For years, mid-sized businesses and departments within larger organizations have been underserved by the business intelligence community. For a variety of reasons, mid-sized organization are often forced to do without, while the information needs of departments can be underserved by corporate IT.

Why? Ultimately it comes down to cost and complexity.

BI is too complex for many mid-sized businesses and departments to support directly:

• Even for midsize organizations, it typically requires complex data integration software or custom-coded integration processes;
• It requires development and maintenance of a data warehouse or data marts;
• It involves implementation of complex BI software for dashboards and reports that involve significant amounts of customization.

Second, traditional BI lacks agility. This is particularly impactful on departments that rely on their corporate IT for BI. All too often, priorities and technology limitations preclude IT responsiveness to business’ need for information.

BI also can be cost-prohibitive. BI software and maintenance alone is expensive. But additional costs such as the cost of data integration software and hardware must also be factored. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, the implementation cost alone can be prohibitive. With the average BI project lasting 17 months and experiencing only a 31% success rate, it’s easy to see why mid-sized businesses have delayed investment in the technology. As a result, these organizations are still relying on time-consuming manual queries and extensive Excel-based data manipulation to get the business intelligence they need to operate.

Now, here’s the good news. The superior speed, ease-of-use, and cost-effectivness of Altosoft now make BI accessible for every organization — regardless of size or budget. Quite simply, Altosoft changes the BI game for mid-sized business and departmental solutions.

It starts with the technology. First, Altosoft enables what we call agile data integration, which makes the hardest part of BI – bringing data together efficiently from multiple source systems – easy. Altosoft’s MetricsMart solution connects to multiple data sources, including operational systems like ERP or CRM, databases like SQL Server and Oracle, flat files, Excel, and even event-based data sources and data warehouses. It then uses an extremely efficient, in-memory engine to derive your key performance indicators (KPIs) from this data in a single step. These fully dimensioned KPIs are stored in an open, accessible database, which is used by InsightBI to provide easy dashboarding, reporting, and analysis functionality. These tables are self-maintaining, meaning no headaches over cube development and warehouse management.

Unlike every other BI product, Altosoft has a unified architecture and codeless implementation. That means the software integration complexity of traditional BI is eliminated, and configuration is easy. There is no coding or scripting at all. You won’t even need to write SQL!

As a result, implementation is speedy. You won’t have to integrate multiple software products. You won’t have to write custom code for data integration or dashboards. You will reduce your hardware expenditure, thanks to the efficient architecture, Microsoft platform, and Altosoft’s IDA technology.

Perhaps most importantly, Altosoft minimizes the normal project risk associated with BI. Altosoft’s iterative; spiral implementation approach enables rapid delivery of production analytical dashboards and reports in just days. Changes and enhancements are easy.

Training is also simple. Dashboard and report development in Altosoft is all drag-and-drop and browser-based. Meaning more of your organization can use Altosoft, faster.

And finally, Altosoft offers the most cost-effective BI solution on the market. Finally, mid-sized businesses and departments of larger organizations can take full, unimpeded advantage of the best that BI has to offer.

You have to admire the marketing audacity of our newest partner, Netezza. They seem to relish attacking the big “megavendors” in their space. They do it tenaciously, but also intelligently and often humorously. One of their latest efforts is case in point. The weblog-based site hits the nail on the head. Traditional solutions have failed to solve the business problem of getting the right information to the right decision maker at the right time. It’s almost unbelievable that after twenty, maybe even thirty years of business intelligence technology, organizations are sometimes still struggling to cope with even the most basic reporting requirements.

Netezza’s aggressiveness is understandable given their position. They offer a superior solution. But they’re the little guy – certainly an increasingly large little guy, but still small compared to the Oracles and IBMs of the world. If Netezza doesn’t challenge the megavendors, how are they going to get a prospective customer’s attention? If they don’t get the customer’s attention, how will the customer find out how much better off they could be with Netezza?

IT buyers – particularly in the BI space – have been fed a steady diet of false expectations and overinflated promises over the years. They are fed up to the point where any vendor’s claim is met with apathy. Of course, this plays right into the hands of the largest vendors. Customer apathy is what they want. It stifles innovation and keeps users dependent, masking the failure of these vendors to innovate and solve the fundamental problems the industry faces.

A mutual partner of Netezza and Altosoft recently remarked to me that the two companies are in a similar position. Both have innovated to offer significantly superior — faster, easier, and more cost effective – solutions. Both have the challenge of getting the word out above the steady (and deliberate) noise created by the large vendors in the space. Netezza has shown the effectiveness of an aggressive, but intelligent, approach. They set an excellent example.

Looks Good

Altosoft typically delivers in our free, one day (sometimes two day) POC. I figured I’d take the opportunity to provide a bit more detail here.

