BI Blogs

I always get blank stares at the office when I ask people how they plan to celebrate Canada Day. I think it’s actually worse than wishing my American friends “Happy Thanksgiving!” in October…

Because the majority of this blog’s audience is either staring at a fax machine right now or celebrating a fantastic Q2 (or better yet, enjoying a warm night on a Lake Ontario dock!), here are 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Canada:

1. Approx. 89% of Canada is not habitable, because of extreme climate conditions.
2. Newfoundland is the only province that does not have an Indian reserve.
3. Yonge Street in Toronto is the longest street in the World.
4. Canada has six time zones.
5. With over 2 Million lakes, Canada has the largest amount of freshwater in the world
6. The oldest program in Canadian broadcasting history is” Hockey Night In Canada”. At first it was on the radio in 1931, and in the Fall of 1952 the first TV ice hockey game was broadcast nationally on CBC. It is still being produced weekly in both English and French .
7. The coldest temperature ever recorded was -63C (-81.4F) in Snag, Yukon on Feb 3, 1947.
8. Basketball: now a favourite in the U.S. - was invented by Canadian James A. Naismith , who was born in Almonte, Ontario in November 1871. After studying at McGill University in Montreal,Quebec he became an instructor at the International YMCA Training School in Massachusetts, USA. where he came up with the idea for basketball. The first basketball game was played in 1891.
9. Canada is the world’s second largest country , but houses only 27 million people - making it rank only 28th in population.
10. Five pin bowling was invented in 1909 by Canadian T.E. Ryan.

Now for some some Rush and a Coffee Crisp. Have a good Canada Day, Eh!

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So the build broke based on a unit test that failed.  Is the general rule of thumb that the build breaking check in person fixes the test?  What if they did something that broke someone else’s test for something? …hmm, the philosophy of project handling and management. Today I have nothing to proffer or offer the world of the blogosphere, merely that I’m exhausted and going to gladly jump on my bike and high tail it out of the office. Tomorrow is implement functionality and dependency…(read more)

Summer Ficarrotta, project marketing manager at Serena Software, motivated their product as dealing with the long tail of IT projects. In other words, there are many small situational applications that will not be done by IT. What if… business users could create their own solution? The solution, according to Summer, is business mashups!

Mashups are modular components that can be easily assembled on a single web page, such as embedded Google Maps with your customer list, showing locations of customers. Business mashups are enhanced mashups compatible with corporate IT standards, such as security, work flow management, and scalability. Serena is obviously pushing the term mashup for marketing motivations. However, that is okay if you accept that mashup technology is only feasible within corporate IT when enhanced as Serena has done.

The development lifecycle is: Design (in Mashup Composer that publishes the mashup), Deploy (in Mashup Management that deploys the mashup to the Mashup Server), and Administer (where Mashup Administrator controls the Mashup Server). Got all that? This should be super easy for non-programmers, which did not seem so during the demos.

Serena is using a per-user pricing model that is still being debated, with addition cost for more users. Meanwhile, Serena can be previewed by downloading the free Mashup Composer and deploy your biz mashup to their cloud for execution.

Side Note: Serena had a major marketing success using a low-cost YouTube video called Just @#$% It!! What are they saying? With over one million views, it had a lot of bang for the buck. However, the video pushes the envelope with sexual innuendo. See the comments by David Berlind at InformationWeek.

Bob Eve, VP Marketing, and David Besemer, Chief Technology Officer, presented their Composite Discovery Appliance, which uses a three-level search approach: search line, list of objects, and a tabular table. In other words, it starts with the typical search query, which generates a list of objects, such as fields, tables, reports. In particular, it will find tables that can relate all values of the query string, even if many such tables are involved.

It uses a pre-computed index that finds all values and relationships among tables, both explicit and implicit. For typical databases, the schema contains relationships among tables. However, such schemas do not exist for tables across diverse sources. A correlation called Relationship Probability Score (RPS) is computed. A high RPS indicates a possible relationship between tables.

The company delivers their product as an appliance (hardware, software, service) so that it is easier for customers. It drops into your network. But, you must configure data sources. Perpetual pricing is $150K plus support, while subscription is $7500 for initial setup and $4000 per month. The first release is a single appliance can handle about a terabyte of data. In future versions, appliances will be able to cluster together to handle larger data storage.

Although limited for larger databases, the product provides a very useful tool for data integration in a complex environment.

