While at SAP TechEd in October, I talked with people about artificial intelligence and other leading technologies. One conversation took me out of my core zone and into how the company is looking at blockchain and other ways of providing distributed ledgers. My latest Search Data Management article discusses what I learned.
A couple of new articles over on the article page.
The first it almost a counter argument to the data problem I’ve previously discussed. It’s not enough to have good data if people can’t trust the algorithm.
Then, at SAP TechEd 2018, Bernd, Leukert’s keynote speech had one key element that showed me that the company was finally internalizing the ecosystem focus needed to thrive in the cloud versus the on-premises model they’ve used for decades.
Two TDWI webinars in one week? Both sponsored by SAP? Today’s was on IoT impacting data warehousing, and I was curious about how an organization that began focused on data warehousing would cover this. It ended up being a very basic introduction to IoT for data warehousing. That’s not bad. In fact. it’s good. While I often want deeper dives than presenters give, there’s certainly a place for helping people focused on one arena, in this case it’s data warehousing, get an idea of how another area, IoT, could begin to impact their world.
The problem I had was how Philip Russom, Senior Research Director for Data Management, TDWI, did that. I felt he missed out on covering some key points. The best part is that, unlike Tuesday’s machine learning webinar, SAP’s Rob Waywell, Director Hana Project Management, did a better job of bringing in case studies and discussing things more focused on the TDWI audience.
Quick soap box: Too many companies don’t understand product marketing so they under utilize their product marketers (full disclosure: I was one). I strongly feel that companies leveraging product marketing rather than product management in presentations will be more able to address business concerns rather than being focused on the products. Now, back to our regular programming…
One of the most interesting takeaways from the webinar was a poll on what level of involvement the audience has with IoT. Fifty percent of the responders said they’re not collecting IoT data and have no plans to do so. Enterprise data warehouses (EDW) are focused on high level, aggregated data. While the EDW community has been moving to blend more real time data, it tends to be other departments who are early into the IoT world. I’m not surprised by the results, nor am I worried. The expansion of IoT will bring it in to overlap EDW’s soon enough, and I’d suggest that that half of the audience is aware things will be changing and they have the foresight to begin to pay attention to it.
Mr. Russom’s basic presentation was good, and folks who have only heard about IoT would do well to listen to it. However, they should be aware of a few issues.
Philip said that “the tendency is to push analytics out to the devices.” Not wholly true, and the reason is critical. A massive amount of data is being generated by what are called “edge devices.” Those are the cars, refrigerators, manufacturing robots and other devices that stream information to the core servers. IoT data is expected to far exceed the web and social media data often referred to as big data. That means that an efficient use of the internet means that edge analytics are needed to aggregate some information to minimize traffic flow.
Take, for instance, product data. As Rob Waywell mentioned, many devices create lots of standard data for which there is no problems. The system really only cares about exceptions. Therefore, an edge device might use analytics to aggregate statistics about the standard occurrences while immediately passing exceptions on to be handled in real-time.
There is also the information needed for routing. Servers in the core systems need to understand the data and its importance. The EDW is part of a full data infrastructure. the ODS (or data lake as folks are now calling it) can be the direct target of most data, while exceptions could be immediately routed to other systems. Whether it’s the EDW, ODS, or other system, most of the analysis will continue in core systems, but edge analytics are needed.
Rob Waywell, as mentioned above, had the most important point of the presentation when he mentioned that IoT traffic is primarily about the exceptions. He had a couple of quick case studies to talk about that, and his first was great because it both showed IoT and it wasn’t about cars – the most used example. The problem is that he didn’t tie it well into the message of EDWS.
The case was about industrial worker safety in the area of gas detection and response. He showed the different types of devices that could be involved, mentioned the multiple types of alert, and described different response paths.
