The Kog Blog: Data Analytics, Data Warehousing and BI

Winning MicroStrategy Business Partner award

2011-11-09T14:07:00.009Z

We're incredibly thrilled with the Business Partner award that MicroStrategy awarded Kognitio at their London Symposium event. As you know, we have been working with MicroStrategy and their front-end mobile, cloud and web-based BI applications for some time as a complementary technology to our high performance in-memory analytic database, WX2.

Over the years we have advocated to end-user organizations the benefits of using MicroStrategy on top of Kognitio to accelerate their efforts to understand more about their large and complex data volumes - or Big Data - in shorter timescales and with greater ease.

Big Data Analytics in the Cloud is definitely here to stay and we can think of no better or efficient solution for organizations to tackle their Big Data analytics needs than with Kognitio and MicroStrategy. Thank you again MicroStrategy!

For the full news release, click here

Driving successful BI and analytics projects

2011-11-03T12:25:00.003Z

The amount of data being created and used in business is growing at a phenomenally fast rate. Whether from inside and outside the enterprise, whether click-streams, transactional data, RFID data, customer data or social behavior information, the challenge for businesses to make sense and derive value from it all can seem daunting.

But it needn't be. For years, Kognitio has been working with global organizations to store, process, integrate and analyze their ever-increasing Big Data volumes. In fact, we're passionate about helping businesses mine, analyze and get demonstrable value from their large data sets that they can then turn into actionable intelligence.

Our high-performance in-memory analytic database platform, Kognitio WX2, helps organizations around the globe to understand more about their business and their customers in shorter timescales and at a price that does not break the bank. From large corporates to smaller businesses, companies of all shapes and sizes run Kognitio WX2 to analyze Big Data sets quickly and efficiently, allowing them to make more informed, better business decisions that help them to drive growth and reduce costs.

As the data explosion continues, organizations count on Kognitio and its in-memory analytic database solution to get comprehensive answers to their questions. Where other solutions cannot cope with overwhelming data volumes and force the user to rely on data samples, Kognitio has helped numerous customers survive the Big Data phenomenon and analyze whatever, whenever and get answers to complex questions in sub-second response times.

Although Kognitio offers its WX2 database as an on-premise solution either as a software-only license or as a fully configured data warehouse appliance, Kognitio also allows companies to get the analytical insight they need for a low-cost monthly fee via the Kognitio DaaS Cloud. The DaaS Cloud offers WX2 as a secure “private cloud” solution providing maximum flexibility for a low cost of entry into data analytics and warehousing.

WX2 complements and drives the analytic stack:

Counting triangles - new performance study, Kognitio triumphant

2011-10-26T17:37:00.007+01:00

Following the challenge thrown down by Vertica and then by an Oracle member of staff, Kognitio decided to rise to the occasion and prove how its WX2 in-memory analytic database would perform against a 86 million row data set. The data was provided by Vertica and is publicly available. The benchmark that was run using Vertica and Oracle also included other technologies such as Hadoop and PIG.

The tests themselves centered around counting triangles in an undirected graph with reciprocal edges, the idea being to queries to find out the quantity of vertexes and edges, which edges are joined and which vertexes join which edges, which is regarded as a computationally intensive exercise. Such a concept can be used to understand social networks and how people are connected and interact with others.

All the tests were run on the same hardware configuration, essentially a cluster of 4 nodes. The results were astounding and are as follows:

Kognitio WX2 - 11.48 seconds
Oracle, post a re-write of SQL - 14 seconds
Oracle, pre the re-write - 90 seconds
Vertica - 97 seconds
PIG - 2,151 seconds
Hadoop - 3,900 seconds

We're extremely excited that Kognitio WX2 won out and would also like to extend our thanks to Vertica for setting the data warehousing community abuzz with this challenge. Similary, for providing the data set as well as the SQL language statements. And for the sake of transparency, here are the links to the research as well as more details on what hardware and software was tested on the 86 million row dataset.

Kognitio ran the tests using WX2 on 4 HP servers, each with 128GB of RAM and 24 cores per server.

Vertica ran the tests using Vertica, PIG and Hadoop on 4 HP servers, each with 96GB of RAM and 12 cores per server. Results can be found here: http://www.vertica.com/2011/09/21/counting-triangles/

Tests were run using Oracle Exadata 2-2 hardware with 2 socket, 12 core Westmere-EP nodes and Oracle Database 11.2.0.2. Results can be found here: http://structureddata.org/2011/10/17/counting-triangles-faster/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=counting-triangles-faster

To download the data set used in all tests, go to:
http://www.vertica.com/benchmark/TriangleCounting/edges.txt.gz

To download the query statements, go to:
https://github.com/vertica/Graph-Analytics----Triangle-Counting

New report on Big Data Analytics

2011-10-07T16:19:00.004+01:00

We are proud co-sponsors of a new report from TDWI on the subject of Big Data Analytics. Published late September 2011, the report is written by expert Philip Russom and he conducted a survey of 325 data warehousing professionals on the topic of Big Data Analytics. There are some interesting statistics in the report and they support the recent emergence of topics such as big data, analytics and the Cloud.

In particular:

- only 7% of those asked had never heard of or hadn't got a "big data" problem

- other terms used to describe the phenomenon include: big data analytics; advanced analytics; large data set analytics, a pain in the a... (seriously....)

- the barriers to adopting a solution for big data analytics include cost, skill set, staffing and scalability

- while 70% regard big data as an opportunity, 30% see it as a pain

- in 3 years time, 31% of those surveyed believe 10-100 TB will be the size of their data warehousing environments

- a third of those asked think they will replace their analytic platform in the next 3 years

- 30% would prefer a cloud-based analytic platform as opposed to on-premise

- drivers to replacing their platform include "cannot scale up with existing platform" (42%) and "need/want a cloud/SaaS platform (15%)

- over the next 3 years, respondents will adopt: a private cloud (22%); in-memory database (26%); data marts for analytics (38%)

- "clouds", "SaaS" and "analytic DBMS" are deemed areas of "good potential growth"

Feel free to download the report from the Resource area of our website.

MapReduce won’t overtake the EDW anytime soon

2011-09-22T16:42:00.005+01:00

Is MapReduce the Holy Grail answer to the pressing problem of processing, analyzing and making sense of large and growing data volumes? Certainly it has potential in this arena, but there is a distressing gap between the amount of hype this technology – and its spinoffs – has received and the number of professionals who actually know how to integrate and make best use of it.

Industry watchers say it’s just a matter of time before MapReduce sweeps through the enterprise data warehouse (EDW) market the same way open source technologies like Linux have done. In fact, in a recent blog post, Forrester’s James Kobielus proclaimed that most EDW vendors will incorporate support for MapReduce’s open source cousin Hadoop into the heart of their architectures to enable open, standards-based data analytics on massive amounts of data.

So no more databases, just MapReduce? I’m not so sure. But don’t misunderstand. It’s not that MapReduce isn’t an effective way to analyze data in some cases. The big names in Internet business are all using it - Facebook, Google, Amazon, eBay et al - so it must be good, right? But it’s worth taking a more measured view based both on the technical and the practical business merits. I believe that the two technologies are not so mutually exclusive; that they will work hand-in-hand, and in some cases, MapReduce will be integrated into the relational database (RDBMS).

Google certainly has proven that MapReduce excels at making sense out of the exabytes of unstructured data on the web; which it should, given that MapReduce was designed from the outset for manipulating very large data sets. MapReduce in this sense provides a way to put structure around unstructured data. We humans prefer structure, it's in our DNA. Without structure, we have no real way of adding value to the data; unstructured data analytics is something of an oxymoron for a pattern seeking hominid.

MapReduce helps us put structure around the unstructured so we can then make sense of it. It creates an environment wherein a data analyst can write two simple functions, a "mapper" and a "reducer," to perform the actual data manipulation, returning a result that is at once both an analysis of the data it has just mapped and summarized, as well as the structure for further analysis that will help provide insight into the data. Whether that further analysis is done in a MapReduce environment might be the more appropriate question.

From an infrastructure standpoint, MapReduce excels where performance and scalability are challenges. Applications written using the MapReduce framework are automatically parallelized, making it well suited to a large infrastructure of connected machines. As it scales applications across lots of servers made up of lots of nodes, the MapReduce framework also provides built-in query fault tolerance so that whatever hardware component might fail, a query would be completed by another machine. Further, MapReduce and its open source brethren can perform functions not possible in standard SQL (click-stream sessionization, nPath, graph production of potentially unbounded length in SQL.)

So what’s not to love? Well, at a basic level I believe the MapReduce framework is an inefficient way of analyzing data for the vast majority of businesses. The aforementioned capabilities of MapReduce are all well and good, provided you have a Google-like business replete with legions of programmers and vast amounts of server and memory capacity. Viewed from this perspective, it makes perfect sense that Google developed and used MapReduce: because it could. It had a huge and growing resource in its farms of custom-made servers, as well as armies of programmers constantly looking for new ways to take advantage of that seemingly infinite hardware (and the data collected on it), to do cool new things.

Similarly, the other high-profile adopters and advocates are also IT-savvy, IT-heavy companies and, like Google, have the means and ongoing incentive to get a MapReduce framework tailored to their particular needs and reap the benefits. Would a mid-size firm know how? It seems doubtful. While it is claimed that MapReduce is easy to use, even for programmers without experience with distributed systems, I know from field experience with customers that it does, in fact, take some pretty experienced folks to make best use of it.

Projects like Hive, Google Sawzall, Yahoo Pig and companies like Cloudera all, in essence, attempt to make the MapReduce paradigm easier for lesser experts to use and, in fact, make it behave for the end user more like a parallel database. But this raises the question, Why? It seems to be a bit of re-inventing the wheel. IT-heavy is not how most businesses operate today; especially in these economic times. The dot com bubble is long over. Hardware budgets are limited and few companies relish the idea of hiring teams of programming experts to maintain even a valuable IT asset such as their data warehouse. They’d rather buy an off-the-shelf tool designed from the ground up to do high-speed data analytics.

Like MapReduce, commercially available massively parallel processing databases specifically built for rapid, high volume data analytics will provide immense data scale and query fault tolerance. They also have a proven track record of customer deployments and deliver equal if not better performance on Big Data problems. Perhaps as importantly, today’s next-generation MPP analytic databases give businesses the flexibility to draw on a deep pool of IT labor skilled in established conventions such as SQL.

As mentioned above, unstructured data seems like a natural for MapReduce analysis. A rising tide of chatter is focused on the increasing problem – and importance – of unstructured data. There is more than a bit of truth to this. As the Internet of everything becomes more and more a reality, data is generated everywhere; but our experience to date is that businesses are most interested in data derived from the transactional systems they’ve wired their businesses on top of, where structure is a given.

Another difficulty faces companies even as MapReduce becomes more integrated into the overall enterprise data analysis strategy. MapReduce is a framework. As the hype and interest have grown, MapReduce solutions are being created by database vendors in entirely non-standard and incompatible ways. This will further limit the likelihood that it will become the centerpiece of an EDW. Business has demonstrated time and again that it prefers open standards and interoperability.

Finally, I believe a move toward a programmer-centric approach to data analysis is both inefficient and counter to all other prevailing trends of technology use in the enterprise. From the mobile workforce to the rise of social enterprise computing, the momentum is away from hierarchy. I believe this trend is the only way the problem of making Big Data actionable will be effectively addressed. In his classic book on the virtues of open source programming, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, Eric S. Raymond put forth the idea that open source was an effective way to address the complexity and density of information inherent in developing good software code. His proposition, “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow,” could easily be restated for Big Data as, “given enough analysts, all trends are apparent.” The trick is – and really always has been – to get more people looking at the data. You don’t achieve that end by centering your data analytics efforts on a tool largely geared to the skills of technical wizards.

In summation, MapReduce-type solutions as they currently exist are most effective when utilized by programmer-led organizations focused on maximizing their growing IT assets. For most businesses seeking the most efficient way to quickly turn their most valuable data into revenue generating insight, MPP databases will likely continue to hold sway, even as MapReduce-based solutions find a supporting role.

Celebrating Pablo and Virtual Cubes

2011-08-24T12:11:00.005+01:00

Virtual cubes seminar, Sep 13-14, NYC - putting an end to your OLAP cube nightmares

2011-08-03T10:26:00.003+01:00

We're excited about our upcoming Virtual Cubes seminar in New York City on September 13-14 - register here. Why? Because our Pablo feature of WX2 is resonating well with organizations that are struggling to keep up with the demands of business users who are used to running and querying data from physical OLAP cubes. You'll already know that Pablo was launched back in July to respond to the question from many enterprises that have made a major commitment to OLAP-based services, but who want to eliminate the logistical issues of designing and populating cube data sources. And we all know just how many OLAP cubes you have to build and constantly re-populate. Imagine if you could benefit from in-memory and zero population virtual cube builds instead.

So if you're one of those sufferers out there that wants to benefit from virtual cubes, sign up to attend our free seminar in New York City. On September 13 we're in Midtown, on September 14 we'll be on Wall Street. Learn more at www.kognitio.com/stopdreaming.

It's time to stop dreaming about virtual cubes and experience them for real. Just think about that: no more physical cubes to create, administer, refresh or repopulate. Your OLAP cube headaches will be gone forever. See you at the seminar!

Exclusive clouds: the next evolution of private clouds

2011-07-05T04:00:00.000+01:00

There’s no doubt cloud-based Data Warehousing as a Service (DaaS) lets you do large-scale data analytics on-demand, at low cost, and with little upfront capital investment. But despite the benefits, the two predominant cloud platform choices – public or private clouds – still don’t sit well with organizations like financial services that face tough privacy and regulatory compliance constraints.

Laws such as Sarbanes-Oxley and BASEL III make it difficult for organizations to take responsibility for who can access data, how they use it, and how it’s stored …when it’s in the cloud. The policies were originally written with the presumption that IT resources were on premises and under tight internal security procedures.

Public clouds, where servers, storage and other DaaS resources are shared by many, are obviously a non-starter for these kinds of organizations. But even private clouds such as Amazon’s Virtual Private Cloud Service simply fence off a section of the public cloud so that workloads can be moved between internal and external data centers in a more secure way. It’s difficult to survive a compliance audit when where your data resides and how it’s managed remains a mystery in the cloud.

That’s why we at Kognitio are big supporters of the “exclusive cloud” model, where the data warehouse still physically resides within the organization’s firewall, but functions as a cloud DaaS service from the organization’s perspective. It’s a completely hands-off solution in which the IT resources are installed, managed and protected by a service provider and served up as an on-demand, pay-per-use cloud service. As with a traditional cloud offering, organizations gain all the benefits of flexible self-servicing. There is no overhead of implementing a data warehouse on site, it’s highly scalable, and no IT involvement is required in managing the database or hardware on which it’s running. Yet the organization meets its data storage and security compliance requirements.

So while traditional public and private clouds can satisfy the needs of many companies, regulated companies have a higher level of burden to protect privacy and data from falling into the wrong hands. The risk to IT for regulatory compliance requires a new cloud strategy that delivers all the benefits of the cloud while keeping safe within the firewall.

