Sandeep Giri's Blog on Adventures in Entrepreneurship

I am Running a Marathon and Raising Funds for HRDC

2011-08-03T17:47:00.000-07:00

My friend Binod Bijukachhe is an orthopedic surgeon in Nepal. He works tirelessly to treat disabled children at the Hospital and Rehab Center for Disabled Children (HRDC) nearby Kathmandu. Simply put, Binod and his team are amazing -- in a poor country like Nepal, where so many children with physical disabilities cannot afford care, HRDC treats thousands of children suffering ailments like burn contractures, club foot disease, polio, and scoliosis, to name a few. In 2010 alone, HRDC handled close to 15,000 cases overall - which is remarkable.

Children under treatment at HRDC having some fun time

I have known Binod from high school back in Nepal. When I visited Nepal with my wife and kids last summer, Binod took us to HRDC. We were touched and humbled by the suffering the children have to endure, and equally amazed by how HRDC was able to provide care at such low costs. For instance, the hospital hires local cobblers to make prosthetic shoes for club foot disease -- at a fraction of cost of buying name-brand shoes.

Dr. Binod Bijukachhe, one of HRDC's talented surgeons

Yours truly prepping for the marathon

Earlier this year, I decided to train for my first marathon, and I just signed up to run the Santa Rosa Marathon on August 28th. The 26.2 miles are surely going to be tough, but nowhere even close to what the kids at HRDC have to face.

I want to dedicate this run to Binod, HRDC, and especially all the children being treated there -- and I ask you to join me in supporting HRDC by making a donation. I will even add a challenge - for every dollar donated up to $5,000, my solar company in Nepal, Gham Power, will make a matching contribution by installing a solar PV system of equal value at HRDC (which also suffers long electricity blackouts each day because of Nepal's ongoing energy crisis).

Please sponsor my marathon run by making a donation to HRDC. The good folks at American Himalayan Foundation (AHF, also a supporter of HRDC) will be happy to process your donation - here is how:

Go to http://www.himalayan-foundation.org/donate
Click on "Give Now"
Click on "One Time Gift"
Fill out the form with your name, address, email, and donation amount. For reference, an average surgery costs $150. A pair of locally made prosthetic shoes costs about $25.
VERY IMPORTANT: Under "About your Gift" - Make sure you check "Please Direct My Gift To.." and type in "HRDC" in the box immediately underneath. This is to make sure 100% of your donation goes to HRDC. In the Notes field at the bottom, type in "Sandeep"

Please spread the word around. If you are in Santa Rosa or nearby on August 28th, please come by to cheer me on (or help carry me on a stretcher). But mostly, please do whatever you can to help Binod's work at HRDC.

Please sponsor my marathon run by making a donation to HRDC.

Tsunami of Sorrow

2011-03-13T11:53:00.000-07:00

Tsunami of sorrow
Swept over Sendai
Shaken
Stunned
Slaughtered
Now suddently still
Million tiny prayers
Enough to rebuild?

Social Entrepreneurship Vs Foreign Aid - Kind of Like The Pig and The Chicken

2010-10-19T11:49:00.000-07:00

There's been a lot of discussion about the effectiveness of foreign aid, INGO's and donations versus social entrepreneurship when it comes to dealing with issues of poverty, infrastructure development, etc., especially in developing countries -- and I can't help but think of the classic story about the chicken and the pig, which goes something like this:

A pig and a chicken are walking down a road. The chicken looks at the pig and says, “Hey, why don’t we open a restaurant?”

The pig looks back at the chicken and says, “Good idea, what do you want to call it?”

The chicken thinks about it and says, “Why don’t we call it ‘Ham and Eggs’?”

“I don’t think so,” says the pig, “I’d be committed, but you’d only be involved.”

Although we can't make blanket statements, but for the most part, it seems to me social entrepreneurs are committed, whereas foreign aid and donations are involved. You can't bring about sustainable change without having your skin in the game.

How to Count Beans when you don't have QuickBooks

2010-09-24T14:04:00.000-07:00

I still recall the sense of relief when I mastered (well, sort-of) the art of start-up accounting during my first CEO gig. Our accountant (who visited us twice a month) gave me a crash course in QuickBooks, taught me how to read PNL, Balance Sheet, A/P, A/R - and also how to make entries for money coming and money going out. I have never been good at accounting, but I got QuickBooks - and pretty soon, I was dangerous enough to keep track of the business via these wonderful reports that QuickBooks could spit out on-demand.

But then came the two companies that I set up in Nepal, so far away from QuickBooks land. The first one is a software company, and we hired an accountant, an auditor (and also a lawyer to complete the triumvirate) -- and they were able to concoct something in Excel that let me get the reports I needed -- so far, so good. However, the second company we set up in Nepal last year - our solar energy company Gham Power -- now that totally threw me off.

For starters, there's more retail activity compared to software business - lots of client transactions, inventory to track, VAT calculations, import tax, custom clearance, supplier credit lines, etc. etc., and I was very afraid. So I asked our team to get a decent accounting system in place - "it must be computerized, and we need to have up-to-date data each day", I said.

Taking a cue from my startup experience in the US, I first suggested QuickBooks, but our accoutants found the interface too weird - "this is made for people who don't know accounting, we are accountants and we do direct ledger entries, dammit!". Well, you have to pick you battles, so I let them figure out the right course.

First - they brought in a software called Tally, I think with a trial license (the actual license cost was about USD $1,000 plus yearly support fee - yikes! higher than my beloved QuickBooks). Then they took about a month to set it up, and then told us it still wasn't right, and probably will not be right until we bought the actual license AND got a consultant to set it up. Phew!

Meanwhile, I needed our numbers, so there was a parallel system in place using good old Excel, which takes 2 full-time staff to maintain - one to record each financial transction on paper and compile paperwork, the other to make entries in Excel. Needless to say, it is far off from where it needs to be, but sort of gets the job done.

Now I'm at a point where I'd rather just have someone scan all the financial paperwork and send it to a QuickBooks consultant who'll at least get me what I need. But one would think there's gotta be a better way - right?

I'd love to hear from fellow startup entrepreneurs in this part of the world (Nepal, India, China, etc.) on this. What has worked for you? Anyone use QuickBooks, or found a QuickBooks for this part of the world? Is Tally our only option as far as software goes?

Until then, we keep counting beans using Excel, while dreaming of QuickBooks.

My Fall from Grace to Watch TV Online

2010-02-20T08:52:00.000-08:00

Over the years, I've been trying my best to recover from TV addiction, and by the end of 2009, it's been limited to watching Lost, Supernatural (my wife's colleague turned us on to this by lending us first 4 seasons on DVD, to which we happily traded whatever sleeping hours we had left on any given night), Tivo (Craig Ferguson and Charlie Rose mostly), then the occasional sports (NFL and NBA), then the occasional Netflix "watch instantly" movies.

While that may sound like a grand accomplishment (at least to me), you have to understand that I haven't fully recovered from my addiction.

This was made painfully clear earlier this month when during the same week that I left for Nepal, both Lost and Supernatural started airing new episodes, and I would miss Super Bowl as well. Still, I figured since we have "broadband" (ahem, 512kbps) in Nepal, I'd be able to catch a lot of it on the web. So, my first weekend in Nepal, I go to NBC site to watch Lost - and I get this warning - "You appear to be accessing from outside of United States, f&#( off!". Same with Supernatural. (Superbowl I didn't even attempt to because it was 5 am in the morning in Nepal when the game started, and when I talked to my kids on Skype later that morning, my 6-year son very happily let me know who'd won)

I then tried hulu - it basically told me to buzz off for the same reasons when I looked for Lost or Supernatural. Tried Netflix to see if I can watch instantly - they don't allow access from outside the US either. Hence came my fall from grace - I searched for bittorrent feeds for the shows, and whoala, I had all 3 episodes of Lost and Supernatural downloaded overnight, and the next night around 10 pm, I was all content to start my marathon session of watching all missed Lost episodes, and Supernatural the next night, and I became complete again.

Anyone know if there's a way to access my Tivo'd shows online? I installed the Tivo Desktop thing (even the paid version), but haven't found any easy obvious way to access my transferred shows over the web.

'Water' by Steven Solomon: A View From the Melting Himalayan Glaciers

2010-02-19T20:12:00.001-08:00

Pulitzer Prize winning author Kai Bird who lives in Nepal writes in The Huffington Post about Steven Solomon's book "Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization" and how water problems add to Nepal's current energy crisis. It is interesting to note that Kai is dealing with the loadshedding problem with diesel generator and inverter-batteries. Also, he doesn't mention his views about solar or any other renewable energy in his writeup, because we feel that renewable energy is crucial to addressing this issue. So, I wrote this response to Kai's article:

Kai - thanks for pointing out this critical issue in Nepal

I'm curious why you haven't explored solar PV as an alternative (full disclosure: I work for a solar PV company in Nepal) beacause using diesel and "inverter-batteries" actually add to the water crisis.

Diesel genset spews out pollutants that cause environmental damage, which then accelerates the melting of Himalayan glaciers, which as you've pointed out is the direct cause of Nepal's hydropower plants generating less electricity.

"Inverter-batteries" also make matter worse because they don't actually add any new energy. Instead, they inefficiently store Nepali utility company's already scarce electricity into batteries to use later as backup during "load-shedding", but with 70% loss-factor. That's why Nepali government is considering a ban on inverters (see http://ghampower.com/?p=426)

Now I'm biased on solar. I left my job in San Francisco to come back to my native Nepal and make solar PV systems available at diesel-generator prices, because decreasing costs of PV are now at a point where developing countries can consider it as an alternative to diesel.

I'd love to welcome you to visit http://www.ghampower.com and our offices in Kathmandu. We are confident solar can help produce a good part of your current energy needs, at costs comparable to your diesel generator and inverter-batteries, but minus the damage to water and the environment.

Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Cost of Doing Business in Nepal

2010-02-17T08:24:00.000-08:00

When I came back to Nepal to launch our solar venture Gham Power, I had no illusions in my mind that the process was going to be smooth. After all, I was born and raised here, finished high school from here, and have been visiting frequently enough to know that the way business is done in Nepal is very different from what one would expect say in the US.

However, it’s the little things that surprise you, and also drive this point home.

Last week, our staff found out that there was no straightforward way to connect the solar panels to the rest of the wiring. This, of course, was very concerning, since the solar panels *are* the source of electricity, and if you can’t connect them to the rest of the system, there is no power whatsoever.

This problem was because the cables coming out of the panels needed a special type of connector, which is commonly available probably everywhere else in the world, but alas, not in Nepal. We talked to several other solar installer in Kathmandu, and everyone complained about the same thing – “yeah, those *&#%ing cables, can’t find them here, so we just cut them to bare wire and connect it from there”

Little did they know (or maybe pretended not to) that if you cut the cables on the panel, the solar panel warranty becomes void.

So, I did some research, and found a company in China who sells this type of cable. After a couple of emails back and forth, their rep says - “our entire staff is on leave for 8 days for Chinese New Year’s, so order by Thursday, or else you will have to wait for 8 days.” The total order came to be about $170, so instead of doing something elaborate like a TT (Tele Transfer, or “wire”), LC (Letter of Credit), or Bank Draft, I asked the rep if they took a credit card. Answer came back saying – “we don’t have a POS machine, so can’t do credit card, you must send a TT.”

This is Wednesday afternoon. These guys go on leave on Friday.

So, to prepare the TT, I had the rep email me an invoice with all the details spelled out. Our bank only accepts printed invoice, and their office is all the way across the town (30-minute drive) so we had to print the invoice and get to them. That was the end of Wednesday. Our bank says this will get done in the “first hour” Thursday.

Thursday we go to bank. We need someone with signing authority as well as the company seal that needs to be stamped on several papers that get signed to prepare the TT. By the time everything is said and done, it is only late Thursday when I can send a scanned copy of the TT document to the rep in China. Fortunately he hasn’t left for vacation, so he ends up sending the shipment first thing Friday morning.

I thought that was the happy ending, but we had one more crazy act remaining.

Normally when something gets sent via UPS, Fedex, or DHL, I’m used to expecting a package shipped to my door. I expected the same in this case as well – but express shipping in Nepal means the carrier brings your shipment to the airport and then calls you to clear customs.

Now, in midst of running a business, I really don’t have the time to go to the airport to custom clear a $170 shipment of $%&*ing cables, so we send our shipper instead. He spent the entire day (“the customs’ computer system was down, that’s why it took long”), but came to our office in the evening with a few boxes of cable.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m really glad we finally have our cables and that we can hook our solar panels without voiding their warranty. But can’t there be an easier way to get this transaction done?

I understand Nepal has all these protective measures to control the flow of foreign currency going out of the country, but maybe there’s a way to set a dollar-limit per transaction and then a limit for the quarter or the year on how much stuff a firm can order without having to go through all these shenanigans. One can only hope.

Gham Power Inaugurated!

2010-02-09T19:20:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was a big day at Gham Power

First, the ad in Kantipur has our phones ringing off the hook. Even though the staff was prepared for the call volume, at times it got overwhelming. If you had to wait long to get connected, sorry about that - we will do a better job in responding quickly to your calls. In the meanwhile, also consider contacting us by email at contact@ghampower.com, or just drop by our showroom in Gairidhara

Second, although it was an unusually wet rainy winter day in Kathmandu (everyone at office took it as an auspicious "sagun" sign) - many friends and family showed up for our inauguration event. Their support has been amazing and inspiring, we feel truly blessed.

Right about the time we had everyone show up for the function, the lights went out and we were all in the dark. Obviously, giggles and jokes started flying around - "man, these guys can't even power up their office, what are we to expect?"

We'd just finished electrical wiring, so Shrawan Dai and Kebal Dai started troubleshooting, while Moon and I were sheepishly trying to humor our guests.

Turns out a big water tanker had parked outside to supply water to the building, and they hooked up their big fat huge water pump's electrical plug directly to our electrical sockets, blowing up our inverter's fuse. Anyhow, about 10 or so very long minutes later, we had our lights (and breath) back, and the show went on..

Then, the highlight of the evening was to see all the Gham Power executives' moms cut the inauguration ribbon

Truly amazing!

True Calling

2010-02-01T16:23:00.001-08:00

My, my.. it was September 2009 when I last posted a blog entry. Well, we can blame twitter and facebook for that a little bit, but what I realized is that blog posts are effective when you can write from your true voice, and let's say I spent 2009 finding my true voice (and glad to report that it's been found ;)

This blog used to be called "business intelligence adventures" because that was my sole profession when I started this blog back in 2005. Since then, a lot's happened - our company Loyalty Matrix got acquired by Responsys where I spent about 2 years (part of the acquisition deal). Then in 2009, we started a new company OpenI - building on the open source business intelligence project we'd started in 2005, and also to scale the partnership we'd developed with Codemandu, our off-shore partner in Kathmandu, Nepal. It's been great to be back in start-up mode again, and the progress at OpenI is very satisfying and rewarding.

However, life is full of strange but powerful co-incidences.

During my 2 years between Loyalty Matrix acquisition and starting OpenI, I started becoming more fascinated with the clean energy industry, and wondered how I could get in. Perhaps part of it was my own mortality trying to find a way into my profession - I wanted my work to contribute towards more serious issues our world faces today.

Then in February 2009, a funny thing happened:

I was on a short trip to Kathmandu to kick-off a project. Right around then, Nepal was hit by its worst energy crisis, and the government-run power company (Nepal Electrical Authority, NEA) had issued a 16-hour daily blackout ("load shedding"). Needless to say, our software development staff was severely impacted. They bought hordes of batteries and inverters, but when you only have 8 hours of electricity per day, that too in two 4-hour slots, it's hard to adequately charge your battery bank. So we looked for alternatives, and the suggestion was to buy a diesel generator.

Not only the clean energy freak in me cringed at this, but the noise, fumes, etc. would be too much of an irritant to have within an office full of sofware developers. Now, I'd seen a lot of homes and businesses in the San Francisco bay area switching to solar power - so we explored if solar would be an option. Turns out there were about 40 solar companies in Nepal - but none of them could provide us with a solution.

