Cubegeek

Solutions 2007 Coolness

Several  impressions and reflections on the last Hyperion conference ever.

MOLAP Wars
The good news is that some of the best Hyperion folks on the planet are still with the company. That is to say some stellar Essbase product managers and developers are on the team and not going away. That includes guys like Marciante, Nader, Hite and Tai as well as very capable new folks I've never seen before. The even better news is that it's Essbase again. Not Hyperion Analysis Services Enterprise 9X or some huge mouthful. So when it gets right down to it, the Essbase we know and love is there in all its beauty.

The bad news is that I didn't have time to sit down with the Essbase guys and talk about futures. It was too crowded. But I did see some slides that said 'Trickle-Feed' and some that said 100s of Gigabytes OK. Since I have heard last year that the aim was for ASO to handle a full set of BSO functionality, eventually, I will have faith. So there is no doubt that Essbase has a future.

In fact, I think the case will be made abundantly clear going forward that the Essbase-centric paradigm of OLAP development will continue into the future. It is the platform for the future of BI. The Oracle-Hyperion people know exactly where the strengths and weaknesses of OLAP are, but Essbase still  has got the advantage. That advantage depends on the combined company's ability to reposition the meaning of BI.

Yeah I said it was murky, but that's because the presence or absence of Essbase is not necessary to make sense of the application stack. It's not until you get into the details of how capable these applications are going to be at the individual level that you begin to recognize how key Essbase is to them. That's why Oracle is challenged to present BI in a whole new context.

The New BI Paradigm
People have been saying 'drill down' and 'slice and dice' for two decades now. And you would think that they would have gotten tired of that. Oracle is going to show them how retarded that is with their new technologies going forward. The reason is that now that System 9 is the big dog on the block, the APIs to Essbase are going to support a class of workflows that have never been so integrated before.

What the Hyperion engineers know, better than perhaps anyone on the planet, is how analytic workflows run. They have been doing complex OLAP for many years. They understand the cyclical nature of OLAP queries and iterative analysis, planning, goal-setting and review. Now this is what they are calling the BI paradigm, and what is new and exciting is that they are going to be exposing more of the data mining features of Essbase (that have been around for years) into the BI paradigm.

Obviously Essbase has always been able to handle multiple scenarios of data. There isn't one real application that we deliver that doesn't have at least three. What's new is that they are going to bring forecasting into the foreground with tools that will allow end users to drill down into a set of products (for example) and mine the past data, as well as the past generated data and automate the process of selecting heuristics, employ them and expose those heuristics for adjustment.

This means in Hyperion Planning, it will automatically fit curves at every level and generate a base forecast for you. It will crank those through and allow you to select for factors that effect the outcome, and recycle. This is way more intense than "take last year's sales number and add 10% and spread it". This is more like figure out which products have the most affinity with this new product we have and predict its sales, calculate the profit and forecast the profitability. Now take into consideration my promotions budget, and reforecast sales volume. Now what's the profitability?  Now lets cut costs here and reallocate to tweak the price against this demand curve. What's profitability now?

That's the new paradigm of BI. It's not just reporting, it's smart extrapolation of financial and operational history and application of data mining for the individual user forecasting. It is a revolution just waiting to happen.
 

Merger News
One of the comments that struck me in elaborating details of the merger was that Oracle was impressed with the amount of work that Hyperion produced per capita. As a relatively small company, the extent to which Hyperion absolutely dominated BPM was stunning to the Oracle folks. In addition, I've heard tell that they are staffing up their pre-sales and post-sales consulting groups. So all that points to more reasons to believe that as a wholly owned subsidiary, Hyperion will not lose, but possibly gain headcount within Oracle.

Crystal Ball
I've been in this business for a long time and even I had a hard time following the presentation by the guy from Decisioneering. What I can tell you is that a whole new era of risk management is coming to be integrated into the planning cycle. That is because unlike the products I've seen before with SAS and SPSS, this stuff is totally integrated with Excel. Excel makes the world go around, and Essbase connects that world with the universe of business data. But I just learned how to do a 10,000 case Monte Carlo Simulation and a 10 factor sensitivity analysis in under an hour. I saw curve fitting and confidence intervals put in place and I saw a 4 year forecast built in front of my eyes that was simply brilliant. And guess what? They did it at Ludicrous Speed.   

MapReduce
By far the coolest thing that I learned at the conference, aside from the fact that I've still got my presentation chops, is that the guys at Tellme are using MapReduce to get massive data into Essbase. What does that mean? It means that I now have a framework for integrating VLDB data into an analytic platform.

Tellme basically generates 100GB of data daily. Huh? What? That's what I said. 100GB daily. it comes from processing 5 million telephone calls which generate on the order of 150 million detail records, PER DAY! They've got something like 30 MySQL master / slave arrangements in a two-tier MapReduce network. They issue a query through this very cheap, open source network of PCs in about 4 minutes. That's right, in 4 minutes they have processed all of the aggregate data they need into an ASO cube. That, my friends is scalability.