He then mentioned, with what I felt wasn’t enough emphasis (refer to my soap box paragraph above), the real power that a company such as SAP brings to the dance that many tinier companies can’t. In an almost throwaway comment, Mr. Waywell mentioned that SAP Hana, after managing the hazardous materials release instance, can then communicate to other SAP systems to create the official regulatory reports.
Think about that. While it doesn’t directly impact the EDW, that’s a core part of integrated business systems. That is a perfect example of how the world of IoT is going to do more than manage the basics of devices but also be used to handle the full process for with MIS is designed.
I’ll finish up with a focus that came up in a question during Q&A. Philip Russom had mentioned an initial classification of IoT between industrial and consumer applications. That misses a whole lot of areas, including supply chain, logistics, R&D feedback, service monitoring and more. To lump all of that into “manufacturing” is to do them a disservice. The manufacturing term should be limited to the actual manufacturing process.
Rob Staywell then went a different direction. He seemed to imply the purpose of IoT was solely to handle event-driven, real-time, actions. Coming from a product manager for Hana, that’s either an understandable mistake or he didn’t clearly present his view.
There is a difference between IoT data to be operationalized and that to be analyzed. He might have just been focusing on the operational aspects, those that need to create immediate actions, without minimizing the analytical portion, but it wasn’t clear.
This was a webinar that is good for those in the data warehousing and core MIS functions who want to get a quick introduction to what IoT is and what might be coming down the pike that could impact their work. For anyone who already has a good idea of what’s coming and wants more specifics, this isn’t needed.
This is more of a marketing flavored post as the recent presentation seemed to miss its own point. The title implied it was about fast decision making, but Fern Halper, TDWI Research Director for Advanced Analytics, gave a rather generic presentation about the importance of operationalizing analytics.
Fern gave a nice presentation about operationalizing analytics, but it was not significantly different than her last few. In addition, some of the survey issues discussed were clearly not well thought out. For instance, Ms. Halper listed the expected growth of predictive analytics and web/mobile analytics as if they belonged in the same discussion. The fact that web and mobile are methods of display doesn’t overlap with whether they are used to display descriptive or prescriptive analytics. The growth of those display methods also don’t move away from the use of dashboards in CRM and ERP applications, as was implied, since those applications will migrate views to the new display methods.
The best thing mentioned by both Fern Halper and the SAP presenters was the fact that there were multiple references to that need for multiple data sources. Seeing the continued refocusing of many firms on wide data rather than big data is a good thing for the industry. Big data is more of a technical issue while wide data more directly addresses complex business environments.
Now I’m hoping for more people to begin to refer to loosely structured data rather than unstructured data. Linguists, I’m sure, are constantly amused at hearing languages referred to as unstructured.
The case study was by Raj Rathee, Director, Product Management, SAP. It was an interesting project at Lufthansa, where real-time analytics were used to track flight paths and suggest alternative routes based on weather and other issues. The business key is that costs were displayed for alternate routes, helping the decision makers integrate cost and other issues as situations occur. However, that was really the only discussion of fast decision making with analytics.
The final marketing note is that the Q&A was canned but the answers didn’t always sync up. For instance, the moderator asked one question of Fern, she had a good answer, but there was no slide in the pack about her response, just the canned SAP slide referenced by Ashish Sahu, Director, Product Marketing, SAP, after Ms. Halper spoke.
I think the problem was that the presenters didn’t focus down on a tight enough message and tried to dump too much information into the presentation. The message got lost.
The Internet of Things (IOT) is something more and more people are considering. Wednesday’s TDWI webinar topic was “Stream Processing: Streaming Data in Real Time, in Memory,” and the event was sponsored by both SAP and Intel. Nobody from Intel took part in the presentation. Given my other recent post about too many cooks, that’s probably a good thing, but there was never a clear reason expressed for Intel’s sponsorship.
Fern Halper began with overview of how TDWI is seeing data streaming progress. She briefly described streaming as dealing with data while still in motion, as opposed to data in warehouses and other static structures. Ms. Halper then proceeded to discuss the overlap between event processing, complex event processing and stream mining. The issue I had is that she should have spent a bit more time discussing those three terms, as they’re a bit fuzzy to many. Most importantly, what’s the difference between the first two?