First off, they all focused on rural electrification (which is a noble cause, also helped by government subsidies), and the types of systems they offered were just for basic lighting. We were told "solar can't power up heavy equipments like computer servers" :)

So -- an idea was born. Can we build an organization that can provide solar electricity as a viable backup option for urban homes and businesses in Nepal who need more than just basic lights?

A year after - I am happy to report that we just launched our solar energy company in Nepal - Gham Power - that just does that.

Of course, just like many other entrepreneurial adventures, this involved a lot of crazy things. I attened a Clean Energy certificate program at UC-Berkeley to learn more about solar technology and the financial structures to make it feasible. My wonderful friends Mike McCarthy and his dad Tom McCarthy introduced us to Solar Power Inc, a great solar company (public) out of Roseville, CA - who agreed to become a partner and help us bring one of the best solar technology to Nepal. Friends and family pitched in like never before -- both in the US as well as in Nepal -- to make this idea a reality. We had interesting adventures with the Nepali government, shipping companies, banks, vendors (topics for other posts). We put together a truly kick-ass executive team to run the company in Nepal. It's been a truly amazing process.

And to ensure our work with OpenI doesn't take a back seat to this - we got more help into the company so it continues to excel in its independent course, as evidenced by the new and exciting projects we've had the opportunity to participate recently.

Of course, we have a lot of work ahead of us. I'll probably also go nuts travelling back and forth between San Francisco and Kathmandu. I can't thank my wife and kids enough to be so greatly understanding to let me pursue this (I know I'm stretching the limits of their generosity and kindness). I feel truly blessed.

Being a technology geek, one of the hardest thing for me was to accept that it's okay to pursue what you are passionate about even if you don't have much experience or if that wasn't your area of training in school. Also, being an entrepreneur is about creating and growing companies, not necessarily being involved in running the company. I had severe doubts about what will happen to OpenI (and my personal career as a Business Intelligence software guy) if I went after my solar energy dream, but it turns out, they don't need to be conflicting.

One of the hardest lessons is to figure out how you can focus on your core strengths, and then bring in other smart people as business partners to do things which are not necessariy your core strengths. They probably teach this from day one of Entrepreneurship 101, but it's amazing how easily we can fall into the trap of not applying this to the businesses we build.

So, I am changing the blog title to "Adventures in Entrepreneurship" and will continue to share my experiences (more frequently). I'd also love to hear from other entrepreneurs out there about their experiences (similar and different). At the moment, I am just happy to have found a true voice to communicate, and look forward to sharing new adventures.

Healthcare Speech Notes for Obama

2009-09-09T22:22:00.000-07:00

Ok, the delivery was great, but the content could have been more clear if he'd used these notes from Dan Roam:

My Speech to Congress (Health Care)

View more documents from Dan Roam.

Carrot-and-Stick Model doesn't Motivate Innovation

2009-08-26T18:44:00.000-07:00

Great TED talk by Dan Pink:

Healthcare Debate Explained on Back of a Napkin

2009-08-12T14:12:00.000-07:00

Author and visual thinker Dan Roam does an amazing job of explaining what the healthcare debate is all about, all with pictures drawn on the back of a napkin . Here's a link to his blog where he provides more commentary on this, or you can check out the slideshows below:

Healthcare Napkins All

View more documents from Dan Roam.

I wish the media took a cue from this to put the politics and business aside and actually explain the fundamentals of this debate, instead of all the FUD that's been going on in the townhall meetings.

BTW - if you haven't checked out Dan Roam's work on visual thinking called Back of the Napkin -- be sure to check it out. Good stuff!

Another New Beginning

2009-07-31T10:49:00.000-07:00

This week I completed my tenure as an employee at Responsys and started my new venture OpenI -- a company that provides open source business intelligence software and services to businesses that want to be data-driven in their operational strategy.

I guess you can call me a serial entrepreneur now, since OpenI will be my fourth startup -- last one being Loyalty Matrix, which was acquired by Responsys in 2007. I am happy to say that the marketing analytics technology we built at Loyalty Matrix found a way to express itself as Responsys's own analytics product Interact Insight. It was interesting to see the formal structures it requires in a more established company to release a product -- valuable lessons that I'll surely apply in future product releases. It is also great that Responsys will remain a client of OpenI, so that we can advance this technology in a mutually beneficial fashion (and also that OpenI has a few clients from the get go :-).

OpenI will partner with Codemandu, a software development company in Kathmandu, Nepal that has provided the engineering help for OpenI in the past. Codemandu will help us deliver support and integration work for our clients. So -- if you have software projects in business intelligence, reporting, and/or analytics (or know of someone who does) -- we are here for you :-) Basically, if you are an on-demand company that stores transactional data for your customers, we can help you build an on-demand analytics product based on OpenI -- something you can private-label and up-sell to your customers.

So, needless to say -- next couple of months are going to be crazy, and pretty exciting. Personally, I have a lot of pent-up ideas on making BI more accessible and actionable, and we will be toying around with these ideas in OpenI. And given the nature of open source, these experimentations will happen in public domain -- and so you'll see some fun stuff appear on this blog and OpenI site.

The BI landscape has definitely evolved since OpenI started back in 2005. Most of the big guys (Busienss Objects, Hyperion, Cognos, SPSS) have been acquired by even bigger guys (SAP, Oracle, IBM). On the open source BI side, Pentaho and JasperSoft have done a remarkable job in leading the sector. Plus there has been a great deal of movement in on-demand BI as well - with Swivel, GoodData, and PivotLink, and also at desktop level with Tableau. We will definitely give our best shot to stand on the shoulders of these giants and raise the bar a bit differently.

I recall Sting (lead singer of The Police, for the benefit of our younger readers) say this in a Rolling Stone interview once when asked about his unique singing voice -- something like "Nobody can sing like me -- I'm not saying that I have the best voice in Rock 'n Roll, it's more like someone can sing better or worse, but they can't sing exactly like me"

So, this I can say -- OpenI will be unique in its approach to BI. Stay tuned..

cheers,

Sandeep

OpenI 2.0 RC1 is Released

2009-06-19T04:55:00.001-07:00

OpenI is an open source BI software for SaaS or On-Demand deployments. I have been involved with it since 2005, and it's come a long way since then. We released the release candidate RC1 for version 2.0 on June 17th -- and it's good to see our ranking go back in the top 100 of sourceforge.net.

For those of you who dabble with software that involves reporting and analytics, it is worth a look -- there is a demo at http://demo.openi.org/openi (login: openi2/openi2) -- and it's always great to hear your feedback.

Please pass the word around.

Yours Truly @ Nepali Business Forum @ ANA 2009 - Oakland Convention Center - July 4 11:30 am

2009-06-19T04:41:00.000-07:00

For the past few months, I have been working with a few friends - Niley Shrestha, Jagdish Pandey, Sanjay Khatri from our virtual Nepali Business Network - under the guidance of Rita Stecklein "Dijyu", to put together a business forum at the upcoming ANA (Association of Nepalis in Americas) convention. The venue is at the Oakland Convention Center, and our theme is to highlight entrepreneurship amongst Nepalese around the world.

It has been a fun process - soliciting speakers, refining the theme, and also collaborating with Bineet Sharma, Pukar Malla, Kumar Pandey, and friends at CAN-USA - we had a last minute change in speakers rosters where yours truly had to jump in from the bench -- and here is the formal announcement:

Namaste!

The Nepali Business Network (NBN) is pleased to announce and host the Business Forum at the Association of Nepalis in the Americas (ANA) - 2009 Convention.

When: July 4th (1130–1230 hours)
Where: Oakland Convention Center, 1001 Broadway, Oakland, CA 94607

The Forum presents experiences of members of the Nepali diaspora engaged in business and entrepreneurial ventures. In particular, the credentials of our speakers (Mr. Bhawani Sapkota, Mr. Ram Sah and Mr. Sandeep Giri) span the fields of software and IT products, mobile telecommunications, and commercial and residential real-estate. The speaker profiles can be found in the ANA and NBN websites.

We invite and welcome your attendance at the Business Forum. Come listen / participate in the interactive discussion focused around the ‘Nepali Experience’ in areas of business, commerce and high technology as well as sharing of thoughts and ideas on some questions around entrepreneurship.

What does entrepreneurship mean in a world where ideas are boundless, seamless and traversing at the speed of light, commercial borders are interconnecting and expanding, virtualization is growing and for real and collaborative communications continues to be a click-of-the-mouse away?
Why do local and global perspectives matter in entrepreneurship and how do they support / influence innovation, marketing and delivery of new products and services?
In what ways can entrepreneurial vision help explore and harness business opportunities, whether they are in financial investments or in the setup, nurturing or management of businesses?
How is being a Nepali entrepreneur advantageous in today’s business landscape?

The Forum offers an informative and exciting session with networking opportunities during lunch. It will be held in the Oakland Convention Center. You can attend the Forum with the ANA convention registration card.

We look forward to seeing you soon!!

The Organizing Team,
Nepali Business Network (http://www.nepalibiz.net/)
CAN-USA (http://www.can-usa.org)

Note: The Professional Networking Luncheon is at 1230–1330 hours, immediately following this forum. Seehttp://www.eticketbazaar.com/event/99 for details.

Remember this in your next price negotiations

2009-06-01T10:35:00.000-07:00

Architecture is mostly an art of building emotions

2009-05-22T13:55:00.001-07:00

I watched 2 amazing architects - Frank Gehry and Renzo Piano - on Charlie Rose yesterday. Something Renzo Piano said in reference to Louis Kahn's Salk Institute building in La Jolla really stuck out -- "Architecture is mostly an art of building emotions"

.. wisdom just oozes out of these great men..

Frank Gehry:

Renzo Piano:

Data Visualization is about Telling a Story

2009-05-14T22:31:00.000-07:00

First off -- Hans Rosling is an inspiration to us all in the business of analytics and data visualization. Not only this story is extremely relevant, but the way he shows the numbers -- there is a lot to learn. I will make an attempt here to deconstruct his latest TED talk in terms of what a good BI tool show do, and also how this is a great use case of how great BI users behave:

BI Features Used by Hans Rosling:

The most prominent is the use of Time as a special type of "dimension". The tool knows that Time will support the concept of a Play button. This is still very novel -- most BI tool, OpenI included, treat Time as any other dimension -- you can drill up, drill down, set date filters, or date ranges -- but that's about it. Taking a lesson from here, what we should do instead is that the moment there is a Time dimension, user should have the option to "superimpose" Time in "Play" mode within a given analysis -- this should result in a Video Player like slider widget appear at the bottom of the analysis with a big old Play/Pause button next to it

Notice how he first presents the data bubbles in dual-axis graph and then transitions it over to a map view. This makes the concept of "background canvas" a dynamic entity for presenting data. How many other choices a user can have (in addition to dual-axis and map overlay) to use as the context in which the data should be presented

He keeps only 1 attribute per axis - country in X-axis, and % of population with HIV on Y-axis, and everything else (gender, per capital income, etc.) is treated as a filter (in OLAP speak). This keeps the visual very clear on its message. I have often struggled with OLAP based analyses, which have multiple dimensions on each axis, which makes sense sometimes in the table view, but the chart-view is completely horrid. Single data attribute per axis is a way to address that

When it comes to drilling further into data, he basically clicks on a country bubble -- and it can either split by income groups, or only the specific country goes on a time play motion while others stay the some, etc. -- the key for me here is that drilling down is best done at the visual level -- somewhere on the chart/graph itself the user should be able to isolate a data group (in this case a country bubble), and have a choice on drilling down or move it back and forth in time

Hans Rosling as a BI User/Presenter

Emotion, emotion, emotion... he is so far away from the stereotype of a statistician making a presentation. He cares about what he's presenting. The numbers are real people -- they get sick, and they can either get better or they can die.. you can feel that empathy as he presents.

Al Gore did this first (that I can recall) in The Inconvenient Truth when he brought a crane ladder to hoist him up so he can point to the tallest bar in the chart that he is showing. Maybe a bit too melodramatic -- but it drives the point, and also makes a more visceral connection with the data. Hans Rosling stands on top of a table at the beginning of the presentation to explain the different numbers he is presenting, and the audience is at once connected and engaged

His bringing of the long metal pole to point to the numbers instead of your generic laser pointer ("I have solidified the laser beam") is another way to get more personal and physical to show how involved he is

Ultimately he has leverages the BI tool to make a presentation, to tell a compelling story. Earlier in my career, we worked on a feature with another BI tool that automatically generated powerpoints from its charts. Yes, it was pretty crude, and didn't really work that well usabilitywise -- but the point is, this was definitely a feature aimed at helping users build a story off the various charts and grahps and analyses. People want to tell a story -- the BI tool should help them do that.

Ultimately, watching Mr. Rosling is definitely inspirational -- I can only hope that OpenI will one day does the things he's shown us in this presentation. I'm sure we will get there in due time, but it is the spirit in which BI tools are used, and their ultimate message.. that's the important thing to keep in mind as we move the product forward.

Vote for OpenI in sf.net Community Choice Awards

2009-05-14T21:54:00.000-07:00

Please support OpenI by voting for OpenI as the "best enterprise project" in the SourceForge.Net Community Choice Awards.

I promise you we won't forget you once we become famous :-)

Thanks!

San Francisco Approves Nation's Largest Municipal Solar Project

2009-05-08T09:43:00.000-07:00

From San Francisco Chronicle:

Solar project is a go, but still has critics

Despite concerns that the city is getting a raw deal, the Board of Supervisors on Tuesday approved a controversial 25-year deal with a private company to build a photovoltaic solar plant on top of a city-owned reservoir.

And from Recurrent Energy, who will be buliding this plant:

The San Francisco Sunset Reservoir Solar Project

The City of San Francisco is currently planning a five megawatt solar photovoltaic system on the roof of the City’s largest reservoir, located at 24th and Ortega Streets in the Sunset district. Upon completion, the project will consist of nearly 25,000 solar panels that span nearly twelve football fields — becoming California’s largest photovoltaic system and the nation’s largest municipal solar project. This project will more than triple the municipal solar generation in San Francisco and reduce carbon emissions by over 100,000 metric tons, furthering the City's leadership in clean energy implementation.

Everyday when I drive my son to his school, I pass by this big reservoir in the sunset district, and to think that it's going to look like this is really cool (photo simulations from Recurrent Energy's site)

Here's one from Chron with GG bridge in the background:

There have been critics that the city is paying too much money to the private builder, etc. -- and while I'm no expert, the deal does make sense for many reasons:

This is a great example of a city taking leadership in reducing carbon emissions, producing energy not reliant on foreign oil, and more importantly, right smack middle of the city you have the largest "billboard" you can imagine for public awareness on environmental responsibility
Financially, the city did a smart thing by doing a power purchase agreement (PPA) with the private builder. This way, the city only pays for the energy produced by the plant at a fixed rate of $235/MWH (about 23 cents per KWH, which is approximately similar to buying power from PG&E directly at A-6 commercial rates), escalated at 3% per year over the next 25 years. This may seem high compared to what you'd normally pay -- but what this cost doesn't reflect is the hidden price of carbon emission if the city bought that energy from fossil fuel-based sources.
I as a citizen of this great city, and I'm sure I'm not the only one, feel a great deal of pride that our city has the courage to take this bold step, and also to offer new programs to promote residential solar (pioneered by the city of Berkeley); and a city thrives when its citizens are proud of it, a sentiment that magnifies all the way up to the county, state, nation, and the entire planent

So, it was a great feeling today as I drove my son to his school -- I proudly pointed out to the reservoir and said "see that? our city is going to cover all that with solar panels that will produce electricity, and help our environment a the same time.."

My son's response -- "you mean we will have electric cars?"

Well, one thing at a time..

Starter Rental Place in San Francisco

2009-05-07T16:40:00.001-07:00

A colleague of mine moving to San Francisco asked -- "where's a good neighborhood to rent? which parts should I avoid?"