One of my most popular blog posts was “Analysis Services 2005 protocol - XMLA over TCP/IP”. Previously this information wasn’t available from anywhere else. But things changed today. Microsoft now has engaged in the “Open Specification program”. Citing from the web page:

Microsoft is providing open connections to its high-volume products—Windows Vista (including the .NET Framework), Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Office 2007, Exchange Server 2007, and Office SharePoint Server 2007—as well as additional information so that software developers, business partners and competitors can better interact with these Microsoft products or invent new solutions for customers.

As a developer, you now have full access to information about protocols, binary file formats, and other specifications for these products that can be used to create solutions.

(Yes, these include Office file format specifications!)

Since Analysis Services is part of SQL Server, the protocols for accessing Analysis Services are listed under “Microsoft SQL Server Protocols”. The most interesting one is

[MS-SSAS9]: SQL Server Analysis Services Protocol Specification

which documents Analysis Services 2005 protocol (and 2008 as well, since protocol didn’t change between these versions).

There is also

[MS-SSAS8]: SQL Server Analysis Services Protocol Specification

which documents Analysis Services 2000 protocol. However, this one would be much harder to go through, since AS2000 had “smart client” architecture, where client code was doing lots of work – MDX parsing, evaluation, caching etc – therefore the protocol between client and server is at much lower level than MDX queries and it is not easy to make sense out of it.

The first speaker is Kevin Quinn, VP of Product Marketing. Some facts about IB: privately-held software vendor, $314M in 2007, establish 1975, 1,400 employees, 12,000 customer site. They have a tight partners with IBM to resell their products. The company has a dual image for integration software with iWay and BI tools with WebFOCUS.

A nice byline is Your Business, No Barriers, which has evolved into Because Everyone Makes Decisions. IB is reaching down the organization pyramid by emphasizing operational applications. Ford was given as a customer example with their Warranty Claims Mgt System. A unique feature is the guided ad-hoc report via a form. This generates a template that can then used to generate hundreds of specific reports by normal users. Kevin demonstrated Developer Studio with the ability to have various output formats, such as HTML, Excel, Word, and PDF.

Active report is a portable and distributed thin-client analytics with no licensing. It can generate PowerPoint slides, pivot table, time-elapse reports. In the future, flash is embedded within PDF reports to allow self-contained interaction with the data. Google Maps is used to create dashboards for location intelligence. Mobile Favorites can reach disconnected people with simple mobile phones.

WebFOCUS Magnify Search is an enterprise search solution. A recent release has reduced the cost to customer. Monitors can be put on input transactions, which can intercept to be enhanced or filtered. Performance Metrics Manager comes with over 500 pre-built metrics. InfoAssist is a new tool coming out in October, written in Ajax, to compete directly with BO and Cognos web tools. In the fall, IB will release rStat that is a predictive analysis tool. They plans to release XBRL generation tool to submit complex financial reports to

The second speaker is Vincent Lam, Director of iWay Product Marketing. iWay group evolved from the need for data integration to feed the old FOCUS reports. The Java standards of J3EE caused a rewrite that stimulate the spin-off of iWay.

The tag line of iWay is Because Everything Should Work Together. Their adapters cover 85 databases and 150 real-time sources, both traditional data and event-driven messages, along with application adapters for terminal emulation, transaction servers, and procedural code hooks. The seven styles of data integration for: data warehouse, RT data warehouse, operational data access, (missed items), general search data.

Partnership with IBM supplies various adapter because IBM is discontinuing their old CrossRoads adapters. Google is using iWay adapters for their search product. Integration tools use Eclipse studio. In 2008, iWay has released an activity monitor, managed file transfer, secure messaging, and service manager. In 2009, iWay plans to released a data manager tool, message exchange tool, (missed remaining items). iWay is positioned to be an application development environment where their components can be assembled via the SOA framework. Their call is to Don’t Code, instead Integrate and Assemble.

The On-Demand Index (ODI) is down 18.55% YTD. This compares to YTD performance:  iShares S&P GSTI Software Index Fund (IGV)  -7.69%, Dow -14.46%, Nasdaq Composite -12.69% and S&P 500 -12.94%. But the stocks in the ODI vary widely from a 24% YTD gain to a 69% loss.

The stocks recording a YTD gain include: The TriZetto Group, Inc. (TZIX), Ultimate Software Group Inc. (ULTI), Salesforce.com (CRM) and Kenexa Corporation (KNXA). Although these four companies vary widely in what they sell they have several key business attributes in common:  profitable (earnings now), applications that businesses need in growth and recessionary climates, ability to beat out competitors (even much larger companies with deep pockets) and, a reasoned business growth plan.

