nextanalytics blog

by Ward Yaternick

Where does nextanalytics fit in the BI foodchain? 

Our product has been called "Analytic Middleware."  Implementors of nextanalytics integrate it into their database access, their user interfaces, their solutions and applications.  Business analysts design scripts specific to the customer's needs in ways that were previously impossible.  From a technical view, five things comprise the core value we offer.

1. a set of unique analytic commands create the opportunity for better and unique data analysis, easily, and in-expensively. If you're operating in a crowded market, you need something like nextanalytics to differentiate yourself.
   
2. borrowing a page from OLAP, we offer on-demand data caching, optimized for fast retrieval, even with production volume of data.  It also provides several excellent architectural choices to avoid volume, performance, and scalability issues and reduction of licensing fees and IT complexity.
   
3. nextanalytics is vendor and platform agnostic. This means multi-platform and multi-database.  Our engine brings data from different sources together.
   
4. low cost open-source. Your investment is low, so a positive return on investment is easier to attain.
   
5. open-source means there are a whole lot of things you never have to worry about.

From a business view, we've decided to be a bit disruptive by offering high functionality, extremely low cost, and encouraging a worldwide network.  Actually, we'd like to follow the success story of MySQL, except with an analytic focus.  Our thinking is that, at only $595/year/server, nextanalytics can be included in more applications and solutions, more often.  At such a low price, even if you only use a subset of nextanalytics, you are quickly cost effective.  Each time nextanalytics is implemented, a re-usable library of analytic scripts is built, increasing profits on future installations.

We are open-source, but we are commercial open source.  We charge a nominal annual license fee and use it to fund support and education, as well as ourselves to continue the development of the software.  The real intent of being open source (for us) is to facilitate external integration and customization services and to encourage a partner network.  This allows us to be specialized and stay focused and it keeps the product and its releases under our control. In the long run, due to a singular focus on the development of the intellectual property, we'll have a ubiquitous best of breed analytical engine. With 25+ years of development management experience in large commercial analytics ventures, we feel we know what needs to be done, and can deliver this. This is what business customers really want.

To encourage a large community of 3rd party developers and consulting services, we offer a developer license that costs $0/year (yes, that's a zero).  This means easy entry, minimal business risk, and low investment for even the smallest dev shop in any country.  We want to encourage a large worldwide base of trained human resources.   We feel that the resulting proliferation of 3rd party products will be in everyone's best interest. In support of this, we have a marketplace in our forums where 3rd parties advertise their consulting services and add-on products.  

We support our users, even those with free developer licenses.  For us to keep up with the demand this creates, we have invested and continue to invest heavily in plentiful free video examples, tutorials, online documentation, FAQs, and question & answer forums.   We've learned that a software company is successful not only through leading intellectual property, but also in how well it communicates about what the software does.   Therefore, we are committed to being very good at documentation and support.

And, because nextanalytics is commercial open source, if you have a question or suggestion, or if you don't like the way something operates, you have the choice to customize it yourself, or contact a member of a worldwide 3rd party base of experts to do it for you.  Through our marketplace forum, there is a venue for you to get your customization work done, and get support from any company, even if it isn't nextanalytics!  The simple nextanalytics architecture makes it feasible to outsource a project without having to share confidential data or duplicate an infrastructure, thus saving you cost and time.

What's your next step? 

Go see our examples, walk through our tutorials and learn why we claim an order of magnitude improvement over conventional query reporting tools in the area of business analytics. After you've seen the examples and tutorials, we hope you're hooked.  Your next step is to register to get your free annual license and then download nextanalytics and the open source user interfaces.  As a registered user, you get full access to our forums.  Registration is completely confidential and no one will send you junk mail. We only ask that you register your free license annually so that we can track the usage of our product and prevent spam in our forums. 

A nextanalytics download is very small, about half a megabyte. Installation takes two minutes. You could be running on your own computer five minutes from now! Our .NET product is Microsoft Gold Certified so we are safe and certified for use on your desktop. The Java version is 100% pure java and works well on unix.  There's no reason to hesitate.

In closing, we hope you will be inspired to take advantage of nextanalytics.  We urge you to take this opportunity to use our forums to create new business relationships and use nextanalytics to distinguish your products and services in the marketplace. We look forward to meeting you online! 

(Ward Yaternick is the Founder and CTO of nextanalytics corp.)