The primary difference is that complex event processing is when data comes from multiple sources. Some of the same things are necessary as ETL. That’s why the in-memory message was important in the presentation. You have to quickly identify, select and merge data from multiple streams and in-memory is the way to most efficiently accomplish that.
Ms. Halper presented the survey results about the growth of streaming sources. As expected, it shows strong growth should continue. I was a bit amused that it asked about three categories: real-time event streams, IOT and machine data. While might make sense to ask the different terms, as people are using multiple words, they’re really the same thing. The IoT is about connecting things, which interprets as machines. In addition, the main complex events discussed were medical and oil industry monitoring, with data coming from machines.
Jaan Leemet, Sr. VP, Technology, at Tangoe then took over. Tangoe is an SAP customer providing software and services to improve their IT expense management. Part of that is the ability to track and control network usage of computers, phones and other devices, link that usage to carrier billing and provide better cost control.
A key component of their needs isn’t just that they need stream processing, but that they need stream processing that also works with other less dynamic data to provide a full solution. That’s why they picked SAP’s Even Stream Processor – not only for the independent functionality but because it also fits in with their SAP ecosystem.
One other decision factor is important to point out, given the message Hadoop and other no-SQL folks like to give. SAP’s solution works in a SQL-like language. SQL is what IT and business analysts know, the smart bet for rapid adoption is to understand that and do what SAP did. Understand the customer and sales becomes easier. That shouldn’t be a shock, but technologists are often too enamored of themselves to notice.
Neil McGovern, Sr. Director, Marketing, at SAP gave the expected pitch. It was smart of them to have Jaan Leemet go first and it would have been better if Mr. McGovern’s presentation was even shorter so there would have been more time for questions.
Because of the three presenters, there wasn’t time for many questions. One of the few question for the panel asked if there was such a thing as too much data. Neil McGovern and Jaan Leemet spent time talking about the technology of handling lots of streaming data, but only in generalities.
Fern Halper turned it around and talked about the business concept of too much data. What data needs to be seen at what timeframe? What’s real-time? Those have different answers depending on the business need. Even with the large volume of real-time data that can be streamed and accesses, we’re talking about clustered servers, often from a cloud partner, and there’s no need to spend more money on infrastructure than necessary.
I would have liked to have heard a far more in-depth discussion about how to look at a business and decide which information truly requires streaming analysis and which doesn’t. For instance, think about a manufacturing floor. You want to quickly analyze any data that might indicate failures that would shut down the process, but the volumes of information that allow analysis of potential process improvements don’t need to be analyzed in the stream. That can be done through analysis of a resultant data store. Yet all the information can be coming across the same IoT feed because it’s a complex process. Firms need to understand their information priority and not waste time and money analyzing information in a stream for no purpose other than you can.
Tuesday’s TDWI webinar had a guest star: Claudia Imhoff. The topic was predictive analytics and the presentation was sponsored by SAP, so Pierre Leroux, Director of Product Marketing, SAP, also had his moment towards the end. Though the title was about predictive analytics, it’s best to view the presentation as an overview of the state of analytics, and there’s much more to discuss on that.
The key points revolved around a descriptive slide Ms. Imhoff presented to describe the changing analytics landscape.
Claudia Imhoff described the established EDW information supply chain as being the left half of the diagram while the newer information, with web, internet of things (IOT) and other massive data sources adding the right hand side. It’s a nice, clean way of looking at things and makes clear that the newer data can still drive rather than eliminate the EDW.
One thing I’d say is missing is a good name for the middle box. Many folks call was Ms. Imhoff terms the Date Refinery a Data Lake or other similar rationalizations. My issue is that there’s really no need to list the two parts separate. In fact, there’s a need to have them seamlessly accessible as a whole, hence the growth of SQL for Hadoop and other solutions. As I’ve expressed before, the combination of the data integration and data refinery displayed are just the next generation of the ODS. I like the data refinery label, but think it more accurately applies to the full set of data described in the middle section of the diagram.
