Category Archives: Marketing

Rocket Software at BBBT: A Tale of Two Products

Last Friday’s BBBT presentation by an ensemble cast from Rocket Software was interesting, in both good and bad meanings of that word. They have some very interesting products that address the business intelligence (BI) industry, but they also have some confusion.

Bob Potter, SVP and GM, Business Intelligence, opened the presentation by pointing out that Rocket has more than $300 million (USD) in annual revenue yet many tech folks have never heard of them. One reason for the combination is they’ve done a good job in balancing both build and buy decisions to provide niche software solutions in a variety of places and on a number of platforms. Another is a strong mainframe focus. The third is that they don’t seem to know how to market. Let’s focus on just the two products presented to demonstrate all of these.

Rocket Data Virtualization

Most of the presentation was focused on Rocket Data Virtualization (DV). There are two issues it addressed. The first is accessing data from multiple sources without the need to first build a data warehouse. DV is the foundation of what was first thought of as the federated or virtual data warehouse. It’s useful. Gregg Willhoit, Managing Director, Research & Development, gave a good overview of DV and then delved into the product.

Rocket Data Virtualization is a mainframe resident product to enhance data virtualization, running on IBM z. While this has the clear market limit of requiring a company large enough to have a mainframe, it’s important to consider this. There are still vast amounts of applications running on mainframes and it’s not just old line Cobol. Mainframes run Unix, Linux and other OS partitions to leverage multiple applications.

An important point was brought up when Gregg was asked about access to the product. He said that Rocket is working with other BI industry partners, folks who provide visualization, so that they can access the virtualized data.

However, if you want to know more about the product, good luck. As I’ll discuss in more detail later, if you go to their site you’ll find all marcom fluff. It’s good marcom fluff, but driving deeper requires downloads or contacting sales people. That doesn’t help a complex enterprise sale.

Rocket Discover

The presentation was turned over to Doug Anderson, Solutions Engineer, for a look at their unreleased product Rocket Discover. It’s close, in beta, but it’s not yet out.

As the name implies, Rocket Discover is their version of a visualization tool. It’s a very good, basic tool that will compete well in the market except for two key things. The first is that they claimed Rocket is aiming at “high level executives” and that’s not the market. This is a product for business analysts. Second, while it has the full set of features that modern analysts will want, it’s based on a look and feel that’s at least a decade old.

On the very positive side, they do have a messaging feature built in to help with collaboration. It needs to grow, but this is a brand new product and they have seen where the market is going and are addressing it.

Another positive sign is this isn’t a mainframe product. It runs on servers (unspecified) and they’re starting with both on-premises and cloud options. This is a product that clearly is aimed at a wider market than they historically have addressed.

While they have understood the basics of the technology, the question is whether or not they understand the market. One teaser that shows that they probably don’t was brought up by another analyst who pointed out that Doug and others were often referring to the product as just Discover. Oracle has had a Discover product for many years. While Rocket might not have seen it on the mainframe, there will be some marketing issues if the company doesn’t always refer to the product as Rocket Discover, and they might have problems anyway. Their legal and marketing teams need to investigate quickly – before release.

Enterprise IT v Enterprise Software: Understanding the Difference

The product presentation and a Q&A session that covered more issues with even more folks from Rocket taking part, show the problems Rocket will have. As pointed out, the main reasons that so many people have never heard of Rocket is it sells very technical solutions to enterprise IT. Those are direct sales to a very technical audience. However, enterprise software is more than enterprise IT.

Enterprise software such as ERP, CRM, SFA and, yes, BI, address business issues with technology. That means there will be a complex sales cycle involving people from different organizations, a cycle that’s longer and more involved than a pure sale to IT. I’m not sure that Rocket has yet internalized that knowledge. As mentioned above, their website is very fluffy, as if the thought is that you put something pretty (though I argue against the current fad of multiple bands requiring scrolling, it’s neither pretty nor easy to use) with mission and message only, then you quickly get your techies talking directly to their techies, is the way you sell. Perhaps when talking with techies only, but not in an enterprise sale.

That’s my biggest gripe about the software industry not understanding the need for product marketing. You must be able to build a bridge to both technical and business users with a mix of collateral and content that span the gap. I’m not seeing that with Rocket.

In addition, consider the two products and the market. DV is very useful and there are multiple companies trying to provide the capability. While Rocket’s knowledge of and access to mainframe data is a clear advantage, the fact the product only runs on mainframes is a very limiting competitive message. I understand they have tied their horses very closely to IBM, and it makes sense to have a z option, but to not provide multiple platforms or a way for non-mainframe customers to use their more general concepts and technologies will retard growth.

If their plan is to provide what they know first then spread to other platforms, it’s a good strategy; but that wasn’t discussed.

Both products, though, have the same marketing issue. Rocket needs to show that it understands it is changing from selling almost exclusively to enterprise IT and needs to create a more integrated product marketing message to help sell to the enterprise.

There’s also the issue of how to balance the messages for the two products. For Rocket Data Virtualization to succeed, it really does need to work with the key BI vendors. Those companies will wonder about Rocket’s dedication to them while Rocket Discover exists. Providing a close relationship with those vendors will retard Rocket Discover’s growth. Pushing both products will be walking a tightrope and I haven’t seen any messaging that shows they know it.

