Archive for the 'Jedox' Category

Besides increased performance, what’s new in Palo 3.1?

Published on April 6, 2010 in Business Intelligence, Jedox, OLAP, Palo, Palo Suite and Palo for Excel. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .
Palo Suite 3.1

Palo suite 3.1

We are proud about yesterday’s release of the new version Palo 3.1 , which brought a strong progression in performance. Users already called it “a much much (!) increase in speed” and “a dramatic increase in speed.”  The release included Palo for Excel 3.1 (including Palo OLAP 3.1), Palo Suite 3.1.(including Palo OLAP 3.1 , Palo ETL 3.1 and  Palo Web 3.1). Also part of the release was the first ramp up of Palo OLAP GPU. I have already written periodically about the incredible gain in speed by using GPU in Business Intelligence, so today I would like to focus on Palo 3.1 and pick a few highlights from the more than 50 new features Palo 3.1 is offering:

  • New Styles for Palo for Excel. We refreshed the look and feel of the Paste View Style sheet. Take your style (The new styles are also available at the MyPalo community)
  • Palo Spreadsheet Auto-save and recovery. Like in Microsoft Office changed reports will be saved automatically and can be recovered from a previous saved version, e.g. if a connection to a Palo Spreadsheet gets lost during editing.
  • Enhanced User Management of Palo Web. New roles can be defined and used to setup security for Palo Web components and reports. For example: IT is supposed only to monitor and maintain the Palo ETL processes, so just assign the Palo ETL manager access to a group defined as IT, and all other Palo Web components will not be visible to them.
  • MyPalo Community integration. Palo Web and Palo for Excel are now able to store your MyPalo Community account. By this, while working in Palo, you can access advanced information through our MyPalo website.

There loads of other features to make working with Palo more comfortable – Palo fully supports now Microsoft Internet Explorer 8, contains a new homepage button to get back to homepage with on click , offers extended chart configuration for Meter charts, or German and French interfaces for Palo Pivot, or automatic calendar generation for time dimensions, etc.

All new features are listed in the “What’s new in Palo 3.1” – guide, which is available under http://www.jedox.com/en/community/mypalo/my-palo-installation-first-steps.html.

Palo for Excel – Elevator Pitch

Published on March 23, 2010 in Jedox, Palo and Palo for Excel. 1 Comment

We recently launched a new Palo website that is especially designed to attract Excel users to Palo. While our main website www.jedox.com continues to be the primary source of information about Jedox and Palo, www.palo.net is something like a 60 seconds elevator pitch about Palo for Excel. The website is targeting the technically oriented Excel power user. Feel free to forward the link to www.palo.net to any Excel power user in your network.

Bild

Palo adds “light” to BW

Published on January 28, 2010 in Business Intelligence, ETL, In-Memory, Jedox, OLAP, Palo, Palo Suite and SAP. 0 Comments

Even if Germany’s predominant SAP is not pursuing an Open Source strategy (yet*), SAP clients take a different position. Money matters, especially in midsized firms, in manufacturing, in commerce and quite badly in public administration. Lots of SAP users are looking for affordable, flexible alternatives to SAP BW, especially for planning, but also for reporting and analysis. In plain language, they are scanning the market for something like a “BW light”.

Palo OLAP Server can play this role. The latest release of the Palo Suite now has SAP interfaces SAP R/3 ERP (in addition to SAP BW Connector in the previous release). So with the new and enhanced Palo SAP connectivity, it is now no longer necessary to refer to SAP BW for OLAP analysis using SAP data. SAP R/3 and ERP system users who do not require full BW functionality can now use the Palo Suite and Palo SAP Connectivity as an easy and very flexible alternative to a BI platform which can be installed quickly and is ideal for use by professionals.

Bild

With access to SAP BW and SAP R/3 ERP-systems, Palo can now be integrated optimally into SAP landscapes. SAP data is extracted simply and effectively at the table level or through a generic RFC /BAPI interface. The ETL process is fully modelled using a graphic web front-end. Details about the new Palo SAP Connectivity are available at: http://www.jedox.com/en/products/palo-sap-connectivity.html

* which they could, since SAP makes 75% of their revenues with software related services

Palo OS, SOS and Premium

Published on January 20, 2010 in Jedox, Palo, Palo Suite and Palo for Excel. 0 Comments

Don’t worry. Jedox is not sending an SOS signal. Jedox is doing fine. Downloads and sales are on the rise, products are advancing, new people on board and a new website as of today.