Coming together with MicroStrategy to solve Big Data problems

2011-06-23T11:59:00.003+01:00

We announced today that more and more and more organizations worldwide are deploying Kognitio WX2 as the underlying analytical database to their MicroStrategy front-end BI platform in order to access and query “Big Data” data volumes. And we’re truly excited about it; not only is WX2 fully optimized to show off MicroStrategy’s applications, but our joint customers are seamlessly integrating both technologies to run analytical queries against massive amounts of data and make informed business decisions within seconds. And they are doing this fast. Usually, it is unheard of that users deploy large-scale data warehousing and BI projects within a few weeks, but not so with the MicroStrategy-Kognitio solution. In fact, one joint customer in the gambling and gaming sector deployed both WX2 and MicroStrategy’s application in just ten weeks. Compare and contrast this with the 12-18 months that large-scale data warehousing and BI projects usually take and you can see the huge difference that this makes.

Our partnership with MicroStrategy is successful because MicroStrategy’s flexible reporting capabilities work seamlessly with our WX2 analytic database to help business people create and refine their own web- or mobile-based reports on query results without IT involvement. Now in its 7th generation, WX2 uses in-memory processing and unprecedented query speeds to obtain results in a fraction of the time and cost of competing products. Together, the technologies enable businesses to conduct complex analysis on ever increasing data volumes to solve time-sensitive problems that were previously unachievable.

And that’s why we’re excited to be at the forthcoming MicroStrategy World event in Monte Carlo, Monaco from July 11-14, 2011. If you are at the show, stop by and see us. We’d be delighted to tell you more about how Kognitio and MicroStrategy is the perfect marriage between data analytcs and BI.

Meanwhile, if you want to read more on the partnership between Kognitio and MicroStrategy, click here.

In-memory analytics beat the odds

2011-06-09T19:39:00.000+01:00

Today’s business landscape is both dynamic and data rich. Technology advances present new threats and opportunities almost simultaneously. World events – from wild weather to unexpected political developments and shifting consumer sentiment – can disrupt even the best laid plans. When it comes to understanding what it all means for the bottom line and re-calculating your odds of success, mastering Big Data analytics is key, a truth that online gambling and gaming businesses have been quick to acknowledge.

Online gambling and gaming sites are more popular than ever. More than 3.2 million people gambled online last year according to Nielson Media; a 40% jump from the previous year. Online gambling growth is even outpacing social network sites like Facebook. And big betting events like the Kentucky Derby, X Factor and the 2012 Olympics are sure to sustain that healthy growth rate.

This bettors’ tsunami is a big data challenge for gaming sites. Keeping track of who signs up, what they bet on and the slew of other factors that impact a game or event are critical to calculating the correct odds. The slightest miscalculation can result in lost revenue or angry customers.

That’s why gambling site businesses have become some of the most advanced power users of data analytics. The ability to crunch the data and calculate the odds quickly and accurately allows them to respond instantly to ever-changing information -- from an injured race horse to changing weather to the betting popularity of athlete. Accurate, competitive odds keep their customers happy and revenue streams flowing.

The biggest challenges gambling sites face with traditional approaches to analyzing big data are a) the analytics systems take too long and too much money to deploy and b) running queries could often take days, even weeks. In an industry that thrives on real-time and predictive information, speed means everything.

These real-time businesses need solutions that let them continuously query data effortlessly, quickly and accurately as soon as the questions arise. In-memory analytical platforms can be deployed within days, creating an environment where they can start analyzing data within seconds. In-memory analytics enable ‘train-of-thought’ analysis in which betting data can be updated and queried in real-time, keeping the odds continuously updated.

Knowledge truly is power in the gambling industry. Without recognizing this, online gaming sites risk alienating their customers and losing revenue – a gamble they’re not willing to take in today’s economy.

The database ego problem - it's not the size, it's what you do

2011-05-27T13:42:00.002+01:00

In a week where adjectives were flying around to describe a certain relationship between a President and a Prime Minister (is it "special" or now "essential"?), it would appear that in the world of data warehousing and analytics, a few adjectives are also being thrown around to describe the huge challenge that faces organizations as they try to make sense and derive competitive advantage from their ever-increasing corporate and customer data volumes.

Is it a case of "big" data? Or "large" data? "Massive" data or "extreme" data? Or is the adjective used to describe the issue at hand just plain irrelevant? After all, it's all relative and it's more than just a size issue. Hence the title of this blog; for one man's big data is another man's small data mart. Indeed, just how much is considered as "big"? And how do you quantify "massive"? You can't. Surely, the question is how you approach the whole issue at hand. How do you even begin to get value from such an amount of data when it is more than just a case of volume. There's the issue of complexity - just how many disparate data types do you have? Where are they located in your business, across multiple systems perhaps? Then comes the question of variety - what do you exactly want to get from your data? A marketing professional will want very different information from what the CFO demands. Then you have to think about velocity - how quickly do you need or want to get to all of your data, and how fast does your business need to get the insight in order to remain competitive?

Therefore, it's all much more than a case of size and therefore ego. Whether GBs, TBs or PBs, it's not the adjective that is important, it's what you need from your data and how you can perform the analytics on it that is much more essential.

Latecomers to the in-memory party

2011-05-18T01:23:00.002+01:00

As a company focused on analytic database technology that has always run in-memory, it’s gratifying to see new arrivals to this market recognize that the future is in-memory and that the future is now. Whether it’s Dell or HP or some other standard platform – hosted, in-house, appliance, etc. – the larger message is that hardware trends have finally caught up with analytic aspirations. Abundant, inexpensive RAM harnessed to massively parallel processing capabilities means spinning disk speed is no longer the query gating factor it was in even the early part of the decade. Kognitio WX2 has been at the leading edge of this trend for years.

In fact, Kognitio WX2 has always been and always will be in-memory. To the latecomers, we say: "Welcome to the party!"

We're happy to be nominated, but...

2011-04-14T18:17:00.002+01:00

Big speculation once again rippled through the Big Data vendor landscape after the recent acquisitions of Vertica (by HP) and AsterData (by Teradata). Those-in-the-know say it’s a foregone conclusion that further consolidation is just ahead because Giant Vendors X,Y and Z clearly need a Big Data play to counter these recent rival moves and gain a foothold in what is one of the growing major trend markets. Kognitio has even made the speculative short list of likely targets. Flattering, but what if the inevitable isn’t?

Often when these types of acquisitions are made the term “game changer” is tossed about, but it’s not typically the large, acquiring companies that change the game in technology. They’re usually just trying to keep abreast of a suddenly hot, rapidly changing market space; hoping to fabricate a suite of offerings that convinces businesses of a larger vision worth buying into. In truth, the game is more often changed by independent companies possessing the luxury of focus and agility. It’s why start-ups get bought in the first place.

It’s also why buying from “built-to-sell” start-ups is a bit of a risk. Beyond the lack of a track record and concerns over their funding viability, an acquisition typically means the end of the product and its assimilation into a larger vendor’s agenda – and pricing schedule.

For a company like Kognitio, these realities present a compelling case for independence. We’re not exactly a start-up. Formally named in 2005, our technology history traces back some 20 years. We have a proven track record of success, including working for more than a decade with global telco player BT, and our focus on data and analytics has kept us on the leading edge of innovation. We were ahead of the curve with in-memory analytics, data warehousing as a service and now, the elimination of physical OLAP cubes with Pablo.

We know that Big Data analysis is more than a passing trend – it’s a fundamental and growing business need. While for many vendors, grow and sell is the preferred (and well trodden) path to success, history shows that a company with innovative technology and good execution can become just as successful as a stand-alone venture. We believe we are ready to make history.

Kognitio tagged as 2011 "Vendor to Watch"

2011-04-01T17:20:00.004+01:00

Information Management magazine recently announced the top 40 vendors that they are watching in 2011, and it's a testament to the recent customer wins and product developments at Kognitio that the good folks over at the NY-based magazine have tagged Kognitio as one of the technology houses to keep an eye on. Indeed, you can see the Kognitio entry here.

The addition of Kognitio to this year’s list was prompted in part by the recent unveiling of Pablo, making WX2 the industry’s first analytic database that creates “virtual” cubes at the data’s source without compromising performance. Moreover, the fact that Kognitio customers have more than 1 petabyte of data under active, licensed management and more than 1 trillion database rows are being analyzed using our WX2 in-memory analytic database, shows the market that Kognitio is being increasingly deployed as the analytical platform that performs.

For more information on Information Management's top 40 vendor list, click here.

The End of Traditional OLAP? New Approach Spells Death for Physical Cubes

2011-02-22T12:06:00.002Z

Several new data-management approaches are challenging the long-standing process of delivering Business Intelligence solutions via OLAP cubes built atop Data Warehouses. While the warehouse will surely never go away, and cubes certainly expedite queries, the shortcomings in time, collaboration and synchronicity associated with the traditional model have become downright burdensome in many cases.

One new approach for avoiding such bottlenecks uses a combination of in-memory power and Massive Parallel Processing (MPP). When implemented properly, this solution solves many of the limitations tied to the old model, including latency, inaccuracy and scalability.

View this Briefing Room Webinar to learn from veteran Analyst Robin Bloor, who explains how and why the world of information management is changing, then offer insights on what you can do. Bloor was briefed by John Coppins of Kognitio, who showcased the company’s latest offering Pablo, which creates a virtual marshalling area for metadata and super-charged “cubes” -- thus circumventing many of the issues that companies encounter with cube maintenance and proliferation. Furthermore, Pablo embraces Excel as the front-end, thus catering to many non-technical business users.

Announcing Kognitio Pablo - putting an end to OLAP cube nightmares once and for all

2011-02-14T03:05:00.006Z

If you are struggling to keep up with the demands of business users who are used to running and querying data from physical OLAP cubes, then you need worry no more. Kognitio is proud to be launching Pablo, an extension to its WX2 database platform. Intended for use by enterprises that have made a major commitment to OLAP-based services, Pablo dispenses with the logistical issues of designing and populating cube data sources. Instead, Pablo enables turbo-charged train-of-thought analytics on extreme data through the use of in-memory and zero population virtual cube builds.

And now, using mass market tools such as Microsoft Excel or other front-end BI applications, frontline users can access larger data volumes more quickly with 100% drill-down capabilities. Gone are the headaches of cube proliferation, multiple versions of the truth as well as data strewn throughout your business.

And because there are no more physical cubes to create, administer, refresh or repopulate, your cube headaches are gone forever. To find out more about Kognitio Pablo, go to www.kognitio.com/pablo

Kognitio positioned as Visionary player in Magic Quadrant report

2011-02-02T18:19:00.004Z

We are extremely delighted that Kognitio has been positioned in the visionaries quadrant in Gartner's latest Magic Quadrant report on data warehouse database management systems (DBMS), published January 28th, 2011.

As our customers have come to expect, Kognitio is committed to offering a high quality analytic database platform that is resilient, robust and feature-rich. Our mature WX2 solution is just that, and with quality support on hand to ensure that our customers are successful in their efforts to get competitive advantage from their data, we are thrilled that the leading analyst firm has recognized our efforts as well as vision in the data warehousing market place. Indeed, Kognitio was the first to introduce many of the innovations that have driven the business intelligence and data analytics markets forward, including in‐memory database capabilities, Data Warehousing as a Service (DaaS) and the industry’s first data warehousing appliance.

To read more about Kognitio's position in the report, please go to our website and see our news release. To access the full report, please go to www.gartner.com

Kognitio customer TRA to speak at Gartner BI Summit 2011 in London

2011-01-27T19:55:00.008Z

We're pleased to announce that Kognitio customer, TRA, is speaking at Gartner's Business Intelligence Summit 2011 in London, which takes place from January 31 - February 1, 2011, where Kognitio is a platinum sponsor of the event.

Mr. Mark Lieberman, CEO of media monitoring and market research agency TRA, will discuss how the organizaion has created new revenue streams in just weeks by running deep-dive analytics on large and complex data sets using Kognitio's WX2 in-memory analytic database.

During the presentation at the show, Mr. Lieberman will discuss how TRA has harnessed the power of next-generation data warehousing and analytical platform - Kognitio WX2 - to build its own product called Media TRAnalytics, and how this has helped it to slash internal costs, accelerate the creation of new revenue streams, and allow its customers to get more actionable information on TV viewing habits and consumer spending behavior much more quickly.

So if you are headed to the Gartner BI Summit, be sure to catch this exciting presentation. Mr. Lieberman will be speaking on Tuesday, February 1, 2011 at 11.30am GMT.

And be sure to stop by the Kognitio stand on the solution showcase showfloor where you can learn more about Kognitio's solutions, including a sneak preview of something exciting that is coming down the line.

Kognitio to present at MicroStrategy World 2011

2011-01-20T11:58:00.006Z

Kognitio will present at MicroStrategy World 2011 on big data and deep-dive analytics next week in Las Vegas. If you are at the show, be sure to stop by session 2 on Tuesday, January 25 and learn how Kognitio customer, TRA, has created new revenue streams in just weeks by using Kognitio's WX2 in-memory analytic database to perform deep-dive analytics on large and complex media and advertising data.

During the presentation - entitled "TRA - how deep-dive analytics on big data helped a media monitoring and market research agency to create new revenue streams in just weeks" - you will learn how TRA has harnessed the power of next-generation data warehousing and analytical platforms (Kognitio WX2) to build its own product, Media TRAnalytics, and how this has helped the company to slash internal operating costs, accelerate the creation of new revenue streams, and allow its customers to get more actionable information on TV viewing habits and consumer spending trends much more quickly and efficiently.

The presentation takes place Tuesday, January 25th at 2.15pm PT (track 12, session 2). We look forward to seeing you there!

A fantastic start to 2011

2011-01-06T08:55:00.006Z

Happy New Year to everyone - we hope you all had a great festive break! And what a fantastic way it is to start 2011 with the news that Kognitio has received substantial funding from CFP & Founders Investments, which will help Kognitio to continue its global expansion, as well as invest in new R&D and partnership efforts.

CFP & Founders Investments believes Kognitio is the industry's fastest and lowest TCO data warehousing solution and intends to support Kognitio with expertise, commercial contacts and management capacities over the next couple of years.

For more information on this great news, be sure to check out our news release here:
http://www.kognitio.com/kognitio-secures-funding-from-cfp-founders-investments

Happy Holidays from Kognitio!

2010-12-17T16:36:00.004Z

Dear reader

From all of us at Kognitio, we would like to wish you all the very best this holiday season and for the New Year. We would also like to thank you for your continued support throughout 2010. It's been another great year for Kognitio and we're very grateful to all of you for our continued growth - new products, new awards, new customers and new partners.

As you know, we're committed to helping organizations derive more value and actionable insight out of their ever-increasing data volumes at a considerably lower cost. So if you're faced with the challenge of implementing or running analytic solutions that won't cost you a fortune, then come and talk to us.

Here's to an even better 2011!

