CEO Blog: Zen and the Art of Machine Generated Data

I love the old saying that "it takes longer to write a short paper than a long one". I can certainly attest to that. My education is in Industrial and Systems Engineering. I never actually thought I would become an engineer, but was very attracted to the extension of engineering, and in particular, the fundamentals of Industrial Engineering to so many other aspects of life. Along the way there were a couple of people in the field that influenced me. One was Dr. W. Edwards Deming. He is in many way is the father of Industrial Engineering, whose overriding philosophy was "fix the process, not the product". In the subtext of this was the notion that less can often be better. A product might be built better, with less errors, and with less cost by having fewer processes and less handling along the way. More doesn't always equate to better. The other figure was Dr. Eli Goldratt. He championed the Theory of Constraints, and pioneered a scheduling algorithm called "OPT", which was controversial when it was introduced. Many organizations who adopted the use of OPT for scheduling would ultimately disregard the result sets and corresponding scheduling imperatives because "it did not feel right". This became so common that he subsequently worked with an author (Jeff Fox) to produce a novel called "The Goal" (which later took on somewhat of a cult status) that served as a backdrop for explaining his theory. Later he would deliver a series of corporate presentations on overheads (for those over 40) that he eventually compiled into the follow-on book called "The Race". The simple underlying principle was that work-in-process is bad, and that it should be limited to as little as possible. Your costs, your delays, and your error rates all went up when you failed to embrace the very simple principles behind this. Dr. Goldratt had a Steve Job's-like quality of abrasiveness, probably born out of his combination of intelligence and focus, much like Jobs. He was known to tell plant managers and company presidents that they were "idiots" who were screwing up their companies.

At Infobright we are guided in many ways by these principles. Our clear focus is to provide the ability to store, retrieve, and analyze machine-generated data. As a central design point, we strive for simplicity in the user experience and a minimalist requirement in terms of computing resources. We touch the data as little as possible by implementing an architecture that is uniquely suited for machine-generated data. Many of our customers have said "I just loaded the data and began working with it" and that "It just works like it says on the tin". This is music to our ears.

The Mac was not a success because of its complexity. And the songs played on an iPod were no different than the songs played on the RIO that came before it. But the appeal, and subsequent massive acceptance of both the Mac and the iPod, was in the elegance and simplicity of the design, delivery, and user experience. We think that's a great thing. Relative to the alternatives for storing and analyzing machine-generated data, we believe we are simpler and more cost-effective. We don't really extend into other areas, but as a result, we gain in terms of this simplicity and cost reduction. We are absolutely OK with that. And while we believe we have a nice level of elegance in our simplicity, we continue to iterate and improve.

Regards,

Don