illuminate Systems' iLuminate May Be the Most Flexible Analytical Database Ever

OK, I freely admit I’m fascinated by offbeat database engines. Maybe there is a support group for this. In any event, the highlight of my brief visit to the DAMA International Symposium and Wilshire Meta-Data Conference conference last month was a presentation by Joe Foley of illuminate Solutions , which marked the U.S. launch of his company’s iLuminate analytical database.

(Yes, the company name is “illuminate” and the product is “iLuminate”. And if you look inside the HTML tag, you’ll see the Internet domain is “i-lluminate.com”. Marketing genius or marketing madness? You decide.)

illuminate calls iLuminate a “correlation database”, a term they apparently invented to distinguish it from everything else. It does appear to be unique, although somewhat similar to other products I’ve seen over the years: Digital Archaeology (now deceased), Omnidex and even QlikView come to mind. Like iLuminate, these systems store links among data values rather than conventional database tables or columnar structures. iLuminate is the purest expression I’ve seen of this approach: it literally stores each value once, regardless of how many tables, columns or rows contain it in the source data. Indexes and algorithms capture the context of each original occurrence so the system can recreate the original records when necessary.

The company is rather vague on the details, perhaps on purpose. They do state that each value is tied to a conventional b-tree index that makes it easily and quickly accessible. What I imagine—and let me stress I may have this wrong—is that each value is then itself tied to a hierarchical list of the tables, columns and rows in which it appears. There would be a count associated with each level, so a query that asked how many times a value appears in each table would simply look at the pre-calculated value counts; a query of how many times the value appeared in a particular column could look down one level to get the column counts. A query that needed to know about individual rows would retrieve the row numbers. A query that involved multiple values would retrieve multiple sets of row numbers and compare them: so, say, a query looking for state = “NY” and eye color = “blue” might find that “NY” appears in the state column for records 3, 21 and 42, while “blue” appears in the eye color for records 5, 21 and 56. It would then return row=21 as the only intersection of the two sets. Another set of indexes would make it simple to retrieve the other components of row 21.

Whether or not that’s what actually happens under the hood, this does illustrate the main advantages of iLuminate. Specifically, it can import data in any structure and access it without formal database design; it can identify instances of the same value across different tables or columns; it can provide instant table and column level value distributions; and it can execute incremental queries against a previously selected set of records. The company also claims high speed and terabyte scalability, although some qualification is needed: initial results from a query appear very quickly, but calculations involving a large result set must wait for the system to assemble and process the full set of data. Foley also said that although the system has been tested with a terabyte of data, the largest production implementation is a much less impressive 50 gigabytes. Still, the largest production row count is 200 million rows – nothing to sneeze at.

The system avoids some of the pitfalls that sometimes trap analytical databases: load times are comparable to load times for comparable relational databases (once you include time for indexing, etc.); total storage (including the indexes, which take up most of the space) is about the same as relational source data; and users can write queries in standard SQL via ODBC. This final point is particularly important, because many past analytical systems were not SQL-compatible. This deterred many potential buyers. The new crop of analytical database vendors has learned this lesson: nearly all of the new analytical systems are SQL-accessible. Just to be clear, iLuminate is not an in-memory database, although it will make intelligent use of what memory is available, often loading the data values and b-tree indexes into memory when possible.

Still, at least from my perspective, the most important feature of iLuminate is its ability to work with any structure of input data—including structures that SQL would handle poorly or not at all. This is where users gain huge time savings, because they need not predict the queries they will write and then design a data structure to support them. In this regard, the system is even more flexible than QlikView, which it in many ways resembles: while QlikView links tables with fixed keys during the data load, iLuminate does not. Instead, like a regular SQL system, iLuminate can apply different relationships to one set of data by defining the relationships within different queries. (On the other hand, QlikView’s powerful scripting language allows much more data manipulation during the load process.)

Part of the reason I mention QlikView is that iLuminate itself uses QlikView as a front-end tool under the label of iAnalyze. This extracts data from iLuminate using ODBC and then loads it into QlikView. Naturally, the data structure at that point must include fixed relationships. In addition to QlikView, iAnalyze also includes integrated mapping. A separate illuminate product, called iCorrelated, allows ad hoc, incremental queries directly against iLuminate and takes full advantage of its special capabilities.

illuminate, which is based in Spain, has been in business for nearly three years. It has more than 40 iLuminate installations, mostly in Europe. Pricing is based on several factors but the entry cost is very reasonable: somewhere in the $80,000 to $100,000 range, including iAnalyze. As part of its U.S. launch, the company is offering no-cost proof of concept projects to qualified customers.

The Limits of On-Demand Business Intelligence

I had an email yesterday from Blink Logic , which offers on-demand business intelligence. That could mean quite a few things but the most likely definition is indeed what Blink Logic provides: remote access to business intelligence software loaded with your own data. I looked a bit further and it appears Blink Logic does this with conventional technologies, primarily Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services and Cognos Series 7.

At that point I pretty much lost interest because (a) there’s no exotic technology, (b) quite a few vendors offer similar services*, and (c) the real issue with business intelligence is the work required to prepare the data for analysis, which doesn’t change just because the system is hosted.

Now, this might be unfair to Blink Logic, which could have some technology of its own for data loading or the user interface. It does claim that at least one collaboration feature, direct annotation of data in reports, is unique. But the major point remains: Blink Logic and other “on-demand business intelligence” vendors are simply offering a hosted version of standard business intelligence systems. Does anyone truly think the location of the data center is the chief reason that business intelligence has so few users?

As I see it, the real obstacle is that most source data must be integrated and restructured before business intelligence systems can use it. It may be literally true that hosted business intelligence systems can be deployed in days and users can build dashboards in minutes, but this only applies given the heroic assumption that the proper data is already available. Under those conditions, on-premise systems can be deployed and used just as quickly. Hosting per se has little benefit when it comes to speed of deployment. (Well, maybe some: it can take days or even a week or two to set up a new server in some corporate data centers. Still, that is a tiny fraction of the typical project schedule.)

If hosting isn't the answer, what can make true “business intelligence on demand” a reality? Since the major obstacle is data preparation, then anything that allows less preparation will help. This brings us back to the analytical databases and appliances I’ve been writing about recently : Alterian, Vertica, ParAccel, QlikView, Netezza and so on. At least some of them do reduce the need for preparation because they let users query raw data without restructuring it or aggregating it. This isn’t because they avoid SQL queries, but because they offer a great enough performance boost over conventional databases that aggregation or denormalization are not necessary to return results quickly.

Of course, performance alone can’t solve all data preparation problems. The really knotty challenges like customer data integration and data quality still remain. Perhaps some of those will be addressed by making data accessible as a service (see last week’s post). But services themselves do not appear automatically, so a business intelligence application that requires a new service will still need advance planning. Where services will help is when business intelligence users can take advantage of services created for operational purposes.

“On demand business intelligence” also requires that end-users be able to do more for themselves. I actually feel this is one area where conventional technology is largely adequate: although systems could always be easier, end-users willing to invest a bit of time can already create useful dashboards, reports and analyses without deep technical skills. There are still substantial limits to what can be done – this is where QlikView’s scripting and macro capabilities really add value by giving still more power to non-technical users (or, more precisely, to power users outside the IT department). Still, I’d say that when the necessary data is available, existing business intelligence tools let users accomplish most of what they want.

If there is an issue in this area, it’s that SQL-based analytical databases don’t usually include an end-user access tool. (Non-SQL systems do provide such tools, since users have no alternatives.) This is a reasonable business decision on their part, both because many firms have already selected a standard access tool and because the vendors don’t want to invest in a peripheral technology. But not having an integrated access tool means clients must take time to connect the database to another product, which does slow things down. Apparently I'm not the only person to notice this: some of the analytical vendors are now developing partnerships with access tool vendors. If they can automate the relationship so that data sources become visible in the access tool as soon as they are added to the analytical system, this will move “on demand business intelligence” one step closer to reality.

* results of a quick Google search: OnDemandIQ, LucidEra, PivotLink (an in-memory columnar database), oco, VisualSmart, GoodData and
Autometrics.

