Nicholas Goodman on Business Intelligence

UPDATE: ParAccel have updated their website and no longer have the below silly teaser link.

I ran into someone from ParAccel at a TDWI conference this year and she alluded to the fact that I might find their product interesting. I saw another blog posting that mentioned them so I figured out it was time to go and find some information.

I’m a consultant. I’m not into vague marketing statements like “We scale linearly and process data 100x faster than everyone else.” Everyone has that on a website with a Dashboard or some whizbang graph. What is going to get a company into my sales channel (I have customers)? Good information about their product. What it is. Specs. Diagrams with approach to scaling. Things people like me need to understand what a product is.

So - here’s a dumb move. Put a link on your homepage (http://www.paraccel.com) that invites people to learn about your Architecture but then come up with some self important fake popup about an architecture that is SOOOO secret we can’t even give you a big diagram with bubbles and concepts.

In the day and age where Open Source and user generated content, tips, ideas are progressing technology at impressive rates there are clearly some people who get “it” and don’t. Getting customers jazzed about your product (with that big diagram with bubbles and concepts) is more important than what you think your competitors will gleam from it (big diagram with bubbles and concepts).

Yawn. Moving on.

Or why Speakeasy now sucks.

Let’s set this up (and tune out if you’re not in for a customer service rant).

Cable companies have historically done an exceptionally poor job about treating customers well. Chalk it up to a condoned monopoly, stagnant business model, etc. We’d all heard the horror stories about the cable appointments missed, must be there between 8am to 5pm three weeks from today, etc.

Speakeasy, a rather hip DSL provider (VOIP, data solutions, and DSL service) has always had grand service. Call them and they are helpful and smart. The other people on the end of the line aren’t people reading scripts taking orders, these are people that know what they’re doing. I first became a speakeasy customer in 2000 and have recommended them to several people.

Speakeasy, or more specifically COVAD (their subcontractor for doing installations), muffed up my DSL installation order when I recently moved. Suffice to say that the COVAD dispatcher who berated me for not being available for an appointment that I never knew about was what unfortunately the deciding factor to leave a company that I had, otherwise, had a good experience with. So, having spent approximately 5000 USD over my lifetime as a customer (I get their top shelf DSL with all the bells and whistles) I had to say no more I’ll make other arrangements. Called and cancelled the move.

I was surprised then to find the 49.00 “order charge” on my last invoice for the cancelled order. Clearly they’re not going to charge me for having an awful customer experience which already caused me to cancel my service with them. Yup! Called to ask to have it removed. Nope. Pointed out that I’ve been one of their top shelf DSL clients. No dice. So, here a company which used to be savvy, hip, and customer focused is now trading 50USD administrative fees for happy big spending customer satisfaction (5000 USD).

Speakeasy; you had much potential to be different. But, like other phone/utility providers you’ve crossed over and you pretty much blow. Sold your soul to the nickel and diming “concession this and administration that” fees.

The irony is that when I called the Cable company who has historically done exceptionally poor in terms of responsiveness and customer support they responded exactly the way I would have expected the new, hip company to. Called two days before my installation, asked if they could do Internet in addition to Cable. No problem. 10am (when they said they’d be here) they showed up, polite, courteous, helpful, and 30 minutes later Cable + Internet up and running.

There you have it. Old companies can renew their service focus and end up wowing a customer. New companies can let their service slide and lose customers over silly stuff. Goes to show that a focus on the customer is the thing that matters more than the size and age of the providers. It’s timeless for new and old.

I work with people all over the country and the world. What that means is that we often schedule meetings, calls, webex meetings, remote consulting sessions, etc. Lacking some great shared calendar in the cloud that we can use to do this adhoc (I’m sure there’s some web 2.0 startup who does this so please comment if you know of something GOOD) this means that people email and put suggested and adjusted times in emails.

For instance, just yesterday, I received the following email:

The regular 10am EST XYZ meeting tomorrow is cancelled until further notice.

What’s the issue with this email? Well, we don’t have a 10am EST meeting. We have a meeting scheduled at 10am Eastern (ie, when the clock in the eastern time zone hits 10am during the summer months).

EDT and EST have VERY SPECIFIC timezone offsets.

EDT = UTC - 4
EST = UTC - 5

I use generally, and think many others also use “Eastern” to refer ONLY to local time. Ie, what the clock on the wall says in New York regardless of EDT/EST.

