Founder Ward Yaternick offers a new perspective on business analytics http://www.nextanalytics.com Fri, 04 Jul 2008 00:49:40 +0100 FeedCreator 1.7.2 http://www.nextanalytics.com/MyBlog/MyBlog/Can-SMB-afford-Open-Source-BI-or-Traditional-BI.html I was looking for statistics on BI in the Small and Medium Sized (SMB) market today. It’s surprisingly hard to find material. This blog documents some of my findings and makes a few comments. First, a Definition of SMB. Techtarget suggests (http://searchcio-midmarket.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid183_gci1005201,00.html (http://searchcio-midmarket.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid183_gci1005201,00.html)) anyone with less than 1,000 employees is medium sized or smaller. Based on my anecdotal experience, one could assume that if you have 1,000 employees, you could make $100M a year in revenue and 100 employees could make $10M in revenue. If you have $100M in revenue, it’s likely that your annual IT budget is about $3M. $500k of that might be BI, probably less, but not all of that is money spent on BI software itself, you also have to have your IT staff and the equipment. I read that somewhere but I can’t find the URL anymore. I think it might have been something O'Reilly wrote (If I find it, I'll add it as a comment). If you really wanted to see the benefit of general purpose BI, then perhaps a 10% of your users would need BI. The rest could probably read the static copies of... nextanalyticsBlog - BusinessAnalytics Sun, 01 Jun 2008 04:14:19 +0100 http://www.nextanalytics.com/MyBlog/MyBlog/Can-a-business-intelligence-product-be-used-to-answer-analytic-questions.html To deliver something in BI, one has to write a SQL query or create a cube. But doing this is actually a two step process. 1. you must find the data and the relationships between tables, if they exist. 2. the data usually needs filtering, grouping, and calculations and other things that change it from a list of data, to something that you make decisions with. Maybe the SQL or MDX can do it, but more than likely, it can’t. If it can’t, then you must design intermediate tables and views and run a series of processes to populate them. If you’re going for a cube, a cube needs to be built or an existing one modified, and this might even be on top of those intermediate tables and views. The costs of doing all this can be significant, but that’s just a start. The IT deparment will never know when it can drop support for these tables, views, and cubes so it’s probably going to be a permanent investment. That’s the crux of the... nextanalyticsBlog - BusinessAnalytics Fri, 30 May 2008 11:30:53 +0100 http://www.nextanalytics.com/MyBlog/MyBlog/Improve-your-data-access.html It Starts By Improving On the Data Access Layer Many reporting and analysis products rely on SQL and MDX to obtain their data. In the context of delivering analytics, these query languages can get extremely complicated and, even if the syntax does exist to deliver the result, it might require changes to the database or datawarehouse or for a new cube to be designed and maintained. Any of these mitigations raise the cost and risk of the solution. The root cause is that many analytics require sequential passes, multi-datasource data access, and iterative processing. In some situations, Excel is used to mitigate, but it is not a strong solution because formulae and ranges and relationships between data can be easily broken due to dynamic nature of production data and business in general. In contrast, nextanalytics offers the ability to design simple SQL or MDX queries, ones that don’t need a lot of training and expertise, and certainly won’t require changes to a database or to build a complex relationship with an Excel workbook. Then, nextanalytics follows up with scripts to perform the requisite sequential, iterative, and multi-data source steps. This saves a great deal of complexity with producing dashboards... nextanalyticsBlog - BusinessAnalytics Tue, 20 May 2008 10:53:51 +0100 http://www.nextanalytics.com/MyBlog/MyBlog/Our-free-open-source-site-is-finally-created.html nextanalytics now has a project on SourceForge.net and at CodePlex. If you are motivated by true and legitimate Open Source, then go see the project at http://www.codeplex.com/nextanalyticsOS (http://www.codeplex.com/nextanalyticsOS). The SourceForge.net site is incomplete (circa May 2008) because of technical difficulties in using sourceforge.net, but the codeplex.com site works fine. The two versions are not the same. Right now, the commercial version does a lot more. The reason for the difference is this: According to the root philosophy of Open Source, the community will take the project over, will operate as an entity, and will take the software in the direction that the community wants it to. In other words, whatever happens is technically independent of nextanalytics corporation. That being said, the founder of nextanalytics corporation is a member of that community and will contribute more source code as time and energy permits. As consumers, people now have the choice of using the nextanalytics commercial product, or the analytic product from the open source community (according to the terms of GPL2). ward yaternick is the Founder and CTO of nextanalytics corporation nextanalyticsBlog - BusinessAnalytics Sat, 17 May 2008 06:25:22 +0100 http://www.nextanalytics.com/MyBlog/MyBlog/The-age-of-mainstream-BI-is-over.-Welcome-to-the-new-age.html Are you selling or implementing products from major vendors but still not getting the information you need ? Did you know that’s been a common complaint for nearly twenty years, back when BI was just taking shape. If you've been holding your breath waiting for something to come, I suggest you stop. Nothing's coming from that direction. They’ve even forgotten that’s what the problem is. Their big claim (now) is: if you can share something, then that's BI. In other words, take what you get, share it, and be happy. Oh yes, and their prices went up 10% again this year. nextanalyticsBlog - BusinessAnalytics Fri, 25 Apr 2008 17:01:43 +0100