As we push forward here at Infobright, we are striving to be more and more open and accessible in our operation. You should be seeing signs of that already. Our goal is to de-mystify what we bring to the market, both from a community standpoint as well as as with our Enterprise Edition. I have noticed a number of companies over the years who do this well, and even more who make doing business with them a struggle.

In our quest to be more open, we are doing things like our Youtube channel, where we will be posting everything from short whiteboard discussions to quick demos to video blogs. It’s already up and running, so please check it out at www.youtube.com/user/InfobrightDB. Soon we will also have “Infobright Radio” established as a podcast, exploring various topics in the database and analytics space. We are close to launching an educational webinar series aimed at the Infobright community to make coming up to speed with Infobright as easy as possible. Later this year, we plan to bring forward a series of sample applications that we will make available on the community website so you get get up and running quickly as you experiment with new applications. And last, we plan to evaluate the trial programs and procedure for evaluating our Enterprise Edition offering to ensure it’s easy and straightforward.

Good products are often limited by not-so-good companies. It takes more than just a product to help your business. It takes a company behind the product that is easy to work with, friendly, knowledgeable, and committed to helping you succeed. My observations of other companies suggest that the ones that do that well are both more fun and more prosperous. This observation is not rocket science, but rather basic common sense that may seem all too uncommon.

The last key to all this is listening. We want to hear from you. What are we doing that helps you succeed? Where can we be doing a better job? We are launching a customer advisory council with some of the Enterprise customers and our Community users to collaborate on everything from our roadmap to our overall processes in place to support you. We think you know more about what you need than we do, so we ask, and then ask some more.

Our report card then becomes our success. Are we gaining ground with new customers? Is revenue growing? Are we seeing repeat customers? Are we seeing a growth in resellers and ISV/OEM relationships embedding Infobright in their offerings? Are we seeing growth in the community? The answer to every one of these questions is, at this point, yes. We are very grateful for that. And to that end, we think the best way to sustain that is to continue to challenge ourselves to do better, hence our push for a greater level of accessibility and interaction.

I hope you like the things we are doing. I encourage you to check them out. And I absolutely welcome the feedback.

All the best;

Don
 

Recently Infobright had the opportunity to meet with the Boulder BI Brain Trust, a group of leading industry analysts and BI practitioners. Listen to Claudia Imhoff's interview with Infobright CEO Don DeLoach at the bottom of the Webcasts/Podcasts page.

“Partner” is perhaps the most overused, rhetorical word in the technology business. When IT buyers want a better price, they want the vendor to behave like a ‘partner”. When vendors want a deal to get done, they speak of the pending “partnership”. Vendor hype (and for that matter, buyer hype) is generally motivated by personal gain. So sales people, service people, contracts people, even CEO’s will often say whatever believed to be appropriate in order to get what they want. I sat in a contract negotiation a few years ago with a bank where the chief negotiator was their outside counsel. He wasn’t even a bank employee. He kept telling me we needed to give them a better deal because of the unique partnership based on their status as our “Inaugural Customer”. Really? I tried pointing out that they were, in fact, not our original (or to use his words, “inaugural”) customer, and that the price that was on the table was, in fact, extremely aggressive already. Then we were told that they had really spent way, way, way too much money with another vendor on the failed project that we were about to help them rescue. Of course, this part was entirely true. They had. But then he followed up with another “partner” request. As their ‘close partner”, we needed to understand that since they really had no money left after their aborted project, they “truly” needed for us to be aggressive. They were so conditioned to assume they were always getting taken to the cleaners that they would not recognize the very behavior they wanted. And herein lies the problem with the rhetoric, and my disdain for vendor blather. It is so accepted to speak in lofty terms without the corresponding commitment, understanding, or concern for the other parties well being that using the words does more harm than good – especially if you are working towards a very real meaningful partnership.

I have enjoyed several meaningful partnerships in my career. Without naming personal names (because they know who they are anyway), I would include FedEx, Bank of America, Barclays, ITG, and a few others on this list. These were relationships where both parties took the time to understand what the other wanted and needed, when there were times of slack and times of stress, and how we could work together, always, towards shared success. The “partnership” was earned in both directions through challenges, opportunities for failure, and expectations of commitment which were often beyond reasonable. In every case, we gave more as a vendor than we would have under normal circumstances, and we received more in return. And in every case, the customer received far more than would have been reasonably expected, but also went out of their way to help with our success.