Service Oriented Architectures Might Really Change Everything

I put in a brief but productive appearance at the DAMA International Symposium and Wilshire Meta-Data Conference running this week in San Diego. This is THE event for people who care passionately about topics like “A Semantic-Driven Application for Master Data Management” and “Dimensional-Modeling – Alternative Designs for Slowly Changing Dimensions”. As you might imagine, there aren't that many of them, and it’s always clear that the attendees revel in spending time with others in their field. I’m sure there are some hilarious data modeling jokes making the rounds at the show, but I wasn’t able to stick around long enough to hear any.

One of the few sessions I did catch was a keynote by Gartner Vice President Michael Blechar. His specific topic was the impact of a services-driven architecture on data management, with the general point being that services depend on data being easily available for many different purposes, rather than tied to individual applications as in the past. This means that the data feeding into those services must be redesigned to fit this broader set of uses.

In any case, what struck me was Blechar’s statement the fundamental way I’ve always thought about systems is now obsolete. I've always thought that systems do three basic things: accept inputs, process them, and create outputs. This doesn't apply in the new world, where services are strung together to handle specific processes. The services themselves handle the data gathering, processing and outputs, so these occur repeatedly as the process moves from one service to another. (Of course, a system can still have its own processing logic that exists outside a service.) But what’s really new is that a single service may be used in several different processes. This means that services are not simply components within a particular proces or system: they have an independent existence of their own.

Exactly how you create and manage these process-independent services is a bit of a mystery to me. After all, you still have to know they will meet the requirements of whatever processes will use them. Presumably this means those requirements must be developed the old fashioned way: by defining the process flow in detail. Any subtle differences in what separate processes need from the same service must be accommodated either by making the service more flexible (for example, adding some parameters that specify how it will function in a particular case) or by adding specialized processing outside of the service. I'll assume that the people who worry about these things for a living must have recognized this long ago and worked out their answers.

What matters to me is what an end-user can do once these services exist. Blechar argued that users now view their desktop as a “composition platform” that combines many different services and uses the results to orchestrate business processes. He saw executive dashboards in particular as evolving from business intelligence systems (based on a data warehouse or data mart) to business activity monitoring based on the production systems themselves. This closer connection to actual activity would in turn allow the systems to be more “context aware”—for example, issuing alerts and taking actions based on current workloads and performance levels.

Come to think of it, my last post discussed eglue and others doing exactly this to manage customer interactions. What a more comprehensive set of services should do is make it easer to set up this type of context-aware decision making.

Somewhat along these same lines, Computerworld this morning describes another Gartner paper arguing that IT’s role in business intelligence will be “marginalized” by end-users creating their own business intelligence systems using tools like enterprise search, visualization and in-memory analytics (hello, QlikView!). The four reader comments posted so far have been not-so-politely skeptical of this notion, basically because they feel IT will still do all the heavy lifting of building the databases that provide information for these user-built systems. This is correct as far as it goes, but it misses the point that IT will be exposing this data as services for operational reasons anyway. In that case, no additional IT work is needed to make it available for business intelligence. Once end-users have self-service tools to access and analyze the data provided by these operational services, business intelligence systems would emerge without IT involvement. I'd say that counts as "marginalized".

Just to bring these thoughts full circle: this means that designing business intelligence systems with the old “define inputs, define processes, define outputs” model would indeed be obsolete. The inputs would already be available as services, while the processes and outputs would be created simultaneously in end-user tools. I’m not quite sure I really believe this is going to happen, but it’s definitely food for thought.

eglue Links Data to Improve Customer Interactions

Let me tell you a story.

For years, United Parcel Service refused to invest in the tracking systems and other technologies that made Federal Express a preferred carrier for many small package shippers. It wasn’t that the people at UPS were stupid: to the contrary, they had built such incredibly efficient manual systems that they could never see how automated systems would generate enough added value to cover their cost. Then, finally, some studies came out the other way. Overnight, UPS expanded its IT department from 300 people to 3,000 people (these may not be the exact numbers). Today, UPS technology is every bit as good as its rivals’ and the company is more dominant in its industry than ever.

The point of this story—well, one point anyway—is that innovations which look sensible to outsiders often don’t get adopted because they don’t add enough value to an already well-run organization. (I could take this a step further to suggest that once the added value does exceed costs, a “tipping point” is reached and adoption rates will soar. Unfortunately, I haven’t seen this in reality. Nice theory, though.)

This brings us to eglue, which offers “real time interaction management” (my term, not theirs): that is, it helps call center agents, Web sites and other customer-facing systems to offer the right treatment at each point during an interaction. The concept has been around for years and has consistently demonstrated substantial value. But adoption rates have been perplexingly low.

We’ll get back to adoption rates later, although I should probably note right here that eglue has doubled its business for each of the past three years. First, let’s take a closer look at the product itself.

To repeat, the basic function of eglue is making recommendations during real time interactions. Specifically, the system adds this capability to existing applications with a minimum of integration effort. Indeed, being “minimally invasive” (their term) is a major selling point, and does address one of the significant barriers to adopting interaction management systems. Eglue can use standard database queries or Web services calls to capture interaction data. But its special approach is what it calls “GUI monitoring”—reading data from the user interface without any deeper connection to the underlying systems. Back in the day, we used to call this “screen scraping”, although I assume eglue’s approach is much more sophisticated.

As eglue captures information about an on-going interaction, it applies rules and scoring models to decide what to recommend. These rules are set up by business users, taking advantage of data connections prepared in advance by technical staff. This is as it should be: business users should not need IT assistance to make day-to-day rule changes.

On the other hand, a sophisticated business environment involves lots of possible business rules, and business users only have so much time or capacity to understand all the interconnections. Eglue is a bit limited here: unlike some other interaction management systems, it does not automatically generate recommended rules or update its scoring models as data is received.

This may or may not be a weakness. How much automation makes sense is a topic of heated debate among people who care about such things. User-generated rules are more reliable than unsupervised automation, but they also take more effort and can’t react immediately to changes in customer behavior. I personally feel eglue’s heavy reliance on rules is a disadvantage, though a minor one. eglue does provide a number of prebuilt applications for specific tasks, so clients need not build their own rules from scratch.

What impressed me more about eglue was that its rules can take into account not only the customer’s own behavior, both during and before the interaction, but also the local context (e.g., the current workload and wait times at the call center) and the individual agent on the other end of the phone. Thus, agents with a history of doing well at selling a particular product are provided more recommendations for that product. Or the system could restrict recommendations for complex products to experienced agents who are capable of handling them. eglue rules can also alert supervisors about relationships between agents and interactions. For example, it might tell a supervisor when a high value customer is talking to an inexperienced agent, so she can listen and intervene if necessary.

The interface for presenting the recommendations is also quite appealing. Recommendations appear as pop-ups on the user’s screen, which makes them stand out nicely. More important, they provide a useful range of information: the recommendation itself, selling points (which can be tailored to the customer and agent), a mechanism to capture feedback (was the recommended offer presented to the customer? Did she accept or reject it?), and links to additional information such as product features. There is an option to copy information into another application—for example, saving the effort to type a customer’s name or account information into an order processing system. As anyone who has had to repeat their phone number three times during the course of a simple transaction can attest—and that would be all of us—that feature alone is worth the price of admission. The pop-up can also show the business rule that triggered a recommendation and the data that rule is using.

As each interaction progresses, eglue automatically captures information about the offers it has recommended and customer response. This information can be used in reports, applied to model development, and added to customer profiles to guide future recommendations. It can also be fed back into other corporate systems.

The price for all this is not insignificant. Eglue costs about $1,000 to $1,200 per seat, depending on the details. However, this is probably in line with competitors like Chordiant, Pegasystems, and Portrait Software. eglue targets call centers with 250 to 300 seats; indeed, its 30+ clients are all Fortune 1000 firms. Its largest installation has 20,000 seats. The company’s “GUI monitoring” approach to integration and prebuilt applications allow it to complete an implementation in a relatively speedy 8 to 12 weeks.

This brings us back, in admittedly roundabout fashion, to the original question: why don’t more companies use this technology? The benefits are well documented—one eglue case study showed a 27% increase in revenue per call at Key Bank, and every other vendor has similar stories. The cost is reasonable and implementation gets easier all the time. But although eglue and its competitors have survived and grown on a small scale, this class of software is still far from ubiquitous.