Festive greetings and warm wishes from the entire Kognitio team

2010 highlights for Kognitio Product news:
:: WX2 Appliance range
:: Kognitio wins Vision award
:: Kognitio wins Innovative award

Featured customers:
:: Segmetrix' Match2Lists.com
:: American Access Casualty Company
:: bet365

New partners:
:: Hosted Solutions - DaaS hosting
:: Capgemini - cloud computing alliance
:: Panopticon - visual analysis tool
:: Quomation - DaaS pricing service
:: ITB - South Africa
:: Poslovna Inteligencija - Croatia
:: Umanis - France
:: GNOSYS Technology - Australia

New!
:: Catch Kognitio on YouTube at the KognitioWX2 channel
www.youtube.com/kognitiowx2

Announcing the Kognitio YouTube channel

2010-12-13T17:10:00.002Z

We're excited about our new YouTube channel where you can learn more about Kognitio and our WX2 analytical database in the form of short videos around a certain theme. Have a look at the channel and already you can see an introduction to WX2 as well as our viewpoint on the eternal "which is better, row-based or columnar database?" question. Moreover, you'll see customer viewpoints as well as more details on how WX2 delivers the performance it does, thanks to its in-memory nature, its shared nothing architecture and the fact that it is a MPP (massively parallel processing) database.

Subscribe to the channel now and be the first to see new content when it appears.

The channel is here: http://www.youtube.com/kognitiowx2

Here is the introductory video to WX2:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHHx3LsBDVA

Here is the video that discusses the row vs columnar debate:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apeURjTzodU

And here is the video that discusses how WX2 offers the performance it does:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-rwzmI1vLo

Looking for the diamonds in the data

2010-12-07T12:28:00.001Z

When dealing in data analytics, organizations don’t care about individual numbers such as birth dates or social security numbers. They do care about customer habits; they want to know things like how old they are, their annual household income, what their buying habits are, and things like that.

It’s not because they want to do anything bad with that data; quite the contrary. The more companies know about people, the better they can market to them…the better they can anticipate their needs and wishes, and not spam them with stuff for which they have absolutely no use.

The responsible use of personal data benefits everyone. For instance, when customers shop online sites like Amazon.com, they’re already seeing this kind of behavior in use. After they click on an item, chances are the next window says something like, “People like you also liked,” and there’s a list of other products that are tailored to their demographic. This is not an invasion of their privacy; they’ve agreed to provide certain information to the vendor, and allowed them to use it to market more effectively to them.

And every time they go to the grocery store and swipe their loyalty card, they’re allowing the grocer to know exactly which products they’re buying, how often, and what their shopping patterns are. In return, they get discounts every week off their grocery bill.

Responsible marketers and vendors need to do a better job of conveying the benefits of sharing information. This is increasingly important as the U.S. government considers a “do not track” bill, which would allow consumers to easily say “no thanks” to online marketers who want to follow their click-trails.

Such a law makes perfect sense, but there is an inherent need to better communicate to consumers the advantages associated with making use of the information they share with retailers and vendors, making it abundantly clear that…no…they don’t care about them as individuals. But they do care about them as people.

Announcing a new line of WX2 Appliances, built on HP

2010-11-15T10:25:00.003Z

We’ve already received significant positive feedback from folks throughout the industry about last week’s announcement that we offer a complete line of data warehouse appliances. InformationWeek, Network World and more have written articles. And at the TDWI World Conference in Orlando last week, a substantial number of folks came up to our booth wanting more information.

There’s a wonderful irony here, of course, and it’s not lost on anyone at Kognitio. We were building data warehouse appliances before they were ever known as “appliances.” And we’ve been building to-order appliances for companies around the world; it’s part of our commitment to give our customers the industry’s widest range of delivery options (software, appliances, DaaS).

What’s really piqued the interest of so many is our use of HP servers in combination with our WX2 in-memory analytic database. At the very time that so many of our traditional competitors have been swallowed up by larger hardware firms and are focusing their attention on increasingly proprietary configurations, we’re doing just the opposite. HP servers are industry-standard, but enable us to offer our customers an appliance that costs significantly less to buy, and operate. Plus, HP’s track record of reliability is second to none in our business, and that counts for a lot.

Especially so, as you consider that more companies than ever are realizing that the costs involved with advanced data analytics, or “Big Data,” are dropping significantly. They’re seeking ways that they can implement it at their firms, without having to deal with the traditional gating factors: too expensive, too slow to implement, too long to obtain actionable results.

The Kognitio/HP approach blows pasts all of those challenges. At the high end, our tests show that our appliances outperform our competitors, delivering results of up to five times more quickly, and at one-third the cost. Plus, they’re designed to scale more efficiently. Our approach is simple: if you only need an appliance capable of analyzing ten terabytes of data, why should you be forced to buy one that handles ten times that workload, under the guise of “preparing for the future?” We believe you should by what you need now and worry about the other stuff later, since our HP-hardware appliances scale seamlessly with no loss of performance.

We remain committed to allowing our customers to deploy WX2 in the way that’s most convenient for them. But it’s kind of fun to see all the buzz we’re generating about our new line of appliances. Especially when you consider how long we’ve been doing it.

Kognitio wins BeyeNETWORK's "Vision Award for Business Impact" second year in a row!

2010-11-03T09:33:00.003Z

We're thrilled that our efforts in helping our clients achieve maximum business value from their data has been recognized by the folks at the BeyeNETWORK for the second time in a row.

This year, we entered the competition together with our client Segmetrix and highlighted how, using our DaaS-based model, Segmetrix has been able to build its Match2Lists.com application on top of WX2 quickly, and how it can now offer end-users the ability to upload various data lists via a web front-end and then match, cleanse, de-dupe and cleanse then. All at an exceedingly low cost and within very short timescales.

If you would like to read the full press release, click here. For more information on how WX2 via DaaS has proven to be the optimum solution for the Segmetrix Match2Lists.com application, click here.

Making your BI program world-class

2010-10-26T15:45:00.003+01:00

We recently ran across an article from Timo Elliott, answering the question of “What Does a World-Class BI Program Look Like?” He writes that successful programs incorporate five separate elements:

• Focus on changing the business
• Focus on people
• Provide some simple data access for everyone
• Tell stories
• Stick with it

The end result, he writes, is that a world-class BI program “successfully changes the information culture of the organization.” We agree, but we’d go a little bit further.

• Successful BI implementations are game-changers. They don’t merely take what you’re already doing and make it a little better; they move you into a completely new realm of possibilities. In traditional programs, BI can be used to better understand customer thinking, help predict their future behavior and anticipate their needs. More recently, as the size of data sets have exploded (the so-called “Big Data” initiative), billions of customer transactions are being analyzed in a fraction of the time it used to require, providing near real-time understanding of market trends. Specialties such as sentiment analysis and the mining of social data are newcomers, but would not have been possible without the technology improvements of the last several years.

• WIIFM? Marketers everywhere will recognize this acronym; it means “What’s in it for me?” Simply put, a successful BI program must contain a WIIFM for everyone who interacts with it, from the C-suite all the way down to the customer service reps on the front lines. Good BI implementations no longer require oodles of time, money or personnel commitment: the emergence of BI SaaS programs, like our Data Warehousing as a Service, means that programs can be quickly implemented and begin producing tangible results at a fraction of the cost it used to take. The WIIFM for those who need the data is obvious; the WIIFM for your CFO is equally so.

• Fulfill the vision. The beauty of BI SaaS, as well as market-driven improvements such as analytical appliances on commodity hardware, is that companies can move quickly to test out the potential benefits of BI initiatives. Things like ROI and TCO have never been more important than they are in today’s economy; BI’s evolution has made it possible to imagine what your company could do with a greater level of insight and to actually implement it, rather than leaving the vision on the wish list indefinitely.

Above all else, we’d expand Timo’s thinking: well-strategized BI programs, properly implemented, change not only the “information culture of the organization.” They change the organization itself, as well as every person who comes into contact with it.

New product announcements are fine, but how are they helping businesses?

2010-10-19T15:23:00.005+01:00

The idea for this blog posting comes not from what people are talking about; it is from what they aren’t discussing. Like any business day, today there are a number of news releases available about this or that new service or product. Each promises to deliver significant benefits at lower cost in less time…in short, what we’ve all come to expect from news releases of this type.

The thing that strikes us most, however, is the dearth of stories about customers who are actively using a product to make a difference in the way they do business. And yet prospects who are actively seeking to find a solution to their challenges are going to be looking for that kind of information.

So whenever we can, we make a habit of leading with stories about our customers, and how our WX2 analytical database has made the difference that allows them to be more competitive in the marketplace. For example, a company such as Segmetrix. Its founders had a great idea: what if we could, they thought, make it possible for marketers to take multiple mailing lists and clean them up, standardizing the lists in a mere fraction of the time it was taking data analysts to do it manually? And what if they delivered it as a cloud-based service, helping those marketers keep their costs to a minimum and allowing them to focus on the results they needed, and not the underlying technology?

Segmetrix knew what it wanted to do, but couldn’t find the company that would help it meet its vision…until it found Kognitio. Today, Segmetrix’s Match2Lists.com is a leader in its market, and the guys who run it will gladly tell you that Kognitio was an integral part of its success.

That’s the kind of information that people are seeking: while news releases about the latest and greatest are fine, people really want to know how products can make their lives easier, more successful and more profitable.

Incidentally, watch this space for further news on Match2Lists.com.

Is your glass half-full or half-empty?

2010-10-12T16:37:00.001+01:00

A Corporate Executive Board survey finds that corporate IT budgets are going to grow by an average of more than three percent next year. It’s the first increase in three years.

Of course, if you’re a “the glass is half-empty” kind of person, it’s going to be very easy to disregard this news: you might add that they won’t be spending like they did in the past. In fact, they may never spend like they used to!

Quite true, but this is good news from our perspective. Here’s why: the survey found that much of the increase will be “spent on services that can provide analytics and other tools that help target customers,” according to the Wall Street Journal. But as they spend more on the services, they’ll be spending less on the hardware that’s needed to make the services work. Instead, they’ll be working with companies that can deliver those services through cloud computing.

Which means that services like Kognitio’s Data Warehousing as a Service (DaaS) offering are well positioned to deliver the kind of results that companies are seeking. They need to analyze greater amounts of data than ever (the so-called “Big Data” initiative), in less time than ever, and make the results available to more of their workers in a timely manner.

And, as the survey found, they simply don’t have unlimited amounts of money to spend to make it all happen, as may have been the case several years ago.

The lesson here is clear: businesses are seeking more efficient ways of doing business. And if you’re not one of them, your competitors are looking to gain on you…or surpass you. If, in fact, they haven’t already done so. It may be time to take a long, hard look at what you do as a company, and the way you do it…and to ask yourself if there are more effective and efficient ways of doing it. Data Warehousing as a Service is an incredibly effective way of enabling your firm to do the deep dive analytics required in today’s marketplace, but it’s only one of the options you should consider.

The result, of course, will be a company that fires on all cylinders, nimbly responding to changes in the market to help keep you at or near the front of the pack. And that’s worth than just half of a glass.

A rising tide lifts all ships

2010-09-22T17:15:00.003+01:00

We’re sure you’ve seen the news about IBM buying Netezza. Not only is the news a good thing for the business intelligence industry, but for Kognitio as well.

If you agree with the old adage that “a rising tide lifts all ships,” then Netezza’s good fortune means good news for other BI vendors as well. As an industry leader, IBM is in position to strongly influence trends: the technologies that people can and should use to make their companies more effective. Its purchase of Netezza indicates that IBM believes business intelligence will continue to grow in strategic importance at more firms, and that there’s a significant market to be served.

We believe they’re right. Moreover, we believe that companies like Kognitio and Netezza have made it possible for more mid-tier companies than ever before to realize and take advantages of the benefits that BI has traditionally offered far larger firms.

At Kognitio, of course, we’ve pioneered concepts such as commodity hardware-based data warehousing appliances and BI delivered on a SaaS basis. Both concepts are accepted as the norm today; in fact, more than half of our total business is trending toward implementations based on a SaaS delivery model.

So, what do we expect as the result of IBM’s purchase? Well, nothing but good things. IBM has validated the market for companies that may have been sitting on the fence about adopting BI technology, or deploying it at an organization through an appliance. Moreover, we believe the pace of innovation will actually accelerate, as companies like Kognitio deliver new ideas to the market…so that we can stay ahead of the behemoths. (We’re already working on a new concept that we plan to deliver soon.)

Overall, we’re pleased with this week’s news. We believe the greater awareness that the purchase of Netezza has generated means greater understanding of what we and other BI vendors are telling the market. Which is good news for everyone.

Bringing data analytics to the world of football

2010-09-10T09:26:00.002+01:00

There are a number of solid reasons to utilize data analytics. It can be used to better understand and predict your customers’ future behavior based on prior purchases; it can be used to prevent fraud by seeking trends and patterns that may indicate abnormal activity; it can do a deep dive on huge amounts of data to help your company develop a better pricing strategy.

Or it can be used to pick the best players for your fantasy football team.

Computerworld ran this article, about a product manager who’s a fantasy football fanatic. She applies the same type of analytical thinking to creating her team that she does in her work. That is, she takes the available data, runs it through an analytic application, and figures out which players to choose: which are most likely to gain her points based on touchdowns or field goals, and which quarterback is probably going to have the best game on any given Sunday.

In doing so, she’s doing far more than the other team “owners” in her league. They basically rely on their gut feelings to choose their rosters. In that respect, they’re not that far removed from a number of business executives; a 2008 survey from Accenture revealed that 40 percent of business executives made important business decisions without using analytics.

Obviously, we think that’s not a wise move on the part of those executives. The more you can make solid decisions with the right data in front of you, the better your chances are of making the right decision.

The product manager says the other member in her league are aware that she’s using analytic software to help her draft her roster; “not that they like it very much, because it gives me an edge,” she says. It helps her make better decisions, which helps…regardless of whether you’re a fantasy team owner, or the owner of a very real business.

And the analytic approach works. The woman says in the last five years she’s been crunching the numbers before choosing her fantasy football rosters, she’s won her league three times. Let’s see: that’s a 60 percent winning percentage; finishing first in a league where finishing second counts for nothing.

That gets her the results she wants for another year. In the business world, the effective use of data analytics can deliver far more.

Tweets on-demand: analyzing what they're saying, as they say it

2010-08-27T08:26:00.002+01:00

You may remember that earlier this year, we reported the results from our survey, which found that almost two-thirds (63%) of the people who responded said they are "undecided" about the value of data collected from social media sites like Twitter and Facebook to help them understand more about their organization or customers. Another 23% called social media "overrated," saying "there are not as many customer conversations going on as the media would have us believe." Only 14% of the survey’s respondents said they wanted to incorporate data from Twitter and other sites as part of their ongoing data analysis efforts.

We made the point at the time that social media was producing huge amounts of real-time data that would need to be incorporated into any analytic work, of things such as consumer sentiment.

Guess what. Google’s already there. It’s just launched what it calls its “Realtime Search,” which “lets you see up-to-the-second social updates, news articles and blog posts about hot topics around the world.” So, if I’m a large network/cable provider like Comcast, I now have another valuable tool that allows me to see what people are saying about my service. For a company that’s had its share of unhappy customers who’ve taken to Twitter to vent and let others know their feelings, this can be an invaluable tool. (A typical Tweet reads, “You know what's annoying? Paying to have @comcastcares install internet in your new apartment and IT NOT WORKING CORRECTLY. Die.”)