His requirements: his job is in San Bruno. Wife doesn't drive, nor wants to. No kids.

My gut response: should live in the city, easier for his wife to get around and make friends, etc. Since he needs to go to San Bruno, should live close to BART. So I sent him this map

Or get a place close to San Bruno BART station. SOMA might be another option.

Anything I might be overlooking?

OpenI 2.0 Beta Released

2009-05-06T00:40:00.000-07:00

Happy to announce that we released OpenI 2.0 beta today. Check out the updated OpenI.Org site for more news.

With this, I feel I have reached a milestone with this blog. I originally titled this blog "Business Intelligence Adventures", thinking there isn't much difference in my private versus professional life, and as such, I could pretty much blog everything under BI, since that is what I ate, slept, and breathed.

Now as I look at my posts for the last year, they seem to be all over the place, and so I questioned if this is the right blog to post everything under the sun. I think that it is probably better if I blog all BI specific rants over at the OpenI site since that is a much more relevant forum. I really need to free this blog from any topical constraints (probably at the expense of alienating some of the BI-oriented readers) to let this blog evolve through its natural course.

What does that mean? Well, you can probably guess if you look at the last few posts :-) So it will be more about life's offbeat adventures than just BI.

You be the judge.

Indians give a Middle Finger to their General Election

2009-05-01T15:17:00.000-07:00

No, literally.

See -- yesterday was general election in India, and here is how Amitabh Bachchan describes the whole affair in his blog:

So when the four of us are asked by paparazzi, to show our fingers in acknowledgment of us having punched our votes, we show it to them. It is another matter that, the Government marks our middle finger with an indelible ink, to avoid duplication and therefore unfair electoral procedures. Showing of the middle finger in the Western world apparently has different connotations. So I guess, in usual fashion, that is all that the press shall flash tomorrow !! And for those that may miss it here is the photo..!!

And in his post today, there are gobs of other pictures of everyone from common citizens to police to celebrities showing their pride in the democratic process. See for yourself

.. and we worry about "hanging chads" :-)

Jon Stewart hosts Jim Cramer

2009-03-18T23:52:00.000-07:00

Missing Conversion Metrics and Power

2009-02-23T22:35:00.000-08:00

It's been a crazy couple of months, now trying to catch up on my posts :-)

First on BI front, I am working on an email metrics benchmark that we will present this week on Friday exclusively to Responsys customers. What's intriguing is how few companies actually track conversion and actually calculate ROI. One would think that if you were spending any money on "one-to-one" marketing campaigns, wouldn't you at least track how much money you made on the campaign? Few years ago, when we worked with a different email company, the big spiel was about moving on from open rates to clickthrough rates -- but clickthrough rate doesn't tell you the real deal, does it? And it's not that tricky to configure your website to track conversions using pixel-tracking. Am I missing something? Can someone please explain why companies are not doing this? Not just to make my benchmarking project more fun (although that will be nice), but come on people, for your own sakes!

Ok - I'll get off my soapbox.

Secondly, I've picked up a new hobby borderlining on obsession -- this whole whoopla around clean tech. Yes, yes... I know you're going to say, another one jumping on the bandwagon, and maybe I am, but seriously, you have to admit that there are very few things as important for this world than finding, and (more importantly) scaling clean, renewable sources of energy.

Earlier this month, I was in Nepal for a week doing some training at our offshore software development company Codemandu (and also visited family, old friends, and tried some home cuisine -- business with pleasure indeed :-) -- but back to my main point -- the government there has issued a 16-hour daily load-shedding because of power scarcity. That's right, you only get 8 hours of electricity in a day, and even that in two 4-hour chunks. Trust me, you get a whole different perspective on energy conservation when you have that sort of constraint.

Interestingly, this has led to a huge increase in the sales of inverter and battery-based backup systems. Everyone who can afford one, has bought an inverter and a battery. At Codemandu offices, they have enough inverters and batteries to make sure all computer systems can run uninterrupted for at least 24 hours. One of the officials from the local utility company told me that with the load-shedding the power consumption has actually gone up, because in the 8 hours when electricity does get turned on, everyone hordes the energy like crazy and stores it into however many batteries they can get their hands on to. And because there aren't any new power sources becoming available any time soon, they are now talking about running some large-scale diesel generators to keep up with the demand.

Both these instances, the lack of conversion tracking and the lack of electricity, it seems to me a manifestation of a lack of foresight, although in different levels of extreme and of course, very different levels of impact on daily human lives. Well, I'm sure lots of critics have probably explained and commented on both these phenomena, but I'm more interested in learning how to get out of these bad situation caused by bad behavior.

Fixing conversion tracking is easy -- just start tracking. It'll take you a few hours at max in terms of IT resources. And while you're at, track your product/services sold and the dollar amount. Running campaigns without any ROI figures is ... well .. flying blind.

Fixing lack of electricity is not that easy -- if people still wait for another big power plant to be built, nothing will be solved. My advice: don't wait for a big government or corporation. They can't do anything any time soon. What you can do is to take the matter in your own hands. I've been very fascinated by the advances in both solar and wind energy where it truly democratizes energy production by enabling a household to produce its own energy. Yes, the cost is still a factor, but the prices have now come down to a point where if you get 3-5 year financing, your monthly payments are the same as your regular energy bill. And specially when you have 16-hour blackout, it makes all the sense in the world to go for it.

But above all, there is something very liberating about this model where each house and each building being its own little energy producer, like a million little mini-Chevrons or PG&E's, being self-sufficient and big time conservationist, while producing clean energy -- I don't have the actual projections, but I'm pretty sure it's a hell of a lot better than burning more borrowed diesel to fix the situation.

Please Vote for Me - How Election Change Human Behavior

2009-01-21T18:27:00.001-08:00

Last night, while every TV channel was showing Obama's inauguration speech and the never-ending series of inaugural balls, I ended up on KQED, local PBS channel, which had this striking documentary called "Please Vote for Me". The premise is:

In an elementary school in the city of Wuhan in central China, three eight-year old children compete for the position of Class Monitor. Their parents, devoted to their only child, take part and start to influence the results.

Here's a clip - check your local PBS station to see airtime

What's insane is how the candidates' behavior towards their classmates changes. Without any coercing, they start forming alliances, offer bribes for votes, become rude and even demeaning to their opponents -- all in all, pretty disturbing traits for eight-year old's. Then things get worse as their parents get involved in shaping their campaign strategy and speeches.. and we wonder why Karl Rove was (and probably still is) so sought after by candidates.

Election to these children mean their own friends need to make a choice -- who do their friends like the most? And these three candidate go through excruciating emotional torture trying to deal with this, asking their friends to make the choice, and even sell them on it by any means possible.

Maybe it is just wrong to have such young children go through this sort of experience. They just acted out their normal reaction to the situation, probably made worse by their parents' participation. As they mature, they'll be better able to mask their emotions and act more cordially and keep a straight face when they try these questionable tactics to win the election. But I can't help but wonder -- if these children's behavior is any indicator of normal reaction of a human being running in an election -- God help all these candidates we have running for offices deal with their demons.

Business Intelligence for Startups

2009-01-21T17:18:00.001-08:00

A product's progress is measured not by features, but by user experience.

You can add a lot of value to your product by removing features.

Spending 6 to 12 months with a 4-5 person team to develop the first release of your product is way too long. You can't wait that long to get market feedback.

These were just a few golden nuggets of wisdom in Dave McClure's presentation yesterday at SD Forum's BI SIG meeting. At one point, Dave said -- "I come from an engineering background, I used to write code.. and I can't believe that I'm saying this to you -- but all the architecture, algorithms and engineering behind your product don't matter as much as how strong your marketing is, which starts with user experience.. we all tend to develop a lot of cool features which the user never ends up discovering" -- reminded me of that tree that fell in the middle of a big forest (did it really fall?)

Much of Dave's talk may seem like web analytics 101. He's got a (cleverly named) "Startup Metrics for Pirates" called AARRR (stands for Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, and Revenue) to measure your overall success. Then as a startup, you focus on improving these metrics one step at a time (here is his detailed presentation):

Make a Good Product: Activation and Retention
Market the Product: Acquisition and Referral
Make Money: Revenue and Profitability

Personally, I get the step 2 and 3, but it is the first step where a great many of us falter because it is not so easy as it sounds.

Part of making a great product is to have inspiration, vision, and an intense passion to solve a particular problem -- and then you hope that there are millions of others out in the market who see the problem with the same high priority as you do -- and then also hope that your solution beats the competition by being in a completely different league, either by being the first of its kind, or by introducing a completely superior technology, er, user experience.

So can you do all that in 3 months or less? Seems like you have to, if you want to survive in the web 2.0 world (or whichever version we are on these days)

This clearly does not apply to everything. It only applies to a certain class of products/services where customers can experience the
product on the web, and where the quality of user experience can
be measured (even if it is a model of lead generation online and fulfillment being offline)

So if you are building a new product/service today -- can you fit it into this model? Well, one way to try it out is to strip away all the features until you are left with just one or two that are your core differentiators, and see if you can create a version of it that can be experienced completely online. But the point is, if you can do this, you have a framework to measure success a lot earlier in the game. One key edge that startups generally have over bigger organizations is the speed of their product development iteration. How soon can you release a feature to your customers, get feedback and go through a series of subsequent iterations and releases?

Dave's "Pirate Metrics" are about tracking the effectiveness of these iterations, but first you have to configure your business practice so this model can fit. Not a bad thing if you can.

Sun Salutations

2008-12-04T10:17:00.001-08:00

Towards the end of the 3-hour mark of the Solar Industry 101 Tutorial at TiE Silicon Valley offices last night, the moderator Murali Rangarajan asked in a very innocent way to the six distinguished panelists:

"How many of you actually have a solar panel on your roof?"

Here they were up on the stage - all six of them - a very promising Solar Industry entrepreneur, two successful solar energy company executives, a VC and an angel investor who specialize in clean tech, and a prominent consultant and industry journalist. You'd expect almost all of them to raise their hand, right?

Only one hand went up out of the six, rest murmuring some embarrassment-laden excuses.

It's really not their fault. It just shows the state of the overall clean-tech or green-tech industry. A typical consumer in the US today does not have a lot of economic motivation to switch to Solar or any other clean energy source. The ones who do it, they are doing so more out of the goodness of their heart, or a feeling of social and moral responsibility to take care of their planet. And I salute their effort. But the rest of us, let's admit it -- this is one of those things we label as "a great noble idea, should do it when we can get around it", very much like the panelists in yesterday's seminar. Because there is not a compelling need to do so (our electricity and utilities seem to be working fine), there is no market force (it's not cheaper, and actually more expensive in the short term), and it sounds like a complex, time-consuming project (it's feels more like a full-fledged home improvement project as opposed to how we typically get electricity installed when we move into a new place, which is basically a phone call to the local utility company)

This is not to justify our current behavior of consuming unclean energy and further endangering the planet, but more an observation of the long, long way we still have to go in terms of making clean energy a viable alternative.

During yesterday's session, Eric Wesoff from GreenTech Media jokingly mentioned his sidegig as a Yoga instructor and that if the talk got boring, he offered to lead the audience through some sun salutation asanas. Not sure if the reference was intentional, but the pioneers and the entrepreneurs in the solar industry are definitely worth of our salutations.

I personally think that currently solar has a better market fit for developing nations, specially at the so-called bottom of the pyramid (BoP), where there is extreme energy poverty. These folks don't have energy resources like electricity and natural gas and coal-fired plants, etc. -- but the sun shines equally upon them as it does in any other nation, so solar to them is a very accessible resource. Can there be micro-sized solar installations for these BoP communities that will at least light a few light bulbs, help with basic cooking and food preservation, and water purification? For a solar solution combines all these, I'm sure the market there will raise their hands a lot faster than our panelists last night.

Now that would really be worth some heartfelt sun salutations.

BI 2.0, Next Generation BI, and Everythig New and Improved

2008-11-24T12:26:00.000-08:00

My fellow blogger Bhupendra Khanal has an interesting post that mentions the challenges associated with BI 2.0/Information 2.0 (he also plugs OpenI, my open source project, which is much appreciated -- Bhupendra, may OpenI karma come back to you thousand-fold :-)

Software industry, not unlike any other, contains a lot of hype and probably sometimes even more so with all this 2.0 buzz, which probably seems cool to the industry insiders, but is definitely confusing to the market.

Take BI 2.0 (or Information 2.0) for example - what in the world does it mean? Well, turns out, at the end of the day, to most BI vendors, it means more fancy charts and graphs and dashboards, except this time they'll have rounded corners, larger fonts with brighter colors, and maybe a fit of Flash and/or Ajax thrown in for a good measure to demonstrate live interactivity.

All this is fine and well, but all this is also pure BS if you are not helping your user make better decisions, or informing them of something new.

If BI 2.0 or Information 2.0 is to be seen as the "next generation" (it seems you cant' escape these cliches), then it needs to go beyond charts/graphs/dashboard paradigm. BI applications and tools need to be rooted in the knowledge worker's workflow - and should be cognizant of the types of decisions that need supporting. BI needs to be aware of the domain context - i.e. which industry are you supporting? which area - marketing, finance, operations, research..? Because without this, the best BI can do is to provide nice visuals and hope and pray that the user knows how to translates them into intelligence and action.

But software can be better than that if is stops being lazy. And that's my hope with our work in OpenI. We certainly started in the charts/graphs/dashboards paradigm, so we are as guilty as anybody. But as they say in any 12-step plan, "acceptance" is the first step -- and now, we are moving towards a future of BI software that caters to the root need for intelligence -- i.e. not only that you see your data clearly, but you also see it in your specific business context, and get immediate option to act upon it.

For e.g. a marketing analytics BI application - once it incorporates the data about customers and marketing campaigns and resulting purchases -- should not wait for a user to define dashboards and reports, but rather already provide a suite of analyses that answer the most typical marketer's questions - i.e. how effective are my campaigns , who are my best customers/prospects, and what tactics work the best for individual customer segments? And don't stop there btw -- if you have identified some new and interesting customer segments - it should integrate with an online campaign manager tool to immediately launch new campaigns; or publish the list of your most valuable customers to your e-commerce engine or call center platform which know how to treat them in a special way; etc. etc.

Similar scenarios can be applied to other industries and domains too. We as BI software developers just need to imagine differently. And that's what 2.0, new version, or next generation is all about - next level of imagination.

Donate Blood, Feel Good

2008-11-19T13:04:00.000-08:00

I donated blood today at blood centers of the pacific (www.bloodcenters.org). They have this new machine they call Alex. As it draws blood, it separates the RBC from plasma in real time (in this picture I took as blood was being drawn, the packet on the right is "whole blood", middle one is separated RBC, and the one on left is plasma) and it puts the plasma back into your veins. Benefits of this are - more RBC gets collected, blood donor stays hydrated, a lot of time is saved compared to old methods of separating the blood cells later in the lab, thus delaying the availability of blood for transfusions.

But most of all, it feels good.

Find your closest donation center and just go. You will be glad you did.

Taking BI Beyond Charts and Graphs

2008-11-18T22:03:00.000-08:00

I attended a talk at the monthly BI SIG meeting at SDForum by Christian Marcazzo from Spotfire, now a part of Tibco. I have long admired Spotfire's innovations on data visualization front, so I was curious how they see BI from the whole Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) aspect, and couple of things stood out.

First - if we look at consumer-centric data applications (Zillow, Google Finance, etc.) and compare their interfaces to more traditional enterprise BI applications, it's amazing to see how the latter just doesn't even attempt to look good.

Why is that?

Because enterprise BI app developers aren't under the same pressure to seduce their users like consumer data apps. Zillow, Google Finance, et al live and die by the community they create, so for them, user experience in paramount, and it shows. Most BI apps, on the other hand, are almost developed under the assumption that users are under a “thou shalt always use this BI software” executive order, and as such don't have much leverage in rejecting a software based on poor or sub-optimal user experience.

So they begrudgingly use the BI software for its least interesting/effective use - churn out one report after another. The BI app basically becomes a report production factory.