SmartSpace
The second coolest thing at this conference was SmartSpace. Basically, this is the future look and feel of BI. All I can say about it is this: Forget portals. Forget Web 2.0. It's all about the widgets. SmartSpace is, make no mistake about it, a killer app for Windows Vista. I could not take my eyes off of the screen. It was absolutely gorgeous. It's a single signon, intergrated IM, multi-canvas workspace for System 9 that deploys sharable widgets for every kind of display and control available to the Hyperion stack. It turns a PC for BI what Photoshop does for a Mac. There are auto-hiding toolbars, floating controls like a calc script initialization widget, for example. I didn't think anything would make me take a second look at all this again, but this is the front-end of the future. Oh by the way, it also works like a thumbdrive. You 'mount' a SmartSpace and double click and you get the hierarchy of System 9 Workspace right in the Windows explorer. I'm in the Beta, buddy.

Hyperion Solutions Conference General Session

The general session of the Hyperion conference here in Orlando is over and ... I like it. This one was light on hype, and pretty much got straight down to business as it was dominated by the presentation of Thomas Kurian who will inherit and run the Hyperion development organization.

First thing first. I've been pretty positive that the merger was a good one, and Hyperion president Godfrey Sullivan communicated that the vision of the two companies was very much aligned. He said that the entire thing went very smoothly and you can be fairly sure that he was straight about it. The whole thing went down in four months and now Hyperion is officially a wholly owned subsidiary of Oracle.

What is very clear here is that Kurian is all business and has a rather deep understanding of the products and their capabilities. But there is a very subtle genius in this acquisition which is going to make a fairly impressive change in the marketplace. But let me give you one piece of background that I discovered yesterday. The Hyperion salesforce is safe. This is a big deal. So it appears to me that Oracle is big enough and healthy enough not to go headlong into 'synergies' and cost cutting and that they probably won't until they have significantly changed the market. Even so there's a whole lot of product to sell, which is the genius. Kurian's product strategy is clear. He's going to a modified Six Sigma business model that boils down to the phrase "Insight into Action". There are going to be vertical suites for all of the major industries, and all of the major products are going to be represented. The secret sauce? Contextual navigation.

You may have heard that before. The whole idea of the Hyperion Portal which died somewhere back in 2000-2002 was all about that. The problem was that even though it was a great idea, nobody with Oracle Financials was going to manage their business from the context of new BI technology. Kurian's emphasis on drilling down to application-level detail and changing assumptions in the ERP and CRM systems shows that this is how customers prefer to manage their operational business. It always has been a difficulty for Hyperion to sell end-to-end, not because of a technical limitation but to a lack of an operational integration story. Those days are over.

It's All System Nine, Baby
Oracle buys System 9 completely. System 9 will be the framework for all of the BPM going forward. It is now recast as Enterprise Performance Management Systems. Before long, everybody will be calling this the Management System. It integrates financial reporting, operational BI and CRM+ERP. The vision is bold, it's sensible, it's workable and it looks damned near inevitable. It's also going to cost a lot of money because all of these systems are going to have a lot of baggage. However, there's a lot of time to work all that out.

But here's my quick sketch on it in terms of emphasis.

Hyperion Winners:

• System 9: New Industry Standard
• Planning: Huge win
• Crystal Ball: Big Win
• Hyperion Scorecard: Win
• Hyperion Strategic Planning: Win
• Hyperion FM: Big Fat Win
• Hyperion MDM: Big Fat Win

Oracle Winners:

• Oracle BI EE: Big Win
• Oracle Alerts: Big Win
• Oracle BI Packaged Apps: New Industry Standard

Muddy:

• Hyperion EIS
• Hyperion Essbase

In the new era that's coming, all of the analytics from every cross-platform thing is going to trickle up through System 9. All that's left is to figure out a new Semantic Layer and Oracle BI Foundation. This is where it gets muddy. Obviously Essbase is the keystone of all of the Hyperion Applications today. But at the enterprise level, you don't care about any of that in terms of presenting the solution to customers. Depending upon how smart Oracle gets in that Semantic Layer (dimensions, hierarchies, metrics, calculations.. etc) pipes through to the BI Foundation can go any which way. In this regard, sure we'll be serving up multidimensional models for analysis and reporting, but they won't necessarily be optimized for Essbase. But that will all be internal to the new development group. I have a lot of confidence that Essbase won't be going away as a product, but in the context of EPMS, it's just a small fraction.

Basically the number of integrated applications available has just skyrocketed. Making all of it work together is going to be a lot quicker and smoother than most people imagine and making sense of the products is going to be less complicated than I thought. The big vision works, the integration is on a fast track, this train is moving.

