Tag: Press Release

Why open source companies dont dance?

I have been pondering on this seemingly logical paradox for some time now-

1) Why are open source solutions considered technically better but not customer friendly.

2) Why do startups and app creators in social media or mobile get much more press coverage than

profitable startups in enterprise software.

3) How does tech journalism differ in covering open source projects in enterprise versus retail software.

4) What are the hidden rules of the game of enterprise software.

Some observations-

1) Open source companies often focus much more on technical community management and crowd sourcing code. Traditional software companies focus much more on managing the marketing community of customers and influencers. Accordingly the balance of power is skewed in favor of techies and R and D in open source companies, and in favor of marketing and analyst relations in traditional software companies.

Traditional companies also spend much more on hiring top notch press release/public relationship agencies, while open source companies are both financially and sometimes ideologically opposed to older methods of marketing software. The reverse of this is you are much more likely to see Videos and Tutorials by an open source company than a traditional company. You can compare the websites of Cloudera, DataStax, Hadapt ,Appistry and Mapr and contrast that with Teradata or Oracle (which has a much bigger and much more different marketing strategy.

Social media for marketing is also more efficiently utilized by smaller companies (open source) while bigger companies continue to pay influential analysts for expensive white papers that help present the brand.

Lack of budgets is a major factor that limits access to influential marketing for open source companies particularly in enterprise software.

2 and 3) Retail software is priced at 2-100$ and sells by volume. Accordingly technology coverage of these software is based on volume.

Enterprise software is much more expensively priced and has much more discreet volume or sales points. Accordingly the technology coverage of enterprise software is more discreet, in terms of a white paper coming every quarter, a webinar every month and a press release every week. Retail software is covered non stop , but these journalists typically do not charge for “briefings”.

Journalists covering retail software generally earn money by ads or hosting conferences. So they have an interest in covering new stuff or interesting disruptive stuff. Journalists or analysts covering enterprise software generally earn money by white papers, webinars, attending than hosting conferences, writing books. They thus have a much stronger economic incentive to cover existing landscape and technologies than smaller startups.

4) What are the hidden rules of the game of enterprise software.

  • It is mostly a white man’s world. this can be proved by statistical demographic analysis
  • There is incestuous intermingling between influencers, marketers, and PR people. This can be proved by simple social network analysis of who talks to who and how much. A simple time series between sponsorship and analysts coverage also will prove this (I am working on quantifying this ).
  • There are much larger switching costs to enterprise software than retail software. This leads to legacy shoddy software getting much chances than would have been allowed in an efficient marketplace.
  • Enterprise software is a less efficient marketplace than retail software in all definitions of the term “efficient markets”
  • Cloud computing, and SaaS and Open source threatens to disrupt the jobs and careers of a large number of people. In the long term, they will create many more jobs, but in the short term, people used to comfortable living of enterprise software (making,selling,or writing) will actively and passively resist these changes to the  paradigms in the current software status quo.
  • Open source companies dont dance and dont play ball. They prefer to hire 4 more college grads than commission 2 more white papers.

and the following with slight changes from a comment I made on a fellow blog-

  • While the paradigm on how to create new software has evolved from primarily silo-driven R and D departments to a broader collaborative effort, the biggest drawback is software marketing has not evolved.
  • If you want your own version of the open source community editions to be more popular, some standardization is necessary for the corporate decision makers, and we need better marketing paradigms.
  • While code creation is crowdsourced, solution implementation cannot be crowdsourced. Customers want solutions to a problem not code.
  • Just as open source as a production and licensing paradigm threatens to disrupt enterprise software, it will lead to newer ways to marketing software given the hostility of existing status quo.

 

 

Tableau Interactive "Viz" Contest

The Las Vegas Sign.
Image via Wikipedia
One more contest- open only for US though
but the prizes are hmm okay. The catch is you have to use the software Tableau created 
not R or J or ggobi or ggplot or java

Check out http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/biz-viz-contest/?=decisionstats

Tableau Interactive “Viz” Contest

AS FEATURED AT

Win a trip to Vegas and a chance for $2,000 & an iPad2

Are you a business, finance or real estate geek? This contest is for you! In cooperation with The Economist Ideas Economy conference, the Tableau Software Interactive “Viz” Contest will focus on business, finance and real estate data… Find some data then use Tableau Public to analyze and visualize it. That’s all it takes.