My usual theory is lack of interest by call center managers: they don’t see revenue generation as their first priority, even though they may be expected to do some of it. But eglue and its competitors can be used for training, compliance and other applications that are closer to a call center manager’s heart. There is always the issue of data integration, but that keeps getting easier as newer technologies are deployed, and it doesn’t take much data to generate effective recommendations. Another theory, echoing the UPS story, is that existing call center applications have enough built-in capabilities to make investment in a specialized recommendation system uneconomic. I’m guessing that answer may be the right one.

But I’ll leave the last word to Hovav Lapidot, eglue’s Vice President of Product Marketing and a six-year company veteran. His explanation was that the move to overseas outsourced call centers over the past decade reflected a narrow focus on cost reduction. Neither the corporate managers doing the outsourcing nor the vendors competing on price were willing to pay more for the revenue-generation capabilities of interaction management systems. But Lapidot says this has been changing: some companies are bringing work back from overseas in the face of customer unhappiness, and managers are showing more interest in the potential value of inbound interactions.

The ultimate impact of interaction management software is to create a better experience for customers like you and me. So let’s all hope he’s right.

ParAccel Enters the Analytical Database Race

As I’ve now written more times than I care to admit, specialized analytical databases are very much in style. In addition to my beloved QlikView, market entrants include Alterian, SmartFocus, QD Technology, Vertica, 1010data, Kognitio, Advizor and Polyhedra, not to mention established standbys including Teradata and Sybase IQ. Plus you have to add appliances like Netezza, Calpont, Greenplum and DATAllegro. Many of these run on massively parallel hardware platforms; several use columnar data structures and in-memory data access. It’s all quite fascinating, but after a while even I tend to lose interest in the details.

None of which dimmed my enthusiasm when I learned about yet another analytical database vendor, ParAccel. Sure enough, ParAccel is a massively parallel, in-memory-capable, SQL-compatible columnar database, which pretty much hits all the tick boxes on my list. Run by industry veterans, the company seems to have refined many of the details that will let it scale linearly with large numbers of processors and extreme data volumes. One point that seemed particularly noteworthy was that the standard data loader can handle 700 GB per hour, which is vastly faster than many columnar systems and can be a major stumbling block. And that’s just the standard loader, which passes all data through a single node: for really large volumes, the work can be shared among multiple nodes.

Still, if ParAccel had one particularly memorable claim to my attention, it was having blown past previous records for several of the TPC-H analytical query benchmarks run by the Transaction Processing Council. The TPC process is grueling and many vendors don’t bother with it, but it still carries some weight as one of the few objective performance standards available. While other winners had beaten the previous marks by a few percentage points, ParAccel's improvement was on the order of 500%.

When I looked at the TPC-H Website for details, it turned out that ParAccel’s winning results have since been bested by yet another massively parallel database vendor, EXASOL, based in Nuremberg, Germany. (Actually, ParAccel is still listed by TPC as best in the 300 GB category, but that’s apparently only because EXASOL has only run the 100 GB and 1 TB tests.) Still, none of the other analytic database vendors seem to have attempted the TPC-H process, so I’m not sure how impressed to be by ParAccel’s performance. Sure it clearly beats the pants off Oracle, DB2 and SQL Server, but any columnar database should be able to do that.

One insight I did gain from my look at ParAccel was that in-memory doesn’t need to mean small. I’ll admit to be used to conventional PC servers, where 16 GB of memory is a lot and 64 GB is definitely pushing it. The massively parallel systems are a whole other ballgame: ParAccel’s 1 TB test ran on a 48 node system. At a cost of maybe $10,000 per node, that’s some pretty serious hardware, so this is not something that will replace QlikView under my desk any time soon. And bear in mind that even a terabyte isn’t really that much these days: as a point of reference, the TPC-H goes up to 30 TB. Try paying for that much memory, massively parallel or not. The goods news is that ParAccel can work with on-disk as well as in-memory data, although the performance won’t be quite as exciting. Hence the term "in-memory-capable".

Hardware aside, ParAccel itself is not especially cheap either. The entry price is $210,000, which buys licenses for five nodes and a terabyte of data. Licenses cost $40,000 for each additional node cost $40,000 and $10,000 for each additional terabyte. An alternative pricing scheme doesn’t charge for nodes but costs $1,000 per GB, which is also a good bit of money. Subscription pricing is available, but any way you slice it, this is not a system for small businesses.

So is ParAccel the cat’s meow of analytical databases? Well, maybe, but only because I’m not sure what “the cat’s meow” really means. It’s surely an alternative worth considering for anyone in the market. Perhaps more significant, the company raised $20 million December 2007, which may make it more commercially viable than most. Even in a market as refined as this one, commercial considerations will ultimately be more important than pure technical excellence.

What's New at DataFlux? I Thought You'd Never Ask.

What with it being Valentine’s Day and all, you probably didn’t wake up this morning asking yourself, “I wonder what’s new with DataFlux?” That, my friend, is where you and I differ. Except that I actually asked myself that question a couple of weeks ago, and by now have had time to get an answer. Which turns out to be rather interesting.

DataFlux, as anyone still reading this probably knew already, is a developer of data quality software and is owned by SAS. DataFlux’s original core technology was a statistical matching engine that automatically analyzes input files and generates sophisticated keys which are similar for similar records. This has now been supplemented by a variety of capabilities for data profiling, analysis, standardization and verification, using reference data and rules in addition to statistical methods. The original matching engine is now just one component within a much larger set of solutions.

In fact, and this is what I find interesting, much of DataFlux’s focus is now on the larger issue of data governance. This has more to do with monitoring data quality than simple matching. DataFlux tells me the change has been driven by organizations that face increasing pressures to prove they are doing a good job with managing their data, for reasons such as financial reporting and compliance with government regulations.

The new developments also encompass product information and other types of non-name and address data, usually labeled as “master data management”. DataFlux reports that non-customer data is is the fastest growing portion of its business. DataFlux is well suited for non-traditional matching applications because the statistical approach does not rely on topic-specific rules and reference bases. Of course, DataFlux does use rules and reference information when appropriate.

The other recent development at DataFlux has been creation of “accelerators”, which are prepackaged rules, processes and reports for specific tasks. DataFlux started offering these in 2007 and now lists one each for customer data quality, product data quality, and watchlist compliance. More are apparently on the way. Applications like this are a very common development in a maturing industry, as companies that started by providing tools gain enough experience to understand how the applications commonly built with those tools. The next step—which DataFlux hasn’t reached yet—is to become even more specific by developing packages for particular industries. The benefit of these applications is that they save clients work and allow quicker deployments.

Back to governance. DataFlux’s movement in that direction is an interesting strategy because it offers a possible escape from the commoditization of its core data quality functions. Major data quality vendors including Firstlogic and Group 1 Software, plus several of the smaller ones, have been acquired in recent years and matching functions are now embedded within many enterprise software products. Even though there have been some intriguing new technical approaches from vendors like Netrics and Zoomix, this is a hard market to penetrate based on better technology alone. It seems that DataFlux moved into governance more in response to customer requests than due to proactive strategic planning. But even so, they have done well to recognize and seize the opportunity when it presented itself. Not everyone is quite so responsive. The question now is whether other data quality vendors will take a similar approach or this will be a long-term point of differentiation for DataFlux.

Red Herring CMO Conference: What Do Marketers Really Want?

I’ve spent the last two days at Red Herring Magazine’s CMO8 conference, which was both excellent and a welcome change from my usual focus on the nuts and bolts of marketing systems. Reflecting Red Herring’s own audience, the speakers and audience were largely from technology companies and many presentations were about business-to-business rather than business to consumer marketing. My particular favorites included AMD’s Stephen DiFranco, Ingram Micro’s Carol Kurimsky, and Lenovo’s Deepak Advani. DiFranco discussed how AMD manages to survive in the face of Intel’s overwhelming market position by focusing on gaining shelf space at retail and through other channel partners. Kurimsky described how her firm uses analytics to identify the best channel partners for her suppliers. Advani gave an overview of how Lenovo very systematically managed the transition of the ThinkPad brand from IBM’s ownership and simulataneously built Lenovo’s own brand. Although each described different challenges and solutions, they all shared a very strategic, analytical approach to marketing issues.