“Sentiment analysis” is a relatively new idea, but guys like Seth Grimes have already thought through its importance, in articles like this. He argues that such analyses will require a deep dive, and significant technical focus to cover areas such as “the ability to see beyond keywords,” and understand the context in which they’re being used.

Well, that’s going to require far more than bright people capable of going through lots of data. That’s going to require a business intelligence deployment, with ultra-powerful databases and analytic software, capable of analyzing data on the fly, even as it’s incorporating more data. (In storage circles, they refer to it as CDP: Continuous Data Protection. We could easily refer to it as CDI: Continuous Data Infusion.)

The tools to do this are here, and they’re getting more and more powerful. That’s good news, because even though most of the BI professionals who answered our survey weren’t sure as to whether the analysis of Tweets and Facebook posts was important, the means to immediately gather the information is here. And the demand for its analysis won’t be far behind.

Moving beyond beer and diapers

2010-08-26T12:34:00.001+01:00

As long as Kognitio has been involved in data warehousing and business intelligence, we have repeatedly heard references to the old “beer and diapers” analogy. The analogy is apocryphal, and goes like this: a supermarket chain did a market basket analysis piece of work and discovered that sales of beer and diapers rose sharply in parallel on Fridays, heading into the weekend. Puzzled, the analysts did some further study, and discovered that new dads going to the store to pick up beer for the weekend were asked by their wives to bring home some diapers as well for their children. So, by locating the two items near each other, the chain was able to drive sales of both by some considerable percentage.

This story was even cited by the Financial Times almost 15 years ago, which gives you an idea of how long it’s been around, and how pervasive the lesson has been: use data mining to uncover patterns that will help you do business more efficiently and profitably.

Of course, the big retailers have known this for years, and have deployed data mining and analytical technologies to help them achieve these goals. Of course, they could: this kind of data analytics has traditionally cost a significant amount, and it’s been well out of the reach of most mid-tier companies.

Which is why the concept of BI delivered as an outsource service, or BI SaaS, makes a huge difference; mid-tier companies that previously would not have been able to access or implement such a piece of analytical work can now analyze the information that makes their companies tick, and discover insights they may not have even thought to ask about, let alone seek out. And as with any SaaS offering, the costs of capital expenditures are slashed, uptime is maximized, and the ability to rapidly quantify a return on the investment is present. Kognitio’s DaaS is one such BI SaaS offering.

Businesses have moved quite a long way past the beer-and-diapers analogy; today, we see companies using data analytics and business intelligence to monitor how effective their TV ads are in a given ZIP code in virtual live-time, based on POS data from supermarkets, or change insurance rate quotes in a fraction of the time previously required. And while companies like these may not be behemoths, they are actively taking advantage of a far more powerful BI infrastructure available at a far lower cost.

We’re proud to deliver the kind of business advantage that allows companies to get more from their data.

When it comes to BI and analytics - plan, plan and plan again

2010-08-19T10:29:00.003+01:00

In our line of work, it has become almost a given to suggest that the increased power of business intelligence and data warehousing systems will make it possible for workers throughout the enterprise to access its advantages. No more, we’re told, will a company’s BI capabilities be limited to the “men in white coats”, the power users with answers being sent down to the frontline workers at their whim and whenever they please. Instead, people will have the answers they need, when they need them, so that they can do their jobs more quickly and far better.

Now, granted, the ability to move more quickly is a prerequisite for any successful business these days. And the ability to deliver key information in a timely manner is part of that requirement. Our Data Warehousing as a Service (DaaS) enables precisely that ability; we’re proud that we can deliver answers up to 85 times faster than some of the incumbent systems we’re replacing.

But is that the most important thing? Instead, there’s a basic business issue that should be addressed before you deploy DaaS as a solution: Who needs the information? Why do they need it? And exactly how much better will they be able to do their jobs by getting the information more quickly?

Just because you can do something better doesn’t always mean the older way was necessarily bad. A business intelligence system is not a solution unto itself; if you’re not installing it to answer a clearly defined business challenge, you’re setting yourself up for a massive failure: the kind where CFOs look at the costs and ask, “Exactly what are we getting for this money?”

Even more, you need to balance the ability of systems like DaaS to provide widespread insight to thousands of workers concurrently, with the needs of the information security guys. They’ll tell you about the theory of “least access,” that workers should only have access to the information they need to do their job.

Here’s our suggestion: if you determine that your company has a need for a BI system, or if you find that the one you have isn’t doing the job you need, get your entire team together. Map out an implementation strategy that answers your clearly defined business needs. Do a POC (proof of concept) first. Then, and this is important, do a POV (proof of value) that spells out what you’ll truly get in return for the money and time you’re investing. Then determine whether you’d rather have an on-site appliance or if you can outsource the ability in a DaaS configuration.

Only by answering those questions fully and by planning as a team will you have a comprehensive solution that everyone is happy with.

So what?

2010-07-29T10:51:00.003+01:00

It’s easy to take things for granted, both in our everyday lives as well as in our jobs. And if you’re aware of this perspective, you’ll constantly run into reminders that you might otherwise overlook.

For instance, I ran across this article earlier today; to those of us in the business intelligence community, this article easily falls under the “Yeah? So what?” category. There’s absolutely nothing new in here, from our perspective. From the growth of advanced analytics, to what the article calls the “trend emerging here” in BI appliances…these are all topics we deal with on a daily basis. We take it for granted.

But in doing so, we run the risk of overlooking the key element that our customers and companies who can benefit from our technology aren’t always as knowledgeable as we are about this stuff.

For them, and probably for us as well, we need to take a step back and ask, “so what?” So what if you can build an appliance? So what if you can deliver BI on a SaaS basis? So what if you can slice response time by 80 percent? So what?

The answer is obvious, yet often ignored by those for whom the technology trumps all. It goes back to Solution Selling; understanding the customer’s specific pain points, and then designing a solution that meets their needs. So our approach to an insurance company about a rate analysis system with our Data Warehousing as a Service (DaaS) at its core isn’t about the speed of results. It’s about what they can do with those results once they’ve received them in less time, and how they can stay a step ahead of their competitors.

Likewise, the reduction in response time would be a key selling point for some companies, but may not make any difference at firms where there’s a more measured approach to obtaining answers and insights. (For that matter, there is a point where a reduction may not be worth any extra investment; if you can get your answers back in seconds instead of hours, that’s one thing. But would you be willing to spend the bucks to reduce your response time from five seconds to one? For the record, some would.)

This is true for all segments of business, of course. It’s not just limited to folks working in BI, or IT for that matter. (Get your doctors to explain what some of the jargon they use means. In plain English.) But the article should serve as a reminder to us that the advances in technology we marvel over don’t necessarily wow the people to whom we want to sell it. For them, it’s merely means to an end. And as vendors, we need to keep their needs, and their perspective, in mind throughout.

Helping Capgemini to deliver its new eBusiness platform "Immediate"

2010-07-27T15:19:00.003+01:00

We're very excited about today's news that Capgemini has signed a six year deal with the Royal Mail Group (which include Royal Mail Letters, Post Office and Parcelforce). Why? Because the news marks the birth of Capgemini Immediate, the company's next generation eBusiness proposition which is delivered using a federation of cloud-computing services (SaaS, IaaS etc) and the latest open source technologies. And, as you know, Kognitio has been a key advocate of cloud-based, pay-as-you-go models for some time now via its own DaaS initiative. But moreover, we're excited about the new program and customer win because Kognitio has been chosen to be part of Capgemini Immediate. As one of Capgemini's 18 service partners, Kognitio is offering access to a WX2 data warehouse as a service and continues to ensure that WX2 is not just resilient, scalable and flexible but that it offers the high performance that companies have come to expect from an analytical database.

As with most as-a-service operating models, Capgemini Immediate enables lower up-front costs to minimize inhibitors to innovation, reduces wasted effort and costs. And that's a message that echoes very strongly with Kognitio's DaaS, so we are not only excited to be part of Capgemini Immediate - and thereby helping to make the Royal Mail Group more successful - but we're justifiably proud to do so.

For more information on the Capgemini Immediate program, visit the Capgemini Immediate microsite as well as its ecosystem page to learn more about Kognitio's role in the program.

Know where your data is - don't be in breach

2010-07-22T09:19:00.003+01:00

It’s about to get that much tougher for companies either based or doing business in the UK. A new law forcing all organizations to publically declare data breaches will go into effect in the UK within four years. Telcos and ISPs will have to be ready even sooner; a separate law, requiring them to publicly disclose serious security breaches, takes effect in Britain next spring.

There are already laws like that in the United States, of course; 46 states and the District of Columbia have regulations in place requiring public disclosure, and the European Community has several laws pertaining to this issue as well.

This news hits at the very time that more firms are realizing the potential of the data they’ve simply been storing and allowing to languish in some dark corner. They’re realizing the advantages that can be achieved by actively analyzing the data, seeking trends and insights that can enable them to do business better. It’s not just big companies that are doing this; mid-tier firms are implementing business intelligence (BI) and data analytics strategies, using outsourced offerings (like our Data Warehousing as a Service).

With opportunity, however, comes caution: if the data is being actively used, there’s an increased chance for abuse, loss or accidental disclosure. Having deployed DaaS for companies around the world, we’ve been very familiar with that for years. And we’ve taken steps that any company would do well to heed.

Firstly, know where the data is: simply saying “it’s in the cloud” is not acceptable. You need to know where the information is stored, and where it’s being accessed. Moreover, you should establish clear policies that specifically state who is entitled to access the data, and at which level…some workers may not need the same detail that others require.

At Kognitio, we’ve hosted our DaaS clients’ data at our own data centres in the past. More recently, we’ve established alliances with trusted partners in the UK (2e2) and in the US (Hosted Solutions), which will enable us to store our clients’ information, knowing that security and other concerns are well-addressed. Our clients, of course, have the option of deploying DaaS in such a way that they keep their data on site.

Security is still the primary concern of companies considering a push into cloud computing; in some cases, those concerns trump the potential benefits. We’ve firmly believed for years in the power of BI SaaS, but have known from the beginning that the privacy of the data our clients have entrusted to us is paramount.

If you’re doing more with your data than simply letting it sit there, you need to know it as well. And you don’t need a US or UK/EU law to tell you that.

Get rid of the boxes, they're boxing you in

2010-07-19T09:11:00.002+01:00

We recently submitted an application for an awards program sponsored by one of our industry’s major publications. The program seeks out the most innovative solutions in business intelligence, and groups the categories into areas such as data management, analytics, business process management and more.

Then, there’s the category called, “Other Innovative Solutions.” Which is where our client we submitted for the award falls; it’s a company that takes multiple mailing lists and uses analytics to clean the list in a mere fraction of the time that it’s taken in the past. Marketing folk will tell you that a clean mailing list is vital to their ability to do their jobs effectively. The data analysts who manually cleaned these lists in the past will tell you they’d rather suffer through root canal surgery. Our client’s solution, built on our WX2 database, saves companies untold amounts of time and money, and allows marketers to get their targeted messages into the marketplace more quickly, which means they can begin seeing the results faster as well.

Now, we hope we win the award, but that’s not the point. Rather, it’s that the most innovative solutions frequently come from those who aren’t willing to allow themselves to be categorized. Our client heard the frustration of its clients, and developed a solution that does not fit neatly into any pre-configured box. Hence, the “Other Innovative Solutions” category. Last we heard, they’re doing gangbusters business.

So, here’s your challenge: what have you done recently that doesn’t think “in” or “outside” of the box, but assumes there is no box? What have you done that will set you apart from everyone else, and leaves them trying to catch up with your thinking?

This isn’t a mindless exercise, of course: Kognitio has pioneered numerous initiatives in the BI/DW space, such as the development of an in-memory database, or the use of multiple parallel processing for data analytics. More recently, of course, we introduced the industry’s first BI SaaS offering, Data Warehousing as a Service (DaaS). Others, of course, have followed our lead, and that’s a good thing…because it validates our approach to the market.

Others will undoubtedly copy what our client is doing as well, and implement analytical technology to scrub mailing lists more quickly. But for now, they have a clear advantage in the marketplace, as do their clients. And they did it without relying on “box thinking.”

Get rid of the boxes. They’re boxing you in.

Listening to the client has always been a good idea

2010-07-15T17:06:00.002+01:00

At Kognitio we've always believed that in most cases, business customers clearly show vendors the path to success. This isn’t consumer electronics, mind you, where an iPhone or iPad can change the marketplace, introducing a product that many customers didn’t even realize they needed. This is about companies with clearly defined requirements, needs and objectives.

It’s a given that the more information you have, the better decisions you can make…assuming the information is effectively accessed and analyzed. Which, then, makes this article from Computerworld about the growing trend toward mobile business intelligence not surprising at all.

The article cites an Aberdeen Group survey, reporting that 23% of the companies responding said they already have a mobile BI application or dashboard in place, with another 31% saying they plan to implement some type of mobile business intelligence within the next year.

The keys here are flexibility and mobility. Insight has always been a requirement…as has speed. So, those firms working to deliver mobile BI that combines them are listening to what their customers want, and they’re responding. They’re making it possible for companies to do far more with data than ever before, across a wider scope, from operational BI (“how many widgets did we sell last week?”) to more in-depth data analytics (“which widget sold best, to whom did it sell, and what are their future needs?”).

Powerful tools must be at the core of any mobile BI configuration, of course. From the front-end visualization tools to the analytical database at its heart, companies demand rapid response from these systems. And the tools exist today to deliver on the promise.

It’s not just mobile BI. BI SaaS offerings, like Kognitio’s Data Warehousing as a Service (DaaS), are delivering rapid deployment, lower costs and faster time to decision. All of these are critical factors in the way companies are doing business today; it’s up to vendors to deliver solutions that meet those needs. Vendors that fail to recognize their customers’ evolving needs risk being left behind by more nimble competitors that are doing a better job of listening to their customers. Companies that fail to implement these advanced technologies, meanwhile, risk losing a step to other firms battling for the same client.

Listening to the client has always been a good idea. In a fiercely competitive segment such as business intelligence, it’s vital. The proliferation of mobile BI is just the latest area where listening and leading go hand-in-hand.

Satisfying the need to analyze with small, discretionary budgets

2010-06-01T10:50:00.003+01:00

With the uncertainty in the current economic climate, it is only natural to see organizations adapt to change. Whether it is budget cuts or consolidation of resources, businesses are looking for the most effective way to increase or just maintain performance. To do this, organizations need to work smarter, understanding their business and their customers better.

Yet, in these troubled economic times, the prospect of signing off millions of pounds (let alone Euros) on implementing an infrastructure to do this is just too unrealistic. CapEx budgets just aren't there to invest in new technologies that help analyze corporate and customer data.

So what can you do? Well, how about starting with joining us for breakfast next week in Scotland or London. We're bringing together our customers, experts and other folk to discuss the prospect of outsourced analytics, BI SaaS and on-demand data warehousing.

The events are free to attend and only last for two hours, ensuring that you can then get on with the rest of your day. Join us on June 8th in Edinburgh or June 10th in London.

For more details and to register, please go here: www.kognitio-kafe.com and hit How to Register.