What you’ll win

A 3-day trip to Las Vegas and a chance to win $2,000 & an iPad2

The winner chosen by our judges will also take away a free roundtrip ticket to attend the2011 Tableau Customer Conference. This includes 3 night’s accommodations at theEncore and a chance to compete in the Iron Viz championship with the winners of two other contests. The winner of Iron Viz will take away a new iPad2, and $2,000.

Cash for the crowd favorite

After entering you’ll receive a custom bit.ly link to your viz. Tweet, Facebook and e-mail that link to everyone you can! Whoever gets the most clicks through their link will become our Crowd Favorite and receive a $250 debit card.

Recognition from The Economist Ideas Economy

Your winning entry will be announced live on stage at The Economist Ideas Economy conference, and Tableau will issue a national press release naming the winner.

Everyone who enters gets a t-shirt!

Everyone who enters will get a very cool Tableau t-shirt. The winner will also receive increased Tableau Public limits and a free copy of Tableau Desktop (a $1999 value)!

How it works

(Click on the steps to expand and get the details.)
 Check the box to view all steps and details.

  • Step 1

    Download the FREE Tableau Public tool


  • Step 2

    Create and publish your “viz” to your blog or website


  • Step 3

    Submit your entry formFill out the entry form and submit by June 3, 2011. A panel of judges will evaluate all submissions based on overall appeal, design elements, and data analysis/findings.

Contest Rules Summary

The following contest is open to legal residents of the United Sates only. You must publish your “viz” on your blog or website to be qualified. Submission form must be submitted by June 3, 2011. Winners will be notified by June 7, 2010. Incomplete applications will not be accepted.

Please read all the rules in their entirety before entering.

Read details at http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/biz-viz-contest/?=decisionstats
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PMML Plugin for Greenplum now available

Predictive Model Markup Language
Image via Wikipedia

From a press release from Zementis.

 

, the Universal PMML Plug-in for in-database scoring. Available now for the EMC Greenplum Database, a high-performance massively parallel processing (MPP) database, the plug-in leverages the Predictive Model Markup Language (PMML) to execute predictive models directly within EMC Greenplum, for highly optimized in-database scoring.

Universal PMML Plug-in

Developed by the Data Mining Group (DMG), PMML is supported by all major data mining vendors, e.g., IBM SPSS, SAS, Teradata, FICO, STASTICA, Microstrategy, TIBCO and Revolution Analytics as well as open source tools like R, KNIME and RapidMiner. With PMML, models built in any of these data mining tools can now instantly be deployed in the EMC Greenplum database. The net result is the ability to leverage the power of standards-based predictive analytics on a massive scale, right where the data resides.

“By partnering with Zementis, a true PMML innovator, we are able to offer a vendor-agnostic solution for moving enterprise-level predictive analytics into the database execution environment,” said Dr. Steven Hillion, Vice President of Analytics at EMC Greenplum. “With Zementis and PMML, the de-facto standard for representing data mining models, we are eliminating the need to recode predictive analytic models in order to deploy them within our database. In turn, this enables an analyst to reduce the time to insight required in most businesses today.”

Want to learn more?
 

To learn more about how the EMC Greenplum Database and the Universal PMML Plug-in work together, feel free to:

  1. Visit the PMML Plug-in product page
  2. Download the white paper

The Universal PMML Plug-in for the EMC Greenplum Database is available now. Contact us today for more information.
Michael Zeller, CEO, Zementis

 

 

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IBM and Revolution team to create new in-database R

From the Press Release at http://www.revolutionanalytics.com/news-events/news-room/2011/revolution-analytics-netezza-partnership.php

Under the terms of the agreement, the companies will work together to create a version of Revolution’s software that takes advantage of IBM Netezza’s i-class technology so that Revolution R Enterprise can run in-database in an optimal fashion.

