Today’s TDWI presentation (And they’ve crammed a number of webinars into this week) was led by Philip Russom, TDWI Research Director, and sponsored by Teradata. While the name of the topic was clearly a push to market their best practices report series, I have to say that this presentation was about both higher and lower level concepts than best practices, not that that’s a bad thing.

The one clear thing was the point made by Philip at the beginning. Given the title, this was a presentation aimed clearly at IT and data management issues. Considering my comments on Teradata’s presentation to the BBBT and about previous TDWI webinars, that’s a comfort zone for both organizations. They don’t understand business users of technology as well as they understand the people creating the infrastructure.

As usual, TDWI bases their discussions on the results of the vast number of very interesting surveys that are the basis of their research. The first set of numbers of interest today was the response to a question on what technical issues are pushing change. The need for analytics edged out data volumes for the top spot. That’s the one clear indication that business users are driving IT spending and should be focused on a bit more closely.

One key point made by Mr. Russom was that one of the key questions asked by knowledge workers to IT is always “Where did this data come from?” Data governance matters, even during the rush to focus on rapid analytics. He came back to the point multiple times in the presentation and it’s important for more people in IT to realize that the techniques and technologies falling in the weird category of Big Data won’t become mainstream until data governance is competently addressed by vendors.

A Sidebar on Reports v Analytics

One problem I have with the presentation, and with many of the folks discussing the new types of analytics is they create an artificial wall between reports and analytics. Philip gave an example of fraud protection and how reports would cleanse the data, hiding both the positive and negative connotations of outliers. Well, not quite. Those of us who were programmers years ago, not academics or analysts, clearly remember that exception reporting was always critical.

New analytics techniques allow us to better manipulate the same data in more complex ways or larger data sets faster, but the goal of reporting and analysis is the same: To display information in a fashion that allows actions to be derived from useful information. For some information, a simple report is appropriate, in another a Paretto diagram might be better, but they’re both valuable and there’s nothing new about the intent of modern analytics.

True best practices looks at what’s the appropriate technique for delivering each type of information. Mr. Russom did, a few slides later, talk about older and newer techniques working together as in two decks of cards being shuffled together and I think that imagery is better than his words since the decks look a lot alike.

Back to the Presentation

Another thread that ran through Philip Russom’s presentation was the mention of broader data sources. This is a key point of mine that I’m figuring out how to better document and publish, but I’m not the only one. I’ve always had a problem with the phrase “Big Data.” Big is always relative and constantly changing, plus it’s more of a hardware issue. What’s new about current data management is that the number of sources are much more varied, unstructured data is taking a more prominent role, and IT must look at how best to access very heterogeneous sources and providing integration between them. A Russom points out, IT must be focused on breadth even more than volume.

That led to his final topic, and the perfect lead-in for Teradata, that Hadoop isn’t about to replace EDW’s but that IT needs to figure out how to ensure both co-exist and lend their strengths to cover each other’s weaknesses.

Chris Twogood then took over, focused on technology issues around Hadoop, JSON and other newer tools for managing data. Being a business person, I found the most interesting thing in Chris’ presentation to be a fly-by slide on the way to technology. Teradata defines the goal of data driven business as to “Achieve sustainable competitive advantage by leveraging insights from data to deliver greater value to their customers.” The only thing I’d do is shorten it, ending at “value.” After all, the customers aren’t the only stakeholders in a business. Better insight means better financial performance that can benefit owners and employees alike.

The presentation quickly moved along to Chris discuss the breadth of data means Teradata is working to provide access to all those sources. Teradata QueryGrid™ is their solution to provide an interface across data sources. Though I’m sure they’ll hate me for saying it, think of the product as ODBC on steroids.

From discussing that, Mr. Twogood then made a transition to making a claim that somehow the solution means they’re creating the “disruptive data warehouse.” I know that so many people in leading edge fields want to think they’re invention something glorious and new, but it just isn’t. This is an evolutionary change and not even a big one at that. What Teradata describes as disruptive is just the same concept as defined by the federated data warehouse concept discussed since the 1990s. Technology is finally advancing to be able to provide the actuality impossible to provide back then, but it’s just normal growth. That doesn’t make it any less powerful.

To emphasize that, one question during Q&A gave Philip Russom a great opportunity reinforce a few points by referring again, to data governance. He pointed out that the issues of data governance are the same for the EDW and Big Data. He also extended that by saying that good data management means you’re always trolling for new data sources. Big data isn’t the end, it’s just a part of the continuum and where we are now.