DaaS service that puts auto insurance firms in the fast lane

2010-04-15T08:41:00.003+01:00

Being able to execute faster analyses in an ad-hoc manner on a large, detailed database of price points, quotes, census data and internal data is the nirvana that auto insurance companies crave. After all, the automotive insurance market is extremely competitive; providers are numerous, margins are tight, consumers are fickle. With such aggressive and agile competition, and with agents and brokers offering a wide variety of coverage type and products, insurance companies must ensure that theirs is the model that delivers the most profit, saves costs and guarantees the best possible competitive advantage. But up to now, companies in this space have been plagued by the fact that they just couldn't get all the data together quickly enough to empower this.

Being able to tap into an on-demand pricing service can change the way they do business, allowing them to be much more agile and ensure that their operating model results in an improving loss ratio for each product offered and across their entire portfolio. Kognitio announced this week the availability of such a powerful database service. Developed with American Access Casualty Company in mind, the service brings together the power of Kognitio's WX2 analytical database, Kognitio's DaaS (Data Warehousing as a Service) operating model and Quomation's PowerBatch technology. The result is a service that allows the auto insurer to focus more on deep-dive data analytics rather than laborious and gruelling task of data management; instead they can no do things like strategic pricing and re-rating analyses and assess market effectiveness of new products. All within a matter of minutes instead of the weeks it took before. In short, pricing and risk managers can ask any question of the data, get answers at lightning speed and ultimately gain comprehensive intelligence on operations and their books.

The service is available today. If you're an auto insurance company, this may be the solution you've been waiting for. Click hereto find out more.

Building innovative solutions to match and analyze media data

2010-02-22T18:18:00.004Z

We're pleased to announce a global project that we're undertaking with GroupM, a division of WPP, to build an analytical environment for the firm that will help it match and monitor advertising placement. While the first phase is already underway, the project will see the analytical environment deployed across a total of 80 countries around the globe.

Information from GroupM's local operations will be fed into multiple regional environments, and ultimately into one centralized database at the corporate level, managing a global view of their operations. In fact, when fully deployed, the analytical environment that Kognitio is building will match, measure and monitor almost one-third of the world's advertising spend, across all media outlets in countries around the globe.

We're excited that GroupM chose Kognitio as the vendor to build and put this system in place. In fact, Kognitio beat out several competitors in a head-to-head proof-of-concept comparison; we're committed to helping our customers getting the most out of their data and making them successful.

Stay tuned for more information as the environment is deployed, but to read more about how we are helping the world's leading media investment management company, click here for the news release

Delivering 8 WX2 appliances running on HP hardware since Jan 2010

2010-02-11T11:20:00.003Z

In the last month alone, we’ve supplied 8 WX2 appliances either as customer appliances built on HP commodity hardware or via our Data Warehousing as a Service (DaaS™) running on HP commodity hardware, which is a true testament to the strengths of WX2 in partnership with HP’s platform.

In total, Kognitio’s clients are collectively running WX2 on over 1,300 HP servers, with Kognitio adding more hardware resource at a rate of two hundred new HP servers per quarter, made up of both HP blade servers as well as larger HP rackmount servers.

Many of Kognitio’s clients originally purchased WX2 as a market-leading performance data warehouse appliance. Customers are now subsequently engaging with Kognitio’s DaaS offering to provide disaster recovery (DR) services as well as additional resources for on-going development activities. This is leading to a substantial increase in incremental business in an already buoyant data analytics and warehousing market space. As a platform for our analytical RDBMS, HP offers Kognitio the robustness and resilience that helps make a WX2 data warehouse appliance and DaaS offering unbeatable in scalability, flexibility and performance.

Specifically, Kognitio’s DaaS offering is leveraging the power of 800 HP machines in a dedicated data centre, and Kognitio DaaS continues to see a growth in demand as organizations realize the benefits of on-demand business intelligence and analytics as a service.

In one customer instance where the hardware was refreshed, by simply changing HP BL465 G1 servers to HP BL460 G6 servers a performance gain of 2:1 was noted. Consequently, Kognitio’s customers can analyze yet more data in yet shorter timeframes, improving their analytical output by magnitudes.

As Kognitio’s CTO, Roger Gaskell, puts it: “We are fortunate that our WX2 database architecture benefits directly from the excellent developments from HP; HP offers a development platform that is solid, and our success in providing data warehouse appliances and DaaS is a testament to the reliability and stability of HP hardware.”

Data matching and de-duping will never be the same again

2010-01-29T18:41:00.005Z

Today marks a major milestone in the world of data matching and de-duping. In fact, business analysts and data stewards are about to see their lives get much easier. And that's thanks to Match2Lists.com, an organization that offers companies the ability to upload various lists of data and match/de-dupe/clean them in just seconds. Something that has never been possible until now. Why? Because, typically off-the-shelf software just cannot cut it. Every tool either has fuzzy and phonetic based matching algorithms, which kind of misses the point. The problem is the fuzzier the logic, the more time that is required to scrutinize and evaluate the potential matches. And that takes time, resources, energy and money. Which analysts and stewards just do not have.

Instead, Match2Lists.com is an online service that has its own algorithms and allows users to upload their data sets, hit a button, and in just seconds - yes seconds - get a visual representation of their data that shows how their data sets match, how much they match and then export the newly matched or de-duped data. All done in the space of drinking a cup of coffee.

And it's thanks to Kognitio's WX2 powerful analytical database that powers this ground-breaking service. Match2Lists.com is not just software-as-a-service, it's true computational power-as-a-service, allowing endusers to harness the performance of a fast analytical database on-demand and for just a fraction of the cost and time that would be incurred by using enterprise-type solutions.

So, save time, money and frustration. Take the pain out of complex data matching and de-duping and log on to Match2Lists.com for further information.

New research: Data Management for BI - Strategies for Leveraging the Complexity and Growth of Business Data

2010-01-07T12:39:00.004Z

Analyst house Aberdeen Group has just released the findings of its research into BI in 2010, including the results of a survey of over 215 worldwide senior executives. The research validates the assertion that organizational data is growing rapidly in volume and complexity. The ability to make better informed decisions through Business Intelligence (BI) systems is directly related to the cleanliness, relevance, and timeliness of that data. Best-in-Class companies are taking strides to reduce time-to-information, generate a common view of their data, and arm their business decision makers with a high degree of data quality in order to support enhanced business performance.

Highlights from the report include:

- Best-in-class companies are able to integrate new data sources in an average of 39 days, compared with 4.1 months for the industry average and 8.9 months for the best-in-class.
- 60% of best-in-class companies saw a decrease in "time-to-information" compared with 26% of industry average companies and 10% of so-called laggards.
- At best-in-class companies, 81% of analytical employees, on average, have access to analytical capability versus 56% at industry average companies and 23% at so-called laggard type companies.

Have a read of the research for free.

Click here to download your free report (valid until March 5, 2010).

Making customers feel like kings

2009-12-09T13:29:00.003Z

As technology provides ever more ways to interact with customers, marketers must make sure their customers still feel like kings. Are they getting calls they want, or being barraged with nuisance calls? Are they benefitting from a sound web presence, or deleting spam? Are they engaging in social networks, or online arguments? The principals that Seth Godin outlined more than a decade ago in his book, “Permission Marketing,” still hold true today.

The concern is that businesses are allowing technologies, such as the mass personalization of emails or automated outbound calling, to depersonalize the customer relationship. When personalization is lost, it becomes much easier to treat customers as an amorphous mass, communicating with impersonal tools such as mass untargeted mailing and blanket cold calls, or worse still, bombarding them with offers when they’ve opted out. This is precisely what the use of technology in marketing was meant to avoid. Peppers and Rogers argued passionately for the “1-to-1” relationship between vendor and customer.

Consumers respond much better to personalization: recent research from Gartner found that customers of online banking sites valued personalization and communication above all else, and were prepared to readily switch banks to obtain them. Businesses need to ensure swift, personal communication with their customers.

The easiest method is to ensure human contact as soon as possible. However, this simply isn’t practical in most cases: having enough call centre staff to answer every potential customer query immediately is impossible; while a visitor to a website doesn’t expect human contact, he does seek quick, relevant answers to his queries. What is vital is that, whether on the phone or online, customers get where they need to be quickly and are rewarded with relevant information. Enabling this journey is mostly a matter of smart design, but how can businesses ensure that their design is foolproof?

Any electronic transaction generates data, whether it’s from the clicking of a mouse or the pressing of a phone button. Organizations can gather and monitor this data to study every action customers take when communicating with them. At its simplest, this allows companies to see where in a phone system or on a website customers give up in frustration, or where they easily navigate. With this information, marketers can make sure that phone systems and websites are designed to take customers exactly where they need to go. Yet beyond this simple use, customer data provides insights that can be used for a near-infinite degree of personalization.

Factors such as location, age and general interests can all be ascertained through a customer’s repeated use of a phone system or website and used to further personalize their journey. To continue the banking example, a bank website can’t realistically offer all of its services on one screen. However, providing a personalized landing page with links to savings plans, starter pension advice and maybe even first-time buyer mortgages will be welcome to visitors in their late twenties. Conversely, customers from a more mature demographic may be more interested in managing their own funds. Providing appropriate links based on supplied user data makes the customer’s journey much easier. This kind of approach works, when you remember that the customer is willing to receive marketing messaging only as long as he or she perceives value from it.

It’s important to resist taking personalization too far. Not only is this labour-intensive, it can also repel customers. In recent consumer research, Kognitio found that only 28% of respondents trusted marketing departments to use the information they gathered ethically. If customers believe that companies have too much data about them, they may go elsewhere unless those companies tangibly demonstrate that they are using that data responsibly. (Note to marketers: instead of the legally-required yearly disclosure, filled with mumbo-jumbo, about how personally identifiable information [PII] is being used, why not say it simply and in terms your customers are likely to read, understand and appreciate? If nothing else, they’ll value the honesty…and that can go a long way.)

The information age has given marketers the ability to personalize their dealings with customers as never before. Marketers must use this capability intelligently, responsibly and for the single purpose of keeping the customer at the centre of the universe.

Rapid implementation is key to success

2009-11-10T15:11:00.004Z

Today's news of our customer success at bet365 underscores the fact that data warehouse implementations do not have to take months, if not years, to get fully operational. In the case of bet365, the online gaming firm, just took 10 weeks from placement of order to full operational deployment.

The truth is that as organizations need to obtain insight from their data, they also need to choose data warehousing solutions that are robust, resilient and can be implemented fast. And while Kognitio WX2 has always offered users the benefit of high-speed analytical querying, its rich feature set as well as resilient architecture allows users to deploy the solution within a matter of weeks as opposed to the months typically associated with other data warehousing projects.

After all, just how many companies have the resources, the time or the budgets to spend on data warehousing installations that take umpteen months? Fact is that they don't. So if you're an organization that is currently still trying to get your data warehousing deployment done, perhaps it's time to change tack and opt for Kognitio WX2 instead. Just think of where you could redeploy those resources, time and budgets if your data warehouse was up and running within just weeks.

Kognitio wins award

2009-10-26T17:40:00.004Z

We're thrilled with the news that the BeyeNETWORK and its team of distinguished judges have voted Kognitio and its customer, TRA, winners of their 2009 Vision Award for Business Impact in the category of Analytics. This great news follows the awards bestowed upon Kognitio by SearchDataManagement.com in 2008 and Networks Product Guide earlier in 2009.

As per the judges of the BeyeNETWORK team, TRA's use of Kognitio's WX2 analytical database "provides increased analytical efficiency for the business (back end to front end)." This is a great testament to the power and flexibility of the database solution, in that organizations such as TRA can dramatically slash the time it takes to analyze data and speed up their ability to offer analyses and business insight out to their client base, thereby increasing their competitive advantage significantly. WX2 is core to TRA's offering in the market place, and we're delighted that the folks at the BeyeNETWORK have recognized that.

To read more, click here to view the news release.

Businesses are spending millions on BI failures

2009-10-20T17:19:00.003+01:00

And ouch. Today's news is something that a lot of people don’t want to see; almost two-thirds of companies that employ BI are being barraged with complaints that the system isn’t doing what they need it to do. But that’s what Kognitio has found in a survey of 200 IT directors in the UK. It also found it often takes far too long to get a BI implementation up and running (78% said more than a year).

The key here is better communication is needed between the business and IT sides; 88% of enterprises admitted that business departments do not properly define what they want to achieve from an implementation, expecting the IT department to do it for them. It’s also in rapid deployment of a BI system, and the need to begin generating actionable information quickly. The kind that Kognitio’s customers have been receiving for years through their use of Data Warehousing as a Service (DaaS).

Obviously, as companies need to analyze more data, and obtain those results more quickly, the focus on DaaS-type implementations is set to grow even more. But one thing is certain: companies need to adopt a more flexible, pragmatic approach to BI. Otherwise, they may as well open their window and throw their money out of it.

To read the full results of the survey, click here

Announcing WX2 version 7.0

2009-10-12T10:33:00.003+01:00

We're delighted to announce the release of version 7.0 of our award-winning in-memory analytical database software, WX2. After months of development, we can now offer organizations even more features that will enable them to run high-speed data warehousing, analytical and BI projects fast, securely and at a cost that is palatable to their budgets.

The main features of v7.0 include:

improved in-memory analytical capabilities, offering unprecedented speeds to access and query data
an automated fault recovery capability, offering maximum database uptime
the removal of scheduled downtime
more multi-lingual support for global deployments
increased level of user concurrency - hundreds of users can now query data at the same time without any degradation to performance
even more scalability - WX2 can be deployed and scaled from TB to PB, while maintaining top-line performance

The features all complement the fact that WX2 continues to be the most flexible analytical database product in terms of deployment, available either as a software license to be installed on your hardware, as a fully configurated data warehouse appliance using x86 commodity hardware or via the on-demand utility-based DaaS option (Data warehousing as a Service).

To learn more, view the news release. To register for a free download of version 7.0, just complete our download form.

7 steps to de-risking a DW/BI project

2009-10-02T14:42:00.004+01:00

Here are 7 simple steps to follow if you are faced with data warehousing or BI projects going over time, over budget and increasing risk levels within your organization.

Step 1 - MOTIVATE
Motivate all the users of the system, whether it be the long-term employee who is used to the current system and does not want to change, or the new employee who is looking forward to the new solution and does not see what the fuss is about. People are an organization's biggest asset, more so than any technology solution. Motivate them all to understand each others' issues and get them to work together, not in silos. Which leads us to our next step...

Step 2 - WORK AS A TEAM (Business & IT)
There must be teamwork to ensure a complete and accurate understanding of the data and the DW/BI systems in order to ensure the correct analysis, usage and reporting. This co-operation has to exist at all levels from project sponsor through management, analysts, designers, testers and implementers. Without this level of teamwork, the chances of the project delivering what the business needs are greatly reduced. In other words: talk to each other!

Step 3 - USE EXPERIENCED RESOURCES
If you are challenged with refreshing DW/BI systems and have no experience in this domain, get the help from someone who does. Yes, it sounds straightforward, but it's staggering how many times companies just follow the vendor's lead, implement the new system and then have not thought about how to transfer the data and business processes so it "fits" into the new system.

Step 4 - UNDERSTAND THE DATA
Understanding what you want out of your new DW/BI environment before diving head first into implementation will save you a lot of pain later on. There is no point putting in new systems if they do not meet the analytical needs of the business. Again, sounds obvious, but a little forethought will save a lot of headaches later on. And money!