Claudia also described, the four types of analytics:
It’s important to understand the difference in analysis because each type of report needs to have a focus and an audience. One nit I have with her discussion of these was the comment that descriptive analytics are the least valuable. Rather, they’re the least strategic. If we don’t know what happened, we can’t feed the other types of analytics, plus, reporting requirements in so much of business means that understanding and reporting what happened remains very valuable. The difference is not how valuable, but in what way. Predictive and prescriptive analytics can be more valuable in the long term, but their foundation still resides on descriptive.
My biggest complaint with our industry at large is still the obsession with the mythical data scientist. Claudia Imhoff spent a good amount of time on the subject. It’s a concept with super human requirements, with Claudia even saying that the data scientist might be the one with deep business knowledge. Nope. Not going to happen.
In Q&A, somebody brought up the point I always mention: Why does it have to be one person rather than a team. Both Claudia Imhoff and Pierre Leroux admitted that was more likely. I wish folks would start with that as it’s reasonable and logical.
I was a programmer as folks began calling themselves software engineers. I never liked that. The job wasn’t engineering but a blend of engineering and crafting. There was art. The two presenters continued to talk about the data scientist as having an art component, but still think that means the magical person is still a scientist. In addition, thirty year ago the developer was distanced much further from business, by development methods, technology and business practice. Being closer means, again, teamwork, with each person sharing expertise in math, coding, business and more to create a robust solution.
That wall has been coming down for years, but both technology and business are changing rapidly and are far more complex. The team notion is far more logical.
The other major problem I had was a later slide and words accompanying it that implied it’s up to the business people to get on board with what the technologists are doing. They must find the training, they must learn that analytics are the answer to everything.
Yes, we’re able to provide better analytics faster to management than in the past. However, they’re not yet perfect nor will they be. Models are just that. As Pierre pointed out, models will never explain 100%.
Claudia made a great point earlier about one of the benefits of big data is to eliminate sampling and look at what the entire market is doing, but markets are still complex and we can’t glean everything. Technologists must get of the high horse and realize that some of the pushback from management is because the techies too often tend to dismiss intuition and experience. What needs to happen is for the messages to change to make it clear that modern analytics will help executives and line management make better decisions, not that it will replace their decision making.
In addition, quit making overly complex visualization that have great scientific relevance but waste time. The users do not need to understand the complexities of systems. If we’re so darned smart, we can distill the visualizations to things easier to comprehend so that managers can get the information, add it to all the other information and experience and make decision.
Technologists must adapt to how business runs as much as business must adapt to leverage technology.
The title of the presentation misrepresents the content. It was a very good presentation for understanding the high level landscape of the analytics information supply chain and it’s a discussion that needs to be held more often.
You’ll notice I didn’t say much about the demo by Pierre Leroux. That’s because of technical issues between demo and webinar software. However, both he and Claudia Imhoff took questions about the industry and market and gave thoughtful answers that should help drive the conversation forward.
Tuesday saw a rare, mid-week presentation at the BBBT. Silwood Technology, an Ascot, UK, company sent people to Boulder to present their technology. Roland Bullivant, Sales and Marketing Director, and Nick Porter, Technical Director (and a co-founder) were the presenters.
Silwood Safyr is focused on helping IT understand the metadata in their major packaged enterprise systems, primarily from SAP and Oracle with a recent addition of Salesforce. As those familiar with the enterprise application space know, there are a lot of tables in SAP and Oracle and documentation has never been, shall we say, close to perfect. In addition, all customers of those systems customize the applications, thereby making the metadata more difficult to understand. Safyr does a very good job at finding the technical metadata.
Let me make that clear: Technical metadata. The tables, indices and their relations are what is found. That’s extremely valuable, but not the full picture. Business metadata is not managed. I’ll discuss that in more detail below.