That brings me to my second point - for BI to be more than charts/graphs/dashboards, it needs to be part of the user's workflow. Now the term "workflow" means a lot of different thing to differnt people, and has recently become a popular box in BI markitechture diagrams - but to me, it basically means that BI app needs to know the various contexts under which its users are using it, and provide a way to add intelligence/insight to the process. BI app by itself should almost be invisible.

Zillow users think of themselves as a home buyers/sellers, not a real estate data analysts. Typical Google Finance users are checking out their portfolio and evaluating stocks, but don't think of themselves as financial analysts. So, why in the world BI applications are hell bent to think of their users are data analyst first, rather than understanding the specific tasks they are trying to accomplish more intelligently?

That's where workflow comes in. BI app needs to understand the nuances of the business domains their users are in, make intelligence available in their task workflow where it's needed, and provide a clear way to act upon that intelligence. Too often we think of BI as a separate app where a user will do analysis, and then the users will jump to other apps where they can take actions -- that's now how users see the world. And without understanding the users, BI apps can't really provide intelligence.

It's time to turn this model around. BI apps should think more like mashups --pull data from any "public" repository with REST like API's, make anlayses available to share and tweak, and make the resulting insights be integrateable to other apps. The more lines get blurred between BI apps and the rest, more successful its adoption is going to be.

Historic Moment for All of Us

2008-11-04T22:52:00.001-08:00

I'm not what you'd call religious, but this morning I asked my 5-yr-old and 2-yr-old to join me to pray for Obama's victory.

I'm not always a eager voter, but today both my wife and I were at our local poll station at 8 am.

I'm not a political activist, but today I took the day off so I could make phone calls to get the vote out in FL, OH, PA, MO, CO, and IA. I've never made so many phone calls in a day (close to 500). Last call made was at 6:55 PM PST, literally 5 minutes before polls closed in IA. At times, I felt like a seedy telemarketer, calling people who were already inundated with calls over the past months -- but this election was not a spectator sport, and I'm glad I participated in every way I could.

Regardless of your political affiliation, and whether you voted for Obama or not -- one thing I learned out of all this -- stated so eloquently by Mahatma Gandhi years ago: The only way we can bring about sea change is by "being the change you seek in the world".

For that, I'm thankful to Obama for inspiring millions like me to get involved, and also very hopeful in his presidency. It's a rare moment in history when so many people throughout the world are truly feeling inspired.

Yes We Can :-)

Obama's Loss Traced To Sandeep Giri

2008-10-31T00:29:00.000-07:00

Hacking can't be any more fun than this during the elections. Anyway, don't let this happen

A Striking Overview of the Credit Crisis

2008-10-30T09:31:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Dan Roam's post, I discovered some more fun entrees from SlideShare's contest to explain credit crisis in 30 slides or less. This one's pretty striking:

Creditcrisis 30slides Final

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: capitalism mortgage)

What is the Cost for Different Phases of Outbound Marketing

2008-10-29T11:03:00.001-07:00

A colleague recently sent me an email asking:

I'm trying to find out the cost/spend associated with different phases of outbound marketing campaigns. At a high level, I'm trying to understand the process as,
Idea generation/ Message theme discussions (e.g. what is the campaign all about)
Associated content generation (web site promotion, hard print material, email
content generation...in summary, (creative + message) generation )
Outbound execution : actual delivery, publishing of hte message
Can you provide guidance as to,

1. If I missed any major step(s)
2. What % of total cost will be allocated to each of the above steps.....here if you can add the vertical (retail, hitech software, hi-tech mfg etc), it would help me more

Not that I'm an expert, but my response was as follows - see if you agree or better yet, can add in your 2 cents:

I think you have identified the key themes. I tend to think about outbound marketing in the following categories

Target

Who will you contact? who is your audience? what is your access to that market? If you want to go direct (email, direct mail, telemarketing), how are you going to obtain contact information
-- homegrown lists, purchased lists?
Is there a segmentation strategy applicable? If so, what are you costs/efforts to define/implement it?

Message

Once you know who you will reach out to, you need to craft your message. This involves figuring out the creative for each media (email layout, direct mail layout, video or radio ad, etc.) and producing it
Different elements of the message - creative content, offer, promotion, etc.

Execution

How will the message get out? What are the different media channels? Are you going to work with an agency that can manage all channels, or do it yourself?
How will you co-ordinate the different channels? e.g. someone who got an email offer ends up calling your telemarketing center, are they all in sync?
How well are you able monitor your campaigns in progress and how quickly can you respond to feedback?

Optimization

This is more around anayltics, but a critical part (of course I'm biased :-) -- which is to look at the operational metrics of all campaigns and optimize mainly for 2 things - determine the most profitable/relevant segments and for each segment, figure out the optimal contact strategy

Cost-wise, execution will be the biggest chunk, probably 50-60% of overall cost, closely followed by "target" (acquisition of contact information or markets). Rest is probably evenly divided.

What went wrong with the market..

2008-10-13T14:18:00.001-07:00

A simple and humorous guide to understanding the subprime mess

Subprime Primer

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: subprime mortgages)

SlideShare Link

Charts and Graphs Soundtrack from PBS Kids

2008-10-10T14:52:00.001-07:00

Thanks to Dan Roam's post, and Swivel's post, I'm glad I found this. Start your next "charts and graphs" presentation with this gem from PBS Kids:

Microsoft's BI Vision: Excel = BI Democracy?

2008-10-08T16:06:00.001-07:00

I frequently check out Mosha Pasumansky's blog on OLAP. I learned from his recent post that Microsoft announced 2 very interesting milestones coming up on their BI roadmap - project Gemini (which will be the new incarnation of Analysis Services), and SQL Kilimanjaro release (a move toward column-oriented architecture). If not anything else, check out the presentation video from the 1 hour 16 minute mark -- this is a pretty good presentation of common BI challenges at BI level, and I must say the demo is impressive in how Microsoft is thinking about the BI solution stack going end-to-end from data warehouse to Excel and to a web-based view for general interaction.

As someone who is in the "open source BI land", I must confess that I am a fan of some of the Microsoft's BI technologies - namely Analysis Services and SQL Server. Yes, I have reservations around Reporting Services, or embedding BI into MS Office products like Word, or about bloating a solution with SharePoint and PerformancePoint - but as a common denominator, SQL Server and Analysis Services do provide the best price-performance today for a BI backend solution IMHO.

One of the challenges we constantly face as BI solution providers is to call out which is the most common interface for the BI user. In their demo, Ted Kummer and Donald Farmer are right to point out that if left to their own devices, most people trying to do a data analysis will bust out Excel. Solution providers like me don't like this fact for several reasons (a lot of them may be valid) and try to guide our users towards purely web-based interface to do their analysis. The biggest rationale for this is to avoid various versions of Excel files floating around with multiple copies of data and custom calculations (with no QA) -- and so we like to control by having all BI users access data from a centralized web interface, which is reporting data from a centralized repository -- and that way, we know that users will be guaranteed a "single version of truth", and they will be happy.

Is that true though?

In my own open source BI project OpenI, one of the most used feature turns out to be "export to Excel", so try as we may, there are valid reasons to cater towards a BI user's natural flow of anlayzing data, and let them get their data into Excel.

And in that sense, Microsoft's approach may have its merit in looking at Excel as the piece in the front and center for self service BI. Of course, calling it "democratization" maybe far fetched because this democracy will only be true in the Microsoft Office world, but it is a pretty big world of BI users. And for those who would like to stay far away from the Microsoft Office world, there needs to be equally compelling alternate solutions (open source or not).

If not anything, this thinking from Microsoft is worth for all BI practitioners to consider -- and see the demo. We may not agree with the exact tools used, but the use case, or the scenario, of a knowledge worker finding the data/information they need, analyzing it in an intuitive fashion, and publishing it for their peers to see -- that's a key part of what we're all trying to solve. And unless we make it utterly easy and painless, we still have a long way to go.

WaMu - "Bank with Confidence?"

2008-10-02T09:54:00.000-07:00

This morning I heard Peter Finch on KFOG radio say - "this KFOG news brought to you by WaMu, now a part of JP Morgan; blah blah..", followed by their old tag line - "WaMu, Bank with Confidence".

"Bank with Confidence"? I had to chuckle.

Maybe someone in their advertising will see the irony.

TieCON 2008 - Day 2: May 17, 2008

2008-05-17T09:26:00.000-07:00

The morning started without coffee (I arrived a bit too late for breakfast, but why won't you at least keep the coffee stalls around on a Saturday morning at 9 am) -- but as I stumbled into the auditorium -- I see this Tesla roadstar next to stage and Elon Musk talking about his life in the fast track of entrepreneurship. Maybe I didn't really need the coffee ;-)

What do Internet, Energy and Outer-Space Have in Common? Big Ideas or Elon Musk?
Elon Musk, Chairman Tesla Motors, Solar City, Space-X With Mike Malone, Technology Writer

If you feel there is a big problem out there to be solved, no matter how daunting or crazy, as an entrepreneur you should at least try to go solve it. Early in his career (or life, this guy wrote his first software program at 10, and more astonishing is the fact he *sold* his first program at 12) -- anyway, 3 big opportunity (or underexplored areas) for him were Internet, space exploration, and energy. By 36, he's built companies to address all 3 - sick!

What't next? Elon has a side bet with Mike Malone that he'll get a man on mars by 2030. Elon in a softspoken way says he's got a technology roadmap that is more or less on track for the deadline.

KEYNOTE: Sustaining Entrepreneurship in Biotech and Its Global Impact
John C. Martin, PhD, President and CEO, Gilead Sciences

I have to admit my brain shuts off when I look at powerpoint slides with lots of text, specially when it is an industry I have little understanding -- sorry Mr. Martin

Charging Ahead to Build Global Businesses:
Vivek Paul, Partner, Texas Pacific Group

Digital world -- Chris Anderson talks about abundance, and in the real world, we are running to shortages everywhere..

We are running out of oil

We are running out of food in SE asia - there are food riots showing up

There is water shortage, neighboring countries are starting to fight over water. The latin root for the words "river" and "rival" is the same -- perhaps meaning a river gives rise to rivalry

Successful global businesses are about addressing these challenges

Real Deal About Consumer Platforms and the Opportunities They Create:
Chamath Palihapitiya, VP Product Marketing, Facebook

Barriers to building a business - money, technology distribution - are being lowered
7 OSI Layers (physical, data, network, transport, session, presentation, application) -- the application layer was the often ignored one since its the most abstract and most constrained
Today - instead of OSI layers -- we have something like the LAMP stack -- enabling a few more to succeed at teh application layer
Challenges of building on LAMP - standards, interopeability, cost are addressed, but distribution, identity and engagement still remain as an afterthought
Social Stack

1 - Distribution

should not be gated by a company

should be in a level playing field

is all about the social graph

improvement in communication technology increases the amount of info shared between individuals, and also makes sharing a passive activity a la facebook where my activities are feeds to my friends

as long as my experience is genuine and meaningful, I will be rewarded with automatic distribution by the social graph

e.g. iLike -- 1 million users in 4 days

2 - Identity

Universal single sign-on

Site or service-specific identity establishment is increasingly repetitive and redundant

Identity = trust and authenticity

Facebook photo applicaiton has more users than photobucket, flickr, etc. combined, same with calendar

3 - Engagement

Engaging Behaviors

The perspective on any activity (or application) changes when you add the aspect of sharing it with your friends

stand-alone music app or listening/sharing music

stand-alone photo-editing or creating a photo album together with friends

Challenge: how to build an application that has the awareness of the social aspect

e.g. expedia vs trip advisor

Facebook makes $250k grants to create new applications without asking for equity

Note to self: what is the cross-over possibility of BI with social network? Isn't the act of building/cultivating intelligence from numbers more effective in a social context. If you are staring at a chart or numbers on your own trying to decipher its implications -- versus if you can share the same chart/numbers with a larger group of friends/colleagues -- doesn't it help you come to more effective insights? Deciphering intelligence is a "social" event -- i.e. at a minimum, a group discussion around numbers is needed -- current BI paradigm doesn't explicitly support that. They are more about better visualization, patter recognition, automated triggers, etc. -- but they leave the "group deciphering" part up to the user -- i.e. they will email the link or screenshot to colleagues, or call a meeting with colleagues with a powerpoint -- to talk about the numbers.

But what if the group is not at the same place? What if a stat professor or a business analyst in Berkeley wants to involve or talk over the numbers with all his/her "friends" in the leading stat professors everywhere from Vienna to Mumbai to Barcelona to Boston -- if a BI tool enabled this social context -- wouldn't that make the process more effective?

We in the BI practice often bemoan the fact that except for a few "power users", getting true adoption of a BI application -- isn't part of it attributable to the fact that we as BI application developers often ignore this "discussion of numbers" part of the exercise? If you enable it as a social activity -- help users not only see the numbers but also discuss it -- how does that help adoption?

Social Entrepreneurship- Extending For-Profit Concepts to Social Businesses

Can't believe I missed most of this one. Maybe an indicator that while I really care about social entrepreneurship, it is often getting in the back-burner of my professional life because I am chasing all these things around BI

New Opportunities: Profit at the Bottom of the Pyramid

Who are the people at the BOP?

Jay -- Rose in Nairobi -- earns less 90 cents selling fruits on streets of nairobi - 3 kids, works with youngest one on the back
Dimple -- Urban slums in Dhaka and Mumbai have similar challenges
Kailash -- Also a problem in the US - e.g. of people in Appalachia -- where people earning $20 a day
Richard -- 2 mexican teenager kids left behind in Sonoma county after immigratnt parents went back to Mexico -- slept in cars, worked their way through -- eventually learned winemaking, now have their own winery Screaming Eagle

What are the aspirations of the people at BOP?

Dimple -- property rights - one of her first investments in Omidyar. Opportunity for landless women to purchase land. What did it mean for them? The most important thing the land provided was social capital - standing in the village, their husband less likely to abandon them, likelihood of their kids marrying into better families. Who would they pass the land to? "our sons"
Jay -- aspiration for vast majority in Africa -- education (after food and shelter -- which are more immediate needs, not aspirational per se)
Kailash -- Aspirations also have a lot to do with culture (after following Maslov's hierarchy)
Richard

What are the business models for BOP?

there are many models - public, private, franchise, public/private - how do they work?
Jay

New Globe School - franchise model for for-profit primary schools, starting in Africa

a typical problem - teachers don't show up for classes 50% of the time

Enable local entrepreneur to manage the schools with accountability

Dimple:

Omidyar network applies e-bay like marketplace philosophy for philanthropy

typical $3-5 million investment

3 areas of investment - economic empowerment (micro-finance and sme's); technology (social empowerment); Entities empowering capitalistic market (property rights, anti-corruption)

e.g. property rights in Andhra pradesh - part micro-finance, part

e.g. Rural ICT model based on Kiosk for anything from e-governance, agri trades all the way to BPO

Richard - city of San Francisc0
Kailash

http://www.emri.in
providing 911-like emergency services in India with improved visibility into performance measurement metrics

Charity is appropriate for distress, but if you are looking for sustainability -- you need ownership

Micro-Lending Models:

SKS in India: largest, fastest growing MFI in India
Self help-model: people form groups on their own
Micro finance is not a panacea, it doesn't get rid of poverty on its own - you need to add micro-insurance, remittance
Micro finance combined with implementation could be more effective in efficient use of the capital

Education, if well-managed, is incredibly data-rich -- which helps move towards efficiency

Public-private model

management has to be entirely private
recruitment, procurement, are not influenced by the government any means
but give government all the credit, so they are happy

Can you be wildly successful entrepreneur serving the BOP?

wasn't seen that way
jury still out
omidyar just created a SME fund with google in India, 17.5 million dollars for SME's focusing on BOP

How do you scale?

EMRI -- significant focus on processes and discipline to follow through; there are metrics for every little action of the organization -- and also being reviewed constantly; standardization of ambulance design, processes, training programs
New Global School - design for scale from the beginning

Sustainability

Prosperity enables green awareness.