Why Essbase Looks Muddy
The architectural look of this whole new stack boils down to something fairly straightforward. All of the major Hyperion apps work through a middle tier which is a combination of a relational repository, a Java server and one or more Essbase Cubes. But once the semantic layer is muscled out, you may be able to swap Essbase out for Oracle. That's going to take years, and lots of extentions to OWB, but systems like Star Analytics' SIS could facilitate all that. Now that Oracle owns Essbase, we'll find out price/performance wise if that's a good direction to head, but I'm convinced that the two companies are going with the market leading technologies as a guide. I don't know if Express is behind Oracle BI EE, but Kurian was talking about Essbase as a source on the same level as Hyperion IR and Oracle BI EE. Meaning that pure Essbase apps may be just considered point BI solutions which don't play a major role in the EPMS world going forward.

So I conclude that Oracle is putting behemoth resources behind this. Their combined R&D with Hyperion's, which was no joke, is going to put huge pressures on everybody else in the space. The story already works and already looks architecturally sound. With the combined customer base, the possibilities are very broad and deep.

Fire or Poison?

Deca-BDE is a controversial chemical. According to the SeattlePI:

Stung by the Legislature's groundbreaking ban of a controversial fire retardant, the chemical industry isn't giving up.

Even with Gov. Chris Gregoire's approval all but assured -- she's scheduled to sign the legislation today -- it still didn't extinguish the chemical manufacturers' fight. They've run full-page ads in the state's largest newspapers. They wrote a letter to Gregoire urging a veto. Since 2005, they've spent more than $220,000 here lobbying against a ban.

Why the big spending? Because there is potentially more at stake than prohibitions on flame retardants called PBDEs in Washington furniture, televisions and computers.

A ban here could be the beginning of the end for PBDEs, or polybrominated diphenyl ethers. It could mark a move toward more aggressive protections by local governments -- at a time when the federal government is largely ineffectual in its regulation of long-used but potentially dangerous industrial chemicals.

"The larger story is that there is a highly organized and very well-funded effort to change the way in which chemicals are regulated around the world," said John Kyte, spokesman for the Bromine Science and Environmental Forum, a trade group representing PBDE manufacturers.

One of these days, if a guy like me gets rich in the business, I would have a business model that would put together publicly accessible knowledge bases that would allow environmentalists, industry trade groups, academics, legislators and the general public to look at the same data at the same time and make more scientific conclusions than they are doing now.

My jaundiced eye says this is basically going to come down to some study saying that the increase in the number of cancers in some lab mice goes up x% when they stuff Deca down their throats, and on the other hand we're going to see a repeat of the empty crib commercial because little Johnny's pajamas didn't have fire-retardant. Then somebody else is going to charge that Johnny can't read because the flame retardant in his pajamas is giving him brain damage.

In my business, I make systems that would allow the manufacturer of pajamas (or furniture, or whatever) identify the commodity in his supply chain which is controversial and allow him to swap that out and run a simulation of what a new and improved 'organic' product would cost. I'm talking hours here. With blog-speed, this could become its own marketing campaign. The trick is to make the market that fast.

Even though I'm caustic about environmentalist thinking (mostly because it is ignorant of manufacturing processes and puts an arbitrary infinite cost on those things it wishes to avoid), I have no problem with their end goals. But it should fall to the consumer to have and know the alternatives. I want to be able to go to Dollar Tree and buy pajamas for a buck and know that they are not fire-safe, or that they are fire-safe with DecaBDE for 2 bucks or that they are firesafe with the new post-Washington State controvery Sierra Club approved fire retardant for 3 bucks.

Open the process and break the interest group oligopoly on product R&D. Or sleep naked and buy a fire extinguisher.

Boot Time

I haven't bothered with Windows Vista, and with any luck I won't have to for several years. XP Pro is as good as it gets under Microsoft, and I'm not taking the home network any further along the Microsoft upgrade path. We'll go to Mac first. I refuse DRM, and XP does everything I want.

Over at ZD Adrian Kingsley-Hughes asks why long boot times matter. I essentially get his point, but what he overlooks are the number of software installs, not to mention seemingly random software patches from MSFT that require soft boots. Also, whether we want to admit it or not, there are many companies who require that people turn off their PCs in order to save energy. I know that's dumb and such businesses are on the verge of collapse, but... But the biggest reason long boot times are annoying is because they don't have to be.

Leaving aside the brilliance of Knoppix and other Linux on a CD rootkits that can embed very cool Windows utilities, we know that there are a whole lot of extra things that go on during the boot cycle depending upon what software you have installed on your machine. Why not just push those back to the post boot phase? When I'm logging in I know that a whole lot of profile driven stuff is loaded onto the machine. How many times have I sat waiting to get a wireless connection in an airport hoping the last few minutes of battery life don't slip away before the hourglass over my toolbar disappears? What's going on here? Something. There could be a class of applications that I want to be able to use right away just after boot, and just like power consumption priorities, I ought to be able to determine readiness priorities.