Summary

Rocket is a company that is very strong on technology that helps enterprise IT. Both Rocket Data Virtualization and Rocket Discover have the basics in place for strong products. The piece missing is an understanding of how to message the wider enterprise market and even the mid- and small-size company markets.

Rocket Data Virtualization is the product that has the most immediate impact with the clear differentiation of very powerful access to mainframe data and the product I think should make the more rapid entrant into its space. The question is whether or not they can spread platform support past the mainframe faster than other companies will realize the importance of mainframe data. In the short term, however, they have a great message if they can figure out how to push it.

Rocket Discover is a very good start for a visualization tool, but primarily on the technology side. They need to figure out how to jump forward in GUI and into predictive and other analytics to be truly successful going forward, but the market is young and they have time.

The biggest issue is if Rocket will learn how to market and sell in broader enterprise and SMB sales, both to better address the multiple buyers in the sales cycle and to better communicate how both products interact in a complex market place.

Rocket is worth the look, they just need to learn how to provide the look to the full market.

TDWI Best Practices Report on Hadoop: A good report for IT, not executives

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The latest TDWI Best Practices Report is concerned with Hadoop. Philip Russom is the author and the article is worth a read. However, it has the usual issue I’ve seen with many TDWI reports, very strong on numbers but missing the real business point. In journalism, there’s an expression called burying the lede, hiding the most important part of a story down in the middle. Mr. Russom gets his analysis correct, bit I think the priorities or the focus needs work. It’s a great report to use as a source by IT, it’s not a report for executives.

Why am I cranky? The report starts with an Executive Summary. The problem is that it isn’t aimed at executives but is something that lets technical folks think they’re doing well. It doesn’t tell executives why they should care. What are the business benefits? What are the risks? Those things are missing.

First, let’s deal with the humorous marketing number. The report mentions the supposedly astounding figure that “Hadoop clusters in production are up 60% in two years.” That’s part of the executive summary. You have to slide down into the body to understand that only 16% of respondents said they have HDFS production. It’s easy for early adopters to grow a small percent to a slightly larger small percentage, it’s much tougher to get a larger slice of the pie.

Philip Russom accurately deals with why it will take a bit for Hadoop to grow larger, but it does it past the halfway point of the article. Two things: Security and SQL.

Executives are concerned that technology helps business. Security ensures that intellectual property remains within the firm. It also ensures that litigation is minimized by not having breaches that could be outside regulatory and contractual requirements. Mr. Russom accurately discusses the security risks with Hadoop, but that begins down on page 18 and doesn’t bubble up into the executive summary.

So too is the issue of SQL. After writing about the problems in staffing Hadoop, the author gives a brief but accurate mention of the need to link Hadoop into the rest of a business’ information infrastructure. It is happening, as a sidebar comment points out with “Hadoop is progressively integrated into complex multi-platform environments.” However, that progress needs to speed up for executives to see the analytics from Hadoop data integrated into the big picture the CxO suite demands.

The report gives IT a great picture of where Hadoop is right now. As expected from a technical organization, it weighs the need, influence and future of the mystical data scientist too highly, but the generalities are there to help mid-level management understand where Hadoop is today.

However, I’ve seen multiple generations of technology come in, and Hadoop is still at an early adopter phase where too many proponents are too technical to understand what executives need. It’s important to understand risks and rewards, not a technical snapshot; and the later is what the report is.

IT should read this report as valuable insight to what the market is doing. It’s, obviously, my personal bias, but the summary is just that, a summary. It’s not for executives. It’s something that each IT manager will use for its good resources to build their own messages to their executives.

JInfonet at the BBBT: OEM or Direct, a Decision is Necessary

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Let’s cut to the chase, this is another company with a very good product and no idea how to message. Unless they quickly figure out and communicate the right message, they’ll need to get ready for acquisition as an exit strategy.

Jinfonet is a company founded, it seems, to clone Crystal Reports in Java. Hence the awkward name. JReport, their product, is full featured and we’ll get to that, but the legacy name using report will leave them behind if that remains their focus.

The presentation was primarily by Dean Yao, Director of Marketing, with demo support brought by the able Leo Zhao, Senior Systems Consultant. However, the presentation indicated the message problem.

Reports? What Reports?

The name of the product is JReports, but at no time in the three hours did a report make an appearance. They showed two different analyst charts, Nucleus Research and EMA, of the business intelligence (BI) industry to show where they were placed. BI. Yet when asked about competition, Dean Yao repeatedly mentioned they didn’t compete against BI vendors but focused on reports.

Their own presentation begs to differ:

JReport solution areas

Notice that reports are a secondary feature of one focus.

What’s also good and bad is that Leo Zhao’s demonstrations showed a very richly featured product that does compete against the other vendors. The only major hole wasn’t in functionality, it’s that the rich set of visualizations weren’t as pretty as most of the competition. That is in part because they are self-funded with more limited resources and partly because they’re great techies who haven’t prioritized visualizations as they should.

OEM or Direct?

OEM, in JInfonet’s business model, doesn’t only mean the product embedded in third party applications. Mr. Yao discussed how JReport is also regularly embedded in departmental IT applications. That is different than when companies use JReport as a standalone product.

