Let me start this post by saying that Vector Space has no involvement or business interest in DQS, a startup with a product in beta. But when we heard about it from a former colleague, we thought it was worth a deeper look. Perhaps you’ll find it interesting too.
DQS proposes a new way of bringing together the information resources of large enterprises.
To understand why we’re interested in DQS, we must peek at the dark side of IT. Consider the following common scenario:
Our consultants go to a meeting with a major client.
“I need to analyze corporate operations,” says the customer. “Sales, cost of sales, profitability by channel, that sort of thing, month by month.
“Our company makes 123 different products, it sells them in 54 regions, with 37 sales channels, and produces them at 19 plants. Although it’s a lot of information, we’re already capturing it all in our systems. All I need you to do is pull it together and put it on my computer screen so I can work with the big picture. Can you do it by the end of the month?”
One might imagine every serious enterprise already has this information. After all, how does anyone run a company without knowing what they make on each product? Changes in sales for their channels? Seasonal and regional variations in demand?”
One might also imagine that such a facility is easily created.
But imagination would be wrong, on both counts.
Companies are run without this vital information every day.
And applications that draw information from all over the enterprise pose daunting challenges, because of the way IT systems are typically structured.
The information archipelago
Every large company has many systems. Just a little digging usually shows that corporate information resources reside in a patchwork of purpose-built systems.
- There are systems for different business functions: a sales system, a production system, another for inventory;
- Local offices create their own systems to meet their special needs, especially where the company operates in several countries;
- Where there have been mergers and acquisitions – which is to say at most large companies — legacy systems of the merger parties continue for years, resulting in further division even within the same function. So it is not unusual to find multiple sales systems, multiple production systems within one company.
To make things worse, these systems run on different hardware using different operating systems and different database technologies. Even where they run on software from the same vendor – SAP, for example — implementation can be different and incompatible. And in many cases, similar concepts – product, for example – can be represented by different codes, or tracked at different levels of detail.
Each of the incompatible legacy systems embodies years of staff effort, and represents a complex study in its own right, leading to major staffing headaches. Someone working on one system can only move to another after a significant period of retraining and apprenticeship.
Integration can be shockingly difficult.
Bridge-building vs. consolidation
For analysis – and for every other enterprise function — communication among systems is a constant issue. Some IT departments spend a majority of their resources building bridges connecting their data archipelago, especially in the wake of a merger.
Analytics consultants like ourselves spend no end of time (and customer money) working on what we call ETL – Extraction, Transformation and Loading – in other words, systems reconciliation.
Seeking a detour around the data swamp, many companies initiate a new master system, designed to replace the many existing systems. But since the old systems are needed for ongoing business, a new system is – at least in the short run – simply one more system for the stew.
Mega-system risks
Building a new comprehensive system is also very risky. Big-ticket items costing in the many millions of dollars, such facilities typically require a large dedicated staff and multiple years to complete. To achieve success, they require impeccable design and execution, and a very stable development team.
Even under the best of circumstances, enterprise systems projects only begin to display measurable results towards the end. But they can only succeed with a reliable, unfailing, continuous commitment by top management and investors over long months and years. Impressive persuasive powers are required to maintain such a commitment years in advance of results.
A new system of this size is critically vulnerable to management changes to further mergers and acquisitions and to the financial fortunes of the organization. And the costs of such projects can depress the bottom line dramatically.
The DQS idea
The founders of DQS have a different idea. A great deal of useful business logic and experience is embodied in the well-tested and highly-debugged legacy systems of every company. The problem is not the systems, which typically work very well, but their mutual incompatibility.
What if, instead of building bridges system by system, we designed a method for systems to communicate in general? After all, the incompatibilities between systems are not endless – they can be enumerated and solved in a general way.
What if each computer in the enterprise could be retrofitted with a program whose only purpose is to communicate with the others, using a common communication protocol? And what if these communication links could be made extremely easy to access, so that the information resources of the enterprise appear to reside on one virtual system even though they really live on multiple systems?
John Walsh, Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer wrote to me in a recent email:
We are in beta now with our enterprise version of what we refer to as an Optimized Service Oriented Architecture. We have spent the last four and a half years patenting and developing the technology. We were granted a special patent reserved for technologies that are “in the national interest”. We were told by the patent office that only 10 of these patents have been awarded in past 40 years. We have several other patents pending.
The technology enables you to quickly create an inventory of re-usable objects – data structures, software, and processes – that can be used in designing, testing and implementing applications and processes. The technology is language and operating environment agnostic. We do not rely on XML or Web Services standards.
We have a run time environment that creates a linked network out of disparate computers.
The interface allows users to collaborate and share distributed data, software, processes and computers without regard to geography.
Our goal is to “industrialize” Information Technology. Our models are the manufacturing and construction industries in which products are designed and then assembled from components built by hundreds or thousands of different vendors located all around the world.
This is the premise of DQS. It looks promising to us, and we’re curious to see how it plays out. We’ll bring more to you as we learn more ourselves – stay tuned.
June 27th, 2006
We’re always looking for software that can help solve problems.
Think about it. No problem, no special solution. No special solution, no consultant to implement it. So consultants are always looking for problems, and then figuring out how to solve them.
It may not always be the easiest way to pay the bills, but it’s what we do.
So here’s some of the software we’ve been checking out recently. In the next week or two we’ll talk more about each of these:
- DQS is an enterprise solution now in testing that promises to integrate multiple corporate systems into one virtual “über-system.” We are very interested.
- Enterprise Optimizer claims to accurately model entire enterprises and figure out the real-world consequences of business decisions. Many of our customers do this sort of thing; we’ll be looking a little more closely at this offering.
- PALO is a new public domain read-write in-memory OLAP server with an Excel front end that looks alarmingly similar to the familiar TM1. What is it and what does it mean for users and developers?