Take Aways

Need for the best leadership for BOP enterprises
First -- Try to truly understand the people you are trying to serve
Think of BOP as a real, viable market segment
Decide -- do you want to contribute time or contribute money?

Musings: An Entrepreneur's Odyssey to Change the World
- John Wood, Founder & CEO, Room to Read

The laptop's almost running out of battery, so I hope there's enough to cover this (I should get a laptop with better battery time).

"I'm glad I got the book title before Bill Gates did -- since leaving Microsoft for philonthropy is becoming such a trend"
"Accidental Philanthropist"
Business Model for a Non-Profit NGO

Local Leadership

Local participation/ownership

challenge grants

local contribution

Be nimble and act quickly

Investment heavily in human capital e.g. librarian training

Invest heavily in monitoring and evaluation

Have an intense focus on results - Ballmerism: "What gets measured, gets done"

Make efficient use of donor dollars

Create a worldwide movement of "super-empowered individuals"
Build for Scale

Ballmerism: Go Big or Go Home
Low price empowers wide scale participation in change

What's the most optimistic image you can imagine?
Action-Oriented Optimism

John Woods is a great speaker. He had the crowd on their feet. Standing ovation. Very inspiring. Big question: how many entrepreneurs will embrace the non-profit model for social change?

All in all -- great conference -- good energy boost and a fresh global and social perspective on overall state of business.

TieCON 2008 - Day 1: May 16, 2008

2008-05-16T14:17:00.000-07:00

This is my second year attending this crazy conference. Here're my notes:

Bill Campbell - Intuit

CEO's main job # 1 priority - hire, develop, and retain good people - this is what they should be thinking about it first, and always
Recruiting: look for people with a "few notches under their belt" , people who "understand scale", and have "headroom" (i.e. willing to learn and have capacity)
Integrity: "your reputation stays with you rest of your life" - build that capital
Focus on Process:

is there a structure to your 1-on-1 meetings, staff meetings?
mid-quarter reviews (where are we, what needs to change)

Focus on Product:

"why has marketing lost its clout?"
"because it forgot its first name"
"what is that?"
"product --"if you don't put product focus as #1 and care about it as such, hype ain't gonna cut it"

Management:

Don't aim for consensus - go for the best idea
Hardest thing for a CEO is to not be imperial and not be the smartest guy in the room

Mike Speiser, Managing Director, Sutter Hill Ventures

Ideas are Easy, Execution is Hard:
Free ideas to implement

Personalizr

support.com

Reinvent *existing* markets
Software company mentality: can you plan for daily releases?
Get good PR to get acquired attention instead of focusing on direct solicitations
Recruiting: use linkedin to determine chemistry fit between potential hires and the company by looking at the quality of connections between you and the person you are considering to hire

E-Bazaar: IP Protection for Open Source

It is possible to leverage patent protection for open source, but more as a business process patent. Essentially you are saying that your company has a unique way of using/applying a open source product (which is trying to differentiate your support/services)

Chris Anderson: Mr. "Long Tail" :-)

New marketplace: scarce space = expensive distribution; long tail - abundant space = free distribution
What can "free" do? Internet - nationwide economy built on "free" (really?)
What happens when things get free? Innovation comes when you can start wasting what you'd otherwise conserve; examples:

waste transistors by developing GUI, web, video games
waste storage:

My 9-year old has more storage than my entire company's email server:
Monday morning note from IT: "Please delete old emails from Inbox because our server is full"

waste bandwidth:

Scarce bandwidth causes mass media that shoots for general appeal: e.g. Everybody Loves Raymond
Abundant bandwidth can address long tail needs: Everything that can be done on video will be done -- e.g. LonelyGirl15 on YouTube

Econ 101: "In a competitive market, price falls to the marginal cost" -- BUT what happens when the cost is zero? (software is a zero marginal cost) Everything that can be digitized, will be digitized -- and anything that can be digitized, will eventually be free
Taxonomy of "Free"

Older:

Cross-subsidy (razors for free but charge for blades)

Ad-supported (media)

Upcoming:

Freemium (upselling. old model: give away 1% to sell 99%; new model: give away 99% to sell 1%, e.g flickr vs filckr-pro)

Labor Exchange (consumers create something of value in exchange for free goods or services, GOOG-411)

Gift Economy (wikipedia, craigslist, open source)

Use Abundance to market Scarcity

You write an article for HBR for free to draw attention to your business

Prince gave away CD's (millions) with Daily Mirror to promote performance

KEYNOTE PANEL: They Like You, They Really Like You - Now What?: Challenges After Hypergrowth
Kara Swisher (moderator) with Panelists Derek Liu, Jia Shen and Kent Lindstorm

Somehow my feeble mind hasn't quite grasped how to build a useful (by my standards) application, let alone a business, around social networks. Gadgets, widgets.. it's a far cry from my usual user types that I serve via BI applications. Maybe another way to ask the question is that what is my BI userbase trying to find in social networks that is not there.

Anyway, some interesting tidbits I heard:

"Social network needs to grow organically" it's interesting our competition didn't come from "established" big-traffic sites like Yahoo, AOL, or MTV who did try to enter social network scene, but it rather came from companies that started in college dormrooms like facebook or local music scene like MySpace a- Kent Lindstorm
"Young people use email because their parents send them email, else they don't check their emails at all -- it's all IM or other messages via facebook wall, tweetr, etc." - Jia Shen
"By the time when you get married, social networking doesn't matter anymore, because you aren't really trying to meet someone" - Jia Shen
"We don't have a QA team. Yahoo (as much as I love them), will take 5 weeks deciding whether they should do something, or to QA something that goes out, in our world, 5 weeks means 100's of iterations -- we have to rapidly iterate without QA and look at the metrics to determine your course" - Jia Shen
"Advertising is a maths game - social networking provides a lot of that plus metrics on social dynamics that become extremely important for better targeting" - Jia Shen
"Bigger convergence of gaming world with social network, a la second life" - Derek Liu
"Battle of social graphs coming up" - Jia Shen -- "all leading social networks are taking their social graphs and mapping it out, kind of like what Microsoft Passport was trying to do" -- "AOL could become a bigger player in this that one would think"
Ken: "There is a global aspect to this that is not always realized in Silicon Valley, Facebook is not 4000-times bigger than MySpace as we'd like to believe in the Valley", "Integration with mobile is another key factor -- look at QQ in China, their integration of social network, SMS, and IM is exemplary in a way that US doesn't get it"
"It's all about targeting -- improving your CPM or CTR" - Jia Shen

KEYNOTE: Leadership on The Edge
Robert Swan, Founder & President, 2041

This was pretty inspiring - if I ever saw a true environmental activist, Mr Swan has to be one. The man's led teams to both north pole and south pole to make a statement, and hasn't stopped there. Go to http://www.2041.com and check it out.

Finding and Targeting Your Most Relevant Customers

2008-03-05T12:29:00.000-08:00

Straight up disclaimer: This post here to promote my upcoming webinar on Thursday March 13 (Finding and Targeting Your Most Relevant Customers) -- presented by my employer - Responsys.

It is getting to be almost a year since I joined Responsys (my old company Loyalty Matrix was acquired by Responsys in April 2007). I manage the Interact Insight product, which is the analytics module of the Responsys on-demand marketing platform, Interact.

A lot of the past year has been transitioning our old customers to the Responsys client solution delivery model, and also putting together an analytics product that makes the most sense for Responsys customers. We are releasing Insight version 3.4 this month, and this webinar is to showcase this product as a reference platform/tool to -- you guessed it -- finding and targeting your most relevant customers. Here is the official copy:

Finding and Targeting Your Most Relevant Customers
A Data-Driven Approach to Improving Your Marketing Effectiveness

Join Us for a Live Webcast Thursday, March 13, 2008

In this Leaders Forum live webcast, marketing analytics expert Sandeep Giri wants to help you take a step back, take a deep breath, and really understand:

Are my marketing programs working? Really working?
Who are my most relevant customers and prospects today?
How effective is my communication with my best customers?

Sandeep says the answers are all in the numbers. He'll show you new ways to look at your marketing data and find the key metrics that help you answer these questions and, more importantly, refine your strategy — in terms of defining key customer segments and outlining optimal contact plans for each segment — for improved overall marketing effectiveness.

Date: Thursday, March 13, 2008
Time: 10:00 - 11:00 AM PST (1:00 - 2:00 PM EST)

And a link to register.

Would appreciate it if you can join us for. Also, if you have any specific questions, topics you'd like to be covered -- please feel free to send your comments on this blog.

Hope to see you there.

Holy Trinity of Marketing Automation Systems?

2007-12-12T21:11:00.001-08:00

An old friend and fellow blogger Michael Fassnacht has an interesting blog post -- he advocates a concept of combining marketing resource management (MRM) systems with marketing analytics, the goal being optimization of marketing resource usage, in a fashion very similar to financial asset optimization.

While on surface, this may seem like a straight-up combination of MRM systems and marketing analytics systems, but a hidden yet crucial system to implement this concept is the one that does the marketing program execution. This is the system that uses different subset of marketing assets for each program and its various campaigns, and hopefully tracks the effectiveness of those assets in a full cycle, i.e. all the way to conversion (or non-conversion). In a typical marketing shop today, these are usually 3 different systems/vendors, with little or no integration between them.

Now, if you have a marketing program execution platform that is (a) in tune with all your assets in all different channels, and (b) tracks asset usage and effectiveness in different programs, and also publishes it to an analytics platform -- you are close to implementing the concept that Michael is advocating.

Is there a platform out there that does all this? Stay tuned :-) And I'll be also curious to hear your feedback on marketing automation platforms out there that come close to implementing this concept.

Multi-Lingual Keyboard - Lekhika 2007

2007-12-07T10:30:00.000-08:00

I was very encouraged today to hear the announcement of Lekhika 2007 - a wordprocessing application that covers ten scripts and 3000 characters and supports Windows, MAC and Linux, with a unique way of converting regular keyboards into local language keyboards by creating a simulated keyboard on the bottom part of the screen. See a demo/clip here -- http://www.ibnlive.com/videos/52667/lekhika-takes-technology-to-masses.html

This summer when I was in Nepal, I was fortunate to connect with a group of people working on Open Learning Exchange Nepal (OLE Nepal) -- who are working to produce localized content and educational material aimed for OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project. OLE Nepal is putting a lot of effort to produce Nepali-based content, but the XO laptop's board is still US English-based -- which stresses that a key obstacle for a truly localized computer is not having a local language-based keyboard.

There have been keyboards that support multiple languages (Japanese keyboards comes to mind), but just like any business, they are meant for languages that have a sizable market that wants to buy and use computers. But what about languages like Nepali for example? Being a developing country with no computer manufacturing facility, where can Nepal expect to get laptops that have a Nepali keyboard? And likewise, I'm sure there are so many other students that will be able to get much more usage out of a computer if they had one in their language.

So I hope software like Lekhika paves the way for a new line of innovations that make it easy to enable localized keyboards, and a truly localized computing experience. Sure, because of its origins, the dual nature of keyboard (i.e. local language + English) will still be needed for some time. But if projects like OLPC are truly aiming to have a laptop for every child (regardless of what language they speak and where in the world they live) -- then they must incorporate a solution for 100% localization which includes the keyboard.

Polarization of BI Solutions

2007-11-12T22:52:00.000-08:00

It almost seems like the big BI companies figured out they had to be a part of something even bigger to justify their already sky-high license costs. Just within last 12 months, we've seen Hyperion get bought Oracle, Business Objects get bought by SAP, and now today Cognos got bought by IBM.

And I can't help but feel that Enterprise BI software has become a dying breed.

If you are a fortune 1000 type of organization, chances are you already have some sort of elaborate licensing agreement with at least one of these acquirers (Oracle, SAP, or IBM). So now, they have one more thing to sell you so that you can have a check mark for your BI initiatives without having to drive too far to a different vendor.

I guess I shouldn't be so cynical. As BI software, Hyperion, Business Objects, and Cognos are pretty feature-rich, and have many compelling qualities. My problem is with their complex enterprise deployment model, proprietary nature, and staggering cost of ownership that continues standing in the way of making BI available to the masses. And their recent acquisitions further polarizes the world of BI haves and have-nots.

Perhaps this is how corporate world will come to demand a new breed of BI solutions. Back in 2002, when we started our marketing analytics company, we thought (and still do) open source and software-as-a-service were going to drive this new trend. And it's good to see companies like JasperSoft, Pentaho, Swivel, and LucidEra lead the way in this direction. What's more important than just looking for open source and/or SaaS solutions to BI, is to demand "openness" -- openness in terms of architecture, sharing of insights, and just as importantly, openness about cost of ownership. How many times you have seen a BI initiative where the entire budget got spent just on data integration and/or cleansing? How about the cost of those special consultants who seemed to be the only earthlings that understood the esoteric workings of a popular yet proprietary BI software package?

Above all, one needs to keep in mind that BI is about leveraging all available data to get a clearer picture of what's going on in the business, be able to focus on the most relevant issues, and make better decisions. Instead of taking a centralized approach of one system doing it all, a good BI system today needs to act more like a network that can connect to various data sources, systems, API's, web services, etc. What if your BI system acted more like a mashup that lets you combine compatible information sources and cross-reference them as you please? Swivel has an approach close to this except that it expects all information to be uploaded by its users. It could be interesting if Swivel could connect to some common public data repositories (like geographical locations, weather, stock prices).

The key here is to have BI systems that enable mashup of information resources and analyses, a la web 2.0, as opposed to being traditional "enterprise" solutions that need your business to bend over backwards to fit into their proprietary framework and terminologies. Which to me conjures up images of Oracle, SAP, and IBM.

Maybe I liked them better when they were Hyperion, Business Objects, and Cognos. At least they didn't say -- "BTW, we also do BI".

Freeway to Yosemite

2007-11-05T23:11:00.000-08:00

Freeways are ugly. After driving for a few hours, once I took the exit off Highway 99 to get on Hwy 140 towards Yosemite National Park -- I felt the 2-lane highways much more a part of the landscape than the concrete mesh work I'd just driven through that meandered through equally artificial and out-of-place looking subdivisions. But I digress..

On the way, a rock slide had closed a section of the highway. There was a detour that alternately stopped traffic for 15 minutes each way so vehicles can take turn on a single-lane highway. The geek in me kept wishing for sensors that optimized wait time on each end, but I told myself the whole point about being in Yosemite was to slow down.

More to reinforce rather than repeat something you may have have heard a thousand times -- Yosemite in fall is simply wonderful. Not crowded, the weather is sunny, nice, warm. Ok -- most of the waterfalls were dried up. But, would you consider the following images any less breathtaking?

Since we had our 2 little kids with us, we opted for a relatively short hike to Vernal Falls Bridge (categorized as "mildly strenuous"). We got around the park in these cool hybrid buses. The kids got real excited when we spotted a small bear strolling around the trees, and I was happy we weren't planning on camping out. The hike to Vernal Falls is a part of a much longer trek, most popular of which is the one that goes all the way to the top of the half dome. Maybe next time when we have some babysitting help (or if the kids are old enough to climb with us).

We learned that a few weeks earlier, a man in his 60s was on his way on the 211-mile trek to Mount Whitney. Apparently he'd made arrangements for food/supplies to be air-dropped via a plane or maybe a helicopter. Sounded like a cool (literally) adventure.

On our way back, it was close to 7:30 pm, both kids were asleep in their car seats, we drove up to Glacier Point (about a 20 mile detour) to watch the stars in the clear night sky. Living in the city, you tend to forget what they sky looks like at night without any artificial light. We even managed to see some shooting stars. Too bad my camera couldn't photograph that -- some things are just meant to be experienced.

Driving back on 120 towards 99, suddenly a deer crossed the road in front of me. Good thing I wasn't driving fast and was able to slow down in time, without waking up anyone inside either. Pretty soon, we got back on the concrete mesh work by way of Highway 99, making me even more certain -- freeways are really ugly.