The company, as expected from European companies, uses partners rather than direct sales for its primary sales channel. In addition, they OEM white label products through IBM, CA and other firms. All told, Roland Bullivant says that 70% of their customers are via reseller channels. Also as expected, they still remain backline support for those partners.
As mentioned above, Safyr captures the database structure metadata. As Roland so succinctly put it, “The older packages weren’t really built with the outside world in mind.” The internal structures aren’t pretty and often aren’t easily accessible. However, that’s not the only difficulty in understanding an enterprise’s data structures.
Salesforce has a much simpler data structure, intentionally created to open the information to the ecosystem of partner applications that then grew up around the application. Still, as Mr. Bullivant pointed out, there are companies in Europe that have 16 or more customized versions in different countries or divisions, so understanding and meshing those disparate systems in order to build a full enterprise data model isn’t easy. That’s where Safyr helps.
Silwood Safyr is a great leap forward from having nothing, but there’s still much missing. While they build a data model, there’s not enough intelligence. For instance, they leave it to their users to figure out which tables are production and which are duplicates or other tables used just for performance. Sure, a table with zero rows usually means either a performance table or an unlocked app segment, but that’s left for the user rather than flagging, filtering and indicating any knowledge of the application and data structures.
Also, as mentioned above, there’s no business intelligence (gosh, where’d that word come from?). There’s nothing that lets people understand the business logic of the applications. That’s why this is a pure IT tool. The structures are just described in technical terms, exported to data modeling tools (a requirement for visualization, ERwin was used in the demo but they work with others ) and then left to the analysts to identify all the information need to clarify which tables are needed for which business purpose or customer.
One way to start working on that was indicated in Nick Porter’s demo. He showed that Safyr is good at not just getting table names, but also in accessing descriptive names and other metadata about the tables. That’s information needs to be leveraged to help prepare the results for use by people on the business side of the organization.
The main hole I see in the business links from the last section: The lack of emphasis on business knowledge. For instance, there’s a comparison function to analyze metadata between databases. However, as it’s purely on a technical level, it’s limited to comparing SAP with SAP and Oracle with Oracle. Given that differences in versions of those products can be significant, I’m not even sure how well that works across major version releases.
Not only do global enterprises have multiple versions of one vendor, they have SAP on one continent, Oracle in another and might acquire a new company that is using Salesforce. That lack of an ability to link business layers means that each package is working in a void and there’s still a lot of work required to build a coherent global picture.
Another part of their growth need is my usual soapbox. When the Silwood team was talking about how they couldn’t figure out why they weren’t growing as fast as they should, Claudia Imhoff beat me to the punch. She mentioned marketing. They’d earlier pointed out they don’t spend much on marketing and she quickly pointed out that’s a problem. This isn’t Field of Dreams, they won’t come just because you build it. Silwood marketing basics are good, with a lack of visible case studies being one hole, but they’re not pushing their message out through the channels.
Silwood Safyr is a good core product to help IT automate the documentation of data models in packaged enterprise software. It’s a product that should be of interest to every large enterprise using complex applications such as those by Oracle and SAP, or even multiple versions of simple databases such as Salesforce. However, there are two things missing.
The most important missing piece in the short term is the marketing necessary to help their resellers better understand benefits both they and the end customer receive, to improve interest in reselling and to shorten sales cycles.
The second is to look long term at where they can grow the business. My suggestion is to better work with business logic within and across applications vendors. That’s the key way they’ll defend their turf against the BI vendors who are slowly moving downstream to more technical data access.
The reason people want to understand data models isn’t out of curiosity, it’s to better understand business. Silwood has a great start in aiding enterprises in improving that understanding.
In a busy week for TDWI webinars, today’s presentation by Claudia Imhoff, Intelligent Solutions, and Lother Henkes, SAP, was about how the continuing discussion of the place in the data world for the data warehouse.
