Cubegeek

Ideas Worth Spreading: Hans Rosling from TED 2006

"See" how the world is changing. Visual imagery can tell stories and truths which would be very hard to capture and communicate otherwise. Hans Rosling, Professor of International Health, Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden since 1998, uses beautiful animated charts and minimalistic diagrams to explain the world we live in. Poverty, money and health can be seen at once shaping or being shaped by world events, technology and the passing of time. This is a beautiful lesson in visual communication. A must view for any serious presenter.

The Clocksite

Here's an idea and a term to coin. Clocksite.

A clocksite is a website put together to establish or debunk any economic or social theory that makes predictions about some important occurrence or keeps track of some indicator of public interest.

The term originates from the now familiar practice of billboard advertisements which are calibrated at a certain rate to estimate some important metric of public interest, like the number of smokers who die from lung cancer, the estimated number of dead in war, the number of dollars in the federal deficit or most famously the 'number of minutes to nuclear holocaust'.

A clocksite however, would employ multiple metrics and varying types of analysis and would allow for a more sophisticated and nuanced analysis of the issue at hand.  It might be open for collaboration or some officially sponsored by a partisan group.

As more open source tools become available to present analytic data on websites, we should expect more clocksites to follow the open publishing models that are now being experimented with by the folks at Swivel and ManyEyes. I have been interested in this matter for many years as I have been involved with building such sites with proprietary tools for business.

Step One in World Domination

If you ask me the reason that Business Objects is successful as a company, I would say that the single most important thing it did was publish this book: e-Business Intelligence: Turning Information into Knowledge into Profit.

Why? Because if you wanted to know about BI in the e-Business world, this was the book to buy. Business Objects technology was a huge ungainly patchwork of half a dozen little technologies that allowed a patient person to build anything slowly. That was a perfect fit for hundreds of low cost developers, but I doubt you'll find many folks who would testify that BO tech improved their company's business. It got embedded, that's for sure, but it wasn't evolutionary by a long shot. That didn't matter, Liataud had mindshare. He got managers and buyers to buy his book and seed his products.

The moral of this story is that if you show a man a big enough fish he'll buy any old boat.

Hyperion is the high concept company with strong products, but everybody knows that the strongest consultants for them are in the diaspora. To extend the metaphor, they have great boats and great maps but you've got to hire your own crew. All too often the cushy seats and GPS make amateurs think they can captain Hyperion yachts. It ain't necessarily so.

What's new and exciting now is that Hyperion is making moves on the academy. They're going after mindshare.This strategy worked for SAS for years. Having students know your tools before they enter the workplace gives you a leg up when it comes to the cutthroat world of enterprise software sales.

Mindshare is all about captalizing on the big idea, or putting one into circulation ahead of the need. It's telling the big fish story and getting people excited about getting to the destination. Now that Hyperion is chumming the university system, exciting days may be ahead.

Tableau Gets Geschke

If there is going to be a next generation of easy to use visualization tools, chances are looking good that Tableau is going to be the company that does it. They are starting to look very attractive and my nickel says that an IPO is in the offing within the next two years. Everyone is now on notice that their potential as regards technical vision, which was unquestionably first rate, is now world class. The potential is stellar. OK so I'm biased.

SEATTLE, Feb. 13 /PRNewswire/ -- Tableau Software, the global leader in visual analysis software, today announced that Dr. Charles Geschke, founder and Chairman of Adobe Systems, has joined the company's Board of Directors.

    (Logo:  http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20050922/SFTH013LOGO )

"Chuck brings a marvelous wealth of industry experience and wisdom to Tableau, having founded and built one of the most admired companies in the world," said Christian Chabot, Tableau's CEO and Co-founder. "His entrepreneurial spirit and deep knowledge of visual software applications is a great addition to our young company. We're honored that he has chosen Tableau Software."

"I am delighted to join the board at Tableau Software," said Dr. Geschke. "It's really exciting to join a dynamic team with inventive technology and plans for a family of great products."