First of all, a lot depends on how prepared a prospective buyer is going into the POC. If the buyer is well prepared and understands what they want to measure, and is familiar with the data sources that will support those measurements, then we will accomplish a great deal in a short period of time. Our solutions are built for speed and efficiency. In other words, if you know what you want, we enable you to get there very, very quickly.

And everything we do is completely transparent to the customer. We will never do a portion of the work off site. The buyer sees everything, and learns throughout the process.

In the end, every POC is different. But there are some common characteristics of just about all our one or two day POCs.

Here’s what we do do.

First, we install the product. This is a fast, easy process assuming that the prospective buyer is ready with a properly configured machine.

Next, we connect to data sources. In just about every POC, we connect to multiple data sources. Typically, we deal with two or three relational databases (or existing warehouses), plus we like to show how we can easily incorporate Excel as a data source as well. Since dealing with multiple sources is one of the strong suits of our product, we consider showing this functionality to be important to POC success.

The next step is event mapping and metrics definition. A typical POC involves defining multiple “business events”. These are basically the key business activities that you need to monitor, analyze, and report on. For example, a “new order”, a “product shipment” or a “client approval” could all be business events. Business events can (and often do) incorporate data from our multiple sources. Business events then spawn multiple KPI metrics. For example, “number of new orders”, “discounted dollar value of new orders”, etc.

So multiple events (typically 2-5) create a number of separate KPI metrics (typically 5-10). Each metric can then be analyzed across multiple dimensions. For example, you could analyze “discounted dollar value of new orders” across multiple dimensions (e.g. region/country/city).

The reason we don’t do more events and KPIs is simple – time. In almost all POCs, the actual time we have for development is 2-3 hours at the most. The rest of the time is spent on discussions, explaining to the users how the product works, learning the data, inventing KPIs, trying different visualization options, presenting the results to the business users, etc. If you want to see more KPIs, we can run into a second day…. But for the most part, once you’ve seen us build a few KPIs, you’ll have enough of a handle on it that adding more would be overkill. In fact, you should be able to build them yourself without too much trouble.

Once we’ve built the KPI metrics, we determine who is allowed to see the data. We demonstrate how to set up multiple users or roles, with privileges based on functional access (e.g. right to define KPIs, right to create alerts), privileges to view data, and access to data dimensions.

At this point, we deploy the system and start building our dashboards and/or reports. Typically, in a POC we focus on dashboard development, although we can also demonstrate how to develop, schedule, and distribute a report as well. But dashboards are generally more interesting.

We typically build out a number of dashboards that display our KPI metrics in an organized, informative way. All the dashboard components are interactive, drillable, sortable, etc. We can also link components together, so that you can refresh an entire dashboard based on filtering by a certain dimension. Naturally, we’ll also add your branding into the dashboard to give it a personalized look and feel.

On top of the dashboard, we’ll define a rules-based alert and show you how alerts can be used to automatically monitor new business activities as they occur. We set up the data refresh rate based on your preferences. For example, if you want to monitor changes on a minute-by-minute basis, we can accommodate that. If new data triggers an alert, you can use the incident management functionality within the system to resolve the problem.

So to summarize, in a typical one/two day Altosoft POC you’ll see:

• A solution that joins data from multiple data sources (RDBMS, warehouse, Excel).
• A variety (5-10) of unique metrics that measure your business performance.
• Metrics all have multiple dimensional breakdowns for analysis.
• Demonstration of multiple user roles.
• Near real-time data, data source permitting. (Real-time data is only available for event-based sources.)
• A sample report.
• Multiple interactive web dashboards featuring a variety of ways to visualize data (charts, graphs, maps, etc.).
• Automated alerting based on your rules.
• Workflow-based incident management.
• Your branding.

And we’ll leave the solution with you so you can continue to work with it, show it, even add to it. Since we’re very willing to let you control the mouse during our POC, you will hopefully feel very comfortable with our technology by the end of the day. Because that’s really the goal – to position you to achieve success with the product, without needing to have us around to hold your hand.

Naturally, if you require a more elaborate POC deliverable, we can handle that as well.

Now, what don’t we do?

Typically, we don’t do SharePoint integration. Although if we’re given a few extra hours and the right access to your SharePoint server, we can make it happen. Basically, every dashboard and every component (chart, graph, etc.) that we’ve built with you will be accessible natively through SharePoint as web parts. You can easily use them to build SharePoint composites.

We also don’t typically do business process intelligence. We don’t feel too bad about not offering this as part of the one day POC, because our competition can’t handle process analysis at all. If you really want to dig into our unique ProcessMart capability, we can discuss extending the POC for an extra day.

So as you can see, it’s possible to accomplish quite a bit in just a few hours! This shouldn’t be too surprising given that many of our actual full projects take just a week or two.