Monthly Archive for July, 2009

Catamaran High-Speed Business Intelligence

Published on July 31, 2009 in Jedox, Kristian and Palo. 0 Comments

Inspired by summer and vacation time, I figured it might be interesting to do a post about catamarans for a change. You may have seen on the Jedox website that we are sponsoring a catamaran sailing team. Palo is about speed and so are catamarans. This and the fact that our town, Freiburg, is home of a world and European champion seemed reason enough to back up and support this very successful team.

Let me introduce Sebastian Moser and Thomas Posch, here in their element on Lake Como in northern Italy:

Bild

Sebastian and Thomas as well as Sebastian’s father Alexander make up the Team Moser. Sebastian and Thomas ride the Topcat catamaran as well as the Tornado catamaran which is even faster.

Sebastian maintains an interesting website at www.team-moser.com, a worthwhile site to visit. You can learn a lot about catamaran sailing there and they also provide interesting links. The YouTube video which I came across on their page, gives a good impression of what catamaran sailing is all about.

You might also want to check out this video (if you have never seen a sailing boat tip over in forward direction).

After winning the Topcat World- and European championships the previous years, Sebastian and Thomas have had a very good seasons beginning and they are already leading the German Tornado Ranking. They are now preparing for the “German Open Tornado” which will take place in Hamburg on the 13th to 16th of August.

Talking about “Open” – this is a good opportunity to remind you of the Palo Open (previously known as Palo User Conference).

Palo Open - The Palo Conference

We offer an early bird special until August 31th and you can find additional information about this conference following this link.

Bild

PS: It was very nice of Sebastian and Thomas to take me to one of the trainings in spring 2009 as you can see in the following picture. Sebastian is holding the tiller … and yes, I do like sailing a catamaran.

Bild

Get ready for the next BI generation!

Published on July 21, 2009 in Jedox and Palo. 2 Comments

Business intelligence software has been with us for some time and we’ve seen many new technologies enter the BI stage. There’s no disputing that BI can offer tremendous benefits as an IT investment, but the market is changing fast and providers (note the BI Giants) need to gear up for the next generation – which goes far beyond the latest macro trend.

Driven by the need to cut costs and make room in the BI budget for new investments, Generation-Why, the ‘query generation’ will ask tough questions and have an insatiable need not just for data or insight, but for fast answers.

More than ever, the focus will be on response times: a recent survey from BARC revealed that 38% of users are unhappy with the performance of their SAP BI modules.Thanks to “In-Memory Computing”, SAP may be aiming to increase BI response times by up to 100%, but others, particularly the smaller niche players, can still win the race – both with a speedier and more affordable option.

I see the future for speedy business application answers not in the central processing unit (CPU) as SAP does, but in the graphics processing unit (GPU). Modern graphic cards have 100s of special processors that can be used for parallel computing: an approach that the Universities of Freiburg and Western Australia are helping us research. Intel and AMD also need to think anew.

Alongside In-Memory-Analysis, many new technologies have entered the BI arena. Many call this BI 2.0, but what does this really mean? At the end of the day to most of the new BI vendors it means more fancy charts, graphs and dashboards – with some larger fonts, brighter colours and rounded corners thrown in for “interactivity”. All this is well and good, but this is just pure marketing if it doesn’t help the user make better decisions. If this BI approach is to be seen as the “next generation” then it needs to go further.

BI applications and tools need to be rooted in the workflow – and should be cognisant of the types of decisions that need supporting. BI needs to be aware of the domain context – i.e. which industry, which department. Because without this, the best BI can do is to provide pretty visuals and hope and pray that the user knows how to translate them into intelligence. This is not the Jedox way, as usability and business value need to take first priority…..new technologies alone with little value add will not make customers satisfied.

Very often, it’s the smaller BI operations and niche players who are often the innovators here. Most of the BI-g Boys haven’t kept up with the market.

Looking at the BI tools and software available, one has to ask the question, what’s the next generation really looking for and are we ready? And we don’t need expensive answers here, but super fast ones. In an ideal world, Open Source answers.