Yellowfin held their 7.1 global release Webinars on Wednesday and I listened to the first. The presenters were Glen Rabie, CEO, and Daniel Shaw-Dennis, GM for EMEA.

The key point I took from it was their clear understanding that self-service isn’t the end-all of BI. One early slide pointed out they are concerned with making “A find balance between the needs of self-service users and enterprise IT.” All of us want to allow knowledge workers to more easily understand their business, but data must have some centralized control to security, consistency and validity requirements. It’s nice to hear vendors, and Yellowfin isn’t the only one, begin moving away from the extreme self-service message.

Another critical point is their claim that only 10% of their users want to create data and the other 90% want to consume. They pointed out that they want to focus on the 10%, providing tools that allow for faster and easier creation. Given their demonstration, I believe them. I don’t think the 90% is going to easily get up to speed, but the power for the 10% is very good. The only question is how sustainable that model is.

One way they’re making it easier to create is by extending the power of auto-charting. Vendors are also realizing the business users start with their data and many applications demand they pick graphics (histograms, line graphs, etc) both too early and to people who might not be clear about which is the best chart to use. Yellowfin is helping users by using under-the-hood analysis to suggest default display methods while still allowing the method to be easily changed. That’s a great way to speed visualization and understanding of the data.

Another key YellowFin 7.1 enhancement area has to do with Glen’s statement that 80% of all business data has a location component. Yellowfin is adding a much stronger geospatial package. They are creating what they call Geo-Packs to provide customers with information that helps with geospatial customer, logistical and other analysis. While the package is in the infancy and, as usual with companies focused on the large US market, aren’t strongly fleshed except for the US, it’s a great start and it looks like the company has built in a way to easily expand.

Finally, they announced a marketplace to share reports between customers but, to be honest, who hasn’t? It’s rapidly becoming standard functionality in the marketplace, a “me to!” It’s good they’re adding that but, so far, I’ve mainly seen companies putting out their own reports for customer consumption. I haven’t seen the market mature enough yet for major sharing between customers. It’s needed, but still early to be of full value.

Summary

Yellowfin 7.1 continues to focus on helping power users create analytics for consumption by business knowledge workers. The focus on balancing self-service with the needs of data governance is very good while the growth of geospatial analysis has a strong start.

Their messages and products seem to be working together to continue to give them a good presence and strong growth potential in the marketplace.

Datameer showed up at the BBBT last Friday and it was interesting. The presenters were Stefan Groschupf, CEO, and Azita Martin, CMO. Stefan worked on Nutch project out of which Hadoop was born and he had a refreshingly non-open standard addicted viewpoint of the industry. He very clearly pointed out that Hadoop was big, slow and great for analyzing gathered information but not for speed. He also pointed out that RDBMS’s aren’t going anywhere. The most accurate and humorous thing I’ve heard for a while in a presentation is “hadumping,” Groschupf’s term for getting information into Hadoop.

On the UI front, they’ve picked and stuck with a very spreadsheet oriented view of the data, pointing out that’s what everyone knows so it’s easier to leverage the technology into companies and departments who have been using spreadsheets for years. Yet later he knocked SQL with Hadoop without realizing that’s the same thing. Even worse, he’d already pointed out just how expensive Hadoop programmers are to hire and seemed to miss that hire a few of them and then more affordable SQL workers, of whom there are many more than Hadoop experts, for the high level analytics might make sense.

Meanwhile, while the spreadsheets are familiar, modern BI is providing graphics. The interface they showed is very simplistic and needs work. While the individual graphics weren’t impressive, I did like that they provide a much more naturally looking dashboard paradigm that doesn’t lock in images and allows people to visualize context far more. That was showed in the demo and I didn’t get a good screen shot, but it’s a nice differentiator.

The slide that most impressed me, coming from a small company, was in Azita Martin’s section and presented the customer journey from Datameer’s perspective.

Datameer – Customer Journey

It shows that management is thinking about the customer not just “how do I find somebody to fit the cool thing I’ve built?” They’re a small company thinking strategically. The question is: How strategically?

You were wondering when I’d mention the Chasm?

Stefan Groschupf mentioned Moore’s Chasm and that the industry is moving across it. However, given his admission of Hadoop’s message, I’m not sure that he has enough of a market for it to do the same.

Datameer is focused on analyzing large data sets to find relationships for things that have happened. You might get predictive information out of it. In fact, you hope to do so. However, this is not real-time analytics and isn’t meant to be. I think they have a good product for what they’re marketing. However, as big as that market is, it’s a niche. The growth in BI is moving towards meshing backwards looking, historical data with real-time information (regardless of the wide differences in the meaning of that word within difference industries and user parameters) and providing predictive analytics that can impact decisions that have immediate impact.