About IBM

For information about IBM Netezza, please visit: http://www.netezza.com.
For Information on IBM Information Management, please visit: http://www.ibm.com/software/data/information-on-demand/
For information on IBM Business Analytics, please visit the online press kit: http://www.ibm.com/press/us/en/presskit/27163.wss
Follow IBM and Analytics on Twitter: http://twitter.com/ibmbizanalytics
Follow IBM analytics on Tumblr: http://smarterplanet.tumblr.com/tagged/new_intelligence
IBM YouTube Analytics Channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/ibmbusinessanalytics
For information on IBM Smarter Systems: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/smarter/

About Revolution Analytics

Revolution Analytics is the leading commercial provider of software and services based on the open source R project for statistical computing.  Led by predictive analytics pioneer Norman Nie, the company brings high performance, productivity and enterprise readiness to R, the most powerful statistics language in the world. The company’s flagship Revolution R product is designed to meet the production needs of large organizations in industries such as finance, life sciences, retail, manufacturing and media.  Used by over 2 million analysts in academia and at cutting-edge companies such as Google, Bank of America and Acxiom, R has emerged as the standard of innovation in statistical analysis. Revolution Analytics is committed to fostering the continued growth of the R community through sponsorship of the Inside-R.org community site, funding worldwide R user groups and offers free licenses of Revolution R Enterprise to everyone in academia.


Netezza, an IBM Company, is the global leader in data warehouse, analytic and monitoring appliances that dramatically simplify high-performance analytics across an extended enterprise. IBM Netezza’s technology enables organizations to process enormous amounts of captured data at exceptional speed, providing a significant competitive and operational advantage in today’s data-intensive industries, including digital media, energy, financial services, government, health and life sciences, retail and telecommunications.

The IBM Netezza TwinFin® appliance is built specifically to analyze petabytes of detailed data significantly faster than existing data warehouse options, and at a much lower total cost of ownership. It stores, filters and processes terabytes of records within a single unit, analyzing only the relevant information for each query.

Using Revolution R Enterprise & Netezza Together

Revolution Analytics and IBM Netezza have announced a partnership to integrate Revolution R Enterprise and the IBM Netezza TwinFin  Data Warehouse Appliance. For the first time, customers seeking to run high performance and full-scale predictive analytics from within a data warehouse platform will be able to directly leverage the power of the open source R statistics language. The companies are working together to create a version of Revolution’s software that takes advantage of IBM Netezza’s i-class technology so that Revolution R Enterprise can run in-database in an optimal fashion.

This partnership integrates Revolution R Enterprise with IBM Netezza’s high performance data warehouse and advanced analytics platform to help organizations combat the challenges that arise as complexity and the scale of data grow.  By moving the analytics processing next to the data, this integration will minimize data movement – a significant bottleneck, especially when dealing with “Big Data”.  It will deliver high performance on large scale data, while leveraging the latest innovations in analytics.

With Revolution R Enterprise for IBM Netezza, advanced R computations are available for rapid analysis of hundreds of terabyte-class data volumes — and can deliver 10-100x performance improvements at a fraction of the cost compared to traditional analytics vendors.

Additional Resources


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WPS Version 2.5.1 Released – can still run SAS language/data and R

However this is what Phil Rack the reseller is quoting on http://www.minequest.com/Pricing.html

Windows Desktop Price: $884 on 32-bit Windows and $1,149 on 64-bit Windows.

The Bridge to R is available on the Windows platforms and is available for free to customers who
license WPS through MineQuest,LLC. Companies and organizations outside of North America
may purchase a license for the Bridge to R which starts at $199 per desktop or $599 per server

Windows Server Price: $1,903 per logical CPU for 32-bit and $2,474 for 64-bit.

