Eight Years of Open Analytics – Why its more important than ever

Eight Years of Open Analytics – Why its more important than ever… 

BizCubed is celebrating its eight year anniversary this month, and I’ve been reflecting on the reasons I started the company, and whether these reasons are still valid today.

A passion for data…

At our company launch at CeBIT in 2006, we articulated our vision of bringing data together from multiple sources and providing critical business insights previously hidden from view.

In 2014, the role of data analytics in transforming business is gaining momentum and smart organisations are leveraging data for competitive advantage. We now have a plethora of new buzz words including big data, analytics databases, NoSql, and realtime data blending. Our key founding principles are more revelant now than ever, and apply to all business from SMB to enterprise. How do we get information out of the wide variety of data sources we have in our operation? And how do we use this information to make better decisions and deliver value to our customers?

Penalising Success

One of the defining moments in my early career was when I worked in New York on a major compliance reporting analytics project for a Fortune 100 financial service company. Two years on and five million dollars later, we were showcasing the results to the executive team. The results had been good. The project delivered on its promises and provided insights not previously available. The project looked to be a success.

At the showcase, one of the executive team said, “This looks great! Can we get it on the desk of every manager every Monday morning?”

What we discovered when we looked into it, was that due to the licensing of the product chosen – this request would be prohibitively expensive, and would have destroyed the ROI of the project. The increase in license fees was so significant that it was more cost effective to hire someone to manually deliver the reports to the managers every week.This example of the vendor’s software licensing policy undermining our ROI has stuck with me ever since.

BizCubed is born….

In 2006 I was working in Australia and I came across the Pentaho suite of open tools which were free of licensing fees, and charged for support on a server basis rather than a per-user fee. I immediately remembered my experience in New York and could see how this approach could bring significant value to companies in Australia.

DeBortoli Wines – Our Founding Client

Bill Robertson and DeBortoli Wines became our founding client. Their business challenge: to bring together information from multiple systems and provide reliable sales reports in an automated fashion.

DeBortoli have remained an important client of ours, and on the eve of our eighth anniversary have just published a case study highlighting their successful use of Pentaho’s tools to solve their data integration and reporting challenges.

Download the Debortoli Case Study

Success in through our client’s business

I’m pleased with our progress in the intervening years – successfully engaging with high profile brands including Westfield, Boost Juice, CareFlight, Wotif, Specsavers and Suncorp.

The common theme throughout these organisations has been that Pentaho’s unique approach to business analytics has allowed these them to be nimble and penalty-free in their projects and be able to cost effectively deliver these results to end users.

CeBIT 2014 – Data Blending

Although it’s a buzz-word I’m not yet comfortable with the phrase “data blending” does provide the nicely visual connotation of combining information from different datasets in order to achieve an outcome. In practice, this is the same thing we’ve been doing since we founded, but can now do faster and with larger data sets than ever before.

Join us at CeBIT

This year at CeBIT we are celebrating by having some fun incorporating a real house-hold blender into our demo of real-time data blending, taking information from multiple sources, in multiple formats, and providing immediate outputs.

I hope you have the opportunity to drop by and celebrate with us, and look forward to the next eight years of success!

As an exhibitor, we can also offer you free entry to the Exhibition.  To register now, click here: Register for Free Ticket

Can’t make it?

If you’re not able to make it to CeBIT this year, but are still interested in real-time data blending, we have a recording of a recent webinar.(Unfortunately, without the blender).

Watch the Webinar