This does not imply that the other companies in this index are not as good companies (you have to pick your criteria for what that means) as the top stock gainers but that investors have not felt their stock prices at the beginning of this year were as justified as the top gainers. Fundamentals matter, especially when the bull is taken over by the bear. There were a number of articles and posts about these companies being recession-proof but that is different than the stocks being bear-proof. Any of these companies in the ODI may be good investments at (different) times but you have to do your homework about the company’s products, revenue and earnings prospects, management team and competition. On-Demand software may be the wave of the future but that does not mean any company selling it is a good investment. In the initial hype and IPO wave everyone is seemingly a winner but we are past that wave now.

On June 25, the article in Barron’s titled “Pack the Cooler, Dump These Stock” reinforces our message of examining valuations and fundamentals in regards to tech stocks. The article stated “Stocks of some leading tech companies are trading at absurd multiples relative to the rest of the technology universe. Why, for example, is Salesforce.com (ticker: CRM) trading at a price-to-earnings (P/E) multiple of 110 times next year’s projected earnings, when Microsoft (MSFT), the largest software vendor in the world, trades at just 13 times?” many of us would have no problem making the case for why CRM should get a much higher multiple than MFST, but a 110 FORWARD P/E is pricey and has expectations built in for perfection (or acquisition.)

Eric Savitz, in his Barron’s Tech Trader Blog on June 25^th summarizes Goldman’s tech analysts’ feedback on salesforce.com: “Goldman says the company is benefiting from the transition to software-as-a-service; they also think it is an attractive takeover candidate. But they keep a Sell rating, noting that the stock is “priced for perfection, with a take-out premium baked in.”

Now is not the time to just buy a stock just because it is down and the company sells “cool” software. It is great to be a on-demand enthusiast but before any of these stocks become one of your investments make sure you feel the company business can meet the expectations implied by its stock valuation.

Disclosure: I have no current stock positions in any of the companies listed in this index and no current business partnerships.

Note: The index is calculated on an equal-weight representation based on closing prices as of 12/31/07.

My prior feelings are that the SAP acquisition was not in the best interests of my colleagues at Business Objects. It certainly was in the interests of SAP and maybe in the interests of the greater industry. Hence, I will listen carefully about the pro/con of the acquisition during this session.

During their two-hour session, there are three talks. The first speaker was Paul Clark, Senior Director of BO Marketing. Paul directly started with my issue. SAP is leader in Enterprise Application, which is good execution. BO is leader in BI, which is good strategy. Paul noted that in many companies there is a disconnected between strategy and execution. 9 out of 10 are doing a bad job on bringing strategy together with execution.

Paul suggested a closed-loop approach of Strategy-Decisions-Execution-Insight; hence SAP needed BO. Got it? Well, maybe… The weak link is closing the loop with Insight - taking analytics seriously by senior management so that it influences Strategy formation. How does SAP-BO fix this disconnect? Paul remarked that the problem requires more than tools. It requires behavioral changes in the people involved. This is a partial answer. More focus on senior management specifically.

The second speaker is Dan Kearnan, Director of SAP BI, who was working with BO prior to the acquisition. His first topic was Why SAP+BO! The combination provides the following complete stack, which is claimed to be open and agnostic.

EPM + GRC (Governance/Risk/Compliance) Platform
Biz Intelligence
Data Warehouse
Enterprise Apps
Biz Process

About 50,000 of the BO customers were not SAP. SAP plans to keep BO open to other stacks, like Oracle, IBM, Microsoft and legacy apps. BO will be run as a division of SAP, rather than complete integration, so that BO can maintain this cross stack functionality. Only 15% of the 7,200 BO employees are devoted to SAP, so the rest remain focused on the other stacks. Dan continued by outlining the components of the BI platform from BI. BO recently did an OEM agreement with SAS to provide deeper predictive analytics.

(side note: on several slides Dan showed Cloud Data as referring to external coming from web-based sources)

The third speaker is Aaron Mahimainathan, Senior Director of SAP Platform Marketing, on Trusted Information Foundation, a detailed description of SAP/BO tools. An intriguing example was global data synchronization across the supply chain. SAP supplies data to the data pool to be shared with partners.