Halloween Pumpkin Carving Contest

2007-11-05T22:46:00.000-08:00

In the spirit of the day, we decided to have a little pumpkin carving contest at the office. Here're are the contestants:

Mine is the one on the right below:

And the winner is:

Commoditization of Business Intelligence

2007-10-01T16:53:00.000-07:00

I received an email from Seth Grimes, a very familiar voice in the BI community, with an interesting question -- Do you now see BI as a commodity market?

He was referring to an earlier post about my open source BI project OpenI, where I'd mentioned:

The state of business intelligence software market has been very much controlled by a few big players. The situation is very similar to how the J2EE application server market was before JBoss, or how database server market used to be before MySQL and Postgres emerged as serious alternatives, or how OS market was before Linux. Pretty soon we will talk about the BI platform market in the same manner, because open source and open standards are driving the commoditization of BI as we speak. It is just a matter of time.

That was a few years ago. So, I asked myself -- well, how do I feel now? Have I learned anything?

The question is a tough one -- something I've always grappled with. Ultimately, it depends on what do we mean by "business intelligence". If we go by the current big commercial players' definition -- then BI is more about a software tool providing capabilities around data warehousing/ETL, OLAP, analytical modeling, and visualization. So by that account, I'd definitely stick to my original thoughts and say it's a commodity market.

However, a more relevant question might be -- does having these capabilities make a business intelligent? In reality, what I've seen is that it comes down to an analyst (or group of analysts) who (a) know how to work a "BI" tool, and (b) have some fundamental expertise in the business domain they are analyzing. So, the "BI" tool is more about facilitating the job of an analyst or a general business user. You could argue that by making performance metrics, etc. more easily accessible to a business user, the BI tool is helping them make more effective decisions, but it is making a big assumption that the user knows how relevant the performance metrics are for the business.

In the end, my take on this is that, the most effective BI tools are domain-centric, i.e. they embody some inherent knowledge about a particular business domain -- so, not only they are extremely efficient and accurate about compiling all the performance metrics and making them available, they also "understand" the applicability of those metrics and can almost act like expert systems in guiding crucial decisions. This, I don't think is a commodity market. It needs to be grounded into specific industry domains to be effective.

Would love to hear your thoughts.

Conquerer of Crises

2007-09-27T18:09:00.001-07:00

Prayer lamps @ Sankata Mandir - Kathmandu, Nepal

I've been on sort of a hiatus all summer (if you can't tell from the blog posts or lack thereof). Anyway, I worked from our Kathmandu (Nepal) office for almost all of July/August, and also spent quality time with the entire extended family.

It's one thing to read and hear about globalization, but utterly amazing when you are smack dab in the middle of it. Kathmandu is, well, increasingly chaotic. A coalition government is struggling to restore stability, while there are protests of all kinds happening on a daily basis, sometimes going to the extremes of calling a "bandh" (general strike), which mostly means no vehicles allowed on the streets (except for ambulances and tourist buses, after all the local economy badly needs the tourists).

Still, life goes on, people figure out a way to get their business done. For IT-based businesses, these "bandh"'s really don't matter a lot. "High-speed" (usually 128 kbps) connection literally provides the information superhighway to get past the "bandh". Let's just hope no one stops the traffic there.

For logical thinkers, it is hard to explain how the city/country functions at all -- but it does, and has been doing so for quite some time. The rate of technology adoption is just nuts. Entrepreneurship is on the rise. All the while an uncertain political climate looms, but perhaps people have figured out over time -- this too shall pass -- and carry a strange confidence that their families, jobs, businesses will somehow always find a way to survive.

The Sankata Mandir is an old temple right in the heart of old Kathmandu. We got there as I followed my family through lots of temples. I was mostly looking after the kids, not being much for organized religion myself, but hoping somehow this might help our young ones develop an appreciation for the higher powers. Most of these temple, I'm sorry to say, are uninspiring -- but something about Sankata felt different. Perhaps it's the name -- a loose translation will be "conquerer of crises" -- that symbolized the current state of Kathmandu and Nepal.

And so even after all the daily accounts of various "crises" -- I came back hopeful, for just like these prayer lamps in Sankata Mandir, there are enough souls in Nepal that carry a strong yet silent power inside them. While these people claim they don't know what's keeping the place together in midst of these chaos, they don't need to look any further, just need to look inside themselves. I truly hope they conquer all their crises.

We'll have more women employees, if we only had a separate restroom

2007-06-20T10:49:00.000-07:00

Since my earlier post re men vs women engineers, I have had several discussion with our offshore counterparts on why they don't have as many female employees. Something they mentioned a week or so ago was particularly funny, but also a harsh reminder of some of the unusual (from a western point of view) infrastructural challenges:

Here's the issue: the office has only 1 restroom (for a staff of about 10). And women employees don't like that.

And they aren't unique in this challenge. Most of the office buildings have restrooms built as an afterthought, and even if they have multiple restrooms, even allocated as "Ladies" and "Gentlemen" (part of old colonial legacy) -- the allocations aren't honored all the time. So, a typical complaint across all women staff is the lack of clean, and more importantly, dedicated restroom facilities.

Now, I doubt if this is a key reason for the lack of female engineers -- but in a generally reserved culture, I'm bound to assume that the female employees don't discuss this issue as much with the management, and the management (usually male) doesn't think much of the issue either to actually take some actions. Maybe it's too trivial, not core to the business -- whatever, but it is an issue nevertheless. Maybe offshore locations plagued by high turnover problems can use this as a differentiator for retention.

I should point out that our offshore counterpart has a female president.

Email Marketing is about Engagement First, Revenue Second

2007-06-19T08:51:00.000-07:00

For the last couple of months, I have been trying to get my head around the analytical nuances of email-centric marketing (as a part of my new gig with Responsys). At a first glance, there seems to be a plethora of metrics – some around deliverability, then open rates, click rates, conversion rates, etc, etc. Which ones of these are the true measures of success? To some extent, they all are – but I can’t help but look for a top-down hierarchy which looks at the bottom line first, and then delves into the various supporting factors.

The success of your email (or any other customer contact for that matter) depends on whether the email was successful in influencing a desired action on the recipient’s part -- Did they actually open the email? Did they actually click on any of the external links in the email? Did they actually perform the action that was the goal of the email – like making a purchase or signing up for a program? Measuring each one of these events and understanding how they are influenced by external factors are crucial to optimizing the success of your email campaigns.

A common misperception about emails is that they are more-or-less “free”. Compared to the cost of a direct mail piece or a telemarketing call, the physical cost of sending an email is definitely lower by several orders of magnitude. As a result, what is also common is that organizations get somewhat sloppy about measuring the cost and impact of their email campaigns, and they tend to measure email campaign effectiveness on a more general level.

Particularly important are the hidden costs of email campaigns. Since it is easier and cheaper to send several emails to a recipient, often “list fatigue” is realized much sooner in the email than in offline channels. This means people in the email lists opt out more quickly and the response rates decrease more sharply, indicating a more negative experience for the email recipients.

This breakdown in relationship manifests itself in the following email engagement metrics:

Decreasing click-through rates and conversion rates
Higher opt-out and spam-out rates

However, a common trap most email marketers fall in is to address the above issues by increasing the volume of emails. The thought pattern is something like this:

I am sending out 100,000 emails today, and I only get a 0.1% conversion rate. Since my target is to drive 10,000 new web sales by email this quarter, I must send out 10,000*100 / 0.1 = 10,000,000 emails this quarter. And because it costs me only a penny per email, I am basically spending $100,000. If the gross margin per sale is higher than $10, then I even have positive ROI.

While this calculation may be mathematically correct, the major flaw in this approach is that it evaluates email purely on short-term revenue potential, and does not consider the impact of email volume on the overall quality of customer engagement. In a way, it is very similar to the bad image telemarketing has gotten over the years because telemarketers have been entirely focused on making a large volume of calls without caring much how many people get infuriated in the process. The difference is that in the case of emails, people can easily unsubscribe with a click, tag you as a spammer, or simply hit delete any time they see an email from you. They can do a lot more damage to you in a much shorter amount of time.

So, it is essential to think of email as an engagement tool first, and revenue generator second. The primary goal of your email campaign should be engagement, which in turn drives value. It does not work the other way around.

In the coming days, I will post more of my thoughts around measuring engagement and its influencers. I will also like to hear from you – what are your thoughts around measuring engagement driven by email, and/or do you see the problem space differently? What should be the role of analytics in driving success of email campaigns?

The more I think about this, it seems that analyzing success of email campaigns is not just looking at one particular success outcome, or even looking at individual metrics like open rates or click rates -- the task seems more about developing some sort of "Email Engagement Index" (EEI -- do we really need another acronym?) that incorporates all the different manifestations of engagement that were influenced by the email (open, click, purchase, forum posts, calls to the call center, web site visit, etc.) with their appropriate "weights". Then we need to track the impact of our email campaigns with respect to this index. Else we run the danger of looking at this multi-dimensional issue in a more unary manner (such as looking at only revenue or open rate, one at a time), and thus, not realize the actual impact of the email campaign.

I'll have more on this soon, but thought I should at least get the dialog started.

Loyalty Matrix becoming a part of Responsys

2007-04-24T11:21:00.000-07:00

Some of you may have seen the press release today -- Loyalty Matrix, the company I founded back in 2001, was acquired by Responsys earlier this month. We moved offices last week (it is only 3 blocks away in downtown San Francisco -- so wasn't that bad), and now a new phase begins for the Loyalty Matrix team (including myself).

Since I did become a parent during my tenure at Loyalty Matrix, interestingly I find a lot of parallels between founding a company and raising children. They both need a lot of nurturing at the beginning, many sacrifices, but it is your love/passion that keeps you going. And at some point, you realize that your child/company will need help from beyond the parental units to ensure proper growth. With children, it is the schools, the soccer coaches, friends, guidance counselor, etc. -- and with a company, it is the investors and/or an acquirer. In a way, I feel like we finally got Loyalty Matrix admitted into college where it will have the necessary infrastructure to flourish to its full potential.

So it was fortunate that (a) we as Loyalty Matrix finally recognized that we were ready for the next step in our evolution; and (b) Responsys got the big picture that combining analytics with execution is the next big thing in marketing automation.

Deals like these are always time consuming and intense, doesn't matter if you are a small company or big. Now that the deal is done, here comes the fun part -- we get to work! plus I get to blog when I want to!!

So friends -- a new journey begins. You will certainly hear more often from me. Let's keep the hope alive.

Do You Prefer Men or Women?... Engineers, That Is.

2007-01-17T22:48:00.001-08:00

We have been offshoring for about 2 years now with a small firm in Nepal. Recently someone referred a different offshore firm and suggested I should check them out as a backup option.

The contact happened to be someone based out of the San Francisco bay area, but he travelled frequently to India and eastern Europe, where he managed different offshore teams. The meeting started cordially, with the person describing different areas of technical prowess, fat communication lines where we can call a local phone number which rings an IP phone in Mumbai next to our offshore developers. He also had pictures showing the office -- very similar to the cube farms one would find in silicon valley.

Then he started asking me about our particular technology needs, what type of work we were trying to support with offshore help.. and then, out of the blue -- he asked me:

"Now, Sandeep... do you prefer men or women?"

What?? What kind of question is that, I thought. "Excuse me..?" I said.

"Well, do you prefer male engineers in your team, or women? We can assign team members however you like."

I tried to explain that it didn't matter. Not just because we have equal opportunities law here, but more from a fundamental belief that what's important is that we have productive software engineers, and we could care less about their gender or any other demographic traits.

Yet this person asked again -- implying I shouldn't get hung up on equal opportunity law, since apparently they don't in India, and if I had any deep-rooted prejudices against women software developers, this was my chance to make that clear, and he'd be more than happy to make that happen. He presented it almost a big differentiator that set his offshoring practice apart from others.

Needless to say, we didn't do any business with this person. However, it brings back the issues with gender prejudices in software engineering. Granted that the number of women in software field is very low compared to men, and on top of that we have stereotypes about women not being as good in math and sciences -- but, is it as bad where an offshore company can get away with asking for gender preference for your offshore team's makeup?

I hope not.

I'm not sure if my or anyone's chastising this person on gender equality would make any big of a difference. But if enough people say No, and say that gender doesn't matter, maybe he'll get the message.

Still, how many times do you get asked by a consulting firm -- "do you prefer men or women for your projects?" I can't help but scratch my head every time I think about it.

What do Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh Have in Common?

2007-01-12T09:33:00.000-08:00

Apparently their birthday. Both were born on today's date -- according to the local public radio I was listening to this morning on my bus ride to work.

I thought that was funny -- polar opposites of talk radio born on the same day (I'm sure not the same year, although that would really be funny)

OpenI Listed in Top 10 Free BI Apps

2006-12-07T17:15:00.000-08:00

Ask anyone who is involved in an open source project, getting recognized is one of the greatest kicks you get out of the whole deal.

So, when my Google alert picked up this news on OpenI listed in the Top 10 Free BI Apps list, it absolutely made my day. Of course, a lot of the credit goes to all the folks who have contributed to this project, and the open source community that has supported us all this time. And thanks to Tamina Vahidy for recognizing the project.

When we started OpenI back in July 2005, we just wanted to subsidize our R&D. We needed a BI platform to deploy our analytical models, and instead of opting for commercial BI platforms which would have never fit into our cost model, we decided to develop a BI platform using available open source components, and also as an open source project of its own. We figured if we get even a couple of people outside of our company to pitch -- whether it was design help, or just thinking through requirements, use cases we hadn't encountered -- that alone would pay for the efforts to make it open source.

Well, not only we got design help and advice from a great deal of smart folks in the space, we even have people contributing code. I remember someone (maybe Steve Weber) making a point about open source development model -- not all the smart people in the world work for you, so the only way to get them involved in your projects is via open source (ok, you may argue crowdsourcing ideas such as Netflix's contest, but I don't have a $ 1 million to give away in prize money :-)

So -- here we are -- working on version 1.3 of the product. We are using it internally as the web front-end of our commercial product. Of course, it has ways to go (see roadmap) -- but as contribution and recognition keep coming in, it just seems like a much more rewarding way to develop software.

Is Open Source Java More Restrictive under GPL?

2006-11-13T14:11:00.000-08:00

Today will most probably go down as an important day in the history of software engineering -- Sun open sourced Java under GPL license! (Sun's CEO Jonathan Schwarz's blogs on it as well)

While this is a very welcome news, the choice of GPL as the license has me a bit concerned. Two years ago, I was researching the various open source licenses like mad for our own open source project OpenI, and decided against GPL because of its "viral" nature (we ended up with Mozilla Public License, MPL). The "viral" aspect of GPL (section 2(b)) says:

You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.

and later further clarifies:

..it is not the intent of this section to claim rights or contest your rights to work written entirely by you; rather, the intent is to exercise the right to control the distribution of derivative or collective works based on the Program.

In addition, mere aggregation of another work not based on the Program with the Program (or with a work based on the Program) on a volume of a storage or distribution medium does not bring the other work under the scope of this License.

When someone uses programming language software like Java to build their own software, it is tricky to determine if their work is "derivative", "collective", or a "mere aggregation". In such a case, all the software code is written in Java. The software requires a Java Runtime Environment, which acts like a virtual operating system, to run. So, Java as a software construct becomes very tightly coupled with each new software program built on Java.

This is a contentious issue where there has been a lot of debate. See this blog entry at O'Reilly and its comments back in 2004

For example, with Java being GPL now, what happens when I build a software program in Java and would like to distribute it along with a Java runtime engine (JRE) for user convenience? Since I have built the software using Java and I am combining the JRE in my distribution, will my software be considered a "derivative work" or a "collective work"? If my software is considered "derivative" than by definition of GPL, I *MUST* distribute my software under GPL, which can severely affect the commercial viability of my software.

So, who decides what is derivative vs collective? Unfortunately, most likely it will be lawyers rather than software developers. And that may very well cause at least some amount of concern amongst those who build commercial (i.e. non open source) software using Java for a wider distribution (i.e. for use outside of one's organization, most probably selling commercially licensed copies of software to customers).