Note that Linux server versions are available but do not yet support the Eclipse IDE and are
command line only

WPS sure seems going well-but their pricing is no longer fixed and on the home website, you gotta fill a form. Ditt0 for the 30 day free evaluation

http://www.teamwpc.co.uk/products/wps/modules/core

Data File Formats

The table below provides a summary of data formats presently supported by the WPS Core module.

Data File Format Un-Compressed
Data		 Compressed
Data
Read Write Read Write
SD2 (SAS version 6 data set)
SAS7BDAT (SAS version 7 data set)
SAS7BDAT (SAS version 8 data set)
SAS7BDAT (SAS version 9 data set)
SASSEQ (SAS version 8/9 sequential file)
V8SEQ (SAS version 8 sequential file)
V9SEQ (SAS version 9 sequential file)
WPD (WPS native data set)
WPDSEQ (WPS native sequential file)
XPORT (transport format)

Additional access to EXCEL, SPSS and dBASE files is supported by utilising the WPS Engine for DB Filesmodule.

and they have a new product release on Valentine Day 2011 (oh these Europeans!)

From the press release at http://www.teamwpc.co.uk/press/wps2_5_1_released

WPS Version 2.5.1 Released 

New language support, new data engines, larger datasets, improved scalability

LONDON, UK – 14 February 2011 – World Programming today released version 2.5.1 of their WPS software for workstations, servers and mainframes.

WPS is a competitively priced, high performance, highly scalable data processing and analytics software product that allows users to execute programs written in the language of SAS. WPS is supported on a wide variety of hardware and operating system platforms and can connect to and work with many types of data with ease. The WPS user interface (Workbench) is frequently praised for its ease of use and flexibility, with the option to include numerous third-party extensions.

This latest version of the software has the ability to manipulate even greater volumes of data, removing the previous 2^31 (2 billion) limit on number of observations.

Complimenting extended data processing capabilities, World Programming has worked hard to boost the performance, scalability and reliability of the WPS software to give users the confidence they need to run heavy workloads whilst delivering maximum value from available computer power.

WPS version 2.5.1 offers additional flexibility with the release of two new data engines for accessing Greenplum and SAND databases. WPS now comes with eleven data engines and can access a huge range of commonly used and industry-standard file-formats and databases.

Support in WPS for the language of SAS continues to expand with more statistical procedures, data step functions, graphing controls and many other language items and options.

WPS version 2.5.1 is available as a free upgrade to all licensed users of WPS.

Summary of Main New Features:

  • Supporting Even Larger Datasets
    WPS is now able to process very large data sets by lifting completely the previous size limit of 2^31 observations.
  • Performance and Scalability Boosted
    Performance and scalability improvements across the board combine to ensure even the most demanding large and concurrent workloads are processed efficiently and reliably.
  • More Language Support
    WPS 2.5.1 continues the expansion of it’s language support with over 70 new language items, including new Procedures, Data Step functions and many other language items and options.
  • Statistical Analysis
    The procedure support in WPS Statistics has been expanded to include PROC CLUSTER and PROC TREE.
  • Graphical Output
    The graphical output from WPS Graphing has been expanded to accommodate more configurable graphics.
  • Hash Tables
    Support is now provided for hash tables.
  • Greenplum®
    A new WPS Engine for Greenplum provides dedicated support for accessing the Greenplum database.
  • SAND®
    A new WPS Engine for SAND provides dedicated support for accessing the SAND database.
  • Oracle®
    Bulk loading support now available in the WPS Engine for Oracle.
  • SQL Server®
    To enhance existing SQL Server database access, a new SQLSERVR (please note spelling) facility in the ODBC engine.

More Information:

Existing Users should visit www.teamwpc.co.uk/support/wps/release where you can download a readme file containing more information about all the new features and fixes in WPS 2.5.1.

New Users should visit www.teamwpc.co.uk/products/wps where you can explore in more detail all the features available in WPS or request a free evaluation.

and from http://www.teamwpc.co.uk/products/wps/data it seems they are going on the BIG DATA submarine as well-

Data Support 

Extremely Large Data Size Handling

WPS is now able to handle extremely large data sets now that the previous limit of 2^31 observations has been lifted.