I am attending the ‘first’ Independent Analyst Platform in Phoenix. It is hot outside – 111! Rick van der Lans, the organizer, is using the heat to force us to remain in this cool meeting room. It is three solid days of briefing, seven sessions per day, probably about a total of 18 vendors. The best part is the 24 analysts that are attending. I know most, but there are some exciting new faces with a nice international flare.

Rick measured our GQ metric for all the analysts. GQ? Google Quota! Rick added up all of our GQ. And, this is getting close to Gartner! Yea! When you divide the respective GQ by the number of analysts involved, the Independent Analysts look even better against Gartner!

Depending on my energy level and concentration, I will try to submit a short blog on each! Sure… Wish me luck!

I recently participated in the last of a five-city series “How to Compete on Analytics: Apply It” in Chicago and found the following worth sharing: Jeanne Harris, co-author of Competing on Analytics says that analytics are changing the way people learn, make decisions and compete.

If you don’t believe me – and Jeanne - just watch the TV show Numb3rs and see for yourself. This series is inspired by actual events and depicts how the confluence of police work and mathematics provides unexpected revelations and answers to the most perplexing criminal questions. To quote the show “We all use math everyday… To forecst the weather, to handle money. WE also use math to analtyze crime, to predict patterns and to predict behavior.”

In fact, I recently read the article This is your life with SAS, which takes this one step closer to home, not just math everyday, but SAS everyday in our lives!!

So, why should you care? Well, an education program called We All Use Math Every Day provides educational resources based on the mathematics featured in episodes of the show Numbers, and the material is created by teachers and mathematicians, and is aimed at grades 9-12. So, if middle schoolers can do this, why shouldn’t the rest of us be able to figure it out!

So, I challenge you to determine what you need to learn and do everyday to Compete on Analytics? Here’s what I think:

• Define business intelligence and analytics.
• Determine the steps needed for fact-based decision making.
• Build a vision for a Competency Center.
• Create an analytics business model.
• Identify and mainstream analytical resources within your organization.

Up for the challenge? Send your learnings my way. I’d love to keep seeing how we all use math everyday.

For a long time Dr Ralph Kimball has spoken about subject oriented design. Many have made a living off of producing subject based data marts. One of the problems this has lead to is a series of loosely coupled stove-piped answer sets that are then “discussed” in the light of an enterprise data warehouse. I’ve been teaching, talking and writing about (over the last 10 years at least) a notion called Functionally Oriented Design. In this entry I will briefly introduce my notions of these concepts.

I was running three virtual machines on my laptop and couldn’t help but think, this is awesome.  I couldn’t have imagined doing this 6-7 years ago.   That is three operating systems running in virtual machines.  Windows 2003, Windows XP, and of course Windows Vista.  All running hosted on a Windows Vista Machine - my laptop.  2+ Ghz and 4 GB RAM on dual 7200 RPM 200GB Drives.  Awesome to be able to work with such an environment….(read more)

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Driving in to work this morning in the smoky haze of the San Francisco Bay Area I listened to an interesting story on NPR about the retirement of Bill Gates. You can check out the Geek to Gazillionaire to Do-Gooder link here or just watch the video below.

In the meantime, here’s the week that was on the Keep it Simple blog:

• Summary of some weekend reading and a fantastic PowerPoint presentation that every business should review in SaaS Clouds, Stupid People and Happy Customers.
• Overview of the LucidEra Lead Insight announcement and the LucidInsights newsletter.
• Notes from an SIIA panel on Marketing 2.0.

It’s been quite a ride…

Woah. Suddenly, I’m receiving blog post submissions from all over SAS. Lucky for you - because more engaging content with a personal voice is on its way. Not so lucky for me, because I can’t keep up with all these introductions!

It’s actually quite fun for me to learn about the blogs that our new contributors are reading, so I want to commit to continuing the introductions here - but please forgive me if I let a few slide.

Also, as I get more submissions that need a quick review and posting, it might mean you’ll see fewer posts from me. Yippee! Some of you are already rejoicing - and actually I agree. My intention all along has been to gather a whole slew of bloggers to offer perspectives from all areas of SAS. Hey, but someone had to fill in the dead space until that happened. I’m sure there will be more quiet periods as we go along, and I’ll fill them - or I may just appreciate the quiet from time-to-time.

Our two newest contributors are Kristine Vick and Tapan Patel.
Continue reading “The bloggers. They’re coming out of the woodwork!”