While many younger techies think the latest technology is a panacea and many older techies are far too skeptical for too long, the reality is that while the data warehouse is going nowhere, it has to integrate with the newer technologies to continue improving the information being provided to business knowledge workers.
One of Claudia’s early slides talked about data sources. While most people are focused on both the standard packaged software and the rush of non-structured data from the Web, call centers, etc, Claudia makes clear the item that companies are just beginning to realize and address: Sensor data is just as important as the rest and also driving data volumes. Business information continues to come from further afield and a wider variety of sources and all must be integrated.
Much of her talk, she mentioned, has come out of a couple of years of work between herself and Colin White, in formalizing the changing data architecture environment. Data warehouses are still the place for production reports and analytics, where data provenance and clarity are absolutely necessary while the techniques used on early stage data such as in streaming, Hadoop analytics, etc, are more exploratory and investigative. The duo posit that the combination of data integration, data management (including EDWs), data analysis and decision management are the “glue in the middle,” those things that bind sources, deployment and distribution technologies, and reporting and analytics options into a real system that provides value.
The picture they put together is good and Claudia Imhoff’s presentation should be looked at for a better understanding of where we are; but I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t have a couple of issues.
The first is a that she is a bit too enamored of mobile technology. It’s here and must be addressed, but statements such as “nobody has a desktop, everything is mobile” must be corrected. A JD Power survey last year showed that only 20% of tablets are used for work. On the other side, Forrester Research has pointed out a strong majority of business people are now using two devices for their information.
The issue for business intelligence is not that people are switching from desktops (including laptops in docking stations) but that smart providers of information need to build UIs that address the needs of large monitors, tablets and smartphones, addressing each device’s uniqueness while ensuring a similarity of user experience.
The second issue is a new term thrown out during the presentation. It’s “data refinery” and, as Claudia mentioned in her presentation, it’s the same thing others are calling a data swamp, data lake or numerous other terms. There’s an easy term everyone has used for years: Operational Data Store (ODS). I’m a marketing guy and I understand the urge for everyone to try to coin a term that will catch on, but it’s not needed in this case.
While it’s a separate topic (yeah, another concept for a column!), I’ll briefly point out my objections here. Even back in the late 1990s, during my brief sojourn at Informatica, we were talking about how the ODS can be used for more than only a place to use in order to quickly extract information from operational system so as not to stress them by doing transformations directly from such systems. They’ve always been a place to take an initial look at data before beginning transformations into star schemas and the like. The ODS hasn’t changed. What’s changed is the underlying technologies that support larger data stores and the higher level analytics that let us better analyze what’s in the ODS.
That brings us to one main point Claudia Imhoff made during her wrap-up, the section on business considerations. She points out that people really need to understand the importance of each data source and the data within it. Just because we can extract everything doesn’t mean we need to save everything. Her example was with customer sampling. Yes, you can get all the customer data, but only that which you need to narrow cast. For higher level decision making, those who understand confidence levels know that sampling can get to very high levels of certainty so sampling can still speed decision making and save costs. Disk space might be less expensive in the Cloud, but it’s not free. We’re in the job of helping businesses improve themselves, so we need to look at the bigger picture.
Her presentation was clearly strategic: We need to rethink, not reinvent, data modeling. Traditional techniques aren’t going away and neither are many of the new ones. Data management people need to understand how they combine.
No surprise, that was a great transition to Lother Henkes’ presentation. His key point is that SAP BW now can run on SAP HANA. It’s important even if all the capital letters look like shouting. HANA is SAP’s in memory, columnar database that’s their entry into the Cloud market to manage the high volumes of modern data. It’s a move to bridge the gap between the ODS and relational database arenas with one underlying infrastructure.
In such a brief webinar, it’s hard to see more than the theory, but it’s a clear move by SAP to do what Claudia Imhoff suggested, to take a fresh look at data models in order to understand how to better support the full range of data now being incorporated into business decision making.