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.
How is PALO planning to relate to the broader world of spreadsheet OLAP?
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.
What is your corporate outlook? Do you intend to make most of your money on the client software? Are you planning an “enterprise” Excel client or something of the kind?
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.
What is your relation to the German spreadsheet OLAP maker MIS-AG?
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.
Is the codebase of PALO completely new, or does it derive from Alea?
It is completely new, we have never seen or touched the code base of ALEA (or Applix TM1).
Do you intend to relate in some way to Microsoft beyond Excel? What about Analysis Services?
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.
Can we expect to see some unique features in the product?
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.
What about the clients you are producing? Are you planning to develop for Open Office too?
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.
How will Jedox respond if a group decides to produce a free web client that competes with your commercial one?
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.
How hard is it for a developer to put a web client together using open source tools like PHP?
Easy. Have a look at the demo source code for PHP that you can download with the Palo SDK.
What about involving a community of developers? Are you intending to involve others outside of the company, or do you intend to do the development in-house?
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.
Have you had feedback or reviews so far?
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.
What about documentation?
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.
In our review, we cited an apparent lack of open source infrastructure for PALO, noting that there is no site on Savannah or Sourceforge, or automated bug tracking. Do you have any comments on this?
Both the forum and the public bug tracker are available since the very first day that Palo came out.
August 3rd, 2006
I mentioned the new open source OLAP server PALO (OLAP backwards) in an earlier post. This TM1 workalike is still at an early stage, but any new offering in this area - especially if it is free - is of great interest to spreadsheet OLAP users.
In this post; I will give readers some idea of what this software offers, what it promises and what it lacks. I’ve put together some screenshots and added some thoughts on this entry.
Some of the people behind PALO were earlier involved with MIS AG’s spreadsheet product Alea, and PALO looks quite similar. There’s a long history here which may be worth telling elsewhere, but what matters in this context is that the designers of this software “get it” about how OLAP and spreadsheets should work together.
What’s more, the product is not cheap, it’s actually free - released under the orthodox Gnu Public License (GPL) which restricts distribution only by forbidding the recipients to restrict further redistribution, including source code.
But don’t plan to replace your corporate TM1 applications with a free replacement anytime soon - PALO is missing many
key TM1 features, including security, advanced calculation engine, fast imports, views, subsets and others. Some of the missing features are in the Roadmap, others may take a long time to come.
And while the server is available under the GPL, clients come under a different set of licenses and restrictions, including the free but proprietary Excel client and several completely commercial clients as well, including a web server called the Worksheet Server.
Still, this is a very interesting entry in the public domain world. The server runs on Linux and Windows; the most “native” client, of course, is Excel, but it comes with a Linux Eclipse add-in to browse tables as well. You can download and install Palo from here.
Palo has a few flashy screen shots on its web site, but real spreadsheet OLAP users will want to know a bit more. I’ve put together a few screen shots to show how it looks.
PALO is a server-based system, with an Excel front end on the model pioneered by Applix TM1. The server holds the data; spreadsheets connect to the server over the network and bring in data as needed.
Here are some screenshot showing a simple session:
Connecting to a local server:
Selecting a view:
Simply selecting “paste” provides the following excel spreadsheet.
The “PALO.DATAC” formula for the value contains a reference for the server and to the dimension elements that identify the correct intersection.
The string “Gross Profit” is also a reference to a database value, in this case a dimension element. It uses the “PALO.ENAME” formula, which pulls out a dimension element.
If we double-click on “Gross Profit” we get a “drill-down” as follows”
Similarly, if we double-click on “Variance” we get the following:
Looking at this view, we can see as well that the “title elements” - products, region, month and year are also defined by “PALO.ENAME” formulas.
Double-click on one of these, and we get a selection box like the following:
This is a normal outline view, and we can open it by clicking on the “+” signs, to produce a view as follows:
Selecting, for example, France, we get the following:
We can make “stacked slices by dragging the “Product” dimension to the “Column titles” area as follows:
This will give us a spreadsheet like this:
And double-clicking on “All products” will open that dimension out as follows:
Dragging and dropping a few other dimensions and elements around, we look at the same data in a completely different way something like the following:
This sort of an OLAP view is very effective in uncovering data problems - in this case, it seems the test database hasn’t been updated since 2004.
The nice thing about these spreadsheets is that they are not “magic” - we can save them and retrieve them, and on recalculation they will again retrieve the latest data from the server. We can insert a column, add a regular spreadsheet formula and format it, and everything will behave the way we expect, like this:
If we take every dimension down to the bottom level, we can type in new values which are then sent to the database. So if we want to look at budgets and enter actuals, we can work with a view like this:
If we put the cursor on January Actuals for Desktop L, we can type in the number “323″, press the Enter key, and get this screen:
The number has been sent to the server, and we are looking at a view of server data again. Of course, in the absence of security, there’s no way to make sure the user doesn’t “correct” actuals to values she likes better either 
These slice spreadsheets can be saved and retrieved, and when recalculated with the PALO add-in, they will reflect the current status of the database from the server.
Aside from spreadsheets, though, there is no way to store views. And there is no way to store subsets either, although subsets for views can be manipulated with some basic operations. Here’s an element selection window:
Shortcomings
In short, the product looks like it’s got the basics. But it has critical shortcomings too. Of course, are all those missing features. But looking at the roadmap, it seems they are well understood and at least some of them will be here soon. Other weaknesses concern me more.
- A key shortcoming is documentation. I tried to connect from my Excel client to a linux server without success — the connection software asks for a login and a port number, but there’s no documentation on how to set these. Indeed, while there’s documentation on the API and the source code is open, the user side is almost completely undocumented.
- There’s little evidence that the developers of PALO are taking advantage of the internet infrastructure for open source development, or trying to attract a community of contributors outside of their walls. There’s no site on Sourceforge or Savannah, which host much other GPL software. There is no wiki, no automated bug reporting such as Buzilla or launchpad; their linux software is not packaged for Red Hat or Debian. Prospective users may wonder whether the software will develop rapidly or have a long life if it depends on the fortunes of the Jedox company, and does not foster feedback and contributions from a broad community..
- There are unresolved questions about how the free software model of the server will blend with the commercial angles of the clients. Is anyone thinking of a client for Open Office Calc, for example? How will Jedox respond if a group decides to produce a free web client that competes with their commercial one
In sum, PALO has enough features to make it interesting. It probably won’t challenge the corporate sweet spot of its commercial competitors, and it hasn’t shown a deep involvement with the open source community.
On the other hand, the availability of a free spreadsheet OLAP product may open up new horizons for this genre, especially in smaller and non-profit environments. And it might attract the interest of open source heavy hitters like Sun or IBM, which would turn a very interesting corner indeed.
Barring that, the future of PALO will depend upon how the community of users, developers and implementors take to it, and how well they are able to take advantage of its open source paradigm. We will be following this with interest.
July 25th, 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