Let’s take the above example:

• 10:00 EST on June 22 (someone sends an email requesting a meeting)
• 10:00 EST = 13:00 UTC (given the definition of EST, with an offset of -5 hours)
• 13:00 UTC = 11:00 EDT (ie, makes sense right, 10:00 EST = 11:00 EDT)
• 11:00 Eastern = 10:00 EST (on June 22 when New York is in EDT the actual meeting time)

Obviously you assume that someone requesting a meeting for 10am EST on day that falls on EDT was ACTUALLY requesting a meeting at 10am EDT. However, why bother doing that?

My suggestion to people that can’t keep it all straight:

Use Eastern/Pacific instead of EDT/PSTs. Eastern/Pacific is clear that it’s local time but you haven’t confused it by requesting an incorrect time.

Atlassian, makers of Jira and Confluence, is an exceptional company in my opinion.

• They make a solid product that gives users the “I kick ass” feeling. 
• They understand the benefit of making it easy to BUY software, instead of SELLING software to people.  You can eval their product and purchase it on your CC and expense it.  No stiff suits and long high touch sales cycles.
• They’re open.  They have open APIs, plugins, modules, web services, work with about any app server/db, have transparent discussions about product/features/bugs in public.
• They’re “open source — eee” without an open source license.  They are all the great things about community, openness, flexibility, and choice; they are NOT themselves open source but contribute symbiotically with code and free licenses. 
• They’re HONEST about their open source stance: We contribute to core projects, give our product for free, but we are NOT open source ourselves.  “It’s really quite simple, Open Source (capital O, capital S) means that the software has an OSI approved license. If it doesn’t, don’t use the term.”
• Young, smart, energetic, smart, focused, did I mention smart?

I’d been waiting to publicly describe my regards for this company but this just put me over the edge:

any Atlassian employee can spend up to 6 paid work days a year working for non-profits or charities of their choice.

Not dogging the 20% Google employees get for any project, but WOW.  What a committment to values beyond the bits.  Really shows me that the “community” that Jira believes in is more than just lip service for software sales.  They believe it.

Kudos.  I look forward to suggesting to everyone I know to purchase your product.

There’s been some buzz about googles launch of their first "office-esque" product.  So, I signed up to get a preview to see what all the fuss is about.  To be honest, I was pleasantly surprised with the quality of the application.

Google Spreadsheets is a browser based spreadsheet and collaboration tool.  You make, share, save, edit your spreadsheets in a web browser. 

I was pleasantly surprised to see that it wasn’t a super light grid based notepad; it’s a real spreadsheet with formulas to do real work:

You can highlight ranges of cells, just like good ole Excel:

Overall, I was quite happy with the experience and think it will definitely be useful for individuals and SMBs.  I ponder, like others, how useful it will be in big corporate environments BUT don’t really think of it as a competitor to star office/open office. 

So when are Pivot Tables/Pivot Charts arriving… now THAT would be awesome!

I noticed some other bloggers posted but I’ll encourage people as well. The more people that respond the more accurate the survey represents reality!
“We would very much welcome your participation in The OLAP Survey 6. This is the largest independent survey of business intelligence users worldwide. The Survey will obtain input from a large number of users to better understand their buying decisions, the implementation cycle and the business success achieved. Both business and technical respondents are welcome.

The OLAP Survey is strictly independent. While Oracle, Microsoft, Cognos and other vendors assist by inviting users to participate in the Survey, the vendors do not sponsor the survey, nor influence the questionnaire design or survey results. As a participant, you will not only have the opportunity to ensure your experiences are included in the analyses, but you will also receive a summary of the results from the full survey. You will also have a chance of winning one of ten $50 Amazon vouchers. Click here to complete the survey on-line.”

I think this image helps…

As I shutdown my sleek, stylish, light, and functional Gateway 200 ARC at the hipster coffee shop around the corner from my house I noticed something; my Windows/Intel box was the “odd duck” in the coffee shop. Little iBooks, Powerbooks, iPods were prolific. It just then dawned on me that more of my peers (developers, techies, programmers) are using Macs as well.

Here’s the irony: I’m thrilled and bummed all at the same time. I’m thrilled that the hipster masses are rejecting homogenous Windows. I’m bummed because I’m partial to Linux, NOT Mac!