At Infobright we signed a really nice contract this past week. Hopefully we will be able to announce this in public in the future. But the really meaningful side to this contract was that the signature was the beginning, not the end. Leading up to the signature were times of slack and stress, opportunities and challenges, expectations that were unreasonable yet met, in both directions. The trust, goodwill, and shared sense of direction will be worth more that the value of the contract to either of us. But then again, with true partnerships, however uncommon, they always are.

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.

Just as our customers use our technology to understand the dynamics of their business based on recent data, I do the same to understand how Infobright is performing and to help guide us for the future. We measure success by the growth of our customer base and the growth of our community. We also work to continually improve our understanding of how our technology is being used, as this allows us to enhance the technology in ways that are of the most benefit to our users.

So, how are we doing? Infobright’s customer base grew 500% over the past year, to 120 paying customers. This included end users (60%) as well as ISVs and SaaS providers (40%) who embed our database in their application. It is great to see both segments taking advantage of our technology. During the same period, our open source software was downloaded 35,000 times, which included the integrated virtual machines we developed with our partners Pentaho, Jaspersoft, Talend and Actuate/BIRT.

The end user applications were heavily clustered around Web and Online Analytics tracking with a focus on understanding customer behavior on the web. We also continue to see the growth of application-specific data marts (see the Austin Energy case study as a great example). There is also continued interest and growth in using Infobright technology to analyze IT logs and telecom Call Detail Record data, to identify fraud or security issues, to understand and improve network performance, and other purposes.

One of the areas we are most excited about is Mobile Analytics. Mobile internet access and mobile advertising are growing at incredible rates throughout the world. We are seeing the early leaders in this market using Infobright to achieve very high performance against the large volumes of data they are capturing daily. Companies like Bango, the leader in mobile payments and mobile analytics who is using Infobright Enterprise Edition to make user data available to their customers within minutes of actions having occurred.

The IT and telecom network log analytics use cases are other important areas where Infobright is being used. In these cases the solution must deliver usage, performance and capacity analysis about hundreds to thousands of devices across an enterprise. ISVs and SaaS providers are storing the data in Infobright to enable fast, ad-hoc queries and reports. The data may include audit, activity logs or events being generated by routers, gateways, firewalls and servers of various types across an Enterprise. Again, like most other use cases we see, the need to analyze both high level trends as well as track activity down to the device level is the business requirement the ISV needs Infobright for. Tracking at the device level vs. just delivering summary trends is far more taxing on the database. Turns out the relational products in the market just cannot support the data size and performance SLAs Infobright is capable of at the low price point we deliver.

While looking back at 2009 feels good, the view into 2010 is even more interesting. We must always deliver increasing value to our community and to our paying customers. Our roadmap is full of important feature content for 2010.

You will see Infobright be much more transparent in 2010 about our plans. We will start posting and commenting on future releases and themes in March of this year. The release velocity will continue to be fast as a result of our Agile development process. We expect to drop 3-4 interim releases for every major release and at least two major releases in 2010.

Some of the major improvements this year will be:
• Continued SMP performance improvements without the need for complex hardware configurations or administrative effort
• Extending the “hit rate” of the Knowledge Grid which is when Infobright out-performs all other products on the market
• Better international support with UTF-8 extensions

Feel free to send me a note on any of my comments in the blog. I can be reached at mark.burton@infobright.com . We are always interested in hearing about how you are using Infobright ICE or IEE. Please tell me about your applications and use of Infobright.

We look forward to working with you and hearing from you in 2010.
Mark

If you haven’t noticed that businesses of all sizes and shapes are having earnings issues you are either very lucky or living in a well-appointed cave.  Red Ink has been the color of the bottom line for many companies over the past 18 months  around the world.  Business leaders are focused on gaining a better understanding of all aspects of their business in order to turn the red ink to black by asking questions such as  “Are changes needed to the product mix? Should we sell through different channels?   What target customer should we sell to?  What is happening in our customer base today, last week, last month, and what is likey to happen tomorrow?”

