Often it takes somebody from inside the industry to shake it up. That somebody is Ward Yaternick, the CTO and Founder of nextanalytics.

Already with ten years of development experience, Ward took on the role of leading development teams during the growth years of Cognos 1991 to 1997. During that time, his main responsibility, Cognos PowerPlay, grew from having only one customer to achieving revenues approaching a billion dollars.

OLAP@Work was purchased by Business Objects in April 2000 for $22M CDN and Ward joined the executive ranks of the #1 business intelligence company in the world. During the ensuing three years, Ward performed the roles VP Analytic and Reporting Products, and VP OLAP, providing guidance in strategic areas of product direction. 

The opportunity is rooted in the fact that, in general, BI vendors perceived that their products had become mainstream which meant that they thought their customers wanted evolutionary upgrades rather than new products. Yet, at the same time, everyone knew that deployment of BI licenses was lower than expected, and only a minority were actually getting the reports they needed from their BI purchases.

As an insider, we learned time and time again that OLAP customers were only using OLAP to learn what SQL queries they might want or to ship static views – very few people actually “drilled down” and did the famed “slice and dice” operations. If they weren’t using OLAP, they would custom code SQL, and use sql reporting tools to submit the queries, and then export the data to Excel where the real processing and report presentation was done. As a BI workflow, this was nearly a total failure: All functionality relating to query creation and data rendering was not even being used after the demo and initial training.

In response, within the BI companies, there was an urge to expand BI out into a broader platform of products, to take attention away from the actual intelligence part of the equation.   There were requests to integrate better with Excel which, in hindsight, didn’t respond to the core problem: That BI had ceased innovating on the “intelligence” part. Microsoft recognized the problem and saw the opportunity. It gradually introduced better and better BI in their desktop tools while at the same time increasing the power and flexibility of its servers. In turn, the BI companies were pursuing "applications" which meant their investment went towards packaging pre-defined reports and metrics, which mitigated the way people were using their products. This led to the area of BI innovation which is more popular now, that of dashboards and visualization.

But there was, and still is, a gap. Most of the BI tools based their intelligence on what you can put into a single query to the server. This severely limits what can be done with data but is an architectural flaw, not easily recognized or fixed. We see this problem routinely with dashboard and visualization tools which could do so much more if they were working with better data. But they can't, so their users are sometimes under-whelmed. 

nextanalytics was designed to address the intelligence problem. nextanalytics sits between the result set of the query (multiple queries actually), and the presentation of the data and does iterative multiple passes over the data. Based on many years of BI experience, the functions that are being performed are highly specialized to solve real business needs. Together, these add to a vast amount of new functionality that’s simply impossible in conventional BI query processing.

Bottom line: nextanalytics represents the extra intelligence layer, the one that’s not been added by BI companies over the past ten years.

This was the gap that Ward recognized. After four years of dedicated development, released as a version 1.0 Beta in Q1 2007, the first release of nextanalytics gave Ward and his team ¬– including his 2ic Mike Sullivan, former CIO Entrust, a chance to work with a select group of companies who were deploying solutions. nextanalytics 2.0, released in Q3 2007, focused on data volume and performance so the engine would run well even with 300 million cells of data, delivering response in under one second to analytic queries.

nextanalytics 3.0 is what’s new in March 2008.  In order to ensure that there's no barrier to massive uptake, nextanalytics 3.0 being released as commercial open source. This enables partners to create custom inputs, outputs and even add functional capabilities.  nextanalytics 3.0 also adds a java version for UNIX and of course the Microsoft Gold Certified .NET product is still offered.   Both versions are shipped with a free developer license, to encourage uptake in the various developer communities, and to enable the benefits of global outsourcing.

On the whole, nextanalytics is poised to follow in the path of MySQL, but with an analytic spin.