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.

Marathon disciplines for software companies, speed and heavyweights

Published on November 24, 2009 in Palo, Palo Suite and Palo for Excel. 0 Comments

Business life involves sprints and marathons. Product development, above all, resembles a marathon, especially in the software industry. The most important thing is finding the right people for your team. It takes good consultants and sales, people who understand the customers and know the market, strong developers.

We have been lucky to hire some new specialists with in-depth knowledge of business intelligence. The most important addition is our Senior Product Manager. Matthias Krämer has many years of experience in product development and product management of Business Intelligence software. Matthias was previously employed with Infor as a Product Manager with worldwide responsibility for BI products and their integration within the Infor ERP systems. He will therefore, at the interface between customers, consultants and the development process, from now on have responsibility for the development of the Palo Suite. Even if Matthias knows the market and the job perfectly well, being a product manager always remains a challenge. Product development inherently involves conflict. Apart from dealing with a founder like me, who has de facto been doing the product manager’s work and all the decision-making up until now, there might be conflict between purchasers and end users, sales and marketing, development and consulting. Addressing these conflicts productively is part of the product management marathon.

Development is another marathon discipline for software companies. We are also expanding our Development Department. In Prague, Jedox acquired an entire development team with combined 40+ years of experience in the development of multidimensional databases. The same team had in recent years been responsible for the development of the MIS Alea, now the Infor OLAP. With their expertise in OLAP databases, these OLAP specialists will help to increase the pace of development of our OLAP engine. Our R+D team is now about 30 people strong, while the company as a whole counts around 60 employees and 15 developers nearshore. The new OLAP specialists will also work on integrating our GPU research into the development of our in-memory OLAP software. So we are speeding up both our software by using multiprocessor GPU hardware to achieve exponential performance gains for number crunching in BI, and at the same time our development work by adding state of the art OLAP knowledge. Performance is a key point in BI and CPM, and the speed of development is a key factor for an Open Source software company competing against heavyweights. Speed and heavyweights, on the other side, don’t go together, which is even more true if it is a marathon race. As no other BI vendor is developing GPU based BI and CPM software, and as we’ve gained further momentum in development, I’m confident that we are in a good position for medal winning in the BI race.

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.

In Business Intelligence, small vendors are better

Published on October 15, 2009 in Palo and Palo Suite. 0 Comments

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

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.

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.

Free Products and Pirates

Published on September 24, 2009 in Kristian. 1 Comment

Hal Varian, Chief Economist at Google says it, Chris Anderson says it, too: Digital products like music, news articles or software will be free in the long term. This is because the cost of a digital product drops down to its incremental cost in the interest of competition. And the cost to provide an additional unit of a digital product through the internet is simply zero.

Not a threat to Open-Source companies and certainly not a threat to Palo, but most definitely a lesson still to be learned by many other software vendors in the world.

This weekend we have the parliamentary elections here in Germany. The Internet with its free digital products will create challenges for many vendors in the digital economy, but on Sunday I am most interested to see what challenges our established political parties will face from the new and internet minded Piratenpartei (Pirate Party).

The Pirates talk about reforming the copyright and patent law, ending the excessive surveillance, profiling, tracking and monitoring of innocent people conducted by Government and big businesses and they want to ensure that everyone has true freedom of speech, in the internet as well. Germany’s established parties don’t really have sufficient answers (or even awareness) of this problems. I would not be surprised if the Pirates became a political force in Germany, very much to the surprise of many people.

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.

How many CFOs are still relying on Excel only?

Published on September 3, 2009 in Palo and Palo for Excel. 1 Comment

In today’s fiercely competitive economy, business leaders are turning to the finance group to do a lot more than accounting. Yet despite the world of finance (and the role of the CFO) being turned on its head, spreadsheet functionality has remained basically the same for years. Today’s version of Excel would be instantly familiar to someone who hadn’t used it for a decade.

Whilst CFOs are being increasingly relied upon to turn companies around, how many are still only relying on a static, relatively unchanged formula – the good old electronic spreadsheet? Microsoft gauges the number of Excel users worldwide at more than 400 million, and Forrester Research estimates 50 to 80 percent of enterprises still rely on stand-alone spreadsheets for critical applications like financial reporting or budget forecasting.

Yet increasingly, a common lament for CFO users is that piecing together cash flow, profitability and operations data with Excel spreadsheets and static reports is inefficient and inadequate. Even within companies who have BI tools in-house and have spent significant money on this, when it comes to ad-hoc reports or shared forecast processes, the “last mile” will still be done from many CFOs with an Excel spreadsheet.

This tug-of-war between data consistency and flexibility will plague users of stand-alone spreadsheets for the foreseeable future. CFOs need to take aim squarely – or at least obliquely – at Excel. The answer lies in CPM and BI tools, like Palo, that are absolutely essential to optimize spreadsheets: online modules that are low or no cost, and truly Web-based allowing for file sharing on a global basis. Because, more than ever, companies compete based on the decisions they make.