SOS stands for “Supported Open Source” and is a new offering by Jedox starting today. In 2009, Palo users still had to choose between using the Open Source Edition of Palo (without professional support) or buying the Enterprise Edition with full support and maintenance. With Supported Open Source we are now introducing a third option which fills the gap between those two extremes.

Supported Open Source is based on the Open-Source Edition of Palo (both Palo for Excel and the Palo Suite). You download an Open-Source Edition of Palo and then you can buy a support subscription for a low monthly fee (starting at 187 € per month) directly from our website. The SOS subscription is tied to one specific Palo installation but with no limit in terms of number of users or number of CPUs. It includes 10 support tickets per year (additional support tickets are available).

Also included is a Jedox Software Assurance which basically means that we safeguard you from any intellectual property issue with Palo Open-Source software components delivered by Jedox. These assurances include (a) substituting the infringing portion of the software, (b) changing the software so that its use becomes non-infringing, or (c) acquiring the rights necessary for a customer to continue its use of the software without interruption.

Bild

We also decided to change the pricing and licensing model of the Premium Edition of Palo. It is now available as a monthly subscription starting at 19 € per month and named user (Palo for Excel Premium). Looking at a minimum of 10 users, the monthly subscription comes out at 195 € per month (Palo for Excel Premium) and 390 € (Palo Suite Premium). A feature comparison and price calculator on our new website make it easy to learn about the different subscription options. And as always promised, Palo for Excel and Palo Suite are available as free-of-charge Open-Source Editions as well.

New Palo releases

Published on December 18, 2009 in Jedox and Palo Suite. 0 Comments

Today we published the Palo 3.0 Service release 1.

It includes new release versions of the major Palo products. Our developers in Freiburg and on other locations worked hard during the last months, sometimes even on weekends or at night. My latest blog was about developing software resembling a marathon race.  In that sense today’s release means we are on time and ahead of the crowd.  The service release contains the following elements:

  • Palo OLAP 3.0 SR1
  • Palo ETL 3.0 SR1
  • Palo for Excel 3.0 SR1
  • Palo Suite Enterprise 3.0 SR1
  • Palo Suite 3.1 ramp up

For those who are annoyed by looking at change logs, these are most important changes:

palo-suite

Palo OLAP 3.0 SR1 includes major performance improvements in the Multi-Threaded version.  We optimized all areas of Palo OLAP regarding speed and scalability. Other big improvements were made to optimize the general Marker performance.

The new Palo ETL 3.0 SR1 version offers a 100% web based user interface for modelling and administration of the ETL process. All functions can now be created and accessed via a modern web user interface. Relational database can be used as additional sources to load data into. This allows for example the creation of staging areas to pre calculate and consolidate information before loading them into Palo OLAP.  We also offer in Palo ETL 3.0 SR1 new extraction filter functions for dimensions and cubes. Furthermore, we developed new features for the dynamical creation and extraction of Palo OLAP rules. Palo ETL 3.0 SR1 is also part of the Palo Suite 3.1 ramp up version with additional features.

Palo Suite is now available for download as 3.1 ramp up release with the new components and updated documentation. Palo Suite includes Palo Web (formerly known as Worksheet Server 3) with the ad hoc query component JPalo integrated. JPalo allows defining ad hoc queries on top of any Palo OLAP database. Intuitive slice and dice and drill downs with filtering are possible, as well as write back using splashing commands. Beside Palo User and OLAP modelling management, Palo ETL is also included in Palo Web, which offers seamless integration of all ETL processes through the new Web user interface. We will now work with selected clients on base o the ramp up version for further improvement. The next step than will be general availability. So volunteers for testing the ramp up are welcome.

Publishing the Palo 3.0 Service release 1 is our way of giving pre-Christmas gifts. I hope you do enjoy it. As it is my last blog for 2009, I’d like to wish my readers a merry Christmas and a happy 2010.

