODBC connections in
Windows Start Panel-
Settings-Control Panel-
Administrative Tools-Data Sources (ODBC)
You should probably see something like this screenshot.
Coming back to R and noting the name of my PostgreSQL DSN from above screenshot-( If not there just click on add-scroll to appropriate database -here PostgreSQL and click on Finish- add in the default values for your database or your own created database values-see screenshot for help with other configuring- and remember to click Test below to check if username and password are working, port is correct etc.
so once the DSN is probably setup in the ODBC (frightening terminology is part of databases)- you can go to R to connect using RODBC package
#loading RODBC
library(RODBC)
#creating a Database connection
# for username,password,database name and DSN name
chan=odbcConnect("PostgreSQL35W","postgres;Password=X;Database=postgres")
#to list all table names
sqlTables(chan)
TABLE_QUALIFIER TABLE_OWNER TABLE_NAME TABLE_TYPE REMARKS
1 postgres public bod TABLE
2 postgres public database1 TABLE
3 postgres public tt TABLE
and then we run the same configuring DSN as we did for postgreSQL.
After that we use RODBC in pretty much the same way except changing for the default username and password for MySQL and changing the DSN name for the previous step.
channel <- odbcConnect("mysql","jasperdb;Password=XXX;Database=Test")
test2=sqlQuery(channel,"select * from jiuser")
test2
id username tenantId fullname emailAddress password externallyDefined enabled previousPasswordChangeTime1 1 jasperadmin 1 Jasper Administrator NA 349AFAADD5C5A2BD477309618DC NA 01
2 2 joe1ser 1 Joe User NA 4DD8128D07A NA 01
odbcClose(channel)
While using RODBC for all databases is a welcome step, perhaps the change release notes for Window Users of R may need to be more substantiative than one given for R 2.12.2
More than just a blog aggregator- includes sections on other stuff- thus more like a community than a big feed
Abbreviated feeds- just gives you two-three lines of summary per post than the whole big schmakaround -thats a time saver for me —(D Smith is the only -lonely blogger atm there)
The more the merrier- One more place to read and write R.
btw is the name insider (as in guy who knows inside stuff) or Inside- R (as in get inside the R box)- just kidding. With PlyR, ManipulatR, ApplyR and now Inside R- the pun gets MerrieR
If my blog app gets rejected- these views may change ,grr
Note- for some strange reason I continue to be on top ranked LibreOffice blogs- maybe because I write more on the software itself than on Oracle politics or coffee spillovers.
LibreOffice Beta 2 is ready and I just installed it on Windows 7 – works nice- and I somehow think open Office and Google needs an example to stop being so scary on cautioning—— hey,hey it’s a beta – (do you see Oracle saying this release is a beta or Windows saying hey this Windows Vista is a beta for Windows 7- No right?)-
see screenshot of solver in LibreOffice spreadsheet -works just fine.
We cant wait for Chromium OS and LibreOffice integration (or Google Docs-LibreOffice integration) so Google starts thinking on those lines (of course
Google also needs to ramp up Google Storage and Google Predict API– but dude are you sure you wanna take on Amazon, Oracle and MS and Yahoo and Apple at the same time. Dear Herr Schmidt- Last German Guy who did that , ended up in a bunker in Berlin. (Ever since I had to pay 50 euros as Airline Transit fee -yes Indian passport holders have to do that in Germany- I am kind of non objective on that issue)
Google Management is busy nowadays thinking of trying to beat Facebook -hint -hint-
-buy out the biggest app makers of Facebook apps and create an api for Facebook info download and upload into Orkut –maybe invest like an angel in that startup called Diaspora http://www.joindiaspora.com/) see-
Back to the topic (and there are enough people blogging on Google should or shouldnt do)
-LibreOffice aesthetically rocks! It has a cool feel.
As you can see I used the Chrome Extension for Google Translate for an instant translation from German into English (though it still needs some work, Herr Translator)
Back to actually working on LibreOffice- if Word and Powerpoint is all you do- save some money for Christmas and download it today from
DECISION STATS 