Now it is probably unlikely that Sun will come after commercial software developers who use Java claiming their software fits the category of "derivative". However, if any organization has to spend any legal resources to investigate this, it affects the use of Java in commercial space.

I think Sun should make it very clear to the community why they chose GPL, and how they want to assure the community (both open source and commercial) that their software development efforts in Java are not subject to the "viral" aspect of GPL.

UPDATE: CLASSPATH EXCEPTION TO THE RESCUE

After digging through more details, I found 2 things that address my concern:

1. Sun is distributing Java under GPL with the ClassPath exception, and describes in their FAQ the reasons behind this -- with an example almost the same as I posted earlier where the classpath exception allows me to distribute my software written in Java bundled with a JDK or JRE without requiring GPL:
It allows you to link an application available under any license to a library that is part of software licensed under GPL v2, without that application being subject to the GPL's requirement to be itself offered to the public under the GPL.

2. Following one anonymous commenter's suggestion, I read the original GNU Classpath license text , and it does clearly describe the exception:

 As a special exception, the copyright holders of this library give you permission to link this library with independent modules to produce an executable, regardless of the license terms of these independent modules, and to copy and distribute the resulting executable under terms of your choice, provided that you also meet, for each linked independent module, the terms and conditions of the license of that module.

Still, my suggestion to Sun still remains the same: you can't assume everyone will go through the trouble (granted it wasn't much) of digging through the details of the classpath exception, and as such, they are likely to remain under false assumptions re GPL restrictions on Java. So, don't assume -- everytime you mention Java and GPL, make sure you talk about the classpath exception and how it enables you to distribute your software written in Java under any license.

"All marketers are liars". Seth Godin is a marketer. Hence?

2006-10-20T14:30:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the cheeky title, but Seth sort-of ticked me off today with his post "Nobody Knows Anything".

First off, as someone who makes his living providing marketing analytics, I get a bit, let's say annoyed, when someone like Seth starts a blog post with "There are two kinds of marketing analysis, both pretty useless".

I calmed down a little bit when later in the post he conceded "Here’s the really good news: in addition to analysis, marketing today offers something that actually works: a process".

But his post in general has an attitude that says "Marketing is not science", and that "most marketing breakthroughs come down, sooner or later, to luck".

Well, I am not a guru like Seth (or as "lucky" in terms of having a couple of bestsellers under my belt), and he definitely knows a lot of things I don't -- but this is my blog :-) -- so, I will say that marketing is just as much of a science as social science is. It may not have equivalents to Newton's law of gravity or Einstein's theory of relativity, but marketing analytics does have some tried and tested ways to leverage data to make smart predictions about future behavior of customers and prospects.

Now, once equipped with the intelligence that marketing analytics provides, it is completely up to the marketers on how successfully they can change their strategy and tactics to yeild results (so, marketing is only partially scientific) -- but marketing analytics will almost always put a marketer somewhere above pure dumb luck.

Of course, you may agree with Seth, or not -- but I just had to get this off my chest.

Marketing Analytics for Salesforce.com

2006-10-12T10:13:00.000-07:00

This week and last, we've had 2 good conferences in San Francisco, very relevant for marketing analytics. Last week it was DreamForce'06 from salesforce.com, and earlier this week, we had DMA'06.

Let me talk about DreamForce first because it has become a fad these days (specially for anyone working in BI or SaaS) to integrate with salesforce.com using AppExchange. Since early this year, I have been eagerly trying to find an angle between our business and salesforce.com, so DreamForce'06 was obviously very relevant.

A good friend of mine from college, John Barnes, was at DreamForce'06. John is the VP of Technology at Model Metrics, a Chicago-based firm that specializes in customization and integration of salesforce.com with legacy systems. I pinged John to find out more about what salesforce.com is actually doing about marketing automation and analytics, which was very insightful (thanks John).

Salesforce.com website describes marketing autmation as a key component of their platform, which also includes marketing analytics. Turns out while it is possible to define and manage campaigns using salesforce.com, the marketing analytics bit only provides some very basic reports.

So my idea is fairly simple. If people are actually running high-volume direct marketing campaigns using salesforce.com, then we will write an AppExchange component to suck in all the campaign and customer data into our platform and then provide much more sophisticated predictive analytics and other fun stuff on our platform -- make a lot of money, retire early, speak at next DreamForce (sorry I get carried away with this vision thing).

Anyway, about 10-20% of SF customers are using the marketing functionality today. The SFA is the main use but marketing is growing more and more. But 10% of 22,000+ customers is still a good market to go after. And the marketing analytics (and reporting) on SF is lacking. The main obstacle to making it better is that their API does not have a join capability so the only way to do better reporting today is to have a copy of SFDC locally and use replication software to keep it up to date (by DBAmp or Relational Junction on the AppExchange).

Sounds like a good opportunity.

So, overall I am happy with DreamForce'06. I had a chance to shoot breeze with an old college buddy, and learn about a very feasible way for us to get into the AppExchange game. Now I need someone who will go in on this with me as a "design partner" :-)

Better Blogging by Chemistry

2006-10-10T22:33:00.000-07:00

Elliott Ng, a friend, ex-colleague and fellow blogger, has put an interesting commentary on Top 10 tips from (to) a novice blogger posted by Avinash Kaushik.

My take on it is that a blog's success depends on how effective it is in starting conversations -- which means you either get comments like this, or someone links your post on their blog expanding on the topic -- or simply email the link around with some comments.

Why would someone do that?

Well, only if they actually care about what you write about. And caring is more of an emotional response rather than intellectual one. Scoble, Doc Searls, et al really stress on "having a voice", which happens when you combine passion and get awawy from corporate-speak, IMHO.

Scoble's point on being easy to find is also important -- but instead of going the SEO route, it is more important to find interesting conversations in the blogosphere and participate. If you are an active participator with a unique and compelling voice, the search engines are bound to pick you up.

Personally, I found it helpful to write a post outlining my reasons for blogging -- and to the rest of the bloggers out there, novice and experts alike, I'd love to lob the question -- what have you found to be most effective at starting conversations? Was it different than what you'd initially expected?

How to win $1 Million from Netflix?

2006-10-09T22:52:00.000-07:00

Fellow blogger Michael Fassnacht noted rightly that Netflix has caused quite a stir for marketing data geeks with their recent $1 million prize offer for "substantially improving" their existing Cinematch algorithm to make more accurate predictions of "how much someone is going to love a movie based on their movie preferences".

Call it "crowdsourcing", or harnessing "group smart" -- the approach is intriguing, and one of a kind. Being a curious soul myself, I decided to register a team from our company to check this out (who knows what may happen? we can be smart sometimes with enough luck :-)

A few interesting facts:

The contest is actually slated to go another 5 years until 2011, the bar being raised each year to improve over last year's winner
A fine but important distinction: the algorithm needs to predict how someone will rent a movie, NOT what movie someone will rent
At first glance, the data provided by Netflix seems pretty "skimpy" in terms of richness. Basically you get:

List of movies
List of ratings assigned for each movie by an extensive list of Netflix members

My first reaction was that having extra information on the movies themselves might help. There's a bunch of stuff available from IMDB . However, apparently there are license restictions and also Netflix doesn't really consider extra data to be valuable in improving their algorithm (see the discussion thread )

The "enjoy the journey, not the destination" mantra may be apt for this contest. As you can see on the discussion forum on netflix , this process has invited all sorts of interesting conversation on the validity of approaches, whether Netflix has provided enough data, why should one even bother, etc. etc. -- a dream peer review IMHO, albeit a bit too noisy. So, Netflix should be getting a lot more than their money's worth via this process -- not just by getting better algorithms and the PR buzz, but also by leveraging an almost open-source-type process to involve external community for their internal R&D.

At the moment, I agree with Michael's assessment that trying to solve this with ratings data alone might not be the best way to go. There seem to be so many other interesting dimensions that should influence somone's movie rating: movie characteristics like the cast, director, etc., review from critics, local media review, geo/demographic information about the Netflix member, among others. None of these are being considered in the current algorithm. I can understand Netflix's hesitancy to interface with 3rd party resources, but perhaps they should make all the datapoints within Netflix's movie database available for this contest -- and second, encourage contestants to add their own qualitative datapoints. If the goal is to approach this as a pure improvement of a data mining problem -- then increasing the depth of data should help.

I'll keep you all posted how far we get on this. Being a small company, we will do this in the copious amount of spare time left over after working on existing client work that pays the bills. Still, it should be a lot of fun.

An Asterisk that Cost 2 Million Dollars

2006-09-28T14:27:00.000-07:00

This just in: a colleague of mine pointed out an analysis that showed a sudden spike in the number of new trial subscriber signups for one of our clients. In early 2005, they had just introduced a new product version and through mid 2006, they were averaging around 3,000 new trial subscribers each week -- which was less than half of what they were getting with the previous product version.

What had happened?

Turns out this client had several product feature descriptions listed during the trial sign-up process. One of these product descriptions happened to have an asterisk next to it, which was explained at the bottom of the page saying it required a credit card number upfront to use it. For a casual observer, it wasn't clear to which product feature the asterisk actually belonged. So, during a content review session, someone caught this and said -- wow, people are looking at our new product and they think they need a credit card to subscribe, which they really don't, and they get very hesitant.

So, in July, a quick content change was made. The asterisk was removed.

Since we are tracking all the transactions, within 7 days after this change, we started seeing a sudden spike in new trial subscriptions, which has levelled off above 7,000 new trial signups a week (for now). More than double of what was happening prior to the removal of the infamous asterisk.

My colleague did a quick calculation on revenue impact, and it basically translated roughly $2,000,000 in additional revenue in the coming 12-months because of the asterisk removal.

I hope you don't have a similarly expensive asterisk ANYWHERE on your website.

Can Analytics Influence Direct Marketing Creative Process?

2006-09-22T15:53:00.000-07:00

Direct Marketing Association (DMA's) Northern California chapter hosted its first independent meeting yesterday (Thursday Sep 21st) at Intuit's campus in Sunnyvale. This summer, the national DMA "abandoned" formal support for all its local chapters asking them all to go on their own. It's good to see that Northern California DMA has managed to make this independent start, hopefully they'll get adequate local support to thrive.

The main speaker was Bill Mirbach, VP of Direct marketing and direct sales at Intuit -- presenting a talk titled " Owner's Manual for the Creative Process". Now, I'll be the first admit that professionally direct marketing creative is the last thing we deal with -- at our work, we leverage direct marketing data for predictive analytics, so while we can measure and predict if creative version A will perform better than version B for a target audience, that is very different from the "creative process" itself. So, I was intrigued with the topic.

Bill has been around the silicon valley high tech industry. The highlight of the talk for me was a story he shared going back to 1984 when he helped the founder of a fledgling software company called Intuit with their direct ads. The talk was mostly about how companies should chose vendors and vice versa for the creative process, not the artistic aspect itself -- so, during Q&A, I asked Bill how does knowledge of your audience impact the direct marketing creative process? Can one leverage their direct marketing data, knowledge of their customer segments, etc. to make the creative process more effective? What's been his experience?

Here's what I heard:

Yes, a better knowledge of one's audience and their likes and dislikes about an organization's products and services certainly helps the creative person to craft their message more effectively? However, while this sounds logical, this is not what normally happens. The creative process is more the product of the discipline and idiosyncracies of the "creator", rather than driven by data-derived intelligence.

Bill mentioned a particular test where they wanted to measure the performance of a scare-tactic message ("if you don't use our product, you'll be sorry") versus a benefits-focused message ("and you can get X, Y, and Z at the click of a button") -- where the creative person just didn't believe in scare-tactic and came up with a very tepid "scary" message (which obviously didn't perform well). Whereas he used a different creative person who specialized in scare-tactic message (scary thought, pardon the pun) -- which turned out to be very effective.

What does this tell us?

I don't know how much of Bill's story is the norm or exception, but he certainly has been around direct marketing creative people a lot more than I have -- so I must respect his POV. Still, it seems like rather than asking creative people to use marketing data driven intelligence to fine tune their message -- it's probably better the other way around -- i.e. leverage the analytics to find out what type of messages you want to be send out to different segments -- THEN find the right creative team to craft those messages.

What do you think?

Passion for Data Visualization

2006-09-19T01:02:00.000-07:00

I found this on Christopher Ahlberg's blog, and I completely agree that this is a true display of "passion for information visualization".

http://www.ted.com/tedtalks/tedtalksplayer.cfm?key=hans_rosling&flashEnabled=1

The software used for the presentation is at http://www.gapminder.org and is also a google tool (http://tools.google.com/gapminder) It appears to be "bundled" with the global economic data, not sure if there is an open decoupled version that one can point to their data and play around. Although it seems flash-based and pulling data from static data sources (didn't seem like rdbms, but I could be wrong) -- but this would be a great way visualize OLAP data.

What's interesting is the concept of a "play" button for the time dimension, which makes a great use of animation to see how different quantities (measures) change over time. It also manages the screen real-estate well to put different dimensions on X or Y-axis. But most of all, this truly exemplifies what data visualization is all about -- it goes beyond the realm of charts and graphs that take a while to decipher, and rather tells a very clear, compelling, and visual story. Very impressive!

We've got charts and graphs to back us up, so f@#$ off!

2006-09-10T10:30:00.000-07:00

Recently I had a potential partnership discussion to evaluate whether our predictive analytics technology could provide key insights from this potential partner's (I'll call them company XYZ) marketing database. Here's how my conversation went with Mr. X, an exec at company XYZ, (which is a marketing technology company):

Me: "So, what are they key business pain points for your clients that we can analyze?"
Mr. X: "Well, you know, the usual stuff -- marketing ROI, cut costs, increase sales, etc."
Me: "ah.. yes, but can we delve a bit deeper? Where exactly clients' marketing programs need help?"
Mr. X: "what do you mean?"
Me: "Well, are they more worried about increasing acquisition volume, or is it more about predicting high-LTV customers, or is it more about retention? I'm trying to get a sense of what is their #1 issue?"
Mr. X: "they don't know.. it's probably all of that stuff"
Me: "It's important that we get a sense of priority, because otherwise we are talking about applying analytics without really knowing what we are trying to optimize"
Mr. X: "well, you are the analytics expert -- you need to tell them what to analyze. They don't think like you, worrying about success metrics, etc. They ask us to run marketing programs, and now we'd like to sell them some analytics. I can tell you what data we have on their marketing programs, now you tell me what kind of analytics you can provide me that I can sell."
Me: "But we do need to understand their business objectives before determining what analytics is relevant enough so that they'll pay for it"
Mr. X: "What I need from you is some screenshots --- some charts and graphs that show what kind of analytics you can do -- I'll be more than happy to review that and tell you if we can work together"

Needless to say, I didn't sense a true spirit of partnership here, but I did sense an attitude that I find more often than I'd like that analytics is all about producing charts and graphs that the user will somehow find useful.

Which, IMHO, is total BS!

But I can't blame Mr. X too much because this is a pretty common perception of analytics in the marketplace. Recently I talked to a marketing exec who said --"everytime I meet with the analytics guys from our agency, they basically have this big ream of a powerpoint deck filled with one chart after another -- and I don't want to see all that stuff; all I want them to do is to tell me what relevant insight(s) did they find, and what course of marketing action would they recommend, and it's like pulling teeth to get them to move beyond charts and graphs and talk about action."

Look at the websites of any business intelligence software provider, or analytical software provider -- and I will guarantee you that you will see a bunch of fancy charts and graphs, and dashboards with enough dials and speedometers to make you dizzy. Somewhere along the line, maybe we have forgotten that the purpose of analytics is to equip us with insights that enable better decision making.

So, first off, the type of analysis being done has to be aware of what type of decisions we are exactly expecting to improve; and second, the result of the analysis needs to be presented in a fashion that is "integrated" into the decision making. Maybe you list your recommended actions next to your charts and graphs, or maybe you somehow highlight the figures and trends that demand attention. My point -- don't leave it upto your user figure out the action based on the fancy charts and graphs, find out what decisions users are trying to make, and provide information that fills in that gap between analytics and actionable insight.