Dr. Charles Geschke co-founded Adobe in 1982 with Dr. John Warnock, driving technology innovations that forever transformed how people create, process, and engage with information. A respected and inspiring industry leader, Geschke was instrumental in developing some of the software industry's most pioneering technologies. Presently, he is Adobe's Chairman of the Board.

Prior to co-founding Adobe, Geschke formed the Imaging Sciences Laboratory at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center where he directed research activities in the fields of computer science, graphics, image processing, and optics. Geschke holds a doctorate in computer science from Carnegie-Mellon University as well as a master's degree in mathematics and an A.B. in classics, both from Xavier University.

XBox 720

This is the solution to the video download problem. Get a company like Tivo or Microsoft to build a IPV6 P2P appliance which is essentially a 1 Terabyte File Server. Operate it over cable or FIOS networks, charge $400 for the box and $50 per year subscription. Make an agreement with all content providers for measured cuts of the files and give the user unlimited peer sharing.

SaaS vs Appliances

Don Linstedt has been watching something that I think I should be watching, and that is the emergence of appliances into the enterprise applications space.

Every so often a future suggestion that I've discussed (made by more than just me) actually happens. Now I'm not the kind of guy to normally say "I told you so." However on this occasion, I feel it's important to announce that the market is changing, dramatically - and that software vendors NEED TO TAKE NOTE!!! EAI is now available in plug-and-play appliance format. In this entry we'll discuss what this means, and how it will affect ETL/ELT, EII, and EIEIO (old Mac Donald had an appliance... E-I-E-I-O).

Cast Iron Systems announced in 2006 their EAI appliance. They've made some incredible enhancements, and were recently reviewed again: http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/01/26/05TCcastiron_1.html?APPLICATION+DEVELOPMENT

While the review was neither favorable nor unfavorable, it highlights an important point I've been making about appliances: they will become a combination of hardware and software vendors, specifically ETL/ELT and hardware, EII and hardware, EAI and hardware, and eventually BI and hardware will hook up. Why not? Hardware increases sales, increases price points - at the same time, it can increase ease of use.

He's right. And moreover if these appliances work as advertised, then they will be the counterbalancing force to the ever increasing complexity of tiered services. That means IT can take control where it was losing ground to complexity and simplify at the same time.

My experience is telling me that IT is having increasingly difficult times managing all of the tiers required for the web-centric enterprise. When a repository is not on the same subnet as an application server which is located somewhere else than authentication, stuff gets crazy and nobody wants to debug that. We get a cascade of bouncing servers because the people who installed whatever ear file aren't around any longer or nobody quite knows why some rows are locked in a database whose name doesn't really explain which application is using it. Let's not even get into the prodigious number of bot users which administer tasks for each and every one of the applications dancing in unison. It has been a nightmare, and because of that nightmare I had predicted that more and more companies will find SaaS an increasingly irresistable option.

BUT..

This appliance technology promises plug and play enterprise applications and that's even more irresistable, especially as vendors collaborate. I'm excited.

Data Integration: Imhoff Nails It

Read the whole thing:

And now the latest are full blown integration centers of competency or excellence -- for the entire enterprise with data integration as the keystone. These centers are being used not just to create BI applications but have expanded to take on master data management environments and to even handle the integration of operational systems together. Seems the same skill sets and many of the technologies used to create a data warehouse are exactly the skills and technologies needed to support MDM or operational interfaces.

Yes, ETL has grown up and so has data integration. Those of you who grew up in the BI space, start spreading your wings. You will find that you are desperately needed in almost every aspect of your organization. Start promoting the idea of coordinating all the data integration initiatives in your enterprise. You will find a ready and hungry audience. Bring the disciplines that you learned in building your BI environment with you into these new areas. They will be greatly appreciated, I guarantee it!

Yours in BI and all other forms of data integration success.