Personally I found this anything but surprising. All the good marketers I’ve ever known have been disciplined, strategic thinkers. Apparently, this is not always the case in the technology industry. Many in this audience seemed to accept the common stereotype of marketers as too often focused on creativity rather than business value. And, despite the prominent exception of Advani’s presentation, there seemed to be considerable residual skepticism of the value provided by brand marketing in particular.

The group did seem heartened at the notion, repeated several times, that a new generation of analytically-minded marketers is on the rise. Yet I have to wonder: the worst attended session I saw was an excellent panel on marketing performance measurement. This featured Alex Eldemir of MarketingNPV, Stephen DiMarco of Compete, Inc., Laura Patterson of VisionEdge Marketing, and Michael Emerson of Aprimo. The gist of the discussion was that CMOs must find out what CEOs want from them before they can build measures that prove they are delivering it. Obvious as this seems, it is apparently news to many marketers. Sadly, the panel had a magic bullet for the most fundamental problems of marketing measurement: that it’s often not possible to measure the actual impact of any particular marketing program, and that sophisticated analytics are too expensive for many marketers to afford. The best advice along those lines boiled down to “get over it” (delivered, of course, much more politely): accept the limitations and do the best you can with the resources at hand.

So, if the attendees voted with their feet to avoid the topic of marketing performance measurement, where did they head instead? I’d say the subject that most engaged them was social networks and how these can be harnessed for marketing purposes. Ironically, that discussion was much more about consumer marketing than business-to-business, although a few panelists did mention using social networks for business contacts (e.g. LinkedIn) and for business-oriented communities. The assembled experts did offer concrete suggestions for taking advantage of social networks, including viral campaigns, “free” market research, building brand visibility, creating inventory for online advertising, and creating specialized communities. They proposed a few new metrics, such as the number of conversations involving a product and the number of exposures to a viral message. But I didn’t sense much connection between the interest in social networks and any desire for marketers to be more analytical. Instead, I think the interest was driven by something more basic—an intuition that social networks present a new way to reach people in a world where finding an engaged audience is increasingly difficult. For now, the challenge is understanding how people behave in this new medium and how you can manage that behavior in useful ways. The metrics will come later.

Anyway, it was a very fun and stimulating two days. We now return to my regularly scheduled reality, which is already in progress.

QlikView Scripts Are Powerful, Not Sexy

I spent some time recently delving into QlikView’s automation functions, which allow users to write macros to control various activities. These are an important and powerful part of QlikView, since they let it function as a real business application rather than a passive reporting system. But what the experience really did was clarify why QlikView is so much easier to use than traditional software.

Specifically, it highlighted the difference between QlikView’s own scripting language and the VBScript used to write QlikView macros.

I was going to label QlikView scripting as a “procedural” language and contrast it with VBScript as an “object-oriented” language, but a quick bit of Wikipedia research suggests those may not be quite the right labels. Still, whatever the nomenclature, the difference is clear when you look at the simple task of assigning a value to a variable. With QlikView scripts, I use a statement like:

Set Variable1 = ‘123’;

With VBScript using the QlikView API, I need something like:

set v = ActiveDocument.GetVariable("Variable1")
v.SetContent "123",true

That the first option is considerably easier may not be an especially brilliant insight. But the implications are significant, because they mean vastly less training is needed to write QlikView scripts than to write similar programs in a language like VBScript, let alone Visual Basic itself. This in turn means that vastly less technical people can do useful things in QlikView than with other tools. And that gets back to the core advantage I’ve associated with QlikView previously: that it lets non-IT people like business analysts do things that normally require IT assistance. The benefit isn’t simply that the business analysts are happier or that IT gets a reduced workload. It's that the entire development cycle is accelerated because analysts can develop and refine applications for themselves. Otherwise, they'd be writing specifications, handing these to IT, waiting for IT to produce something, reviewing the results, and then repeating the cycle to make changes. This is why we can realistically say that QlikView cuts development time to hours or days instead of weeks or months.

Of course, any end-user tool cuts the development cycle. Excel reduces development time in exactly the same way. The difference lies in the power of QlikView scripts. They can do very complicated things, giving users the ability to create truly powerful systems. These capabilities include all kinds of file manipulation—loading data, manipulating it, splitting or merging files, comparing individual records, and saving the results.

The reason it’s taken me so long time to recognize that this is important is that database management is not built into today's standard programming languages. We’re simply become so used to the division between SQL queries and programs that the distinction feels normal. But reflecting on QlikView script brought me back to the old days of FoxPro and dBase database languages, which did combine database management with procedural coding. They were tremendously useful tools. Indeed, I still use FoxPro for certain tasks. (And not that crazy new-fangled Visual FoxPro, either. It’s especially good after a brisk ride on the motor-way in my Model T. You got a problem with that, sonny?)

Come to think of it FoxPro and dBase played a similar role in their day to what QlikView offers now: bringing hugely expanded data management power to the desktops of lightly trained users. Their fate was essentially to be overwhelmed by Microsoft Access and SQL Server, which made reasonably priced SQL databases available to end-users and data centers. Although I don’t think QlikView is threatened from that direction, the analogy is worth considering.

Back to my main point, which is that QlikView scripts are both powerful and easy to use. I think they’re an underreported part of the QlikView story, which tends to be dominated by the sexy technology of the in-memory database and the pretty graphics of QlikView reports. Compared with those, scripting seems pedestrian and probably a bit scary to the non-IT users whom I consider QlikView’s core market. I know I myself was put off when I first realized how dependent QlikView was on scripts, because I thought it meant only serious technicians could take advantage of the system. Now that I see how much easier the scripts are than today’s standard programming languages, I consider them a major QlikView advantage.

(Standard disclaimer: although my firm is a reseller for QlikView, opinions expressed in this blog are my own.)

Alterian Branches Out

It was Alterian's turn this week in my continuing tour of marketing automation vendors. As I’ve mentioned before, Alterian has pursued a relatively quiet strategy of working through partners—largely marketing services providers (MSPs)—instead of trying to sell their software directly to corporate marketing departments. This makes great sense because their proprietary database engine, which uses very powerful columnar indexes, is a tough sell to corporate IT groups who prefer more traditional technology. Service agencies are more willing to discard such technology to gain the operating cost and performance advantages that Alterian can provide. This strategy has been a major success: the company, which is publicly held, has been growing revenue at better than 30% per year and now claims more than 70 partners with more than 400 clients among them. These include 10 of the top 12 MSPs in the U.S. and 12 of the top 15 in the U.K.

Of course, this success poses its own challenge: how do you continue to grow when you’ve sold to nearly all of your largest target customers? One answer is you sell more to those customers, which means expanding the scope of the product. In Alterian’s situation, it also probably means getting the MSPs to use it for more of their own customers.

Alterian has indeed been expanding product scope. Over the past two years it has moved from being primarily a data analysis and campaign management tool to competing as a full-scope enterprise marketing system. Specifically, it added high volume email generation through its May 2006 acquisition of Dynamics Direct, and added marketing resource management through the acquisition of Nvigorate in September of that year. It says those products are now fully integrated with its core system, working directly with the Alterian database engine. The company also purchased contact optimization technology in April 2007, and has since integrated that as well.

The combination of marketing resource management (planning, project management and content management) with campaign execution is pretty much the definition of an enterprise marketing system, so Alterian can legitimately present itself as part of that market.

The pressure that marketing automation vendors feel to expand in this manner is pretty much irresistible, as I’ve written many times before. In Alterian’s case it is a bit riskier than usual because the added capabilities don’t particularly benefit from the power of its database engine. (Or at least I don’t see many benefits: Alterian may disagree.) This means having a broader set of features actually dilutes the company’s unique competitive advantage. But apparently that is a price they are willing to pay for growth. In any case, Alterian suffers no particular disadvantage in offering these services—how well it does them is largely unrelated to its database.

Alterian’s other avenue for expansion is to add new partners outside of its traditional base. The company is moving in that direction too, looking particularly at advertising agencies and systems integrators. These are two quite different groups. Ad agencies are a lot like marketing services providers in their focus on cost, although (with some exceptions) they have fewer technical resources in-house. Alterian is addressing this by providing hosting services when the agencies ask for them. System integrators, on the other hand, are primarily technology companies. The attraction of Alterian for them is they can reduce the technology cost of the solutions they deliver to their clients, thereby either reducing the total cost or allowing them to bill more for other, more profitable services. But systems integrators, like in-house IT departments, are not always terribly price-conscious and are very concerned about the number of technologies they must support. It will be interesting to see how many systems integrators find Alterian appealing.