Yesterday I participated in a Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA) marketing and communications roundtable discussion on the topic of Marketing 2.0. The discussion was moderated by Rob Carroll from Clickability (who I notice hasn’t been posting much lately on the his blog). Early in the discussion Rob distinguished between social media as a product (or service) and social media from a marketing perspective. The discussion focused on the latter.

Some interesting points from the panel:

• People agreed on the importance of building customer communities. Lots of good discussion about the importance of having clear objectives, finding ways to measure success, and what role marketing should play (facilitator only? actively involved? no role whatsoever?)
• Rob Lamb from Clickability (and formerly Salesforce.com) talked about the Yahoo community board being the first version of what’s become success.salesforce.com.
• Rob also stressed the importance of having a clear focus in your social media initiatives and always knowing what problem you’re trying to solve.
• Some panelists noted that some 1.0 marketing tools are still the most effective (direct mail anyone?) because of spam filters and email overload. Will we see a back-to-basics movement? Is this all just a bubble? (As the classic video below describes - sorry, I couldn’t resist.)
• A lot of time was spent talking about the growing importance of blogging, Twitter, Facebook, Digg, etc. and the demise of traditional marketing brochures, datasheets and the like.
• When it comes to Marketing 2.0, less is more. Frequency is critical.
• Some of social media books and websites recommended by David Thomas and others include: Here Comes Everybody, The Paradox of Choice, and Webmama.
• Who knew that WD40 had a fanclub and 2000+ uses? Other good community examples include TiVo and Salesforce Ideas.
• Susan Chenoweth from Jigsaw mentioned a webinar they did that had 5000+ attendees. Make the topic catchy, yet relevent. There’s was, “Turn Cold Calls into Gold Calls.” I let her know that I’m a fan of the Garth’s World blog.
• I like the term “crowdsourcing“.

The bottom line seemed to be that firms that aren’t waiting and jumping into social media initiatives are seeing success. The old command-and-control corporate structure simply won’t work so find ways to have a dialog with your customers and get them involved. The next panel will showcase social media success stories as it’s clear that this is a hot topic.

Somewhat gratuitous, but here’s the bubble video in case you missed it…

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I went to yet another social media seminar yesterday where I was reminded that the old rules of marketing and PR do not apply. The speaker, Jim Tobin of Ignite Social Media, gave it a fresh perspective: If you wouldn’t do it at a cocktail party, don’t do it in a social media setting. In other words, you wouldn’t march up to a stranger and immediately start trying to sell her your product. (You wouldn’t, would you?) So don’t do it on someone’s blog or on Facebook or Twitter or Wikipedia.

I also learned that if you’re a social media consultant, all you have to do to establish your cred is drop a name your audience doesn’t know. Jim mentioned at least three that I’m sure he made up on the spot. Watch, I can do it, too:

If you’re serious about social media, you need to be on Frabtangular, Glabberplat and Weendge.

Wikipedia presents a unique challenge and a unique dichotomy. By any measure one of the top sources of news and information on the web, it’s also a potential minefield for marketers. Wikipedia’s guidelines make it clear that corporate flacks, shills and mouthpieces are not welcome.

At SAS we recently went through a comprehensive review of Web 2.0 channels and what we should be doing in each of them. Without too much handwringing we reaffirmed our commitment to Wikipedia’s mission and it’s neutrality policy. So what should we do when we see a SAS-related entry (SAS Institute or SAS System, for instance) or one that’s dear to our hearts (business intelligence or predictive analytics) that could be updated to make it more accurate or interesting?

Here’s a for instance: The SAS Institute entry, under a subheading called Community and Awards, mentions that we were one of Canada’s best workplaces in 2007. In 2007 we were also named to the Fortune Best Companies to Work for in America list, as well as best workplaces lists in Mexico, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Europe, Portugal and China. Seems reasonable and not overly self-serving to update that, and I have made that suggestion. But again, respecting Wikipedia’s guidelines, I made the suggestion on the discussion page and will let the hive mind come to a consensus on it.

We’ve concluded the best possible outcome for everyone, including Wikipedia, would be to have an active, knowledgeable, unbiased group of people taking a look at those entries from time to time. Even just checking the suggestions on the discussion pages would be useful, as sometimes they sit for months at a time before someone acts on them.

To get involved, you should register with Wikipedia, brush up on your Wiki editing skills, and read a few FAQs. Surely there are people out there who would like to participate in the process. Possibly someone you know? Possibly you?