On October 6 and 7 we had the Palo Open 2009 in Frankfurt, the annual meeting of users and partners of our software Palo. Applications and solutions that use Palo were introduced, and the 2009 Palo Award was conferred. Ranked most highly on participants’ feedback forms was the keynote of OLAP-Guru Nigel Pendse. The software analyst and publisher of BI Survey criticised large producers of Business Intelligence software.
Based on the feedback from Business Intelligence users, Pendse demonstrated that BI products and services of large providers performed well below average. Pendse explained that Business Intelligence is simply not the core business of large software companies. Large providers’ ongoing acquisition politics reflects the poor quality of their product portfolio. According to Pendse, nothing positive can currently be expected from the large providers in terms of BI, since they are overly concerned with integrating their many new acquisitions. Pendse advised corporate BI users to choose the best products on the market, which generally are offered by smaller providers.
Levels of business Benefits reported
I agree with Nigel. Particularly SAP and Oracle seem to have considerable product overlaps. Microsoft and Cognos don’t do much better. Clients don’t like to pay for products that are dropped within a few years. These developments in the market might help small vendors like Jedox. Our projects – and our clients – get bigger on average year by year.
Today’s computer games deliver 3D video sequences in photorealistic quality. To do this in real-time, the hardware industry developed high-end graphical processing units, also called GPU. A GPU has unbelievable processing power. Instead of 2, 4 or 8 processor cores as known from the traditional Intel/AMD CPU the GPU uses an arrays of hundreds of parallel floating point processors to compute images in their internal graphics memory.
What value does this bring to finance people? The answer is simple: When doing analysis, planning, budgeting, forecasting, scenarios or reporting a lot of number crunching happens, especially if you are looking at aggregated and multidimensional OLAP data models as we usually do in Business Intelligence or Corporate Performance Management. Number crunching consumes enormous processing power. The number one complaint about BI and CPM software is slow query performance, as BI and OLAP Analyst Nigel Pendse points outs.
So our Palo researchers had a look at the GPU hardware architecture and discovered that GPUs are the perfect hardware accelerator for in-memory OLAP server like Palo. They expect a performance increase by a factor of 20 (not 20%) at least. This would be a performance breakthrough that has never been seen before in the BI industry. The reason why this works so well is the fact that Palo uses an in-memory technology. Since today’s GPUs have 4 GB of Graphic memory it is possible to load the entire cube directly in the GPU RAM. So there is no bottle neck like disk IO etc. that would decrease the GPU power.
And it gets even better: We just had the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose. There NVDIA announced the Fermi Architecture. This new GPU technology is due in 2010 and will again increase the processing power by the factor of 5 (against today’s Tesla technology).
And by the way: Did I tell you that you can combine GPUs? Here at Jedox we run TESLA hardware with 4 parallel GPUs and 16 GB RAM in one server and it still scales almost linear. So this makes 20 x 4 x 5 = 400. A query that took 40 seconds to calculate on a CPU will be done in 0,1 seconds with GPU. Theoretically of course. Results in practice will be seen on CeBIT 2010.
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