Mapped against my five major marketing automation capabilities of planning, project management, content management, execution and analytics, Alterian provides fairly complete coverage. In addition to the acquisitions already mentioned, it has expanded its reporting and analytics, which were already respectable and benefit greatly from its database engine. It still relies on alliances (with SPSS and KXEN) for predictive modeling and other advanced analysis, but that’s pretty common even among the enterprise marketing heavyweights. Similarly, it relies on integration with Omniture for Web analytics. Alterian can embed Omniture tags in outbound emails and landing pages, which lets Omniture report on email response at both campaign and individual levels.

Alterian also lacks real-time interaction management, in the sense of providing recommendations to a call center agent or Web site during a conversation with a customer. This is a hot growth area among enterprise marketing vendors, so it may be something the company needs to address. It does have some real-time or at least near-real-time capabilities, which it uses to drive email responses, RSS, and mobile phone messages. It may leverage these to move into this area over time.

If there’s one major issue with Alterian today, it’s that the product still relies on a traditional client/server architecture. Until recently, Web access often appeared on company wish lists, but wasn’t actually important because marketing automation systems were primarily used by a small number of specialists. If anything, remote access was more important to Alterian than other vendors because its partners needed to give their own clients ways to use the system. Alterian met this requirement by offering browser access through a Citrix connection. (Citrix allows a user to work on a machine in a different location; so, essentially, the agency’s clients would log into a machine that was physically part of the MSP’s in-house network.)

What changes all this is the addition of marketing resource management. Now, the software must serve large numbers of in-house users for budgeting, content management, project updates, and reporting. To meet this need, true Web access is required. The ystems that Alterian acquired for email (Dynamics Direct) and marketing resource management (Nvigorate) already have this capability, as might be expected. But Alterian’s core technology still relies on traditional installed client software. The company is working to Web-enable its entire suite, a project that will take a year or two. This involves not only changing the interfaces, but revising the internal structures to provide a modern services-based approach.

Aprimo 8.0 Puts a New Face on Campaign Management

Loyal readers will recall a series of posts before New Years providing updates on the major marketing automation vendors: SAS, Teradata, and Unica. I spoke Aprimo around the same time, but had some follow-up questions that were deferred due to the holidays. Now I have my answers, so now you get your post.

Aprimo, if you’re not familiar with them, is a bit different from the other marketing automation companies because its has always focused on marketing administration—that is, planning, budgeting, project management and marketing asset management. It has offered traditional campaign management as well, although with more of a business-to-business slant than its competitors. Over the past few years the company acquired additional technology from Doubleclick, picking up the SmartPath workflow system and Protagona Ensemble consumer-oriented campaign manager. Parts of these have since been incorporated into its product.

The company’s most recent major release is 8.0, which came out last November. This provided a raft of analytical enhancements, including real-time integration with SPSS, near-real-time integration with WebTrends Web analytics, a data mart generator to simplify data exports, embedded reports and dashboards, and rule-based contact optimization.

The other big change was a redesigned user interface. This uses a theme of “offer management” to unify planning and execution. In Aprimo’s terms, planning includes cell strategy, marketing asset management and finance, while execution includes offers, counts and performance measurement.

Campaigns, the traditional unit of marketing execution, still play an important role in the system Aprimo campaigns contain offers, cells and segmentations, which are all defined independently—that is, one cell can be used in several segmentations, one offer can be applied to several cells, and one cell can be linked to several offers.

This took some getting used to. I generally think of cells of subdivisions within a segmentation, but in Aprimo those subdivisions are called lists. A cell is basically a label for a set of offers. The same cell can be attached to different lists, even inside the same segmentation. The same offers are attached to each cell across all segmentations. This provides some consistency, but is limited since a cell may use only some of its offers with a particular list. (Offers themselves can be used with different treatments, such as a postcard, letter, or email.) Cells also have tracking codes used for reporting. These can remain consistent across different lists, although the user can change the code for a particular list if she needs to.

Complex as this may sound, its purpose was simplicity. The theory is each marketer works with certain offers, so their view can be restricted to those offers by letting them work with a handful of cells. This actually makes sense when you think about.

The 8.0 interface also includes a new segmentation designer. This uses the flow chart approach common to most modern campaign managers: users start with a customer universe and then apply icons to define steps such as splits, merges, deduplication, exclusions, scoring, and outputs. Version 8.0 adds new icons for response definition, contact optimization, and addition of lists from outside the main marketing database. The system can give counts for each node in the flow or for only some branches. It can also apply schedules to all or part of the flow.

The analytical enhancements are important but don’t require much description. One exception is contact optimization, a hot topic that means different things in different systems. Here, it is rule-based rather than statistical: that is, users specify how customer contacts will be allocated, rather than letting the system find the mathematically best combination of choices. Aprimo’s optimization starts with users assigning customers to multiple lists, across multiple segmentations if desired. Rules can then specify suppressions, priorities for different campaigns, priorities within campaigns, and limits on the maximum number of contacts per person. These contact limits can take into account previous promotion history. The system then produces a plan that shows how many people will be assigned to each campaign.

This type of optimization is certainly valuable, although it is not as sophisticated as optimization available in some other major marketing systems.

I’m giving a somewhat lopsided view of Aprimo by focusing on campaign management. Its greatest strength has always been in marketing administration, which is very powerful and extremely well integrated—something Aprimo’s competitors cannot always say. Anyone with serious needs in both marketing administration and campaign management should give Aprimo a good, close look.

One More Chart on QlikTech

Appearances to the contrary, I do have work to do. But in reflecting on yesterday's post, I did think of one more way to present the impact of QlikTech (or any other software) on an existing environment. This version shows the net change in percentage of answers provided by each user role for each activity type. It definitely shows which roles gain capacity and which have their workload reduced. What I particularly like here is that the detail by task is clearly visible based on the size and colors of segments within the stacked bars, while the combined change is equally visible in the total height of the bars themselves.



In case you were wondering, all these tables and charts have been generated in QlikView. I did the original data entry and some calculations in Excel, where they are simplest. But tables and charts are vastly easier in QlikView, which also has very nice export features to save them as images.

Visualizing the Value of QlikTech (and Any Others)

As anyone who knows me would have expected, I couldn't resist figuring out how to draw and post the chart I described last week to illustrate the benefits of QlikTech.

The mechanics are no big deal, but getting it to look right took some doing. I started with a simple version of the table I described in the earlier post, a matrix comparing business intelligence questions (tasks) vs. the roles of the people who can answer them.

Per Friday's post, I listed four roles: business managers, business analysts, statisticians, and IT specialists. The fundamental assumption is that each question will be answered by the person closest to business managers, who are the ultimate consumers. In other words, starting with the business manager, each person answers a question if she can, or passes it on to the next person on the list.

I defined five types of tasks, based on the technical resources needed to get an answer. These are:

- Read an Existing Report: no work is involved; business managers can answer all these questions themselves.

- Drilldown in Existing Report: this requires accessing data that has already been loaded into a business intelligence system and preppred for access. Business managers can do some of this for themselves, but most will be done by business analysts who are more fluent with the business intelligence product.

- Calculate from Existing Report: this requires copying data from an existing report and manipulating it in Excel or something more substantial. Business managers can do some of this, but more complex analyses are performed by business analysts or sometimes statisticians.

- Ad Hoc Analyze in Existing: this requires accessing data that has already been made available for analysis, but is not part of an existing reporting or business intelligence output. Usually this means it resides in a data warehouse or data mart. Business managers don't have the technical skills to get at this data. Some may be accessible to analysts, more will be available to statisticians, and a remainder will require help from IT.

- Add New Data: this requires adding data to the underlying business intelligence environment, such as putting a new source or field in a data warehouse. Statisticians can do some of this but most of the time it must be done by IT.

The table below shows the numbers I assigned to each part of this matrix. (Sorry the tables are so small. I haven't figured out how to make them bigger in Blogger. You can click on them for a full-screen view.) Per the preceding definitions, they numbers represent the percentage of questions of each type that can be answered by each sort of user. Each row adds to 100%.


I'm sure you recognize that these numbers are VERY scientific.