Dean talked about how 30% of their business in recent years was direct, with the rest being OEM. At the same time, he mentioned that last year was around 50/50. That’s not a problem. What is an issue is that they don’t know why it was. Did sales focus on direct? Was one major direct client a large revenue outlier which skewed the results? They don’t seem to know.

That matters because the OEM and direct models are very different. With OEM, you let the other company deal with business messages. All you’re doing is presenting to them a good technical story and cost point compared do simpler products, a tiny segment of competition or doing nothing and losing out to their competitors.

Enterprise sales, on the other hand, require a focus on the end user, the folks using the products and the business issues they have. That is what’s missing from the presentation, their web site and the few pieces of collateral I reviewed.

One thing should also be said about the OEM to departments model. The cloud is changing the build v buy balance for many departments for the applications in which JReport is embedded, so I’m not sure how much longer this model will be of significant revenue.

Mr. Yao said they don’t do enterprise sales, but just sell to SMB and enterprise departments, so that means they’re not really competing against other BI vendors. A lot of the analysts on the call quickly jumped on that, pointed out that even one of the largest companies openly talks about its strategy of land and expand. “Just land” is not a long term strategy.

What’s that mean?

Right now the enterprise market is very fragmented, so there’s a space for a small company, but that won’t last long. Crystal Reports had a long run based on the technologies of the day, but it no longer is independent. Today, things are changing far more rapidly. The cloud is allowing BI firms to address small to global companies with similar products and the major players (and most smaller ones) are focused on that full business market.

Given the current product, JInfonet can go one of two ways. They can decide to completely focus on OEM, keep a technical message and just sell enterprise as it happens.

The other option, one I openly prefer, is that they realize that they have a very good product that does compete in the direct model and they need to focus more messaging. They can still provide to OEM, but that’s easier – it’s a subset of the full featured message.

The solution, though, resides in the folks who weren’t in Boulder: The founders. The company has been self-funded since 1998 and the founders are used to their control. I’ve seen companies fail because owners were unwilling to see that times have changed. They mistakenly think that pivoting markets says they did something wrong in the past, so they’re hesitant. It doesn’t say that, but only that the people have enough confidence to adapt to a new market with the same energy and intellect with which they addressed the original market.

JInfonet has great potential, but it will require a strong rethink and clarification of who they are in order to convert that to kinetic. From what I’ve seen of the product and two people, I hope they succeed.

AptiMap at BBBT: Improving Data Mapping

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Today the BBBT held a special session. While most presentations are by companies with full products, existing sales and who typically have been around for a few years, today we had the pleasure of listening to Sherry Brown, President of AptiMap. This is a pure startup company, still tiny. She was looking for our always vocal analyst community’s opinions on her initial aim and direction. Not to surprise anyone who knows the BBBT, we gave that at full bore.

Ms. Brown’s goal is to provide a far easier way of mapping fields between source and target datasets for creating data warehouses and other data stores. It’s a great start and she has some initial features that will help. I’ll be blunt: I’m intentionally not going to say a lot. As mentioned, they are a very early startup and the software isn’t full fledged. That means any mention of what they have and don’t have could be inaccurate by next week. That’s not a bad thing, it’s what happens at that phase.

I will mention that the product is cloud based from the start.

The important question about whether or not to contact AptiMap is what who you are and what you need. Most of the feedback to Sherry was about that. It was helping to focus the message. If I have correctly understood the consensus of the attendees, here are the critical things to focus upon while defining a market for the initial product:

Aimed at IT and business analysts
Folks currently using modeling tools or spreadsheets at a start
Focus on standard, enterprise data sources, from spreadsheets to RDBMS’s, Hadoop can wait
Mid-sized companies integrating their first sets of systems or trying to get a handle on their existing data
Might especially be good in the hands of consultants going into those types of companies.
Many of the potential users are tablet users, so focus on that aspect of mobile

One final key, one that needs to be a full paragraph rather than a bullet and one that many technical startups don’t get while building their products based on user needs, is that users aren’t the only decision makers in the product. As mentioned, this is a cloud product and AptiMap will be expecting recurring revenue from monthly or annual fees. The business analyst is often not the person who approves those types of costs. The firm also needs to focus messages on the buyers, whether IT, line or consulting management, to build messages that help them understand the business benefit of providing the tool to their people.

Understanding your market matters. It will help the firm not only focus product, but also narrow down the marketing message and image to aim at the correct audience.

Too often, founders get a great technical idea and focus on a couple of users to fill out product features and then try to find a market. BI is moving too fast for that, the vision needs to be much more clearly set out much earlier than was needed in software companies twenty years ago.

Finally, I mentioned the cloud model but should also mention AptiMap is offering a 30-day free trial.

Summary

AptiMap has an initial product that can help people more rapidly and accurately create mappings between data sources and targets. It’s cloud based for easy access. It is, however, very early in the product and company life cycle.

I would suggest it primarily to analysts in mid-sized organizations or consultants who work with SMBs and want some quick hit functionality add to map data sources for the creation of data warehouses, ODS’s and other relationally oriented data repositories.

If you want to experiment inexpensively with an early product that could help, contact them.