The need to get answers to these critical questions is the reason that Business Intelligence (BI) and data warehousing tools and technology are growing at fast clip.  In most current IT spending reports you will see BI and data warehousing software spend very high on the priority list.   Yet, an even more important question is, should we define and implement an enterprise strategy or deliver at a departmental level? I believe the decision point is how quickly you can design and implement the solution.
 
The need for immediate answers is driving a resurgence in the implementation of data marts.  Data marts gained attention in the 1990s as a means to deliver business intelligence in an efficient manner for a single department or business unit instead of trying to model and analyze data across an entire enterprise.  The basic idea is to identify the data important to your department or customer segment, set up a container to house the data in an organized fashion, then layer on tools that allow you to review, analyze and track changes in the business in a way that tells you what needs to be done today and tomorrow.  
 
Time is not something you can ever get back.  You must find a way to uncover problems and find solutions quickly.  A basic tenet that has been proven over and over is that any project is best solved a piece at a time.  Smaller scope with shorter term deliverables is always lower risk and more likely to succeed.  Projects that cost 10s of millions and take 2 years to deliver, generally fail.  Why?  Because the market, the problems and the opportunity have all changed before you can ever deliver the solution. Years and even months are too long to wait before setting up a platform to track and analyze your business.  Empowering the department to work with their own data and deliver quickly has to be the right approach.

This also comes at a time when innovation at Infobright is available and can significantly reduce the time and effort to design, implement and manage a data mart.  When you walk through the Infobright website, you see references to “Reducing Database Administration by 90%”, “Elimination of Indexes”,  “Self Managing Database”, “support 100GB to 50 TB”.  These capabilities are what enable the successful implementation of data marts without an army of database developers and administrators.  
 
So, don’t take my word for it, the software is available to the Community User at Infobright.org , and serious enterprise users can get a free trial of the Enterprise Edition at http://www.infobright.com/Products/Product-Demo/ . You will find the solution easy-to-use and the time-to-performance amazing.
 

So, don’t try to boil ocean and certainly do not wait for the big corporate-wide project.  Whether you need to analyze customer web activity, call detail records or track online sales, it can be done quickly with limited skills and investment. The Infobright platform is worth a look.

All the best,

Mark
 

It has been an entire week since I arrived at Infobright in my new job as Interim CEO.  Getting to know the team is always fun and generally delivers a surprise or two.  My surprise came on the morning of the second day when I woke up and realized I likely had food poisoning.   I recall going out to dinner the night before with two senior members of the team.  My first thought was that they had actually attempted to poison me, but was relieved to find out that one other dinner partner from the night before was also sick and “enjoying” the same symptoms of food poisoning.   Therefore, I concluded, we were just unlucky and I was not being pursued by the Infobright Management Team. 

Over the course of the week my goal was to learn more about our users and customers.  What I found was that both Community Users and Enterprise Customers are finding ICE and IEE surprisingly easy to make quick progress with.  They are telling us that they have urgent business problems that require an analytic database that is much easier to install, set up and run BI tools against.  They are also telling us that they can achieve results in areas that previously were out of reach using the legacy databases and BI tools they have been using.  In the first week at Infobright the themes of ease-of-use and beyond expectation results were clear and present when listening to customers and users describe their success. 

So, when I consider my intended goal of providing more focus to Infobright, the focus must be in building products that fit market segments where ease-of-use and easily attainable performance are valued.  This doesn’t sound like the high end of Data Warehousing to me where highly complex MPP architectures and teams of DBAs spend their time.  It sounds like the realm of Departmental IT and SMB where business leaders are in a hurry to gain access to data and answers without the lead time and pain of complex architectures and high costs. 

So this is the focus you will likely hear more about from Infobright.  We have ground breaking technology and products that are doing well and will continue to progress in the areas of ease-of-use and easily attainable performance.   

You will find me accessible and interested in your experiences with Infobright products and services.  I am very interested in hearing from you with input on our products and how best to serve you as both community and Enterprise customers.   Please feel to contact me at Mark.Burton@infobright.com . 

All the best, 

Mark