I then did a similar matrix representing a situation where QlikTech was available. Essentially, things move to the left, because less technically skilled users gain more capabilities. Specifically,

- There is no change for reading reports, since the managers could already do that for themselves.

- Pretty much any drilldown now becomes accessible to business managers or analysts, because QlikTech makes it so easy to add new drill paths.

- Calculations on existing data don't change for business managers, since they won't learn the finer points of QlikTech or even have the licenses needed to do really complicated things. But business analysts can do a lot more than with Excel. There are still some things that need a statistician's help.

- A little ad hoc analysis becomes possible for business managers, but business analysts gain a great deal of capability. Again, some work still needs a statistician.

- Adding new data now becomes possible in many cases for business analysts, since they can connect directly to data sources that would otherwise have needed IT support or preparation. Statisticians can also pick up some of the work. The rest remains with IT.

Here is the revised matrix:


So far so good. But now for the graph itself. Just creating a bar chart of the raw data didn't give the effect I wanted.


Yes, if you look closely, you can see that business managers and business analysts (blue and red bars) gain the most. But it definitely takes more concentration than I'd like.

What I really had in mind was a single set of four bars, one for each role, showing how much capability it gained when QlikTech was added. This took some thinking. I could add the scores for each role to get a total value. The change in that value is what I want to show, presumably as a stacked bar chart. But you can't see that when the value goes down. I ultimately decided that the height of the bar should represent the total capability of each role: after all, just because statisticians don't have to read reports for business managers, they still can do it for themselves. This meant adding the values for each row across, so each role accumulated the capabilities of less technical rows to their left. So, the base table now looked like:



The sum of each column now shows the total capability available to each role. A similar calculation and sum for the QlikTech case shows the capability after QlikTech is added. The Change between the two is each role's gain in capability.


Now we have what I wanted. Start with the base value and stack the change on top of it, and you see very clearly how the capabilities shift after adding QlikTech.



I did find one other approach that I may even like better. This is to plot the sums of the two cases for each group in a three-way bar chart, as below. I usually avoid such charts because they're so hard to read. But in this case it does show both the shift of capability to the left, and the change in workload for the individual roles. It's a little harder to read but perhaps the extra information is worth it.



Obviously this approach to understanding software value can be applied to anything, not just QlikTech. I'd be interested to hear whether anybody else finds it useful.

Fred, this means you.

Fitting QlikTech into the Business Intelligence Universe

I’ve been planning for about a month to write about the position of QlikTech in the larger market for business intelligence systems. The topic has come up twice in the past week, so I guess I should do it already.

First, some context. I’m using “business intelligence” in the broad sense of “how companies get information to run their businesses”. This encompasses everything from standard operational reports to dashboards to advanced data analysis. Since these are all important, you can think of business intelligence as providing a complete solution to a large but finite list of requirements.

For each item on the list, the answer will have two components: the tool used, and the person doing the work. That is, I’m assuming a single tool will not meet all needs, and that different tasks will be performed by different people. This all seems reasonable enough. It means that a complete solution will have multiple components.

It also means that you have to look at any single business intelligence tool in the context of other tools that are also available. A tool which seems impressive by itself may turn out to add little real value if its features are already available elsewhere. For example, a visualization engine is useless without a database. If the company already owns a database that also includes an equally-powerful visualization engine, then there’s no reason to buy the stand-alone visualization product. This is why vendors to expand their product functionality and why it is so hard for specialized systems to survive. It’s also why nobody buys desk calculators: everyone has a computer spreadsheet that does the same and more. But I digress.

Back to the notion of a complete solution. The “best” solution is the one that meets the complete set of requirements at the lowest cost. Here, “cost” is broadly defined to include not just money, but also time and quality. That is, a quicker answer is better than a slower one, and a quality answer is better than a poor one. “Quality” raises its own issues of definition, but let’s view this from the business manager’s perspective, in which case “quality” means something along the lines of “producing the information I really need”. Since understanding what’s “really needed” often takes several cycles of questions, answers, and more questions, a solution that speeds up the question-answer cycle is better. This means that solutions offering more power to end-users are inherently better (assuming the same cost and speed), since they let users ask and answer more questions without getting other people involved. And talking to yourself is always easier than talking to someone else: you’re always available, and rarely lose an argument.

In short: the way to evaluate a business intelligence solution is to build a complete list of requirements and then, for each requirement, look at what tool will meet it, who will use that tool, what the tool will cost; and how quickly the work will get done.

We can put cost aside for the moment, because the out-of-pocket expense of most business intelligence solutions is insignificant compared with the value of getting the information they provide. So even though cheaper is better and prices do vary widely, price shouldn’t be the determining factor unless all else is truly equal.

The remaining critieria are who will use the tool and how quickly the work will get done. These come down to pretty much the same thing, for the reasons already described: a tool that can be used by a business manager will give the quickest results. More grandly, think of a hierarchy of users: business managers; business analysts (staff members who report to the business managers); statisticians (specialized analysts who are typically part of a central service organization); and IT staff. Essentially, questions are asked by business managers, and work their way through the hierarchy until they get to somebody who can answer them. Who that person is depends on what tools each person can use. So, if the business manager can answer her own question with her own tools, it goes no further; if the business analyst can answer the question, he does and sends it back to his boss; if not, he asks for help from a statistician; and if the statistician can’t get the answer, she goes to the IT department for more data or processing.

Bear in mind that different users can do different things with the same tool. A business manager may be able to do use a spreadsheet only for basic calculations, while a business analyst may also know how to do complex formulas, graphics, pivot tables, macros, data imports and more. Similarly, the business analyst may be limited to simple SQL queries in a relational database, while the IT department has experts who can use that same relational database to create complex queries, do advanced reporting, load data, add new tables, set up recurring processes, and more.

Since a given tool does different things for different users, one way to assess a business intelligence product is to build a matrix showing which requirements each user type can meet with it. Whether a tool “meets” a requirement could be indicated by a binary measure (yes/no), or, preferably, by a utility score that shows how well the requirement is met. Results could be displayed in a bar chart with four columns, one for each user group, where the height of each bar represents the percentage of all requirements those users can meet with that tool. Tools that are easy but limited (e.g. Excel) would have short bars that get slightly taller as they move across the chart. Tools that are hard but powerful (e.g. SQL databases) would have low bars for business users and tall bars for technical ones. (This discussion cries out for pictures, but I haven’t figured out how to add them to this blog. Sorry.)

Things get even more interesting if you plot the charts for two tools on top of each other. Just sticking with Excel vs. SQL, the Excel bars would be higher than the SQL bars for business managers and analysts, and lower than the SQL bars for statisticians and IT staff. The over-all height of the bars would be higher for the statisticians and IT, since they can do more things in total. Generally this suggests that Excel would be of primary use to business managers and analysts, but pretty much redundant for the statisticians and IT staff.

Of course, in practice, statisticians and IT people still do use Excel, because there are some things it does better than SQL. This comes back to the matrices: if each cell has utility scores, comparing the scores for different tools would show which tool is better for each situation. The number of cells won by each tool could create a stacked bar chart showing the incremental value of each tool to each user group. (Yes, I did spend today creating graphs. Why do you ask?)

Now that we’ve come this far, it’s easy to see that assessing different combinations of tools is just a matter of combining their matrices. That is, you compare the matrices for all the tools in a given combination and identify the “winning” product in each cell. The number of cells won by each tool shows its incremental value. If you want to get really fancy, you can also consider how much each tool is better than the next-best alternative, and incorporate the incremental cost of deploying an additional tool.

Which, at long last, brings us back to QlikTech. I see four general classes of business intelligence tools: legacy systems (e.g. standard reports out of operational systems); relational databases (e.g. in a data warehouse); traditional business intelligence tools (e.g. Cognos or Business Objects; we’ll also add statistical tools like SAS); and Excel (where so much of the actual work gets done). Most companies already own at least one product in each category. This means you could build a single utility matrix, taking the highest score in each cell from all the existing systems. Then you would compare this to a matrix for QlikTech and find cells where the QlikView is higher. Count the number of those cells, highlight them in a stacked bar chart, and you have a nice visual of where QlikTech adds value.