Tableau at the BBBT: Strengthening the Business in Business Intelligence

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Tableau was back at the BBBT last week. Last year’s presentation was a look ahead at v8.2. The latest visit was a look back at 2014 and a focus on v9.0. Francois Ajenstat, VP Product Management, was back again to lead us through product issues. The latest marketing presenter was Adriana Gil Miner, VP Corporate Communications.

Tableau Revenues

Ms. Gil Miner opened the morning with the look back at last year. The key point was thestrength of their growth. They are not only pleased with the year-over year growth, but thechart also shows last year’s revenue as a slice of revenue over Tableau’s lifetime. We’ll leave it simply as: They had a good year.

Another point in describing their size is that Adriana said they have 26,000 customer accounts. Some confusion with a later presentation number required clarification and this isn’t users, or even sites. We were told that the 26k is the number of paying company accounts. There were no numbers showing median account size or how far the outliers are on either extreme, but that’s a nice number for the BI space.

The final key point made by Adriana Gil Miner was localization. Modern companies almost all create products using unicode or other methods that allow for language localization, but Tableaus has made the strong push to provide localized software and data sets in multiple languages. My apologies for not listing them, there’s some weird glitch with my Adobe Reader that’s crashing only on their presentation while no other analyst is having the same problem, so I can’t provide a list. Please refer to your local Tableau rep for details.

Francois Ajenstat then took over. It was no surprise that his focus was on v9.0. He discussed it by focusing on nine points he views as key:

Access to more data sources
Answer more questions
Improve the user experience
Support analytics at scale
Performance as a differentiator
Support for mobile
Tableau Public redesign
Coming out next quarter

If you look at those, you might question why that many bullets? For instance, when it comes out is just a schedule issue and doesn’t rise to the level of the others. Tableau Public’s redesign just seems to be the obvious end of focusing on better user experience and performance.

However, a couple sound the same but should be differentiated. Analytics at scale and performance improvements overlap but aren’t identical. Francois showed both what they did to improve performance on clustered servers, helping both bigger data sources and more simultaneous users, and also demonstrating that they’ve done some great optimization in basic analytics for individuals.

One of the best parts was the honesty, now that they’re close enough to releasing v9.0, in admitting that early versions ran slowly. They showed quotes from beta testers talking about major performance improvements. In addition, Tableau Public is a great source of testing real-word analytics. Mr. Ajenstat pointed out that they took the 100 most accessed visualizations in Tableau Public and analyzed performand differences, seeing a 4x increase in performance on average. While it’s always important to generate internal tests to stress potential use, focusing on how business really use the tool is even more important in ensuring performance is seen as good in day-to-day usage by knowledge workers, not only in heavy loads by analysts doing discovery.

LOD Expressions

The one thing that really caught my eye about v9.0 is the incorporation of Level of Detail (LOD) expressions. BI firms have been adding drill-down analytics for a decade. Seeing a specific level of detail and then dropping down to a lower level is critical. However, that’s not enough.

What’s needed is to be able to visually compare the lower level details with overall numbers. For instance, a sales VP regularly wants to know not just how an individual sales person is doing, but also how that compares to the region and national numbers. Only within context can you gain insight.

Among the other things LODs help is the ability to bin aggregates. Again we can turn to sales to think about retail sales across categories while also comparing those to total sales or in a trend analysis.

While many companies are working to add more complex analysis, it’s clear that Tableau hasn’t only looked at how a very technical person can create an LOD. They’ve worked on an interface, that from the demo, has a simple and clean interface that business end users can user. Admittedly, that’s what demos are supposed to do, but I’ve seen some try and fail miserably. This seems to be a good attempt to understand business intelligence with an emphasis of the first word.

Summary

Some of the very new startups make the mistake of thinking even the first generation BI companies are too old to innovate. Those companies aren’t and are still a threat. However, Tableau is not even in the first generation and is still more nimble yet. They have their eyes on the ball and are moving forward. Even more importantly, while still focusing on their technology, as do many startups, they seem to have become mature enough to start shifting focus from the IT and business analysts to the information consumers.

Understanding what the business knowledge workers throughout the business hierarchy need, in data and performance, is what will drive the next growth spurt. Tableau seems to have them in target.

Revolution Analytics at BBBT: Vision and products for R need to mesh

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Revolution Analytics presented to the BBBT last Friday. The company is focused on R with a stated corporate vision of “R: The De-facto standard for enterprise predictive analytics .” Bill Jacobs, VP, Product Marketing, did most of the talking while Steve Belcher, Sales Engineer, gave a presentation.

For those of you unfamiliar with R as anything other than a letter smack between Q and S, R is an open source programming language for statistics and analytics. The Wikipedia article on R points out it’s a combination of Scheme and S. As someone who programmed in Scheme many years ago, the code fragments I saw didn’t look like it but I did smile at the evolution. At the same time, the first thing I said when I saw Revolution’s interactive development environment (IDE) was that it reminded me of EMACS, only slightly more advanced in thirty years. The same wiki page referenced earlier also said that R is a GNU project, so now I know why.

Bill Jacobs was yet another vendor presenter who has mentioned his company realized that the growth of the Internet of Things (IOT) means a data explosion that leaves what is currently misnamed as big data in the dust as far as data volumes. He says Revolution wants to ensure that companies are able to effectively analyze IOT and other information and that his company’s R is the way to do so.

