Vector Space Inc. has been acquired by Application Consulting Group Inc, a New Jersey-based Business Inteligence consulting company.
This acquisition will bring substantial new resources to Vector Space’s activities, enhancing its ability to deliver outstanding Applix TM1(TM) solutions to its customers.
The press release is attached
Add comment December 20th, 2006
I wish I had a penny for every person who has asked me what Applix TM1 is and why we like it so much. Even enthusiastic users often know little of its origins. I thought readers of this website might want to know a little more –. I meant to write a short piece, but it just grew — so I’ve split it into parts. Let me know what you think. . . . David
TM1 began as a part of the spreadsheet “revolution” in 1984. Dan Bricklin had invented the spreadsheet with VisiCalc in 1979; Lotus 1-2-3 followed in 1983. This new type of computer application exponentially increased the ability of users to apply computer power to problems of their choice without expert intervention. Modelled on a simple grid of paper, the spreadsheet was easy to grasp and easy to use. It could be applied to models large and small, to all manner of reports, fair-sized databases and large calculations involving many variables and formulas.
Unlike many key innovations in computing, the spreadsheet had no roots or theory from the academy, or from the research labs of AT&T, IBM, Xerox or the likes. It had no direct predecessors. It used the unusual but easy declarative programming model, replacing thousands of lines of FORTRAN with a series of formulas that a high school student could understand.
On the bleeding edge of technology, the spreadsheet could easily have faded back to wait for its moment like many other brilliant ideas. But it had some unique advantages. It was extremely accessible to users, immediately useful, and – perhaps most important — appeared just as as microcomputers were coming on the scene. Bricklin’s website tells the story well.
The spreadsheet became the tool of choice for a wide variety of bright and creative people in many fields – financial managers, of course, but also planners, business analysts, economists and scientists.
But as spreadsheet use expanded, and people started to use it for more and bigger projects, the simple paradigm of the ruled sheet of paper became unwieldy.
Many developers at the time looked for a logical next step for the spreadsheet.
Manuel (Manny) Perez, the “father” of TM1 — now CTO at Applix — came up with a unique combination of features that addressed all of these problems.
Manny created a product that integrated a database into the spreadsheet, keeping an extremely tight, formula-driven link between the two. The database was not a conventional relational database, but a special kind of multidimensional database designed for the types of things spreadshets often do. Each value in the database was identified by a set of strings, one from each of its user-defined dimensions. For example, a budget number was identified as the intersection of “2006”, “January”, “Sales”, “Striped paint”, and “Boston”. The dimensions could specify how to “consolidate” numbers. Using this information, if the user asked for “Eastern Region,” the database would calculate a total of the numbers for “Boston”, “New York” and “Washington”, for instance.
These things may seem routine to OLAP users today, but at the time the term OLAP had not been coined and only a few products did anything similar. A good industry history can be found here.
Already in its early versions, TM1 included a multitude of useful features for its user-developers, including the ability to work with more than one “cube” (or multidimensional table), the ability to store strings in cubes, and the “process” command, which uses a spreadsheet to import ASCII data files into the database.
Manny’s TM1 spreadsheet had all the usual functionality, but additionally included a set of special functions to retrieve data from and send it to the database. These formulas worked with strings, so a value could be retrieved based upon the text contained elsewhere in the spreadsheet. And they worked just like all other spreadsheet formulas, so that new data could be brought in by simply changing the value of a cell and recalculating.
This innovation solved most of the problems with spreadsheets until then. It separated data from formulas. It made many very large spreadsheets unnecessary by storing their data in the database. And of course it was multidimensional from the ground up.
Additionally, Manny consistently implemented all aspects of use and administration to work from spreadsheets, making the product very friendly to spreadsheet users.
In 1989, Manny took a further leap, implementing the database side as a server for spreadsheet clients, thus making TM1 a multi-user tool for group collaboration protected by security. This solved the last spreadsheet problem mentioned above — the multiple versions of the truth contained in differet documents. While early releases included the proprietary spreadsheet, TM1 soon made the leap to enabling Lotus and then Excel spreadsheets to serve as clients. Following this came a series of enhancements and improvements, each remarkable in its own way. Manny kept a very close line of communication with TM1’s key power users and seemed to be exactly on time and in tune with the evolving needs of the product’s base.
TM1 continued to be closely connected to its spreadsheet roots.
TM1 quickly caught on with a small group of sophisticated spreadsheet programmers, and developed a very loyal following. Many thought TM1 was the “next big thing”; the logical successor to Lotus 1-2-3, but time was to prove them wrong.
– In the next section, we will discuss some of the further history of TM1 and current developments. We will also reflect on some of TM1’s obstacles and successes, and muse on the many ways in which it was ahead of its time.
Add comment August 8th, 2006
Following our post on the new PALO open source package, Jedox president Kristian Raue agreed to answer a few questions about the company’s plans for the product.