If you actually did this, you’d probably find that QlikTech is most useful to business analysts. Business managers might benefit some from QlikView dashboards, but those aren’t all that different from other kinds of dashboards (although building them in QlikView is much easier). Statisticians and IT people already have powerful tools that do much of what QlikTech does, so they won’t see much benefit. (Again, it may be easier to do some things in QlikView, but the cost of learning a new tool will weigh against it.) The situation for business analysts is quite different: QlikTech lets them do many things that other tools do not. (To be clear: some other tools can do those things, but it takes more skill than the business analysts possess.)

This is very important because it means those functions can now be performed by the business analysts, instead of passed on to statisticians or IT. Remember that the definition of a “best” solution boils down to whatever solution meets business requirements closest to the business manager. By allowing business analysts to perform many functions that would otherwise be passed through to statisticians or IT, QlikTech generates a hugh improvement in total solution quality.

Eventricity Lets Banks Buy, Not Build, Event-Based Marketing Systems

As you may recall from my posts on Unica and SAS, event-based marketing (also called behavior identification) seems to be gaining traction at long last. By coincidence, I recently found some notes I made two years about a UK-based firm named eventricity Ltd. This led to a long conversation with eventricity founder Mark Holtom, who turned out to be an industry veteran with background at NCR/Teradata and AIMS Software, where he worked on several of the pioneering projects in the field.

Eventricity, launched in 2003, is Holtom’s effort to convert the largely custom implementations he had seen elsewhere into a more packaged software product. Similar offerings do exist, from Harte-Hanks, Teradata and Conclusive Marketing (successor to Synapse Technology) as well as Unica and SAS. But those are all part of a larger product line, while eventricity offers event-based software alone.

Specifically, eventricity has two products: Timeframe event detection and Coffee event filtering. Both run on standard servers and relational databases (currently implemented on Oracle and SQL Server). This contrasts with many other event-detection systems, which use special data structures to capture event data efficiently. Scalability doesn’t seem to be an issue for eventricity: Holtom said it processes data for one million customers (500 million transactions, 28 events) in one hour on a dual processor Dell server.

One of the big challenges with event detection is defining the events themselves. Eventricity is delivered with a couple dozen basic events, such as unusually large deposit, end of a mortgage, significant birthday, first salary check, and first overdraft. These are defined with SQL statements, which imposes some limits in both complexity and end-user control. For example, although events can consider transactions during a specified time period, they cannot be use a sequence of transactions (e.g., an overdraft followed by a withdrawal). And since few marketers can write their own SQL, creation of new events takes outside help.

But users do have great flexibility once the events are built. Timeframe has a graphical interface that lets users specify parameters, such as minimum values, percentages and time intervals, which are passed through to the underlying SQL. Different parameters can be assigned to customers in different segments. Users can also give each event its own processing schedule, and can combine several events into a “super event”.

Coffee adds still more power, aimed at distilling a trickle of significant leads from the flood of raw events. This involves filters to determine which events to consider, ranking to decide which leads to handle first, and distribution to determine which channels will process them. Filters can consider event recency, rules for contact frequency, and customer type. Eligible events are ranked based on event type and processing sequence. Distribution can be based on channel capacity and channel priorities by customer segment: the highest-ranked leads are handled first.

What eventricity does not do is decide what offer should be triggered by each event. Rather, the intent is to feed the leads to call centers or account managers who will call the customer, assess the situation, and react appropriately. Several event-detection vendors share this similar approach, arguing that automated systems are too error-prone to pre-select a specific offer. Other vendors do support automated offers, arguing that automated contacts are so inexpensive that they are profitable even if the targeting is inexact. The counter-argument of the first group is that poorly targeted offers harm the customer relationship, so the true cost goes beyond the expense of sending the message itself.

What all event-detection vendors agree on is the need for speed. Timeframe cites studies showing that real time reaction to events can yield an 82% success rate, vs. 70% for response within 12 hours, 25% in 48 hours and 10% in four days. Holtom argues that the difference in results between next-day response and real time (which Timeframe does not support) is not worth the extra cost, particularly since few if any banks can share and react to events across all channels in real time .

Still, the real question is not why banks won’t put in real-time event detection systems, but why so few have bought the overnight event detection products already available. The eventricity Web site cites several cases with mouth-watering results. My own explanation has long been that most banks cannot act on the leads these systems generate: either they lack the contact management systems or cannot convince personal bankers to make the calls. Some vendors have agreed.

But Holtom and others argue the main problem is banks build their own event-detection systems rather than purchasing someone else’s. This is certainly plausible for the large institutions. Event detection looks simple. It’s the sort of project in-house IT and analytical departments would find appealing. The problem for the software vendors is that once a company builds its own system, it’s unlikely to buy an outside product: if the internal system works, there’s no need to replace it, and if it doesn’t work, well, then, the idea has been tested and failed, hasn’t it?

For the record, Holtom and other vendors argue their experience has taught them where to look for the most important events, providing better results faster than an in-house team. The most important trick is event filtering: identifying the tiny fraction of daily events that are most likely to signal productive leads. In one example Holtom cites, a company’s existing event-detection project yielded an unmanageable 660,000 leads per day, compared with a handy 16,000 for eventricity.

The vendors also argue that buying an external system is much cheaper than building one yourself. This is certainly true, but something that internal departments rarely acknowledge, and accounting systems often obscure.

Eventricity’s solution to the marketing challenge is a low-cost initial trial, which includes in-house set-up and scanning for three to five events for a three month period. Cost is 75,000 Euros, or about $110,000 at today’s pitiful exchange rate. Pricing on the actual software starts as low as $50,000 and would be about 250,000 Euros ($360,000) for a bank with one million customers. Implementation takes ten to 12 weeks. Eventricity has been sold and implemented at Banca Antonveneta in Italy, and several other trials are in various stages.

Unica Strategy Stays the Course

I recently caught up with Unica Vice President Andrew Hally as part of my review of developments at the major marketing automation vendors. It’s been a good year for Unica, which will break $100 million in annual revenue for the first time. On the product front, they continue their long-time strategy of offering all the software a marketing department would need. This has mostly meant incremental development of existing components, including continued assimilation of past years’ acquisitions in Web analytics, email, marketing planning, lead management, and event detection. The one major acquisition in 2007 was Marketing Central, which provides hosted marketing resource management. This was well within Unica’s traditional scope, although the “hosted” part is a bit of a change. It will help Unica serve smaller companies in addition to its traditional enterprise clients. But since Unica must penetrate this segment to continue growing, this is less a detour from the company’s primary strategy than a logical extension of it.

Hally did say that Unica still sees substantial growth potential among large enterprises. He said the company still frequently finds itself replacing home-grown systems at big companies, not just earlier generations of purchased campaign management systems. This surprises me a bit, although I suppose many firms never saw the need to replace systems that were already working. I do wonder how many of the holdouts will change their minds each year. If the number is small, then Unica and its competitors will be mostly selling into a replacement market, which can’t be very large. On the other hand, continued demand for new capabilities in Web and mobile marketing should lead companies to replace even relatively new systems. So perhaps the replacement market will be bigger than it seems. Certainly Unica has added features for email and Web analytics. But it still has gaps in ad serving, keyword management, and mobile. Acquisitions in those areas would not be surprising.

Probably the most interesting development Hally reported was a sharp rise in sales for Unica’s Affinium Detect, an event-detection system based on the Elity software acquired with MarketSoft in 2005. Hally said Detect is now Unica’s third-best-selling product, with one to two dozen installations. This compares with the handful that Elity had sold when it was independent. He attributed the growth both to increased demand and to the reduced risk marketers see in buying from Unica. He also reported the product has been sold for telecommunication and credit card applications, in addition to the traditional retail banking.

While at NCDM, I also took a look at Unica’s newest module, an ad hoc reporting package called Affinium Insight. This provides some basic visualization and analysis capabilities for non-technical users. It is designed to free up marketing analysts for more demanding work by giving business users a simple graphical interface linked to data marts assembled with standard Unica technology. The interface resembles the NetTracker Web analytics system Unica acquired with Sane Solutions in 2006.

Advanced Analytics and Still More Reasons I Love QlikView

I’m at the National Center for Database Marketing Conference this week. NCDM is always a good place to get a feel for what’s on people’s minds.