While BI is crossing the chasm, I think that analyzing large datasets will have a product life cycle and not a market life cycle. People will continue to want it but they’ll want it as part of a larger solution.

For instance, they briefly talked about enhancing operational analytics but much of what that market is doing, whether in hospitals, the transportation industry, oil fields or elsewhere is demanding faster analytics to find problems before they happen and take proactive actions. Slower analytics will help, but as a subset.

So what’s that mean for Datameer?

Summary

Datameer management has a great understanding of Hadoop’s strengths and weaknesses and they’ve done a good job of focusing on the strengths to create a company with a great short term future. Looking at the larger market, however, makes me think of two words: Acquisition bait.

Many founders think that success is only in terms of making it to IPO. Many others, thankfully, have a more open view to other exit strategies. Acquisition is nothing to be ashamed of and another great sign of success. If Datameer keeps focusing on their niche they’re going to build a strong customer base with a good technology that will fit somebody’s needs for enhancing an overall BI portfolio. There’s nothing wrong with that.

If you’re looking for a company to help you better understand large and diverse datasets, you should be talking with Datameer.

Last Friday’s BBBT presentation was by Cisco Composite. Composite Software was a company in the data virtualization space until it was bought by Cisco last year. The initial problem is what is it now? My internet search bubbles up two pages:

• The old company’s site which looks like it hasn’t been updated since last year. There’s no copyright year at the bottom and the news page includes articles only through 2013.
• The Cisco page which has nothing of use on it.

The presenters assumed folks at the BBBT knew who they were because of a previous presentation, but the group’s grown a lot in the last year. The people should have started with a basic overview of product and company. Bob Eve gave an introduction, but it was very brief and made too many assumptions. Composite was in the business of providing access to disparate data sources in a way that allowed business applications to leverage that data into information and then insight. Think of them as ETL without the L. So why did Cisco buy them?

The confusion was slowly cleared up over the course of the presentation and Q&A. The data visualization tool is being incorporated into Cisco to help create a full solution offering for the Internet of Things (IOT). Mike Flannagan, General Manager, Data and Analytics Business Group, showed a good slide that I think is too crowded to really show in the blog format, but provided three different layers for Cisco’s strategy for delivering enterprise solutions. From bottom to top, they are: Ready to build, ready to integrate and ready to consume. From network management components at the bottom to solution sets such as Connected City at the high level, it’s a well thought out approach for a major organization to provide flexibility and control across markets.

Mr. Flannagan’s key point is that that IOT means the amount of data flowing through networks has massively increased and will continue to do so, and that edge devices, the network and the applications they support all have to adapt to meet the changing environment. While that might be obvious, there’s an old saying that common sense isn’t. It’s good to see the Cisco is looking at the full range from edge to application, and not just concentrating on the network.

Jim Green, former CEO of Composite and now CTO, Data and Analytics Business Group, Cisco, gave an NDA presentation. I can’t wait until some of it is announced because a key part is very interesting, so I’ll talk about it at some point – just not today.

Kevin Ott, General Manager, Data Virtualization Business Unit, focused on the massive amounts of data sources that have to be comingled in an intelligent fashion. He has one of the best graphics I’ve seen to show that, displaying just some of the no-SQL technologies in the market today.

Some no-SQL options…

However, then he brought up something that made my marketing mind shudder. Kevin rightfully pointed out that there are lots of clouds, not just the Cloud that’s marketing. Individual sets of servers inside and outside corporate firewalls. He posited that some term in needed to refer to the entire set of networked things and came up with Intercloud. What?!?!? We have had this thing called the internet for quite a while now. Back when we old client server folks were drawing clouds to represent the internet while designing systems, we knew that the cloud referred to the internet. There’s no need for a new term. I know many in marketing love to invent words, but there’s just no need in this case.

Summary

The network is a key component in today’s information infrastructure. The explosion of Cloud applications combined with the supernova of edge device growth in the Internet of Things means that a networking company must adapt if it is to help the industry and itself. While the key component of Cisco’s plan to do so is not something I can yet discuss, and while the presentation was a bit disjointed and some concepts still need clarification, I can state that it seems as if Cisco knows what it’s doing in this arena.

Their own problem seems to be they don’t yet have their message together and coherent. Hopefully that will be fixed in the near future, and I’ll watch it carefully. The right mindset and solution are necessary, but not sufficient. They need to communicate better.

Cisco Composite is on the right path to helping Cisco build a strong and holistic set of offerings to help us manage the information explosion across the internet, from edge devices to the BI applications for the business knowledge workers.