Revolution Analytics is following in the footsteps of many companies which have commercialized freeware over the years, including Sun with Unix and Red Hat with Linux. Open source software has some advantages, but corporate IT and business users require services including support, maintenance, training and more. Companies which can address those needs can build a strong business and Revolution is trying to do so with R.

GUI As Indicative Of Other Issues

I mentioned the GUI earlier. It is very simple and still aimed at very technical users, people doing heavy programming and who understand detailed statistics. I asked why and was told that they felt that was their audience. However, Bill had earlier talked about analytics moving forward from the data priests to business analysts and end users. That’s a dichotomy. The expressed movement is a reason for their vision and mission, but their product doesn’t seem to support that mission.

Even worse was the response when I pointed out that I’d worked on the Apple Macintosh before and after MPW was released and had worked at Gupta when it was the first 4GL language on the Windows platform. I received as long winded answer as to why going to a better and easier to use GUI wasn’t in the plans. Then Mr. Jacobs mentioned something to the effect of “You mentioned companies earlier and they don’t exist anymore.” Well, let’s forget for a minute that Gupta began a market, others such as Powersoft did well too for years, and then Microsoft came out with its Visual products to control the market but that there were many good years for other firms and the products are still there. Let’s focus on wondering when Apple ceased to exist.

It’s one thing to talk about a bigger market message in the higher points of a business presentation. It’s another, very different, thing to ensure that your vision runs through the entire company and product offering.

Along with the Vision mentioned above, Revolution Analytics presents a corporate mission to “Drive enterprise adoption of R by providing enhanced R products tailored to meet enterprise challenges.” Enterprise adoption will be hindered until the products reflect an ability to work for more than specialist programmers but can address a wider enterprise audience.

Part of the problem seems to be shown in the graphic below.

Revolution Analytics tech view of today

Revolution deserves credit for accurately representing the current BI space in snapshot. The problem is that it is a snapshot of today and there wasn’t an indication that the company understands how rapidly things change. Five to ten years ago, the middle column was the left column. Even today there’s a very technical need for the people who link the data to those products in order to begin analysis. In the same way, much of what is in the right column was in the middle. In only a few years, the left column will be in the middle and the middle will be on the right.

Software evolves rapidly, far more rapidly that physical manufacturing industries. Again, in order to address their enterprise mission, Revolution Analytics’ management is going to have to address what’s needed to move towards the right columns that mean an enterprise adoption.

Enterprise Scalability: A Good Start

One thing they’ve done very well is to build out the product suite to attract different sized businesses, individual departments and others with a scaled product suite to attract a wider audience.

Revolution Analytics product suite

They seem to have done a good job of providing a layered approach from free use of open source to enterprise weight support. Any interested person should talk with them about the full details.

Summary

R is a very useful analytical tool and Revolution Analytics is working hard to provide business with the ability to use R in ways that help leverage the technology. They’re working hard to support groups who want pure free open source and others who want true enterprise support in the way other open source companies have succeeded in previous decades.

Their tool does seem powerful, but it is still clearly and admittedly targeted at the very technical user, the data priests.

Revolution Analytics seems to have a start to a good corporate mission and I think they know where they want to end up. The problems is that they haven’t yet created a strategy that will get them to meet their vision and mission.

If you are interested in using R to perform complex analysis, you need to talk to Revolution Analytics. They are strong in the present. Just be aware that you will have to help nudge them into the future.

Webinar Review. Lyndsey Wise and Information Builders: Five Ways SMBs are Putting Information to Work

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This morning I attended a TDWI webinar with Lyndsay Wise, Wise Analytics, and Chris Banks, Information Builders, presenting the subject line topic. It was a nice change from the webinar earlier in the week.

Lyndsey Wise began by speaking about the differences between Small-to-Medium sized businesses (SMBs) and enterprises. While SMBs are smaller and have fewer resources than enterprises, they are also more adaptive and can more quickly make decisions that impact corporate infrastructure.

I’ll disagree with what she said in that description on only one point. Ms. Wise mentioned the lack of internal IT resources makes SMBs more comfortable with consultants, the Cloud and information appliances. Two out of three ‘aint bad. Appliances tend to be a capital expense made by enterprises wanting to retain control inside the firewall. They give enterprises more comfort. SMBs don’t typically want that kind of investment and overhead. She’s absolutely right that’s why many external IT consultants and web software vendors have successfully focused on the market.

She then turned to a discussion of the following five ways SMBs are better utilizing information:

Embedded BI within operations
Web portal expansion and information sharing
Mobilization of the workforce
Better flexibility in dashboard and analytics design – self-service and data discovery
Monetizing of data collected

The first point was that SMBs have had to deal far longer than did enterprises with separate operational and BI software that barely overlapped if you were lucky. Operational software companies have begun to add BI to their packages while BI vendors are better linking to operational systems, both at the data end and up front through single-signon and other interfaces enhancements that aid integration.

The growth of web portals is not new and not really in the pure BI space, but it is a key part of the solution, as Ms. Wise points out for the reason that it helps businesses share with customers, suppliers and other people and organizations in their ecosystems. I’m glad she had the point there because many people in tech sectors get focused just on their niche and don’t look at the full information picture.

Workforce mobilization issues are the same for any size business. The only difference I see is that SMBs have fewer resources for training. People wanting to focus on SMBs need to ensure that mobile apps go through user interface design cycles to present clear and easy understanding of critical information.