One theme I’ve picked up is a greater interest in advanced analytics. Richard Deere of Direct Data Mining Consultants, a very experienced modeler, told me that interest in segmentation always increases during recessions, because companies are more determined to increase the return on diminished budgets. This is apparently common knowledge in the modeling community, although it was news to me. In any case, it is consistent with what I’ve been hearing from vendors both at the show and in separate conversations over the past few weeks—products for event detection, automated recommendations and contact optimization, which have existed for years but gained few users, are now showing substantial growth.

Before anyone gets too excited, let’s remember that this is off a very small base. Products that sold two installations over the past three years might have added another six in 2007. Many of these products are now offered by larger firms than before, either because the original developer was purchased by a bigger company or because a large company developed their own version. So it’s possible the growth could simply be due to better distribution and more vendor credibility, in which case it could be a one-time increase. But the vendors tell me that interest is strong across all stages of the pre-purchase pipeline, so I suspect this uptick in sales is a precursor to continued expansion.

My personal theory is that the industry has matured in the sense that there are many more people now who have been doing serious database marketing for ten or fifteen years. These people saw the benefits of advanced techniques at the handful of industry leaders early in their careers, and have now moved into senior positions at other companies where they have the experience and authority to replicate those environments.

Of course, other reasons contribute as well: much of the infrastructure is finally in place (data warehouses, modeling systems, etc.); integration is getting easier due to modern technologies like J2EE and Service Oriented Architectures; vendors are becoming more willing to open up their systems through published APIs; and the analytical systems themselves are getting more powerful, more reliable, easier to use, and cheaper. Plus, as we’re all tired of hearing, customers have higher expectations for personalized treatments and competitive pressures continue to increase. I’d still argue that the presence of knowledgeable buyers is the really critical variable. I think this is an empirically testable hypothesis, but it's not worth the trouble of finding whether I’m correct.

Back to NCDM. The other major conclusion I’m taking from the show is confirmation of our recent experience at Client X Client that people are very interested in accessing their data in general, and in “marketing dashboards” in particular. There were several sessions at the show on dashboards and marketing measurement, and these seemed quite well attended. There were also a number of exhibitors with dashboard-type products, including TFC, Nicto from Integrale MDB, Tableau Software, and of course our own QlikView-based Client X Client. While there are substantial differences among the offerings, they all take the databases that people have spent years developing and make them more accessible without a lot of IT support.

This has been the problem we’ve heard about constantly: the data is there, but you need a technical person to write a SQL query, build a data cube or expose some metadata to use it, and that involves waiting on a long queue. We’ve found that QlikView addresses this directly because a business analyst can load detail data (e.g. individual transactions or accounts) and analyze it without any IT involvement (other than providing the data access in the first place). The other products listed can also access detail data, although they mostly read it from conventional relational databases, which are nowhere near as fast as QlikTech’s large-volume, in-memory data engine. (Tableau does some in-memory analysis, but only on relatively small data volumes.) It’s not that I’m trying to sell QlikTech here, but it’s important to understand that its combination of in-memory and high scalability provides capabilities these other systems cannot. (The other systems have their own strengths, so they’re not exactly direct competitors. Tableau has vastly better visualization than QlikTech, and both TFC and Integrale provide database building services that Client X Client does not.)

I’ve concluded that QlikView’s core market is the business analyst community, precisely because it empowers them to do things without waiting for IT. IT departments are less interested in the product, not because they are protecting their turf but simply because they do know how to write the SQL queries and build the cubes, so it doesn’t really let them do anything new. From the IT perspective, QlikView looks like just another tool they have to learn, which they’ll avoid if possible. You can argue (and we frequently do) that IT benefits from having business users become more self-reliant, but that hasn’t seemed to help much, perhaps because IT can’t quite believe it’s true. A more persuasive advantage for IT seems to be that they themselves can use QlikView for data exploration and prototyping, since it’s great for that kind of work (very easy, very fast, very low cost). This is a direct benefit (makes their own job easier) rather than an indirect benefit (makes someone else’s job easier), so it’s no surprise it carries more weight.

1010data Offers A Powerful Columnar Database

Back in October I wrote here about the resurgent interest in alternatives to standard relational databases for analytical applications. Vendors on my list included Alterian, BlueVenn (formerly SmartFocus), Vertica and QD Technology. Most use some form of a columnar structure, meaning data is stored so the system can load only the columns required for a particular query. This reduces the total amount of data read from disk and therefore improves performance. Since a typical analytical query might read only a half-dozen columns out of hundreds or even thousands available, the savings can be tremendous.

I recently learned about another columnar database, Tenbase from 1010data. Tenbase, introduced in 2000, turns out to be a worthy alternative to better-known columnar products.

Like other columnar systems, Tenbase is fast: an initial query against a 4.3 billion row, 305 gigabyte table came back in about 12 seconds. Subsequent queries against the results were virtually instantaneous, because they were limited to the selected data and that data had been moved into memory. Although in-memory queries will always be faster, Tenbase says reading from disk takes only three times as long, which is a very low ratio. The reflects a focused effort by the company to make disk access as quick as possible.

What’s particularly intriguing is Tenbase achieves this performance without compressing, aggregating or restructuring the input. Although indexes are used in some situations, queries generally read the actual data. Even with indexes, the Tenbase files usually occupy about the same amount of space as the input. This factor varies widely among columnar databases, which sometimes expand file size significantly and sometimes compress it. Tenbase also handles very large data sets: the largest in production is nearly 60 billion rows and 4.6 terabytes. Fast response on such large installations is maintained by adding servers that process queries in parallel. Each server contains a complete copy of the full data set.

Tenbase can import data from text files or connect directly to multi-table relational databases. Load speed is about 30 million observations per minute for fixed width data. Depending on the details, this comes to around 10 gigabytes per hour. Time for incremental loads, which add new data to an existing table, is determined only by the volume of the new data. Some columnar databases essentially reload the entire file during an ‘incremental’ update.

Regardless of the physical organization, Tenbase presents loaded data as if it were in the tables of a conventional relational database. Multiple tables can be linked on different keys and queried. This contrasts with some columnar systems that require all tables be linked on the same key, such as a customer ID.

Tenbase has an ODBC connector that lets it accept standard SQL queries. Results come back as quickly as queries in the system’s own query language. This is also special: some columnar systems run SQL queries much more slowly or won’t accept them at all. The Tenbase developers demonstrated this feature by querying a 500 million row database through Microsoft Access, which feels a little like opening the door to a closet and finding yourself in the Sahara desert.

Tenbase’s own query language is considerably more powerful than SQL. It gives users advanced functions for time-series analysis, which actually allows many types of comparisons between rows in the data set. It also contains a variety of statistical, aggregation and calculation functions. It’s still set-based rather than a procedural programming language, so it doesn't support features like if/then loops. This is one area where some other columnar databases may have an edge.

The Tenbase query interface is rather plain but it does let users pick the columns and values to select by, and the columns and summary types to include in the result. Users can also specify a reference column for calculations such as weighted averages. Results can be viewed as tables, charts or cross tabs (limited to one value per intersection), which can themselves be queried. Outputs can be exported in Excel, PDF, XML, text or CSV formats. The interface also lets users create calculated columns and define links among tables.

Under the covers, the Tenbase interface automatically creates XML statements written to the Tenbase API. Users can view and edit the XML or write their own statements from scratch. This lets them create alternate interfaces for special purposes or simply to improve the esthetics. Queries built in Tenbase can be saved and rerun either in their original form or with options for users to enter new values at run time. The latter feature gives a simple way to build query applications for casual users.

The user interface is browser-based, so no desktop client is needed. Perhaps I'm easily impressed, but I like that the browser back button actually works. This is often not the case in such systems. Performance depends on the amount of data and query complexity but it scales with the number of servers, so even very demanding queries against huge databases can be returned in a few minutes with the right hardware. The servers themselves are commodity Windows PCs. Simple queries generally come back in seconds.

Tenbase clients pay for the system on a monthly basis. Fees are based primarily on the number of servers, which is determined by the number of users, amount of data, types of queries, and other details. The company does not publish its pricing but the figures it mentioned seemed competitive. The servers can reside at 1010data or at the client, although the 1010data will manage them either way. Users can load data themselves no matter where the server is located.

Most Tenbase clients are in the securities industry, where the product is used for complex analytics. The company has recently added several customers in retail, consumer goods and health care. There are about 45 active Tenbase installations, including the New York Stock Exchange, Proctor & Gamble and Pathmark Stores.