Google blogsearch excludes blog entries made on Google's new blog tool

2006-08-28T15:51:00.000-07:00

I like the new beta version of google's blogging tool. I was one of those who couldn't switch their blogs on the older product to the new one. So, I just started a new blogsite since I didn't have that many older posting.

But -- to my dismay, none of my new postings on the beta blogger were showing up when you do a blogsearch. So, I decided to do a quick test. I made the same postings from my new beta blogger account to the old bogger account and did a search immediately. And lo and behold, the entries from the old blogger turned up instantly, but not the new blogger.Try this for yourself:

Go to blogsearch.google.com
Search for "tie global poverty" -- entry of my last blog post
Refine search to within last hour (or day, depending upon).
You'll see that while my recent post on my old account shows up, my original post on the new blog doesn't.

Why is Google not indexing the beta blogger entries?

TiE's session on The Pivotal Role of Entrepreneurship in Addressing Global Poverty

2006-08-28T15:31:00.000-07:00

Part of my job is to leverage every networking opportunity to get the word out on the company. With that intent, and also to learn a bit more about social enterpeneurship, this afternoon I drove down to Santa Clara for TiE (The Indus Enterpreneurs) member networking session titled "The Pivotal Role of Entrepreneurship in Addressing Global Poverty".

If you are an enterpreneur living close to a TiE chapter, and haven't been to their events, it's definitely worth checking out (they always have great Indian food at each gathering). Not surprisingly, the crowd at the Silicon Valley chapter is a good mix of mostly Indian enterpreneurs and seasoned industry execs, so it's pretty decent networking. Today was a bit different, because instead of promoting our individual companies, the crowd was more interested in how enterpreneurs can play an active role in tackling global poverty.

Dr. Bill Musgrave from The Enterpreneurs Network(TEN)-Silicon Valley gave the keynote, with many anecdotes on enterpreneurs finding viable business models serving the "bottom of the pyramid". Particuarly striking was his quote of former president Clinton: "I have never seen uneven distribution of intelligence, but always seen uneven distributions of opportunity". Dr. Musgrave argued that to make the grand changes needed to address global poverty, governments and large corporations haven't proven to be much effective, but it is rather the enterpreneurs who are most effective at empowering the poor. His call of action to the roomfull of enterpreneurs was to seek out such opportunities and make a difference.

The session also gave 2-minute "open mike" pitch slots to any interested attendee to promote their company/cause. I was particualrly impressed with Vipin S (?) from Intel who's starting a program in India to enable local farmers to grow crops for biodiesel fuel. Also interesting was Navaneethan Sundaramoorthy's pitch on Association for India's Development's local chapter , which has a collection of development projects that harness the collective resources of local Indian diaspora.

I couldn't pass this "open mike" opporutnity to talk about my friend Mahabir Pun's work in Nepal. Mahabir and I went to the same college in Nebraska. Upon graduation, while I took the more common path of getting a job and later launching start-ups, Mahabir went back to Nepal, back to the same rural village where he grew up, and started a grade school for the local kids deprived of education, and also started several income-generating micro-projects. I should do a post describing his work in detail, but check out Himanchal Education Foundation's web site in the meanwhile, which is the foundation that tries to get financial help and recruit volunteers for the school. It is a very inspiring story of sheer will that is making a difference without much help from government and NGO's who are now finally warming up to this project.

Afterwards, I got a chance to chat with several other folks who are somehow involved part-time with similar social projects, big and small -- and as I write this, I feel a lot more hopeful about these enterpreneurs making a lasting social impact. I sensed a similar drive to make social changes as we have in launching new companies and seeking successful exits. Key is, how effective will we be in pooling our resources and provide helping hands (I should say, empowering hands) to organizations such as Mahabir's himanchal.org. Just like with any new venture, we don't have the answers when we start, but with the right will, we will find a way.

Qualitative Data vs Behavioral Data: Who do You Pay Attention To?

2006-08-28T15:30:00.000-07:00

Yesterday during a call with a potential client, this topic came up. This is a well-known desktop software company, and they have a unique challenge: Their primary measure of customer loyalty is the "Reichheld Score" aka the Net Promoter Score, which is based on customer responses to a single question -- "Would you recommend us to a friend?". Now, the interesting thing is that while this company is doing rather well in the market, their overall net promoter score is not that great. In fact, their score is lagging behind other comparable software manufacturers.

So, the obvious question is -- why doesn't their net promoter score correlate with company growth? Which metric should they rather measure as a driver of company growth?
As we talked, I also found out that this company hasn't done much in terms of evaluating the behavioral data on their customers -- you know, stuff like actual purchase transactions, new purchases versus repeat purchases, customer complaints, returns, etc. And I couldn't help but think that perhaps this is where they should start look first. A great deal of research work has shown us that past behavior is the best predicator of future behavior, and this is true when it comes to measuring customer loyalty as well. A 2002 HBR article "mismanagement of customer loyalty" describes this as:

Simply put: Not all loyal customers are profitable, and not all profitable customers are loyal. Traditional tools for segmenting customers do a poor job of identifying that latter group, causing companies to chase expensively after initially profitable customers who hold little promise of future profits. The authors suggest an alternative approach, based on well-established "event-history modeling" techniques, that more accurately predicts future buying probabilities. Armed with such a tool, marketers can correctly identify which customers belong in which category and market accordingly.

So why isn't this company looking at behavioral data on its coustomers? I didn't get a clear answer, but could it be that it is easier to conduct surveys rather than dig deep into data, specially when the data volumes are huge and the data is scattered around different corporate silos? Could this company be viewing the analysis of behavioral data as a long, complex exercise that involves getting down and dirty with data warehouses and analytical modeles, when all they needed was a nice simple metric that would measure customer loyalty and nicely correlate with company growth?

Yes, I am being a bit facetious -- but while I don't dispute the value of qualitative research, I think in this case, they are more applicable AFTER an initial study of behavioral data. This company needs to understand the "WHAT" first (i.e. what is going on with my customers? which customer attributes/behavior are best indicators of company growth?), and then they can apply qualitative reserach to understnd the "WHY", i.e. why things are happening the way they are.

Would you consider a SaaS/on-demand solution for marketing analytics?

2006-08-24T13:04:00.000-07:00

By normal conventions for my job, I'm supposed to answer a "hell, yes!" to this question because I work for a company that does on-demand marketing analytics. But all hype aside, let's explore this and see where it makes sense.

We all know, specially the direct marketers, that data can be leveraged to get a better understanding of customers/prospects which results to more targeted and effective marketing programs. This concept has been around for decades and generally well accepted. For a while, data used to be the challenge where an organization wouldn't have much data on its customers -- but in the age of web, RFID, CRM explosion, etc. -- people have way too much data to know what to do with it. Still then, why are we being bombarded with spam and other irrelevant marketing messages?

A lot of marketers, specially in the SMB sector would answer -- well, it's hard to do this. Analytical solutions to leverage your customer data are tough to implement. It's either some expensive software/hardware (think BI/CRM/Analytics solution providers), or some elaborate marketing service provider (agencies, mailhouses, etc.) with heavy-duty hourly rates, or else you left with your own devices to put together an analytics team who has:

Technology know-how to deal with large datasets and apply heavy-duty analytics
Business know-how to understand vital issues challenging your business and marketing
Strategic approach to analysis to avoid not seeing the forest for the trees

Sounds familiar?

What direct marketers, and a lot of other data-driven decision makers, seem to be lacking is an agile yet reliable set of tools that help them "see through" their data without having to own expensive hardware/software infrastructures, or having to pay for service provider hours throught the nose. And I think, a Sofware-as-a-Service (SaaS) or on-demand approach can be a very valid alternative approach to get there.

Because let's say you had an option to go with a SaaS solution provider for analytics, someone who had an easy way for you to upload all your marketing data securely and reliabley, and then let you define what exact answers you were looking for, and based on that apply the relevant analytical models and provide you the answers in a form you can actually understand. I am not talking about showing a bunch of fancy charts, graphs, and (yes) the dreaded dashboards -- but actually providing you with deliverables you can use.

Things like a downloadable list of all customers who are likely to bail out on you in the next 30 days. Plus the optimal set of retention tactics derived via a set of data mining models that analyze all past retention programs. Or, it could be a list of customers who are most likely to purchase a certain product -- or conversely, list of customers who will be really upset if you try to direct market them.

Now, I know these deliverables may sound simple, or "gee, everyone can do that" -- but at most of the companies I have worked with, I still don't see this. It baffles me as well, but most companies aren't even at this level of understanding.

Yes, I am biased because my job is to build and promote SaaS or on-demand analytics; but I also know that market will only buy a solution if it makes sense, only if it is truly a better alternative to other solutions. I don't know that. I have confidence in our approach, and with the different customers who we have been able serve via this model, but honestly, that's not enough data points. And as a solutions provider, I sure would like to make sure we are building/providing things to our customers that add a great deal of value.

So, what do you think? Do you feel SaaS/on-demand is a viable model for analytics? If you were in a situation to choose, would you go with an on-demand analytics solution (provided analytics is not the core competency of your businees)?

I think it's surely worth a shot to consider.

Why am I doing this @#$%?

2006-08-24T12:37:00.000-07:00

In the summer of 1990, the same day Saddam invaded Kuwait, I boarded a Northwest flight from my native Nepal and 20-odd hours later landed amongst the beautiful cornfields of Nebraska (state tag line is "the good life") to start by bachelor's degree in computer science, which later extended to a master's. After finishing my master's and a first taste of Internet startup, somehow I ended up in San Francsico, where I live today -- went through another string of startups, the latest having something to do with deriving "actionable insights" from customer databases, in other words -- business intelligence.

Why should you care? Well, I don't know, but..

I have come to believe that blogs are perhaps the best way to share your experience, both professionally and personally, with the widest possible audience who as a group are always smarter than you.

So that's why I'm here -- to share and explore conversations that haven't happened yet, but I know they will take me (and perhaps you as well) into fascinating aspects of "business intelligence" (and its repercussions on a practitioner) -- or at least get us all a good laugh.

So, come back, come often.. get my RSS feed, trackback, whatever works for you. But let me know if you find these postings useful, boring, or pointless, or what would you rather talk about.

Overall -- let's have some fun chats.

Our baby OpenI is a Finalist on SourceForge: Please Vote!

2006-03-22T04:02:00.000-08:00

One of my many professional roles is that of the project lead for OpenI, which is an open source BI web application that enables interactive analysis and reporting from OLAP, RDBMS, and data mining data sources. I am very proud to annouce that OpenI is now a finalist for the 2006 SourceForge Community Choice award in the Enterprise category. This is special because this puts OpenI is now in a select group of top 12 projects out of the 116,000-plus projects that exist today on SourceForge.

Now the time has come to cast the final deciding votes. Please go to the link below, select Enterprise category, and check OpenI -- it's that easy

http://sourceforge.net/awards/cca/

March 23rd is the last day of voting, so please vote now. And when you're done, please pass the word around -- we can use all the support/publicity :-)

A bit more on OpenI --at our company Loyalty Matrix, we developed OpenI out of necessity. Our main business is doing customer analytics and delivering actionable marketing insights. Microsoft SQL Server, with Analysis Services for OLAP, is our platform of choice. We needed a thin client web front end for client access. Nothing special you say.

But, the .MAC group at Apple is one of our clients. Guess what, Apple really doesn’t like to use Internet Explorer!

After spending significant time and money on comercial components, that claimed to be browser independent, we punted and decided to search out open source tools. Starting only a year ago last July, we are now about to release version 1.2 of OpenI which includes support for both SQL Server 2000 and 2005. Loyalty Matrix has been using OpenI in production for over six months to serve a number of clients including 24 Hour Fitness and Olivia in addition to Apple.

OpenI is a web-based application for business intelligence reporting, that enables users to analyze data and publish results over the web. Today, OpenI is consistently in the top 100 most active open source projects, with a growing and thriving community. More on OpenI at http://openi.sourceforge.net

Thanks for your support.

When it comes to prediction, Machine Learning kicks CHAID and CART's Tails

2006-02-10T10:53:00.000-08:00

Conventional wisdom for direct marketing analytics regards CHAID and CART as cutting edge analysis for discovering correlations. (see "Optimal Database Marketing" by Drozdenko/Drake, Chapter 8, 2002)

However, what's not commonly known is that these are more than 20-year old techniques, and recent academic work has shown that analyses like CHAID and CART are more applicable for hypotheses testing rather than predictive analysis. And it's the latter that's more key to direct marketers. So, what's the cutting edge technology for predictive analytics, you say? Machine Learning!

In our own experience for conducting predictive analysis for direct marketing optimization, we have found that machine learning techniques such as Random Forests(tm) are far superior to the single-tree based analyses like CHAID and CART. Machine Learning has far better accuracy for prediction, mainly because instead of trying to come up with a single best tree algorithm for prediction, it develops many different simple trees (many trees = forest!) and collectively combines them into a "forest model".

The I in BI is about Intelligence, not Infrastructure

2005-11-04T23:31:00.000-08:00

BI software products, open source as well as the commercial ones, have mainly been focused on the developers/SI's building BI applications, as opposed to focusing on the end-user of the BI applications. The end-user's problem is pretty straightforward: "I am sitting on a mountain of data accumulated over various data silos in my organization, and I need help making sense out of it; I need a tool that helps me derive actionable insights". The end-user doesn't want to write code or SQL/MDX queries, they don't want to mess with complex regression models or machine-learning data mining models. They want a tool that has some notion of the *business* questions they ask, and can help analyze their existing data in the context of those questions -- hence the term *business* inelligence.

The "I" in BI should be about intelligence, not infrastructure. Most of current BI technology talk solely focuses on the "infrastructure" components - database, OLAP, workflow, data mining, reporting, etc. but just by having those components in one stack, you don't become intelligent. You still need data models optimized for your specific types of analyses, you still need to find the appropriate data mining and stat models for your problem space, you still need the right visualizations both to interactive analyze your data, as well as to publish your analyses in such a way that mere mortals can understand and use those insights to make business decisions. *This* is the real "I" in BI -- Intelligence, not Infrastructre!

Open source BI platforms are going to be key in highlighting this differentiation because open source by its very nature commoditizes the infrastructure of BI -- pushinig the proverbial "value up the stack" to components that actually produce intelligence.

At my work, we bet on this very phenomena where we utilize an open source BI infrastructure, and build domain-specific BI applications on top of it. Since we started doing this a few years ago, we didn't have the advantage to choose between Pentaho, JasperSoft, or BIRT -- so we did our best by building our own platform by integrating existing open source BI components, of which some like Mondrian and JPivot are also being utilized by Pentaho, et al. For us, this was a pure R&D initiative to leverage an open source development model, and in the spirit of collabortion, we even published it into sourceforge as OpenI (http://openi.sourceforge.net). We hope that as Pentaho, JasperSoft, etc. start releasing complete version of their platforms, we should find a way to collaborate with their stack. But for what it's worth -- you can download and use OpenI today as a BI application, just like we use it in production to serve our clients. In fact, I am keenly interested in community feedback on OpenI to understand the best ways to collaborate with the other open source BI projects.

The key is that open source BI needs to first define itself as a respectable, reliable alternative to the commercial BI vendors. Then we can bicker about what's free, and what's commercial. The infrastructure should be completely open, on top of which you can have commercial, domain-specific BI applications. But first, Pentaho, JasperSoft, BIRT, and OpenI -- all of us need to collaborate and put an open source BI stack out there that can hold its own in comparison to commercial BI vendors. Open source doesn't work like enterprise software where one company/organization needs to own the entire space. And even if they wanted to, they can't, because successful open source is all about building a community that spreads far beyond the confines of your organization. We are fortunate to have several noteworthy projects and components in the open source BI space -- it is time to these projects to collaborate and present open source BI as a unified front, and start growing the community. That's how open source BI is going to become real.