Access Standard Databases

Use I/O Features in WPS Core

  • CLIPBOARD (Windows only)
  • DDE (Windows only)
  • EMAIL (via SMTP or MAPI)
  • FTP
  • HTTP
  • PIPE (Windows and UNIX only)
  • SOCKET
  • STDIO
  • URL

Use Standard Data File Formats

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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/

Aster Data hires Quentin Gallivan as CEO

AsterData formally marked phase 2 of it’s rapid growth story by getting as new CEO Quentin Gallivan (of Postini before it was sold to Google and also Pivotlink).

Founders (and Stanfordians) Mayan Bawa stays as Chief Customer Officer and Tasso Argyros as CTO. It has a very deja vu feel -like Eric Schmidt coming in CEO of Google in the glory days past.  Indeed the investment team in Google and AsterData is quite similar and so are the backgrounds of the founders.

AsterData of course creates the leading MapReduce (also created by Google) solution for providing BI infrastructure for big data and has been rapidly been expanding into new frontiers for Big Data.

Aster Data Appoints New Chief Executive Officer

Quentin Gallivan Joins Aster Data as CEO to Lead Company to Next Level of Growth

San Carlos, CA – September 9, 2010– Aster Data, a proven leader dedicated to providing the best data management and data processing platform for big data management and analytics, today announced the appointment of Quentin Gallivan as President and CEO. Gallivan brings more than 20 years of senior executive experience to the leading analytics and database company. With Aster Data achieving tremendous growth in the past year, Gallivan will take Aster Data to the next level, further accelerating its market leadership, sales, channel partnerships and international expansion.  Founding CEO Mayank Bawa, who grew the company from its inception based on the founders’ research at Stanford University, and whose passion for helping customers uniquely unlock the value of their data, will take on the role of Chief Customer Officer.  Bawa, in his new role, will lead the Company’s organization devoted to ensuring the success, longevity and innovation of its fast-growing customer base. Together, Gallivan and Bawa, along with co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, Tasso Argyros, will deliver on the the Company’s mission to help customers discover more value from their data, achieve deep insights through rich analytics and do more with their massive data volumes than has ever been possible.

Gallivan joins Aster Data with over 20 years of leadership experience in the high-tech industry and has held a variety of CEO and senior executive positions with leading technology companies. Before joining Aster Data, Gallivan served as CEO at PivotLink, the leading provider of business intelligence (BI) solutions delivered via Software as a Service (SaaS), where he rapidly grew the company to over 15,000 business users, from mid-sized companies to Fortune 1000 companies, across key industries including financial services, retail, CPG manufacturing and high technology. Prior to Pivotlink, Gallivan served as CEO of Postini where he scaled the company to 35,000 customers and over 10 million users until its eventual acquisition by Google in 2007.  Gallivan also served as executive vice president of worldwide sales and services at VeriSign where he was instrumental in growing the business from $20 million to $1.2 billion and was responsible for the design and execution of the global distribution strategy for the company’s security and services business. Gallivan also held a number of key executive and leadership positions at Netscape Communications and GE Information Services.

“We are delighted to have someone of Quentin’s caliber, who is a veteran of both emerging and established technology companies, lead Aster Data through our next stage of growth,” said Mayank Bawa, Chief Customer Officer and co-founder, Aster Data. “His significant experience around growing organizations and driving operational excellence will be invaluable as he takes Aster Data forward. I’m excited to shift my focus to customers and their success; to bring our innovations to our customers worldwide to help them unlock deep value from their growing data volumes.”

“I am very excited to be joining Aster Data and taking on the challenge of augmenting its already impressive level of growth and success.  Aster Data is very well respected and established in the marketplace, has an enviable solution for big data management that uniquely addresses both big data storage and data processing, an impressive client list and a very talented team,” said Quentin Gallivan, President and CEO, Aster Data. “My task will be to leverage these assets, help shape a new market and provide operational guidance and strategic direction to drive even greater value for shareholders, customers and employees alike.”

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