Step 5 - MONITOR AND HANDLE CHANGE
So you've embarked on the whole implementation of your new or refreshed DW/BI/analytical environment. During the project, built some contigency into your planning so you can handle any curve balls that the business or IT throws at the project. In short, keep talking, communicating and reviewing whether you are on track and act accordingly.

Step 6 - CONTROL THE ISSUES
Nip issues in the bud as soon as they happen, do not let them fester and snowball into bigger issues later on. They'll be harder to rectify for one thing. Document any change that is made so that everyone is up-to-speed and changes or amendments can be referenced later on.

Step 7 - DELIVER QUALITY
If data is your biggest asset, and let's face it, it is for the majority of organizations (both large and small), then make sure that whatever the DW/BI/analytical environment looks like, it works, it serves the business, users are happy and that data can indeed be analyzed freely and quickly, and in turn that there is valuable insight gleaned from the data that can be acted upon to drive the business.

Follow these steps and you will be well on your way to success and growth.

Data Migration matters, too

2009-09-07T16:14:00.005+01:00

Kognitio is pleased to be part of this year's Data Migration Matters 2 conference, held at the Kings Fund, London on Thursday October 1st, 2009.

It is the only conference of its kind in the UK and follows the very successful Data Migration Matters event held in November 2007. Don’t miss a unique opportunity to gain insight and knowledge on best practice ideas for data migration projects.

This year's conference brings together the leading authorities in the data migration field including industry analysts and senior managers who have been there, done that and can share their experiences. There will be guidance on budgeting, managing and executing low-risk data migration projects to best practice standards. A technical stream will also include speakers and experts on the use and selection of software tools and technical delivery options.

For more information, go to Data Migration Matters 2

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery

2009-08-05T05:12:00.005+01:00

Dear Netezza:

If they say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, well, thanks…we’re flattered!

We’ve seen your news about your new approach to your appliance. And we’re glad to see you’re moving away from the purely proprietary approach you’ve had from the beginning.

Analysts and reporters have been advising you about that for several years: last September, Curt Monash wrote, “Many people see proprietary hardware designs as a weakness, and aren’t convinced that the benefits are so large as to compensate. There are lower-priced rivals. Feature advantages vs. newer vendors aren’t that obvious upon close inspection. And so on.” A year and a half ago, Full Table Scan wrote, "The variety of MPP database vendors offering white-box solutions has certainly accentuated Netezza's secondary weakness - proprietary hardware."

And you listened! Giving your customers a variety of choices is always a good thing.

Of course, we at Kognitio have been offering them the industry’s widest range of choice for years. We were making data warehousing appliances before you guys were even around. But seven years ago in 2002, we realized that proprietary hardware-based appliances didn’t make sense, given where the market was headed. We made the decision to broaden our offering, allowing companies to license our WX2 analytical database software without tying them to our unilateral vision of the best way to deploy it. Today, companies that run WX2 can do so, incorporated in a commodity hardware-based appliance, across the widest range of platforms from HP and IBM to Sun, Dell or any other x86 Intel architecture.

And despite your claims over the years of low energy consumption, best price/performance ratio, the “greenest” solution, etc., we note you now say proprietary hardware is no longer the way to go. While we’re glad you finally agree with us, we hope that your customers aren’t too dismayed to see such a dramatic U-turn in your marketing messaging and positioning.

Overall, however, we’re glad to see you finally moving toward a more open approach to your product. We know you’ll face a number of challenges moving forward with your new direction, but know you’ll overcome them. And when you do…you’ll be at the point where we at Kognitio were several years ago.

Sincerely,

Your friends at Kognitio

Two awards in the space of two months - WX2 is recognized as best in class

2009-05-19T18:58:00.005+01:00

We're pleased to announce that we have recently been awarded another accolade. This time it's fromNetwork Products Guide Reader Trust and it's for the Best in Business Intelligence. For more information, read here:
http://www.kognitio.com/news/pressreleases/index.php?id=80

This follows on from the announcement in early April 09 that the good folks at SearchDataManagement.com named WX2 business intelligence/analytics 'Product of the Year.' For more on that, read here:
http://www.kognitio.com/news/pressreleases/index.php?id=78

We're delighted that more and more people are realizing the benefits of WX2. If you'd like to reap the rewards, too, then don't hesitate to get in touch!

It's our birthday - Kognitio WX2 is 20!

2009-05-07T12:11:00.005+01:00

Happy Birthday to our analytical database, WX2!

Since its introduction, WX2 has been a constant source of innovation in the field of data warehousing. It was the first platform to offer large-scale data warehousing, the first to enable Data Warehousing as a Service (DaaS) for organizations and one of the first to move onto an entirely software-based model. In fact, you could say that Kognitio has been responsible for innovating and advancing numerous data warehousing concepts and practices that are considered the leading edge in the field of business intelligence, such as the ability to query hundreds of terabytes of information within seconds instead of weeks, and enabling companies of all sizes to more easily take advantage of advanced data analytics at lower cost.

In the whole history of WX2, the decision to move to a software-based solution was undoubtedly one of the most important. As hardware became available that was powerful enough to perform the processing we needed, it became logical to move to away from our own, proprietary hardware. We could then focus on our core talent: making sure our product is plug-and-play, and can return ultra-fast results on queries any time, any place, anywhere, while at the same time reducing the work required by the IT department. Our customers rely on us to make complex analysis of their data possible within seconds, whether it’s from housands of set-top boxes or millions of telecoms customers, no matter how unstructured it might be.

WX2 uses massively parallel processing to provide a high-quality, fast data warehouse. Essentially, a large number of machines run in synchronization with one another, using their combined power to run a far larger data warehouse than would otherwise be possible. The power this method provides means that there is no need to rigidly stratify the data warehouse and vet data as it is entered: all of the data can be accessed and queried, all of the time, as soon as it is added to the warehouse, greatly decreasing set‐up times. WX2 is flexible in its operation and implementation. WX2 can act and operate as a disk‐based database or it can reach impressive and unmatched speeds by accessing the data in‐memory on the parallel machines, WX2 is able to produce results exponentially aster than using disk-based methods as with other systems. As a result, query times are reduced from hours to seconds, and from weeks to hours.

The power of these massively parallel processing systems means that WX2 is ideal for providing Data Warehousing as a Service (DaaS), essentially relieving the customer and their staff of the responsibility for building and maintaining a data warehouse and placing it in the hands of Kognitio’s expert consultants. As a result, organizations can rely on a best-of-breed data warehouse manned by expert personnel without requiring a significant capital expense or the acquisition and maintenance of a specialist skill set that may or may not currently exist.

Customers that have expected implementing data warehousing to be a six-month to two-year project have seen DaaS from Kognitio up, running and returning analysis within an afternoon. Over its history, WX2 has gone through several iterations and evolutions and is currently on its fourth generation.

The first-generation Information Processing Engine was upgraded in 1993 to the 9,000 series. At this point, WX2 was a hardware as well as software‐based technology, with the technological and maintenance issues that entailed. The next major update, in 1997, moved the technology on to Intel processors away from InMOS, making for a more standardized approach but still remaining somewhat tied to physical boxes. In 2003, the fourth-generation WX2 was announced, moving for the first time to an entirely software-based platform and massively reducing the price and increasing the potential of data warehousing. Today, WX2 offers companies the widest, most flexible range of deployment options; it can be licensed as software‐only for deployment on a total capacity basis, as an integrated appliance built with industry-standard hardware, or through Kognitio’s innovative, industry-first DaaS offering.

Companies globally are taking advantage of WX2’s power: they include Kelkoo, Groupe Aéroplan's Loyalty Management Group, the National Center for Genome Resources (NCGR), TRA, Inc. and British Telecom, which has been a customer since 1997.

An affordable way to get insight

2009-03-06T14:00:00.004Z

The question every company wants answered is "how can I make it easier for my customer to do business with me and how can I be more effective in selling to those customers?" They know they are wasting time on non-profitable customers and not giving the best level of customer experience they could to their best customers because of it.

Knowing who your customers are and what makes them tick can have a profound effect on the way you do things. If you ask some of the biggest companies in the world who their most profitable customer is, they struggle to answer the question. They might think they know the answer but they really don’t because they can’t pull the data together. If you can get better insights into who your biggest and most profitable customers are and build a better experience for them, rerouting the least profitable customers to a lower cost channel, you can also dramatically improve your markets.

So how can companies get to that detail? The answer is to put all the data in one place and analyse it using powerful technology such as Kognitio WX2. And for those that cannot afford to deploy new systems internally, DaaS is becoming increasingly popular given that organisations benefit from the analytics but pay for it on a cost-per-month-per-capacity basis. A proposition that continues to take hold in the market.

The potential is huge; the devil is always in the detail. But now organisations can benefit from a cost model that allows them to get to that detail easily, quickly and affordably.

Join us for breakfast!

2009-02-06T14:36:00.002Z

Will the recent cuts in interest rates make a huge difference to businesses out there? The economists are saying that it won't, that instead we need to spend our way out of recession. And yet, from the way we see things, businesses are still conservative about their capital expenditure budgets, especially when the banks are not freeing up the flow of credit as much as we'd like them to. In our opinion, the CapEx spend just isn't there...yet.

Given the market situation, we're running a series of breakfast briefings in early March for businesses that want to learn how they can still do more without having to commit large, up-front capital expenditure. We're seeing more and more organizations interested in the "as a service" model, using OpEx spend instead and in the world of data warehousing, business insight and analytics, it's no different.

Come and join us for breakfast at one of our briefings. We'll be discussing the following topic:

“With limited or no capital expenditure budgets in today's financially challenging times, is it time for businesses to consider "on-demand" services for their data warehousing and business analytics needs?”

We'll be in Manchester on 3rd March, Leeds on 4th March and London on 5th March. It would be great to have your input on the debate, too.

Go to www.NoCapEx.com for more information.

Data Warehouse Appliance Study

2009-01-07T11:36:00.003Z

The Business Intelligence Network (www.beyenetwork.com) has released their updated report: "Data Warehouse Appliances - Achieving the Business Value".

There's a webcast too that explains the growing phenomenon of data warehouse appliances including the results of a survey of over 200 professionals. Both the study and webcast depict a very interesting landscape whereby more and more IT professionals are waking up to the advantages of these appliances.

Download the research on Data Warehouse Appliances at:
www.beyeresearch.com/study/9366

Listen & view the associated webcast at:
www.beyeresearch.com/watch/2139

Free DaaS seminar

2008-11-26T15:59:00.002Z

Never has the need for analytics been greater than in today's turbulent economy. To weather these unfavourable conditions, businesses need information about their own operations and about the market, and they need it fast.

But for many organizations, that requirement will be frustrated by the lack of capital available to spend on IT projects. The equipment involved in analytics - especially data warehouse technology - expensive, both to acquire and to set-up.

One solution to this quandary is to apply the software-as-a-service model of IT procurement to data warehousing. Data warehousing provider Kognitio calls this approach 'Data warehousing as a Service.'

Kognitio invites you to attend a seminar introducing Data warehousing as a Service that takes place in Canary Wharf, London, on December 11th.

Attendees will hear how DaaS can not only reduce the capital expenditure required to set up analytics projects, but can also reduce implementation times while improving performance.

There's change and there's major U turns

2008-10-17T12:23:00.003+01:00

The current economic turmoil is spreading uncertainty across most markets and organizations are making changes to ensure their future. But there’s change and there’s major U turns. After many years and several million dollars spent telling the world that it had the perfect software-only database, Oracle has just partnered with HP and taken a giant leap to board the appliance bandwagon. Somehow this does not look like a move to adapt to the current market demands; it has the distinct look of a big, bold U turn prompted by the lure of extra revenues.

It looks like the vendor finally surrendered itself to the fact that data warehousing appliances based on non-proprietary hardware are the way forward. They say that imitation is the best form of flattery and we are flattered. And the Oracle database remains the same, a transactional database not designed for high-speed, complex data analytics like in-memory technologies are; it remains built on indexes and this overhead is what slows it down.

Don’t get us wrong – as business folk we welcome a good dose of healthy competition; it validates the market and makes us push the boundaries of technology. But it is odd how an established vendor would suddenly go against its core position to join a group of data warehouse appliance players that had been swimming in the opposite direction for years. And it won’t be long before end users realize that the product is no easier to use; to offer it as an appliance does not make it any more suitable to address customers’ needs. No doubt it will come with a hefty price tag and a fairly complex upgrade process.

What I see here is a market incumbent changing tack to capitalise on demand and to jump into a market that a number of vendors have worked diligently to create and validate. We look forward to the competition.

Frustration - none, Data Migration - done

2008-10-17T12:16:00.003+01:00

It never fails to surprise us how many organizations underestimate the complexity of a data migration project. Many think it is straightforward process. Well, it can be, but only after completing sufficient prep work and understanding the methods that will be required. And yet, many companies bypass this stage and just throw resource and money at the project, expecting it to be a success. As a result, they find that the project fails, their budgets are blown and implementations continue to be delayed. Worse still, they are cancelled and the money has gone down the drain.

Kognitio offers the perfect solution. Having worked for more than 10 years in this space, Kognitio has delivered more successful data migration projects for the insurance industry in the UK than any other company out there. Our proven toolkit, methodology and experienced people are the secret to our success. Names such as Abbey, Allianz Insurance, AXA Sun Life, Genworth Financial, Pearl Assurance, Prudential, Scottish Amicable and Sun Life Financial of Canada have all benefited from Kognitio’s experience in data migration.

You may think that you have the resources internally to undertake your data migration. Experience has shown that the opposite tends to be true. Nine times out of ten, companies call on Kognitio to help out in the end. Ours is a very flexible approach; we can offer the resources where needed on a project basis or we can take care of the entire data migration project from soup to nuts.

So, if you find that you’re frustrated by your current data migration project, let us help.

Open to on-demand analytics

2008-07-16T15:42:00.003+01:00

A recent poll on whether end-users were open to the idea of outsourced, on-demand analytics (or DaaS - data warehousing as a service) has returned some interesting results.

The first point is that more than one in three respondents (38%) said that they would trade an on-site system for an on-demand 'data warehousing as a service' in order to eliminate set-up, administration and running costs.

The second point is that 32% said no they would not, citing issues such as security and overall control of their BI/DW environment that would prevent them from adopting the DaaS model. Seems like the remaining 30% can't make up their mind.

The third point is that firms in the retail, distribution and transport space were the most open to the DaaS model along with firms that had less than 3,000 employees.

So all this lends us to believe that DaaS will see its big success in the SME space, where companies typically do not have the time nor the resource nor the budget to deploy data warehouses themselves on their site. For these companies, the idea that they can outsource their data analytics needs to a third-party and get analytics on demand seems like a great alternative. Plus, they only pay for what they use, so there is no big overhead.

The DaaS market is set to grow so it will be interesting to see how many other firms trade their on-site DW system for an on-demand DaaS offering this time next year compared to the results of this survey. Interesting times.

Analytics in the cloud: cloud nine thinking?