We’ll also be talking with some of the personalities in our world getting their views on software directions.
This web site is new, and we’re very interested in your responses and ideas. If you have something of interest to suggest, if you like, or if you violently object to what we’re putting out here, please drop us a line at Vector Space.
June 19th, 2006
Since I had more questions than answers about Temtec and Applix (see my last post below), I decided to take the bull by the horns and call Dave Menninger, Applix’s Vice President for Marketing to get a little perspective on what Applix is thinking. Here’s what he told me:
While TM1 continues to be the king of the Excel-OLAP connection, experience with customers has shown that not all business users of TM1 data are Excel users or like to work in Excel. There are many who prefer a full-featured GUI user interface. Applix had already moved to address this need with in the design of its web client, TM1 Web, but Temtec’s Executive Viewer offers a mature, elegant and powerful GUI interface tested and proven with “non-Excel” users.
In the future, Menninger said, Applix will integrate some of the features of Temtec’s product into TM1 Web as well, making it more friendly to a wider variety of users while continuing to support its customer base of Excel users.
I noted that Temtec today accesses other OLAP databases, including SAP BW, Microsoft Analysis Services and Hyperion. I asked Menninger how that plays with TM1’s server model and what Applix’s plans might be for the other OLAP technologies.
Menninger noted that the two companies have had parallel activities with many of the same relationships – Applix, like Temtec is Microsoft Gold Certified, and SAP certified as well. The big exception, of course is Hyperion, which has been competitive in many situations. Menninger said he hopes that Temtec’s Hyperion relationship will continue, and perhaps even increase. Hyperion and Applix, he noted, co-exist at many accounts, so there may well be a basis for a closer relationship.
Finally, as a hands-on integrator, I asked a strictly technical question. Does Temtec support writeback?
Yes, Menninger responded, it does write back, but only through the ODBO interface, which is somewhat limited. This, he said, may be an area of further development going forward.
Stay tuned . . .
June 16th, 2006
We frogs in the spreadsheet OLAP puddle watch Applix closely, since Applix is the producer of TM1, the first and still — in our view — the most serious product in the category.
So it caused no little excitement here to read that Applix has acquired Temtec International, Netherlands-based makers of a web-based OLAP browser product, Executive Viewer. The press release is here.
Interestingly, Executive Viewer works with many other servers, including Hyperion, SAP BW and Microsoft Analysis Services.
Temtec founder Hubert Heijkers will assume the role of Vice President and Chief Architect at Applix.
We’ve been TM1 partners since the days of the dinosaurs, and TM1 is a major part of our business, so you can imagine our interest is more than academic. Of course, at this early date there are more questions than answers –
- What does Executive Viewer offer that Applix’s just-announced TM1 Web doesn’t?
- What were the business considerations for this alliance?
- Does this viewer support writeback (I’d assume not, but who knows??
- How does this addition complement Applix’s offerings, especially in the server area?
We’ll be looking closer at this in the next few days, and we’ll share what we find (and are free to disclose) with our readers.
June 16th, 2006
Well, one day after I wrote about Bricklin’s wikicalc, the news came in that Bricklin will team up with Socialtext , an “enterprise wiki” organization, whose product is also open source.
If this sort of product interests you, you might want to take a look at Bricklin’s blog entry explaining the vision. He notes that:
. . . wikiCalc appears to be aimed at a different use than many of the other browser-based spreadsheets (BBSS’s). wikiCalc assumes that the result should be a normal-looking web page that is perhaps part of a larger website. The reader shouldn’t know the page was created with a spreadsheet tool. wikiCalc is more in the class of a blogging tool or a wiki.
. . .
I assumed that the common use for wikiCalc would be one to ten authors for each page, with one to millions of readers. This is similar to most wikis and blogs. . . .
wikiCalc is not for heavy calculation or large data spreadsheeting. It is not a data processing system like Excel and other high-end spreadsheets. It is not a database management system. It is a sophisticated web page authoring tool that helps you easily handle data that involves numbers and text in a semi-regular way that many people find very comfortable.
June 16th, 2006
Reading the entry below about web spreadsheets, a friend writes:
The web spreadsheets are interesting, but it will be very difficult to unseat Excel even with a free product. Look at Open Office - they have a very capable product, but they’ve barely dented Excel\’s customer base. For corporate customers, it’s all about standards. Excel is the de facto spreadsheet standard, and large companies don’t like to take risks with non-standard software. And then there’s the training issue - “everyone” knows Excel.
That’s interesting, and it’s certainly what Microsoft would like to believe. Organizations are conservative by nature. Perhaps they need to be, since one ill-considered jump can destroy everything they have.
On the other hand, all organizations — and especially commercial ones — are acutely sensitive to the bottom line. After all, Open Office is actually free, that is, it costs nothing, zilch, the great Goose Egg, it has very similar functionality and it reads and writes the Office files that everyone else is using.
It’s not just price
Price aside the most interesting advantage of open source for any organization is that the file formats are open, meaning that they can not be held hostage by a software company. Also, their files will not turn to binary mush if the software du jour changes. Have you tried to read your old WordPerfect files with a recent version of Word?
A significant advantage that Microsoft’s products retains is the market for add-on products like Applix TM1, which actually transform the spreadsheet into quite a different animal.
But most users use Excel for its native features. In the end, unless Excel offers a compelling technical advantage, the point may come where a tiny trickle turns to a flood.
(but price does count)
N.B. Although the FLOSS gurus insist that they mean their software is “free as in speech, not free as in beer,” free beer is certainly received with full honors in suites where free speech may not be so welcome. “Beer freedom” may be the decisive factor propelling free software to dominance in the commercial arena.
June 14th, 2006
