It's official. I'm moving back to the Essbase world.
It has been about six weeks now since I have moved out of my old digs where I was VP of Services for a Microsoft partner. It was an invigorating experience, rather like a shower that ran uncontrollably hot and cold, alternately luxurious and chilling. I'm sure that I learned a few things, but I haven't bother much to decontexualize them. As folks have been speaking to me recently about my change, it has been difficult to express what has been good or bad without speaking out of school. Nevertheless I did have a good analogy that I used a bit while I was employed there regarding my disposition.
Half of my job was gardener, the other half of my job was catcher. So I wore two gloves, one for tending to flowers and fertilizing, the other for catching fastballs, curveballs and the occasional spitball. Occasionally I would use the wrong glove for the wrong task and a flower would get clobbered. More often it was the other way around and I would get seriously burned by the pepper. Builds character. Of course I wish all of my former employees and colleagues all the best, except for one, and that's all there is to say about that.
Today I'm completely decompressed and back to running on slightly modified versions of my old anti-Microsoft bias and gripes. There's a part of me that cannot wait to get back into Unix, and especially on the Macintosh platform. There's another part of me that cannot wait to get back to big hunkin' enterprise customers and their money and sophistication, and there's another part of me that is almost ready to get back to heads down, hands on work, but not really.
As it turns out I'll be doing that hands on in the short term and I'll be working on front-ends for a change. The thing that has really got my attention is, as I've said, multitouch and new visual paradigms for business intelligence. I've decided that 'glasstop' I will now call 'tabletop' computing and that's what I'll be working on as I come up with some theories and product ideas. They will grow to technology and technique ideas as I get my hands on a Mac later this year and start learning UI programming. This very simple application by CNN of Perceptive Pixel gives you an idea of what I think will be irresistible to BI customers in the next generation.
Immediately, however, I'm going to be working with Tim Tow of Applied OLAP on his new Dodeca product, which is a soup to nuts .NET smart client whose features I helped brainstorm a couple years ago. It's a comprehensive development environment and the most sophisticated thing you can put on top of Essbase. Tim and his team are world class and I'm really proud to be working with him. In fact, I just bought 3/4 Terabyte drive just to celebrate the data mongering possibilities I will start to exploit as I get back into serious Essbase.
I have to say that in my career so far, the project that helped generate some of the Dodeca features was my most extreme and extraordinary. It was conceived to replace the cost estimating system for a global 100 company that allowed 17,000 Essbase models to be living all at once. That's was not centrally maintained and driven by a DW, that was with 5,000 cube modelers, with dimension building access who were generating their own data. It's the one that got me up with the HP folks in Cupertino running Essbase on the big 64bit Superdome where I did some screaming performance stuff with parallel java servers and the whole nine yards. When I tell you this front end is the greatest harness ever for Essbase, I kid you not. From what I've seen and know about its capabilities, it's everything that Alphablox and Arcplan promised to be, but better. Most importantly, It allows you to build custom workflows, custom forms and custom distributions of all that with more security granularity than any other front-end to Essbase. Again, all in a secure .NET framework. The guys at Applied OLAP have rethunk client distribution for the BI world, and everybody who is doing anything at all in Excel and VB really needs to check it out.
Only Dodeca enables this kind of Essbase farming. There's nothing else anywhere that scales as an application framework for Essbase. Did I say that it does distributed master data management too? Yeah. That's part of it. The really fabulous idea that makes this even more interesting is something of a future, but you know me, that's where my head goes. The fabulous idea is that you can begin to think about the move from unstructured data to multidimensional structured data because Dodeca is going to make it easier to do so on a different scale than people are accustomed to. But that's all I'm going to say for the moment.
It's wonderful to be as old as I am and still get excited about stuff.
Comments