The fourth point is critical. It ties into what I mentioned in the previous paragraph. As Lyndsey Wise pointed out, SMBs don’t tend to have programmers, especially not ones with the inflated title of data scientist (full disclosure, “inflated” is my opinion not hers), That means UI, UI, UI. True self-service is a must for SMBs.

The final issue is another on which I’m on the fence as to the importance. Not that monetization is unimportant, just that monetization of information has been important to business for millennia before computers. All BI is ultimately about making better business decisions and that usually means a predominate roll in lower costs or increasing revenue. That’s information monetization. It’s not that the point is unimportant, it just seems redundant to me.

The presentation was then turned over to Chris Banks. Information Builders, one of the big first generation BI firms, seems to be making a big push to remind people it’s there. Given the short time frame, Chris intelligently shortened and breezed through his presentation. He gave a good overview of the breadth and depth of his company’s offerings.

The issue I have with Mr. Banks’ presentation is, no surprise to anyone who knows I focus on marketing, is how he presented the company. Information Builders, Cognos, Business Objects, et al, grew up in a time when enterprises were trying to understand the large amounts of data in multiple operational systems. They spent decades on an enterprise sell. Chris is working to position them to fit Wise’s SMB message, but he’s not there yet.

Showing a crowded diagram of the breadth of products is scary to SMBs, even with Chris’ caveat that he’d never expect anyone to buy all the products. He should have focused on a simpler slide showing how SMBs can quickly begin using his products.

Then he transitioned to a slide showing a portal, backing Ms. Wyse’s second point. Sadly, it was the Hertz portal. Not exactly an SMB play.

That continued with a NASCAR slide of global enterprise customers and a case study from a large US bank. It wasn’t until the very end that there was a case study on an SMB, a roofing contractor that achieved insight and business benefit from Information Builder’s tools.

Summary

Lyndsey Wise had a good overview of issues facing small-to-medium sized businesses when trying to better gather, manage and understand business information.

Information Builders is working to communicate with the SMB community and made an ok first stab. From the presentation, I’m not really sure how they can help, but I’m not convinced they can’t. There’s much more work to be done to better address and important market.

WhereScape at BBBT: Another Intriguing Product Without a Clear Message

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Last Friday’s BBBT presentation was by Michael Whitehead, CEO, WhereScape. The company seems to have a very interesting and useful product, but there’s a huge communications gap that needs to be addressed.

What They Do

One marketing issue to start was that I got most of this section from my own experience and WhereScape’s web site, not from Michael’s presentation. When someone begins a presentation by proudly announcing it is ““guaranteed there’s no corporate marketing in the presentation at all” while you’re presenting to a group of analysts, there’s a disconnect and it shows.

WhereScape has two products, Red and 3D, to help build and maintain data structures. The message is focused on data warehouses, but I’ll discuss that more in the next section. One issue was that their demonstration didn’t work as there seemed to be a problem connecting between their tablet and the BBBT display system, so much of what I’m saying is theory rather than anything demonstrated.

Red is their tool to build data warehouses. Other tools exist and have been around for decades, Informatica being just one competing firm.

3D is where the differentiation comes in. Everyone in IT understands that nightmare that is upgrading major software installations such as ERP, CRM and EDW systems. Even migrating from one version to the next of a single vendor can involve months of planning, testing and building, followed by more months of parallel runs to be safe. A better way of analyzing and modifying data structures that can compress the time frame can have a large positive impact upon a corporation. That’s what WhereScape is attempting.

What They Say

However, their message is all “Automation! Automation! Automation!” and the short part of the demo that worked showed some automated analysis but a lot of clicks necessary to accomplish the task. From what I saw, it will definitely speed up the tasks, if as advertised, with clear time and money savings, but it’s not as automated as implied and I think a better message is needed.

In addition, their message is focused on data warehouses while Michael said “We’re in the automation business not the data warehouse business,” which really doesn’t say anything.

Michael did talk for a bit about the bigger data picture that includes data warehouses as part of the full solution, but again there’s no clear message. While saying that he doesn’t like the term Data Lake, he’s another that can’t admit that it’s just the ODS. There’s also a discussion of the logical data warehouse, also not something new.

One critical and important thing Mr. Whitehead mentioned was something I’ve heard from a few people recently, the point that Hadoop and other “unstructured databases” aren’t really unstructured, they support late binding, the ability to not have to define a structure a priori but to get the data and then understand and define a useable structure for analysis.

What They Need to Say

This is the tough one and not something I’m going to solve in a short column. The company is targeting a sweet spot. Data access has exploded and that includes EDW’s not going away, the misnamed concept of Big Data and much more. Many products have been created to build databases to manage that data but the business intelligence industry is still in the place packaged, back-end systems were in the 1990s. Building is easier than maintaining and upgrading. A firm that can help IT manage those tasks in an efficient, affordable and accurate way will do well.

WhereScape seems to be aimed at that. However, their existing two-fold focus on automation and data warehousing is wrong. First, it doesn’t seem all that automated yet and, even if it was, automation is the tool rather than the benefit. They need to focus on the ROI that the automation presents IT. Second, from what was discussed the application has wider applicability than just EDW’s. It can address data management issues for a wider area of business intelligence sources and the message needs to include that.