Microsoft tries to patent Sparklines

Published on November 20, 2009 in Jedox, Kristian and Palo Use Cases. 0 Comments

In my last post I talked about the Pros and Cons of patents (admittedly more about the Cons). Now I just received the following link: http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0003Y1&topic_id=1 . Microsoft surprisingly filed a patent application for a technology called micro charts (also known as Sparklines). From my understanding there is a lot of prior art that stands against such a patent. I hope the USPTO will acknowledge this.

Patents are bad for the consumer

Published on November 3, 2009 in Jedox and Kristian. 4 Comments

Ever since the latest law suite wave by Eolas, everyone with a somewhat common sense must have realized that software patents are nonsense.

It is often referred to the fact that many software patents have the character of trivial patents and should therefore not be recognized as patents. But I am way more intrigued by the question of whether the generic patent concept as such is still of any use.

In my opinion, there is no point in arguing whether a patent is an advantage for the patent holder. By all means, it is favourable in that respect that the patent holder receives the lifelong monopoly for a particular technology. De facto at least, because during the 200-year-old history of the steam engine, 20 years may have seemed a reasonable period of protection; in today’s technological era, 20 years is an eternity.

It is often argued that patents are about protecting intellectual property. The inventor is to be compensated for his development work. Interestingly, consumers regard the idea of patents as fair thinking of the small-scale inventor whose idea is stolen by the large corporation, or the pharmacy industry, which – without patent protection – would supposedly not develop costly meds.

But the original idea of the patent was not about creating a fair and automatic reward system for the inventor. It was more about giving the investor an incentive to disclose his know-how to the general public. And in return, society would not reward the inventor in financial terms but with a time-limited monopoly. But here is the crucial part: the patent concept was not about an inventor’s fundamental right to receive remuneration for intellectual work. It was more about society being prepared to pay dearly (albeit cashless) for new knowledge during periods of scarce know-how and long development cycles.

Today, however, know-how is no longer scarce. Among the 6.8 billion people, there are plenty of intelligent or even genius people, many from aspiring countries like China and India. Each one of them has a desire to ultimately turn his know-how into cash. This can only be done by introducing the know-how to the market. And not as a pure patent exploiter, as, e.g., a manufacturer of tangible goods.

In case of intangible goods, which can be freely copied like e.g. digital products, it will be more difficult, though not impossible. What counts here is the speed of innovation. The one who innovates faster than the competition is able to capitalize on his intellectual property. While patents impede innovation, the cancellation of patent protection would be leading to an innovation race which would ultimately benefit society and the consumer. The following chart shows how the patent system decreases the speed of innovation.

Speed of Innovation - Patents vs. Open Innovation

The level of remuneration for innovation can and must be established by global competition. The time-limited monopoly has become inappropriate as a reward system. In light of the oversupply of know-how in the global market, it has become too expensive for society and ultimately for the individual consumer, too.

Finance people will demand Gaming Cards in their PCs

Published on October 9, 2009 in Jedox, Palo, Palo Use Cases and Palo for Excel. 5 Comments

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.

Bild

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.

Bild

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.

Controller and Business Intelligence – an upturn in the crisis

Published on September 10, 2009 in Jedox, Palo and Palo Suite. 0 Comments

Germany is experiencing the strongest setback in economic activity for decades. Assessments see economics in Germany diminish around 6%. Topics like controlling, risk management and liquidity planning move into the centre of management attention due to the crisis. Companies have no money to waste in time of crisis and need to use company data efficiently to make the right strategic decisions. Shortcomings in liquidity planning for example can drive a company into insolvency quickly. As analytical and planning processes today are run by IT-Systems in most middle-sized and major firms, vendors of business intelligence and performance management benefit from the growing importance of controlling. Currently the industrial association German Engineering Federation VDMA writes in a position paper for its membership titled “To act appropriate in difficult times”:  “… How costs within the firm develop entirely can be monitored by modern Business Intelligence solutions. To exploit the potential of using IT promises far more benefits for the companies than simple saving measures. “