I guess on the upside, my preference for Linux places me in the counter culture; still.

Disclosure: I boot Windows for Wireless/Dual Montior support. However, VMWare Workstation allows me to boot a “developers OS” when I want to do some real work.

As reported by Slashdot, VMWare just released a free VMWare “player” that will play any VMWare machine. I’m quite surprised, but pleasantly! This means that ISVs, consultants, and trainers can all prep an absolutely “perfect” PC at a point in time and distribute it to others in a method that ENSURES that it will fire up and work correctly. The days of “installing” software demos is done… Demos have to be WICKED easy and this does it! This will be invaluable to setting up classrooms on my OWB Workshops / Courses! Hooray!

It’s brilliant!

I look around my office I see a few rack servers, desktops, and a couple of laptops… Mostly Dell, some offbrand, and my Gateway 200ARC notebook. I am 100% certain that the notebook will be the last piece of revenue I ever contribute to Gateway.

I am, apparently, not the only one who feels this way as Gateway has been losing money (and revenue) the past three years. Based on my latest experience with them this is not only likely, but desirable. Gateway product support and customer support was the worst I’ve received of ANY software or hardware vendor, ever (I’ve worked in IT since 1995, so that might tell you something). No company that can perform as poorly as Gateway did with me should thrive in economies of healthy competition. If Gateway makes it, Adam Smith will roll over in his grave and demonstrate the “Doh” made famous by one Homer Simpson.

If readers aren’t interested in descriptions of poor reasoning, business sense, baffling company policies and rude customers service agents than stop now! If you are curious how a well known brand can make a series of mistakes that will cost them a customer (and perhaps many more of warnings heeded from this blog), read on.

It’s quite simple really; the 200ARC was manufactured with a defect that allows the hard drive to become disconnected. This means that after business trip, one needs to whip out a screw driver and reset the drive. No biggie, unless it happens when it’s sitting on your desk running XP. This happened to me last Friday and corrupted my XP operating system.

After four calls to Gateway support (all with relatively helpful CSRs that were doing well executing a series of procedures to troubleshoot) it was clear what had happened. Due to defect, the drive was partially corrupted but no physical damage was done. So my data was safe, which should be a good thing… unless you are talking to Gateway.

Since no physical corruption occurred the solution is to use the recovery disk. Most reading this are tech savvy, so you know what this does: completely wipes out your hard drive. Complete loss of data (which for me, meant rolling back to a full backup 2 weeks prior). That was not, acceptable, as I knew (from a quick linux CD boot) that “My Documents” was in tact and not corrupted.

So, I need a way to get going on the recovery, but to be able to recover the data files that have changed in the past two weeks. I need an identical drive that I can use to reinstall and I’ll recover the files from the other drive over the next couple of day.

Nope… No replacement drive. Their faulty product caused this and I am covered by their highest tier full coverage accidental super duper warranty program (cost an extra $200 USD at purchase). I can’t get Montie (badge CA358) to send me a drive. How about a loaner? Just send me a drive and I’ll send you mine (which you assure me is just fine) in 30 days? Nope, no way… Data Corruption is not Gateways problem, even if it was caused by our product (that was an actual quote).

So here I am with a major pain in the butt situation, and a $50 hard drive can mitigate a huge customer concern and some knucklehead thinks it’s more important to value a corporate guideline than a customer relationship.

That’s what sealed the deal: Gateway is clearly unaware their business is about more than parts, UPCs, and customer support procedures. Dell gets it. The newest Dell commercials, have nothing to do with the amount of RAM in their computers, it’s a guy calling Dell support to make sure Dell will value them as a customer and help them do the things that matter to them (email Aunt Maude and browse oprah.com).

I can’t stress enough to those reading, please heed a warning from a knowledgable purchaser of technology (notebooks, desktops and servers). Gateway doesn’t get it so buy only if you really want the hardware and that’s it!

There is a relatively happy ending, and I love the fact that it is these sweet words: Linux saved the day! A simple download, iso burn of Trinity Linux I was able to “scp” all of my files to a server and then proceed through the process of wiping out my hard drive per Gateway procedures.

My parting advice is download this small bootable CD and burn it right now. It’s simple memory only boot, file system, network support is the convergence of exactly what one needs for recovery situations.

Good riddance Gateway and good job Trinity Linux!