By July 2006 more than 10,000 people had downloaded Palo and we have 50 new downloads each day. So I think we have already had a large impact in the spreadsheet OLAP market. With the availability of a 32- and 64-bit version and with the availability of a Linux version for Palo our target market is potentially bigger than the market of other well-known players in the spreadsheet OLAP field. With Palo 1.5 later this year, we will have access rights, element attributes, an Embedded Transaction Engine and also an advanced engine that promises even more speed. And after 1.5 we will have a 2.0 release in 2007, hopefully 1st Quarter 2007.
Jedox makes money by selling Worksheet-Server, which is our OLAP-enabled multi-user Excel-to-Web solution for corporate use. We also earn money by selling support and consultancy work regarding Palo and Worksheet-Server implementations. At this time we don’t plan on making money by selling some advanced or enterprise version of the Palo Excel-Client or Palo Server. With this business model closely bound to Open-Source technologies we managed to grow more than 100% in revenue each year.
There a basically two relationships to MIS AG. In 2002 I sold my shares of Intellicube AG, which was the initial developer of OnVision, to MIS AG. And second, Peter Raue, formerly president of MIS AG, was my brother. He unfortunately passed away in 2004.
It is completely new, we have never seen or touched the code base of ALEA (or Applix TM1).
I loved Excel from the very first day that it appeared back in 1987. Apart from that, there is not much relation to Microsoft. You can connect Palo and MS AS using Cubeware.
Yes. In some ways, Palo is unique already today for example with its Linux version. In September we will have the ETE (Embedded Transaction Engine), which will allow the server to trigger other processes when server events occur. Such processes could include, for example, PHP scripts or user programs. It will be very interesting to see where clever users and developers go with such unprecedented capabilities. With 15 years of intensive experience in the spreadsheet OLAP market we will deliver more unique features in future releases.
For Palo there a APIs available in all directions (C, C++, .NET, PHP and Java at www.jpalo.net). We used the .NET API to build our freeware Excel client. So far, we are not supporting Open Office yet, but that might change in the future or somebody else volunteers to do it.
We would love to see such a development, which would expand the visibility of Palo. By the way, we also like Google Spreedsheets and Excel 12 Server. These products help us develop the market for Excel-to-Web solutions.
Easy. Have a look at the demo source code for PHP that you can download with the Palo SDK.
MOLAP is about speed. So we currently decided to develop the core engine of Palo ourselves to make sure it is fast. For all other aspects of Palo (clients, ETL, Reporting tools, etc) we are very open and supportive to others outside the company. Look at the jpalo project for example, it is developed by Tensegrity.
Very positive feedback from our customers so far. In October the first book about Palo will appear. Palo is already used successfully in large companies and organizations, for example check this.
We are continuously improving the documentation and welcome suggestions about missing parts. Also the book - which will probably be in German and probably also in English and French - will help a lot. If you have a problem with missing information, simply use the Palo Forum. This forum closely monitored by our team. If you think you have found a bug, please report it to our bug tracker.
Both the forum and the public bug tracker are available since the very first day that Palo came out.
Add comment August 3rd, 2006
Every now and then we see a request for the OLAP Council benchmark, last updated in 1998; since nobody else seems to have all the materials in one place, we have decided to put them here as a service.
While it may be somewhat dated now, this is still the only such benchmark there has been. Our friends Erik Thomson and George Spofford of DSS Labs produced it for the OLAP Council, which was an industry association of many of the leading OLAP companies. Thomsen and Spofford, who worked with us for a while, have maintained a unique focus on theory in an industry not noted for its enthusiastic support for theory.
The diversity of OLAP products ensured that results of benchmark runs could be — and were — conditioned and spun in various ways by the sponsoring companies. Nonetheless, the benchmark continues to represent a set of basic tasks which OLAP products can be expected to perform, and which can be measured and timed.
The OLAP Council is no longer, and with it, the function of certifying benchmark auditors, so this is hardly a current project. We are making available on our site the benchmark specification, and also a little program that generates data files to run the specification.
Add comment August 1st, 2006
This article says that almost nobody reads an Internet news post more than 36 hours old.Well, that article is almost a month old, but it’s still very timely.
This by way of saying that now that this site has begun to take on a life, it seems that we’reproducing new content about once a week. We’re no fireballs, but hopefully the infrequency is balanced by the quality and subject matter — how are we doing? Send us email at Vector Space.
August 1st, 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:
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.
Add comment June 19th, 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 –
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.
Add comment 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.
Add comment June 16th, 2006
The big news last week was that Google is going to add a spreadsheet to its suite of web products. Not that they’ve done it, you can see a tantalizing graphic and sign up for the opportunity to be a beta tester (!) here
Continue Reading Add comment June 12th, 2006
The most useful powerful software applications let users create applications directly. Theorists and academics are exploring this truth, which many of us “in the trenches” have often observed.
Continue Reading Add comment June 6th, 2006
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