2008-05-28T19:47:00.001+01:00

Can you perform analytics on demand by using the “cloud”? If you start to consider the details of what’s involved in delivering such a proposition, you soon become unstuck. Using cloud computing platforms for large-scale data analytics immediately requires ultimately umpteen amounts of internet bandwidth and network connectivity - which is a problem. We have already seen how BBC's iPlayer service is causing telecom operators to baulk about the amount of bandwidth users are consuming downloading their favourite TV shows. So, can you really load and analyse terabytes of information across the Net? No you can’t; there are far better solutions that call for users to install a data warehouse or mart either within a third-party datacentre or behind a firewall and query the data over specific dedicated networks and not the public information superhighway.

But this debate does throw up some interesting questions: what about the added costs to suppliers such as the cloud provider (Amazon EC2, Force.com, Google Apps etc) for its infrastructure? What about the integrity and security of companies’ data as they load it into the cloud environment? How many organisations are realistically going to let their data go into the Net? The gaping hole in the “analytics in the cloud” proposition is that regardless of the cloud computing providers’ size and position in the industry, HIPPA, Sarbanes-Oxley, and various other consumer data privacy laws will prevent many customers from moving their data from beyond their firewall. What fortune 100 company would like to put their sensitive competitive information in a "cloud"? Surely, what’s needed is a dedicated infrastructure, one that is set up for large, complex data analytics and that will take the pressure off the public domain. It’s a debate that needs to happen before we all get brainwashed that this “analytics in the cloud” is the way forward. The truth is that many organisations will still want to retain ownership and manageability of what can be very sensitive data.

Every cloud has a silver lining

2008-05-08T19:05:00.003+01:00

Once again, it looks like the IT industry is going through a rough patch; budgets are shrinking, stock prices are plummeting and yet we all seem to have to meet the increasingly demanding requirements placed on technical infrastructures.

But every cloud has its silver lining and in this case it is this very need to squeeze every ounce of performance out of your systems that can be a reason for merriment for some. When the IT budget cuts are not mirrored by a drop in performance demands, the ability to do more with less shoots to the top of the priority list for most IT managers and CTOs. This is when two main types of solutions tend to fly: those that allow businesses to maximise existing resources and the ones that offer lower initial outlay and lower TCO. Anything that requires large cheques just to get the solution through the door will not do well. It does not matter if over two years it will have paid for itself; when money is tight bosses like to see immediate results.

In the current climate, if you can walk into a meeting and tell your boss that you can use existing hardware to run a new solution, you will score points; if you explain that with your approach they will be saving money from day one, that will also help you. This approach will help IT departments and CTOs increase adoption at a time when the rest of the industry is scratching their heads trying to figure out how to convince their superiors about spending money they haven't got. The market dynamics have shifted: spending large amounts of money is not the way to go. Extracting value out of existing infrastructures is the currency.

Towards a better BI environment

2008-04-10T12:24:00.003+01:00

A recent study on business intelligence and data warehousing has come to light. In it are some worrying statistics. Let’s run through them.

Excerpt 1. "Data warehousing and business intelligence software has now assumed a high profile in many organisations."
Why only now? Surely, organisations should have been thinking about this for years. How can you grow your business and your customer satisfaction if you don't know the first thing about them?

Excerpt 2. "Only 66.6% of senior managers seeing it as "very critical" or "critical" to their decision-making process."
So only two-thirds of the executives questioned deem it necessary to rely on the data when making business decisions. What is the other third thinking? Are they still relying on gut-feel? I bet they are. Yes, gut-feel is a good thing but you can't run a successful business on it alone.

Excerpt 3. "Only a few companies, 6%, see their BI/DW implementation as being ‘very successful’ - compared to 17% who feel they are not ‘too successful’ with their effort."
Ouch! So only 6 out of every 100 BI/DW implementations are great. That means in 94 out of every 100 cases, a large amount of time, resource and money has been spent for practically nothing, for if the implementation is not yielding tangible results, it might as well not have happened. I'm guessing that users are a) not using it, b) weren't consulted in its design and c) IT has gone ahead and put something in that that business cannot use. Bottom line: If this is true, then heads should roll. Staggering.

Excerpt 4. "The most critical issue that needs to be addressed are that the system does not contain all the data that is required for decision making. This ties in with the second concern, that they cannot ask all the questions and obtain all the information that they would like."
Double ouch! What is the point of implementing a data warehouse if all corporate data is not to reside in it? This is like running a shop and putting some products on the shelves, keeping others outside and then trying to stand in the shop and do a stock check. You have got to house all your data in the warehouse if you are to try and make sense of your business.

As for the other point, why have a data warehouse and ask users to interrogate the data if performance works against them? Users need quick, fast access to their data and actionable insight in seconds, not be told that "that query won't work" or "there are too many users on the system" or "that query won't work because we don't have that data in this system". It's like giving someone a fast car to drive and then limiting the speed to 20 mph or not putting oil and fuel in it. It's no wonder that the BI/DW implementation will not be judged a success.

Overall, it's welcoming that organisations are getting more and more switched on to the benefits of BI and Data Warehousing, but it's imperative that they get it right from the start: if they are going to invest manhours and money in implementing a data warehouse, they have to do it properly or not at all.

I like to be in America!

2008-03-12T14:51:00.006Z

The Jets and Sharks were back, standing tall and defending their corner. And in Las Vegas, too. No, this isn’t another glitzy rendition of West Side Story, but rather a reference to the newcomer in town. Last month saw Kognitio's debut in the US, marked by their launch at the TDWI World Conference.

A British company, and proudly so, it has entered the US market to take on the market incumbents at data warehousing, analytics and BI. Why now? Well, timing is everything. First, Kognitio’s WX2 analytical database technology has been adopted by no less than 18 customers in the UK, so it has a strong pedigree. It has customers who are using its product and can defend the company’s claims. Sadly, many newcomers in the BI/DW database space are less forthcoming when asked about their installed base. Second, its flexible licensing model will appeal to many on the international scale, as will its Data (warehousing) as a Service (DaaS) model, as customers are demanding more from their BI environments.

The term “Pervasive BI” seems to be the latest buzzword and there can be no doubt that organizations are demanding business insight and intelligence at the touch of a button, not “ask IT and wait 2 weeks for them to get back to them.” Kognitio is well poised to step up to the “Pervasive BI” mark given that not only is its technology exceedingly fast and highly scalable, but its “load and go” attributes mean that customers can get up and running within minutes instead of days or weeks. Consequently, the CFO can now run ad-hoc financial reports in seconds, drilling into the issues of the day; the CEO can immediately see where the pain points are in the company and the CMO can gain instant access to the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns. Again, all at the touch of a button. Moreover, for those who are beholden to their CIO or IT department for help in the data analysis area, Kognitio offers a flexible outsourcing solution, a kind of analytics on demand service, whereby marketers or finance professionals can bypass the typical IT bottleneck and get an outside company to perform the analytics as and when it is needed. In some instances, IT actually supports this approach. After all, if it is outsourced, the job of data analysis gets done and it is one less headache for the overstretched IT personnel to think about.

As Kognitio debuts in the North American market, it’s clear that it has some key differentiators that will help set the company apart from the other players in the increasingly crowded BI/DW landscape. But they are attributes that are helping organizations get away from IT folk building indices and data marts and talking to the business users delivering them the insight and intelligence when they need it, which ultimately, is what drives business forward.

Bernstein and Sondheim it ain’t, but stay tuned for some interesting times as Kognitio takes on the competition.

Planning for a data migration exercise

2008-02-28T11:01:00.000Z

If you are in the business of processing and analysing data, then you’ve probably been faced with the challenge of migrating data between systems in order to get your data sorted and organised before you start the processing and analysing. Such a data migration exercise may fall under the auspices of a platform rationalisation programme.

Alas, many organisations jump head first into a data migration without sufficient planning. Typically, the result is spiralling costs as the exercise runs over time, over budget and calls for too many resources. In some cases, the migration project may never finish satisfactorily as the decision is taken to abandon the project in order to save costs. It needn’t be that way. The devil is in the detail and the planning. Get the planning right and the migration will succeed. Here are a few tips and tricks.

In the early stages of a platform rationalisation programme, companies are often searching for information to help them determine their strategy. With multiple legacy systems, there are key decisions to be made: Is a new, replacement system required? Can one of the existing systems be used as the target for consolidation? What data quality issues will be encountered, and how can they be addressed? What are the main risks associated with the project? What are the costs and timescales for the consolidation?

To answer questions like these, it’s best to undertake a scope assessment first. A scope assessment is a short, initial piece of work that will define what needs to be done and how. Such an exercise will save time, heartache and resources in the long run. Its purpose is to provide a first level assessment of the scope and cost of a data migration. The primary deliverables from the scope assessment should include a high-level estimate of the number of days and cost to complete the data migration, a high-level statement of any major issues identified at this stage that may affect the delivery of the migration, a high-level project plan for the migration and estimated timeframes, resource estimates necessary to meet the migration schedule, an estimate of the resources required from the client to support the migration, and a full report on the scope of the data migration and the recommended approach.

Such an initial scope assessment will serve you well. It should provide a specific estimate of the number of days and cost for a subsequent data discovery and design (DD&D) phase of the migration project. This is where the source data should be analysed, the scope of the project determined and the overall risk evaluated in terms of the complexity of the work involved. It is an essential pre-requisite for any migration project in order to gain a full understanding of the scope of work and to produce detailed plans and costings. At the end of the DD&D phase, there should be a detailed data migration plan including initial migration design, tailored training and resource plans, project costs, deliverables and milestones which can either be executed in-house or by a third party.

Get this right and not only will your migration be a success, but the ensuing processing and analysis work will be a breeze as you work with one set of consolidated and clean data.

Business vs IT - singing from the same songsheet?

2008-02-07T23:53:00.000Z

"The business doesn't understand IT and IT doesn't get the business." Does this still ring true in this day and age? It would seem so, according to many at a recent BI conference. Apparently, when it comes to choosing and deploying the right BI/DW solutions, IT departments fail to engage with the business enough. Instead, they make the decision on the tools and technology, spend umpteen weeks and months putting it all in and then are flabbergasted to find that the very tools they thought would help are not being used at all by the business. Instead, in many organisations, users circumvent these BI/DW tools that they have had no say in choosing and revert to what they know: Excel. You can imagine the hue and cry when Mr. Data Compliance Officer comes to do his audit; millions of spreadsheets housed on individual desktops. So much for the great work IT has done in putting in the data warehouse and BI tools!

So what should you do? The answer, according to those in the know, is simple: communication, enforcement and accountability. Business users must engage with the IT department and vice-versa. IT must be forced to put in systems that the business a) needs, b) wants and c) will use. The whole project needs a strategy and needs to be managed and reviewed regularly by the business, holding IT to account on their actions. IT shouldn't be left to go off on their own tangents, just because it makes their lives easier. They're not the ones that depend on the BI environment, the business is. All this is common sense. And yet according to another study, in over 75% of today's organisations it is still IT that makes the decisions about BI and DW tools and solutions. This needs to change if businesses are to truly benefit from an effective BI environment. The message is simple: get the CIO and his folks to understand the business and give the business what it wants.

Just another address book?

2008-01-22T23:18:00.000Z

To many businesses it makes perfect sense to implement CRM; however once the database is in and operational the business should constantly review its usage and its yield. What is its ROI? What is the solution being used for? Is it just a marketing database full of names and addresses? Does it actually record more insightful data such as products and services bought, how and as a result of which factors (marketing campaigns, seasonality etc)? Does it give the business a 360 degree view of the customer and what their weak point is in terms of what they are more likely to buy in future? Or, alas, is the CRM just used as a very expensive address book?

Unfortunately, the latter is often the case. To be truly successful and mimic the growth path of the large retailers of this world, businesses need to deploy CRM as one building block of a more sophisticated business development strategy. It's one thing to have a database in place, but it's quite another to use and align that information with other business data gained from other parts of the organisation. When joined, data from systems such as EPOS, websites, general ledger, budgets, forecasts, mystery shoppers and marketing, for example, can yield far more insight into customers and their buying patterns than CRM on its own. But to do this businesses must first recognise the hidden value present in their data and must then acquire the knowledge to release that hidden value and use it to develop customer spend.

Cashless payment systems: turning an expense into a goldmine

2008-01-14T23:34:00.000Z

There seems to be a lot of coverage recently about the advent of cashless, contactless payment systems. Cash, it appears, is no longer king. Cashless is the future. Londoners using public transport have had this for a while with the Oyster card and people in Hong Kong too can not only use their Octopus card to ride the subway, they can also use it to buy a pack of beers down their local 7-Eleven store.

For retailers, especially smaller independent ones, the advent of the cashless, contactless payment system must seem fantastic. Not so, it would appear. Many are baulking at the sheer cost of implementing these systems when they already have a system that works just fine, thank you very much, based on cash transactions.

How short-sighted. The retail community should be embracing the advent of contactless. Just imagine the wealth of information that will be put at their fingertips. Imagine the advantage over anonymous cash-based transactions. Imagine the marketing programs that can be implemented to drive customer loyalty and further spend once they understand customers’ buying habits more thoroughly. Sure, large high-street retailers and those online are doing this already. But small to medium sized companies are not. And as for the corner shop or local newsagents, this is completely foreign to them. It’s fair to say that they have yet to understand the importance of business intelligence and the advantages of customer insight.

Retailers should be chomping at the bit to get these cashless, contactless payment systems installed and operational. For, the more you understand your customers, the better you can serve them, the happier they are, the more they buy. It’s simple logic. But will the retail community get too caught up in the debate about upfront costs instead of stepping back and seeing the bigger picture? It remains to be seen.

New Year, new start? But why don't they get it right first time round?

2008-01-04T11:40:00.000Z

Reading recent articles and announcements by the new analytical appliance vendors reminds me of the old boxing saying: “a good big ‘un” will always beat “a good little ‘un”. In the analytics market we can adapt the saying to “a good fast one” will always beat “a good slow one” and that is why we hear so much from the vendors about speed, speed improvements, more speed etc. And yet, why is it that these new players seem to think it’s acceptable to get their product out and then worry about speed later? It’s not as thought they don’t know what customers need. It smacks of a short-term approach along the lines of “let’s just get our solution out there, create some marketing hype and worry about getting the product right (i.e. fast) later on.”

New technology companies that enter this market need to get it right first time; they need to be “fast enough” straightaway. They are then in the enviable position where their solution offers satisfactory performance and where any further turbo-charging of speed characteristics is a marginal activity for the user, not a major headache. In light of what typically happens, I’m left to conclude that many of the new players didn’t pay attention to their coach and to their customers’ needs; they architected systems that weren’t fast enough, so they now have to spend their waking hours developing turbo devices to solve performance shortcomings in their system.

Technology as we know it today has stated performance characteristics that developers can maximise in different ways. We now see developers adopt a core paradigm for performance (e.g. scanning) and then complement it with the addition of plug-ins such as turbo-charged special hardware, data compression and ancillary indexing modes, because they didn’t get it right the first time. What does this mean for end users? An unsavoury knock-on price increase. In addition, in adopting these ancillary paradigms, users have to suffer the consequences of specialised hardware as well as slow data-loading rates because of the pre-processing undertaken by compression and columnised techniques.