The crisis improves the readiness to change

For sure, implementing a new business intelligence system won’t bail out companies which find out during a crisis that controlling works with wrong numbers, that data produced in different departments are contradictory or that key performance indicators have no significance. The critical view on company structures in periods like those however works in favour of business intelligence vendors. In a crisis the readiness to change in companies is bigger than ever. This applies also inside IT and controlling departments, where simplification of processes and cost efficiency are aimed at. Response time is another topic that comes to the centre of attention, as optimizing the response time allows downstream business processes like the adaption of product offering to market change to be accelerated. But not only crisis drives interest in business intelligence. Many middle-sized firms have been growing massively by global expansion in the last decade. Efficient communication with the new locations is crucial for these companies. Order inflow, stock on hand, liquidity, risks – all data have to be available as quickly as possible and in high quality in a central business intelligence tool.

Whether based on Open source or on proprietary software, due to the shortage of financial possibilities there is a growing influence of the controlling and planning process within an enterprise, and thus a growing interest in Business intelligence.

McKinsey Consulting claims Business Intelligence to be Competitive Intelligence and defines it to be the key information to success in a market situation.

Business intelligence proves the saying: every crisis opens up new chances, right. It can be applied for the former so called “digit douchbags” in controlling, who are gaining massive influence in companies, as well as to provider of Business intelligence Software, as their markets seem to explode.

Cost reduction in IT departments and evolving Company Structures have contributed their part to the rise of a new class of Business intelligence, the Open Source Business intelligence Software. Business intelligence was long ago controlled by the global Heavyweights like SAP, IBM or Oracle. Open source Business Intelligence premiered 2008 in the magical Quadrant of the renowned consulting firm Gartner- Consulting, as a result to fulfilling the same criteria of commercial Software. Open Source business intelligence products are often the favoured software products. They usually convince with higher usability, easy customisation by qualified Users in the departments and the lower prices.

The importance of pi when doing BI projects

Published on August 19, 2009 in Jedox, Kristian and Palo Use Cases. 4 Comments

You’ve probably heard the shortest joke in the IT industry. It goes like this: “I’m almost done”.
When doing BI and Performance Management projects with our clients, we occasionally have the same problem. Projects take longer than we (or our client) anticipated and there is a variety of possible reasons: technical problems with the software or installation, data quality problems on the ETL side, or incomplete requirement specifications. Or different role perception: We see ourselves as coaches for the Palo-BI Suite and we expect the customer to do part of the work, especially at later phases of the project, while the customer expects to be handed over a 100% completed project.

20 years ago, to cope with this and similar types of issues, my brother Peter (former CEO and founder of MIS AG who unfortunately died in a car accident in 2004) came up with a surprisingly easy formula to calculate realistic project duration (both for internal software development projects as well as consulting projects with clients). Simply take the gut feeling of the developer or the consultant and multiply the number of days or weeks that he thinks are realistic with pi (3,1415). In other words, if somebody thinks 10 days are realistic, the project will most probably take 31,5 days.

20 years after Peter had told me about this rule, I finally had a look at the theory behind it. In my opinion it goes like this: If a person takes an educated guess about how long it will take, he will automatically just see the work to get 80% or 90% of the desired functionality done. He simply neglects the 10% to 20% percent that is needed to make the product or the project 100% perfect. But how long will it take to complete these 10%-20%? Very long as you can see in the following drawing which shows a typical curve based on the Pareto principle (80/20 rule). Doing between 80% to 90% of the work will only take you around a third of the total effort (MD gf stands for man days estimated using gut feeling)

Bild

So if you only look at 80% to 90% of the total functionality you will come to the conclusion that the project will only take you 33% of the time it actually really would if you look at the 100% result. That is where pi comes into play. Multiply the number of days a developer or a consultant estimates for the project by the magic 3,1415 and you most probably have a realistic amout of time it will take to really get done 100%. The following drawing explains this.

Bild

PS: At Jedox we decided to multiply the “gut feeling” estimate by 2. This is not pi but then we also have a clause in our general terms of contract where we ask for an additionaly 60% range that we can charge above our original estimate. And 2 x 160% roughly equals pi.