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One of the joys (and dangers) of being the
founder and CEO/CTO of a startup is that it is
very hard for the highly qualified members of
your team who actually understand corporate
communications to shut you up when you decide
you want to launch a blog on the corporate
website – but since at least two of the
members of my executive staff are expert shots
I will try and restrain myself appropriately
and focus on writing a blog on what is the
most important thing to everyone here at
PatternBuilders – how our analytics platform
and expertise can help your
organizations use analytics to make your jobs
easier and more efficient.
Traditionally, I would open this first post
with a bit of self-aggrandizement about our
team and advisors but since
we have already done that
here and
here, I am going to dive directly into the
obvious question: what do we have to
offer customers like you that are looking for
an improved analytics solution?
Or put another way: what can we offer
you over and above what large company X
offers—you know, the one that claims to be the
alpha and omega of all your analytic needs?
Here’s the short answer. We fill a very
large void in software solutions that are
focused on Analytics as well as their runty,
but famous, cousins Business Intelligence and
Data Warehouses.
Here’s the big issue that you are probably
dealing with today. You have all these
automated transactional systems that,
together, run your enterprise, whether it’s
your manufacturing operations, POS Systems,
ERP, Clinical Operations systems, etc. These
systems produce a tremendous amount of
data—but your attempts to produce analytics to
improve your operations based on this data are
expensive, cumbersome, unusable to most of
your staff, and not ready for the real-time
Web 2.0 world that defines your operating
environment. You’ve read “Super
Crunchers,” by Ian Ayres and the
Freakeconomics column of the New York Times
and know the sort of stuff that
can be achieved if you can turn this data into
information, but your BI and Data Warehouse
vendors just don’t seem to be able to get you
there.
Why is this such a big problem since
Business Intelligence and Data Warehouses
would seem to be natural fits? Here’s the
thing: they were designed in, and for, a
different era. Back then:
- Jimmy Carter was President
- Sun was an independent company
- A gigabyte of data was a lot
- A gigabyte of memory was impossible
- A low-end personal computer cost
$6,000
- Multi-threading was a research project
At that time, technologies and
methodologies we take for granted today did
not even exist such as:
- The Web
- XML
- Java
- .NET
-
Domain-Driven Design (a concept where
software development projects are driven
by the domain and domain logic—for
example, interfaces should be designed
using the language and processes of the
business user)
To put it more succinctly, the
original Data Warehouse designers had a lot
more constraints to deal with in terms of
computing power and a lot less data and users
to deal with. In fact, the idea of designing
a system that would provide real-time analysis
of data that comes at rates measured in
Terabytes/Day would have seemed like science
fiction back then, as would the idea that they
would have to create a front-end that could be
distributed securely world-wide to potentially
thousands of users across the globe
simultaneously. But these are the
requirements of a modern analytics system and
lead in to my much longer answer as to why we
need a new analytics technology platform. In
my next post, I will begin to talk about the
differences in analytics approaches and the
advantages our technology and services offer.
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