So what happens when companies don’t get it right the first time? The bottom line is that the user ends up paying one way or another if the core design criteria is not fast enough for the solution they need. Which is probably why some vendors don’t even bother with providing enough speed; at the end of the day with this approach they stand to hit the customer for money twice: once with the initial sale and then with the subsequent plug-ins and turbo-charging.

Don't be fooled and don't get stung! Happy New Year.

Can data warehousing help Santa and Rudolph?

2007-12-14T10:41:00.000Z

It’s the time of the year when many children get excited over what Santa Claus will bring them. But it’s also the time of the year when the more skeptical kids start to question whether Santa does really exist. Perhaps it’s only fair to remove the Santa Claus myth once and for all and expose the believers to some really interesting science. Or would that be too un-Christmas like? Maybe, but here’s a great question to ask the kids: “How fast would Santa and his reindeer have to travel in order to deliver at every single household on Christmas Eve?” Well, given the sheer amount of places Santa would have to travel to and the small window of time at his disposal, the answer (as worked out by some guy with far too much time on his hands) would be 300 times the speed of sound. In fact, as soon as he sets off, he would explode into a ball of flames. “Rudolph’s nose would indeed glow red”, I explained to a friend. “As this would be the first part of his body to smoulder and spontaneously vaporise.” Followed by Dancer, Prancer and all the other no-chancers.

But then again, according to academics such as Stephen Hawking, it’s possible that there are “n” amounts of universes existing in parallel dimensions. So, with enough dimensions, Santa would only need to visit a single child on Christmas Eve. His ability to exist in around three billion other dimensions would mean he could deliver presents to each child simultaneously.

Poor Santa. How could he possibly work all this out? Well, perhaps he could get himself a data warehouse appliance and submit a killer query “How can I deliver all these presents to all these children in just 24 hours?” Of course, he’d have to get the answer quickly. We wouldn’t want him waiting for days for the system to return the result. Otherwise there would be a lot of unhappy children out there.

Speed of gaining results and insight is key. Not only in Santa’s case but in most businesses and organisations out there. And so is believing.

Merry Christmas. See you in 2008.

It never rains but it pours...

2007-12-11T13:26:00.000Z

We’re not talking about the inclement autumnal weather of late, but rather the economic downturn heading our way. Well, that’s what the economists would have us believe. Especially for operators in the leisure and hospitality space (known more commonly as the eating-out trade), it seems that there are turbulent times ahead. Why? Well, according to these economists, public sector borrowing in the UK has hit new levels and consumers are feeling the squeeze. Higher mortgage payments, people spending more than they earn and a high level of unsecured personal loans are all about to take their toll on the economy and us, the consumers. In layman’s terms, at the end of the month people aren't going to have as much money left in their pockets to spend on life’s little luxuries such as eating out or going down their local for a drink.

So, with so little discretionary spend and so many operators out there competing for a share of everyman’s wallet, what can those in the eating-out trade do to survive? Surely, the answer doesn’t lie in targeting consumers with yet more products, but rather in delving into their own operations, cutting out unnecessary costs and driving more profits out of their existing businesses. For if it is true that fewer people will be able to dine out or go for a drink at some point in the future, then operators in the leisure and hospitality industries need to drive out inefficiencies and work smarter, not necessarily harder, to gain that share of the consumer’s spend.

The good news is that questions around the business can be answered with conviction using the data that is probably already present in their systems, such as EPOS, labour, mystery shopper, stock and supplier information. They just need to know how to use it to their advantage; it's a case of use it (the data) or lose it (the marketshare).

From SaaS to DaaS

2007-12-04T12:52:00.000Z

Since it was first introduced a couple of years ago, the SaaS approach has been experiencing a great wave of popularity; businesses have been embracing the software-as-a-service model in order to keep operating costs down and remain competitive. Part of the appeal is also that SaaS allows users to benefit from the latest technologies without the costs traditionally associated with such adoptions. So how easy it is to roll out this model in different industries? Can it work in the Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence market for example?

Well, in the realm of data analytics, companies can indeed leverage a similar model, known as DaaS or Data-as-a-Service, to buy data analytics on demand. By using a data warehouse on a utility basis, users can now purchase CPU power by the hour and run data analytics and BI projects as and when required, without having to invest in a perpetual software license and costly hardware. Ultimately, it’s a case of on-demand data warehousing that allows companies to undertake large-scale data analytics as and when they need it and at a price they can really afford.

The days of expecting businesses to pay licences upfront before they even use the solution are surely coming to an end; the success of SaaS and DaaS are a clear indication of this. And rightly so; would you expect businesses to pay for their electricity by installing their own generator and paying all the costs up front? Or would you expect them to just pay for what they have used from the National Grid? DaaS makes sense from both the technology (users get to take advantage of the latest technologies and architectures) and financial standpoints (there is no initial - and very substantial - outlay to purchase the software and hardware).

The DaaS model may well become a real threat to traditional data warehouse vendors. We live in the digital age and as long as users have an internet connection, they should be able to use data warehousing software as and when needed without having to buy, install and maintain costly software and hardware.

Data Warehouse Appliances – time to go virtual?

2007-11-26T14:17:00.001Z

The concept of the data warehouse appliance (DWA) has gained much interest lately given the the advantages a DWA brings to organisations trying to conduct large-scale data analytics. And DWA vendors are not backwards in coming forwards when touting the virtues of the DWA, including the benefit of software that is tightly optimised to specifically-tailored hardware as well as the simplicity of a single source for hardware and software.

But hang on. What these vendors are actually saying is that the genuine benefits can only be accomplished using specialist hardware platforms and that this is the only way to build an appliance. Is that a cost-effective model? No. Is it vendor lock-in? Yes. To gain true openness, flexilibility and maximum return on investment, end-users should go virtual.

The concept of the virtual data warehouse appliance (vDWA) is simple. Take industry-standard, commodity x86 hardware from all the well-known vendors, add analytical database software and there you have it. Your own DWA. A DWA that is much more open and scalable than any of the other proprietary hardware-based solutions.

Not just more open and scalable, but cheaper. Think of the cost savings. IT managers love vDWAs because they can use existing hardware in their datacentres to build the appliance. And then redeploy that hardware for other tasks once the vDWA has fulfilled its purpose. Imagine it. What was once the web server could become a vDWA and then redeployed to become a mail server. Can existing DWAs do that? No, they just become expensive paperweights when they are not doing their job. Support costs are kept to an all-time low as users can leverage support infrastructures from the global hardware players instead of paying costly 15-20% maintenance contracts from proprietary vendors.

There’s no doubt that a DWA is a great solution, but in the quest to drive down operating costs and increase savings, organisations should look at going virtual. They stand to gain a lot from doing so.

Time to wake up and smell the coffee - IT managers are no longer the innovators

2007-11-19T13:59:00.000Z

I never thought I would see the day when a bunch of accountants would make me feel that IT managers are laggards and that CFOs are the innovators and saviours of the world. After all, we were all here in the halycon days of computing. Think of Y2K. IT ruled then, but seemingly, it has all gone downhill since.

At a recent CFO conference, I was hearing CFOs indirectly stating that IT needs to wake up and smell the coffee, that IT folk are no longer the innovators. Can that be true? Have IT departments taken so many beatings that they have become submissive, withdrawn and afraid to do anything other than “stick to their knitting” and do as they have always done?.

The context of recent CFO commentary was around business intelligence and providing the business analytics required to run enterprise level organisations. I was listening to people who are experts in re-engineering the financial structures of the companies they run. They are now making demands for information that allows them to engage in managing business growth, they understand that they have extracted the bulk of the benefits from cost savings from core business activities. They now need to move out of the cost-saving model into the business development phase of their management. CFOs are building 21st century companies with different dynamics, much different from those of the 1990s. These are companies that acquire and divest segments of their business as routinely as they used fire IT managers.

And yet the problem does lie with IT. IT managers provide solutions for these CFO innovators using products and methods designed over 20 years ago and that are now in the 11th generation of evolution. Yes, I hear you say legacy is good, it’s reliable and it does what it says on the box. The problem is that what it says on the box no longer cuts in the new world.

Going for speed, not overhead

2007-11-13T13:41:00.000Z

Is data aggregation, indexes and employing a bunch of DBAs a necessary evil for businesses that want to conduct analysis? Despite what goes on in most organisations, we say no. The ability to make data warehouse environments screamingly fast without having to throw a ton of resource and overhead at them is more than possible. It’s here to stay.

So what’s the issue here? Well, if you work for an organisation where you have a problem with multiple users working on a crowded database system running complex queries, you might think you need to hire an army of DBAs to cope with the onslaught of demands put on the system. Think again. Employing DBAs to build data aggregates and indexes is hardly the best answer. Think of the cost, think of the overhead. And think of the poor marketing department that wants to run a killer query to gauge success of a sophisticated promotion and yet is told that the results will be returned in a month’s time because a DBA has to re-index part of the database! How on earth can a business run like that?

So what’s the alternative? The key is to provide super fast data access speeds that allow multiple users to get the data they need to aggregate on the fly.

The reality of many business users is that they have three types of analysis: reporting, statistical analysis and data mining. In this last we include just being curious about something. In addition, managers’ needs and management staff change frequently which means the intelligence and insight required from business data does as well. So why not put the power to flex and change the output that directly supports business user needs directly into their hands?

Many might contend this just isn’t possible. Many will shout about indexing issues, hardware and software performance and cost. Others might claim users are not sophisticated enough to run their own aggregation. But these are only barriers if a) the database can’t perform well without complex indexing, b) the hardware is unsuitable, difficult or expensive to extend and c) the business community are so low skilled and unwilling to learn that they can’t be taught. None of these conditions needs to exist in any business.

Enter Massively Parallel Processing databases on industry standard blade servers. The principal is simple. The database runs so fast that all the data is scanned and aggregated for any specific query on the fly. You don’t need data aggregates to gain performance, because the speed you need is inherent in the database software. The database runs so fast that, providing the system is suitably sized for the demand, user queries don’t get in the way of each other allowing hyper quick response times to complex queries. Sitting on industry standard blade servers, you can grow the database system at the same pace as your business grows the data, without periodical cost spikes choking the growth curve.

And then what about the users? It is well within the grasp of most business people to learn data investigation techniques. Give them database query or BI tools to allow them to join the data they want. Let them play with the data and learn the dynamics of business, customer, product, or asset behaviour. There are enough examples of business people getting their hands on data and learning how to use it to support themselves.

Finally, consider the downside of data aggregation:

• You need to keep a team of DBAs available to develop and tune aggregates when you don’t need to;

• New BI requirements mean new aggregates which means a process queue. We all know the impact job queues have on business users. They get frustrated and look for disruptive and expensive workarounds;

• Aggregates need storage space that you don’t really need to use up;

• An aggregate culture limits the scope and vision of analysis. Who knows what correlates with what to identify an opportunity? We’ve seen the benefits of productive curiosity from this time and time again;

• Aggregation creates more work in a rapidly changing business. If the data is available in a raw form already, users and analysts can use it when they need it.

So there you have it. Let your users query the data in a well designed data model and allow the technology to the hard work to give you performance. Don’t build cost in to your business; build capability, flexibility and granularity. It leads to more people having more insight to make better use of the business's markets and resources.

Downturn in revenues at Christmas - what can a retailer do?

2007-11-05T14:34:00.000Z

With just 7 weeks to go to Christmas Day, now is the time that retailers go into overdrive. It’s the one time of the year when retailers count on high revenues. But what can a retailer do if spending sprees are down on last year’s figures? Well, it may not be as bad as it seems.

Although spending might be lower, the number of shoppers will probably remain the same. It’s a fair assumption that whilst people are being smarter with their money, they are still spending it. The truth is that many organisations still don’t appreciate the value of the customer; they continue to ignore the wealth of information that they can gather through loyalty schemes, data-capture linked promotions and even simple transactions. And it is this information that can help them drive more revenue out of customers.

Today, to become or remain a market leader or even just competitive, a retailer needs to have a thorough understanding of its customers. Who are they? Where do they live? When do they shop? What price brackets are they attracted to? What promotions are they most responsive to? Whilst the majority of retailers might already address the different profiles of their customers with various techniques, few are maximising the information they can and do gather at the pay point.

Today’s analytics technologies are capable of supporting the requests of the most demanding retail businesses and yet it’s always astonishing to see the number of organisations that still believe such solutions are either unsuitable for their needs or beyond their means.

Business intelligence vendors have been developing extremely powerful and yet cost-effective solutions that can help most companies better understand their clientele and consequently increase revenues. Basket analysis, customer loyalty, price and promotion analysis, these are just a few of the activities that a retailer should be doing. For if a retailer knows its customers and their habits, the retailer can offer the most desirable products and services at the most competitive price. It means they can create more targeted campaigns, more effective promotions. Ultimately, it means they can use the customer data to their advantage. Knowing their customers and their habits simply translates into higher revenues and profits.

Hallowe'en nightmares for BI

2007-10-29T15:54:00.000Z

Hallowe'en comes but once a year but data can become your biggest headache any hour of any day - or night. Here's our take on the kind of nightmares that are keeping IT administrators awake when they are not consolidating all their business information:

1. The much dreaded year end is looming; it is now only eight weeks away – the business development team and the marketing department are both looking to generate a final spike in sales by identifying untapped sources of revenues. But when they query the customer data the reports are conflicting. The CTO is demanding an explanation.

2. A new regulation demands that all businesses in the telecommunication industry audit their customer data to identify all entries related to children under the age of 16 who have been targeted with a mobile phone-based marketing campaign in 2005 and 2006. The data is however spread across 15 branches nationwide.

3. In a bid to push sales around the Christmas period, the IT administrator has been asked to collate data from the company’s 560 supermarkets across the country to allow the strategy team to analyse customer buying behaviour and consequently adapt their products and sales strategies. Each day billions of items are scanned at this organisation’s checkouts and for each transaction the retailer records the type of product bought, the price, the time of day/month/year, the quantity and more. Unfortunately the sales data is housed on 17 separate databases and the IT department has an unrealistic deadline to meet.

4. A multinational call centre needs to make its workforce more effective and needs to understand how to better organise its staff in terms of permanent Vs temp and in terms of shifts. However the calls come in from several countries around the world and the data related to these is stored in databases in each country. The IT administrator needs to be able to produce a record that takes into account and queries all data.

5. A large coffee house chain wants to understand what their customers are buying with their coffee and whether they can incentivise them to buy that extra muffin or piece of carrot cake. Alas, the EPOS data collected is not in a fit state to be mined as it is held by a third-party in a separate system.

6. One large pub chain realises that there are too many staff on at hours where not enough drinks are being sold. However, the IT department cannot correlate the company’s sales data against that from their HR system. Gut feel comes into play and no-one can actually put their finger on when it would be best to employ fewer or even more staff to meet customer demand.

To chase these nightmares away organisations need a comprehensive BI and data analytics solution that pools all the data sets from a company's disparate operational systems and makes them "talk to one another". Only then can business managers of all levels up and down the corporate hierarchy have "one version of the truth", i.e. access to the right information at the right time and thus avoiding such Hallowe'en nightmares. A single data repository allows organisations to use that intelligence to qualify gut-feel inferences and make the right decisions to ultimately drive growth, performance, competitive advantage and profits.