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