Excel, Excel plus Palo and beyond Excel

Published on July 9, 2009 in Jedox, Palo, Palo Suite and Palo for Excel. 5 Comments

An estimated 500 Million people worldwide use Microsoft Excel. Out of these 500 Million users about 5%-10% perform some kind of analysis, reporting or planning tasks with Excel. While Excel is very flexible and highly accepted in all organisations and enterprises, people will – as soon as the company has more than a few employees – very soon end up in something commonly referred to as spreadsheet hell.

With this in mind, I recently posted an article about the Beauty of Palo. Palo’s beauty lies in the introduction of centralized data cells and in a more than 2-dimensional (i.e. multidimensional) writeback-enabled database which is centrally hosted on a secure server within the organisation. With Palo, many users can simultaneously work with consistent data in Excel. Data entries in one sheet (or even data imported from CRM and ERP systems) will automatically be applied to all worksheets in the organisation. Therefore, “Excel plus Palo” is a better solution than Excel alone. “Excel plus Palo” provides all advantages of a centralized Business Intelligence solution without the cost and the time it usually takes to introduce a dedicated Business Intelligence solution.

Bild

Now, what do I mean by “beyond Excel”? While “Excel plus Palo” is already a great advance in terms of data integrity and process efficiency, could there be even more? The answer is yes. For example one important feature that is missing in todays spreadsheets is “structure dynamics”. When you change a value or filter criteria in a spreadsheet, all dependent cells are updated automatically . This is “data dynamics”. The data is recalculated, but the row and column structure of the spreadsheet remains untouched. But with structure dynamics the spreadsheet would not only adjust the data but also the row and column structure necessary to display the data (for example an ABC Analysis may require 5 or 10 or 100 rows to display all A products depending on the query parameters).

While traditional spreadsheets are structure static, the new online spreadsheet available with the upcoming Palo BI Suite will be structure dynamic by introducing a new technology called “Dynaranges”. While in design mode, Dynaranges are displayed as a rectangle, covering a range of cells within the spreadsheet. These cells are actually linked to a data query (for now restricted to Palo queries, but MS Analysis Server and other data sources to follow within the next few months).

Bild

At run time the Dynaranges unfold (horizontally and/or vertically) and create as many rows and columns as the underlying data (metadata like dimensions or attribute table) require. When the underlying data or the query parameter change, the Dynaranges will automatically adjust the row and column layout of the resulting view.

Bild

Dynaranges are only one example of the advanced spreadsheet technology that we built into the Palo BI Suite. Other examples are server based scrolling, dynamic report repositories or the new chart types that we are adding to the product. I will talk more about these on a future post.

Writeback enabled OLAP Cubes in Excel Pivot Tables

Published on July 2, 2009 in Jedox, Palo and Palo for Excel. 0 Comments

We have some exciting developments to announce in regards to our free-of-charge Open-Source OLAP Product Palo for Excel. We decided to include an ODBO driver (MDX) in the free download of Palo for Excel . The new ODBO connectivity allows to access Palo OLAP cubes via Excel Pivot Tables in Excel. It will be another 2 weeks from now and then everybody can do advanced OLAP-based Pivot Table queries in Excel without having to buy expensive licenses for Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services.

While Pivot Tables in Excel are read-only Palo users will have the option to writeback values from Excel directly to the OLAP cubes. This is done using the Palo Excel Add-In which is also included in the free download of Palo for Excel. By adding the writeback ability to OLAP cubes, Palo becomes an interesting choice for a server- and Excel based planning application in the mid-market space. With Microsoft recently announcing the end of PerformancePoint Planning this is a huge opportunity for people looking for an inexpensive but powerful centralized planning application under the familiar Excel user interface.

The following screenshot shows a Palo cube in an Excel 2007 Pivot Table (it works in Excel 2003 as well). You can also see the ribbon menu bars of the Palo Excel Add-In which allows to write back values, change the dimensions and the cube structures of the Palo cubes and even includes access to a powerful data import wizard to fill Palo cubes with external data.

Bild

One final note that I would like to mention. If we talk about free download for Palo for Excel this is not only the Palo Excel Client. Actually you can download a complete client-server installation for free with as many servers and as many clients installations as you need.