Don DeLoach's CEO Blog

The Insanity of the Edge

As the new CEO at Infobright, I am struck by the elegance and the simplicity of our offering, although in many ways it runs counter to how we are conditioned to view technology. You might be asking, “What is he talking about”? We are all predisposed to achieve certain objectives. Dancers want to get to Broadway. Football teams want to win the Super Bowl. And technology companies always want to be the fastest and the most scalable at whatever they are doing. But the dancers often “pay the price” through years and years of practice, tryouts, and long hours to reach the goal that few reach. The ones that reach Broadway are the edge conditions. Players in the NFL do the same, and the teams that come together to win the Super Bowl do so because of the massive sacrifice and years of time, money, and effort of the players that come together at the pinnacle of their craft. The ones that reach it are the edge conditions.

I have huge admiration for the technology companies that are “the fastest, the most scalable” solutions in the world. That is really great. But the universe of problems being solved with such technology seldom aligns with the capabilities. It is said that most people use less than 10% of the real capabilities in Microsoft Word. Really? I would say it’s also true that many, many companies over-buy technology at a huge cost. Huge. Because the vast number of problems that are being addressed by most companies fall well within the range of the technology they are using, yet in so many, many cases the price points in terms of software, supporting hardware, and especially the related labor costs are exceptionally high because they are using technology designed for the edge conditions. I will be the first to say that those costs are worth it much of the time for those specific edge cases, but the vast majority of problems can be addressed with lower cost technology that uses a fraction of the supporting hardware and an even smaller fraction of labor.

Let’s look at a few examples. Siebel was very good software in certain, very complex cases. It was also very, very costly to purchase, install, and maintain. Salesforce.com (and others) came along and did so well because many organizations realized that the simplicity of Salesforce.com still had more than adequate capabilities for their needs, but at a fraction of the costs, both up-front and ongoing. Tandem was a great nonstop computing platform (and HP eventually did some marvelous things with it), but it suffered quite a demise because, with the exception of certain edge conditions like running ATM networks or stock exchanges, the cost for the failover and high transactional capabilities were not justified. People moved to commodity hardware with (almost) commodity failover capabilities.

The BI world is no different. There are some clever technologies in place that are well suited to address edge conditions. I am in awe of some of the things that have been done. But I am finding that Infobright seems to address a high percentage of the problems almost anyone has in reporting and analytics with a fraction of the hardware requirements and even less in terms of people. The design is quite clever, where the algorithms are adaptive in nature, and the system is self-tuning. The hardware compression ratios are impressive, and all in all, the ability to do a lot for a little is very compelling.

And I would go so far as to say the ability to do a lot for a little is more compelling today than ever. The money spent on the edge conditions, and the insanity of spending that same money for all the rest, makes Infobright’s approach more like “the sanity in the middle”. Not a bad place to be in a market like this.