Summary

Though the presentation was very disjointed, WhereScape seems to have focused on a clearly relevant and necessary niche in the market: How to better maintain and upgrade the major data sources needed to gain business understanding.

Right now, while there is a marketing staff at the company, WhereScape’s message seems to be solely coming from the co-founder and CEO. While that was ok in the very early days, they have some good customer stories, having led with Tesco’s success in this presentation, and it’s time to leverage a stronger and clearer core message to the market.

Where the issue seems to be is the problem I’ve repeatedly seen about messaging. The speed of the industry has increased and business intelligence is, on a whole, crossing Jeffrey Moore’s chasm. That means even younger firms need to transition from a startup, technically focused, message to a broader one much more rapidly than vendors needed to do so in the past.

While WhereScape has what seems to be the strong underpinnings of a successful product, they need to do some seriously brainstorming in order to clarify and incorporate a business oriented messaged throughout their communications channels – including in presentations by founders.

Qlik Sense at the BBBT: Setting Up for the Future

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Qlik was at the BBBT last week to talk about Qlik Sense. The presenters were Josh Good, Director of Product Marketing, and Donald Farmer, VP of Innovation and Design. It was a good presentation and Qlik Sense seems like the start of a good product, but let me start by discussing a tangent.

A startup’s voice: A marketing tangent

Startups usually have a single voice, the founder, CTO or somebody who is the single and sole owner of the vision. Sometimes it’s somebody who is put forward as the visionary, correctly or incorrectly. It takes a level of maturity in a company to clarify a core message to the level where it’s replicable by a wider variety of people and for the original spokespeople to let go. While the modern BI industry is still fairly young and every analyst group talks about the untapped market, Qlik is one of the biggest players in our nascent business.

Donald Farmer is a great presenter, a smart man and has been, until recently, the sole Qlik voice I hear in every presentation. While I don’t always agree with him, he’s a pleasure to hear. Yet I continually thought “why him, always?” There might be somebody else briefly doing a demo, but he was THE voice of Qlik.

It’s not only because of my product marketing experience that I was pleased to hear from Josh. He wasn’t the demo dolly, but let the presentation with Donald chiming in. They worked well together. It’s clear that both of the startup issues I mentioned are being addressed by a maturing Qlik marketing organization who are now using multiple voices well.

Qlik Sense

I’ve blogged about other companies recently, talking about the focus on UI. Thankfully, it’s spreading. Companies who focused, in the early days, on the business analysts are realizing that they need to better address the business knowledge worker. Qlik Sense has a nice, clean interface. It’s nowhere near the overcrowded confusion of most products from a few years back. For those who want to see it, the client software is freely downloadable to you can try it out.

The one issue I have is, again, the same one I’ve mentioned with many other vendors: ETL. Josh was another person who started the demo by importing a spreadsheet. Yes, I know there’s a lot of data in them and all products need to access spreadsheets, but it’s one way of avoiding the ETL issue. Other than very basic, departmental data, more complex decision making always involves other sources. It’s the heterogeneity of data that is today’s big issue. However, that’s a weak spot hidden by just about everyone.

What was nice was the software’s intelligence in building an initial data relationship diagram base on field name relationships. It’s a start and if they keep at it the feature can grow to something that can more easily show the business user the links between different pieces of information.

A number of vendors have recently begun to have their software look at data and propose initial visualizations based on data type. It’s an easy way for users to get going. Qlik Sense doesn’t do that and the response was marketing fluff, but the display to choose types is better than most. Rather than drop down to select charts, it displays the types with mini-images. That will do for now.

Mobile done well

One fantastic part of the demo was in how well they’ve integrated mobile into the system. They were going to show it anyway, but before Josh could get to it there was a problem with his PC. He quickly pulled up his iPad and, using the same account, continued on his way with the same information that was well formatted to the new display. A key point to that is that Qlik isn’t just using mobile devices for display, he was working to create visualizations on the device.

That other data…

I’ve already mentioned heterogeneity. A number of younger companies, focused on the Cloud, have created clear links to Salesforce and other cloud data sources to easily let SMB and departments access those data sources. Qlik does not have that capability, furthermore access to major ERP and CRM systems. That will still take strong interactions with IT to create links and access for the users.

That matters to me, for one example, because of the repeated demo examples from the sales arena. Yes, sales managers remain heavy users of spreadsheets, but SFA systems have made strong inroads and the ability to combine those sources quickly for sales management is critical.

Data Governance: Thinking ahead

One area where Qlik seems to excel is in thinking about the issues of data governance. Even in this early version of Qlik Sense they’ve included some powerful ways of controlling access, both from administration and a business user standpoints. I’ve seen other vendors talk about it and only some of them willing to show if questioned. Josh and Donald brought it up as part of their basic presentation and showed a nice interface.

Just as with the growth of PCs giving individuals power while hurting data governance, BI needs to get ahold of those issue and help the end user and IT work together to manage corporate data to follow business and legislative polices. Qlik’s focus on that is an important differentiator.

Summary

Qlik Sense is a new product. It has very good visualization, which should be expected from Qlik, and has moved forward to an improved UI for ease of use. While they still have issues of concern with data access, their data governance implementation seems to be ahead of the curve and is well thought out. It’s an early generation product, so it doesn’t bother me that it has some holes. The critical thing is to look at the products in the perspective of your timeframe of needs and see if it’s right for you.

Just as importantly, from my marketing perspective, is the maturation of the marketing message and team. I’m hearing multiple voices speaking the same message. On the product and corporate fronts, Qlik is moving ahead in a good direction.

SiSense at the BBBT: High Performance BI at Low Cost?

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The latest presentation at the BBBT was by Amit Bendov, CEO, Sisense. First marketing warning: If you’re going to their web site, be prepared. Maybe it’s only for some weird Halloween thing, but the yellow and black background of the web site is the one of the ugliest thing I’ve seen for a professional company. However, let’s look under the covers, because it gets better.

The company was founded in 2004 and Amit says the first sales were in 2010. There’s a good reason for that delay. They are yet another young company who talks about being a full stack BI provider, being more than a visualization tool but also supposedly providing ETL, data storage and the full flow for your information supply chain from source systems to display. That technology took a while to develop.

Technology: Better integration of memory and Disk

The heart of their system is a patent pending technology that tightly integrates cpu cache, RAM and disk to better leverage all storage methods for higher performance. The opportunities that theory provides are enough that they’ve received $50 million (USD) in venture funding, $30 million in their latest round, earlier this year.

As they are a startup, it’s no surprise that the case studies given were for SMB or departments within enterprises. That’s the normal pattern, where a smaller group takes advantage of flexibility to try new products to solve focused problems. As their customer list includes companies such as Ebay, Wix, ESPN and Merck, companies with lots of data, those early entrants increase the potential if Sisense continues to perform.

Another key technology component is their columnar database. They created a proprietary one to be able to support their management technology. That’s completely understandable as their database isn’t purely on disk or memory, but in a combined mix that needs special database management.

The final key to their technology is that they worked to ensure the software runs on commodity chips from the X86 heritage. That means it runs on normal, affordable, off the shelf servers, not on high priced appliances. Sisense hardware price comparison

The combination of the speed and affordability of the technology is justification for the rounds of funding they’ve received.

Really full stack?

One fuzziness that I’ve mentioned with other full stack vendors is the ETL side of the process. The growth of Cloud companies such as Salesforce, and the accessibility of their APIs, means that you can get a lot of information out of systems aimed at SMB. However, true enterprise ETL means accessing a very wide variety of systems with much less easy or open APIs. When Mr. Bendov talked about multiple systems, it seems, from presentation and demo, that he’s talking about multiple instances of simple databases or open APIs, and not a breadth of source types. There wasn’t a lot of choice in the connection section of his application.

That’s not a problem for companies at Sisense’s state of maturity, as long as there’s a business plan to expand to more enterprise sources. They need to focus on proving the technology in the short term and having more heterogeneous access in their tool bag for the future.

Another issue is the question of what, exactly, their database is. Amit Bendov made a brief comment about not needed data warehouse, but as I and others quickly brought up, there are two problems with that statement. First, they would seem to be a data warehouse. They’re extracting information from source systems, transforming that information even if not into the old star-schema structures, and providing the aggregate information for analysis. Isn’t that a high level description of a warehouse? Second, as they’re young and focused on SMB or departments, as with other companies who serve visualization, they might need to look at customer demands and get access to corporate data warehouses as another source.

The old definition of a federated data warehouse seems to be evolving into today’s environment where sometimes an EDW is a source, other times a result and sometimes it’s made up of multiple accessible components such as Sisense and other databases. Younger companies who disparage EDWs need to be careful if they wish to address the enterprise market. The EDW is evolving, not dying off.

User interface and more

One of my first trips to Israel was, in part, when my boss and I had to bring a couple of UI specialists to show Mercury Interactive’s programmers why it might be nice to rethink application interfaces. It’s wonderful what twenty years have wrought. Amit Bendov says that Sisense has one UI specialist for every two programmers, and the user interface shows that. While I mentioned that they need broader ETL access, the simplicity of getting to sources is clear. While you still will need a business analyst to understand some column names, it’s a very easy to use interface.

The same is true in the visualization portions of their application. While it’s still a simpler tool, it has all the basics and is very clear to understand and use.

Paving the way for their spread into enterprise, the Sisense team also supports single-sign on, basic data access control, both in global administration and in the user interface, and other things that will be needed to convince a larger corporation to spread the technology.

Summary

Sisense looks like a startup in a great position. Their technology is well thought out and seems to be performing very well in the early stages. Affordable, fast, business intelligence is something nobody will turn down.

The challenge is two-fold:

Do they have the technology plans to help them address larger enterprise issues?
Do they have the mindset to understand the importance not only in marketing, but in changing the marketing to a more business focus?

This is the same refrain you’ve heard from me before and which you’ll hear again. This is the Chasm challenge. Their technology has a great start, but their web site and presentation show they aren’t yet thinking bigger and we’ll have to see what the future holds both for the technology and the messaging.

Business intelligence is a very visible market and one growing quickly. While small companies need to focus on the early adopters, they must very rapidly learn how to address the enterprise, both in products and marketing.

High performance BI at a reasonable cost is a great sell, but Sisense isn’t yet read for full enterprise. Sisense has a great start but life is fluid.