WhereScape RED Builds data warehouses, fast.

We are thrilled to be taking part in a Teradata webinar next week.  It is called Production Deadline Insomnia: Beat the Clock with Maximum Results.  As the title implies the webinar will be be about the unfortunately all too common scenario of having project deadlines that look too tight.

The presenters will be:

Dan Mosher, Director of Enterprise Data Warehousing, United Rentals,

Chris Twogood, Director, Appliance Product Marketing, Teradata Coroporation, and our very own

Mark Budzinski, VP and GM, WhereScape USA

The format is an interactive panel, where the presenters will discuss the challenges and solutions within the business world where time waits for no one.

Details are:

Wednesday, February 3, 2010

1pm-2pm (EST), 10am-11am (PST)

Registration is at http://www.teradata.com/t/webseminar.aspx?id=12969

The BBBT is one of those events you wait a long time for.  The brain child of Claudia Imhoff, the Boulder BI Brain Trust is an opportunity for vendors to spend quality time with some of the BI industry’s leading analysts.  It is a popular and sort after event - I understand the slots for 2010 are basically gone already.  Our slot was booked in the beginning of the year, and we got to present on the 20th of November.

We have met with and briefed a number of the analysts before, but this is a little different.  First off it is face-to-face in Claudia’s office.  Secondly it is for half a day - much longer than a standard briefing.

Talking with a room of highly intelligence and opinionated analysts has its challenges.  At one point a tweet came through that it was like being in a room full of ADD sufferers - and that was from some one sitting there.  As well as the physical audience, analysts also dial in from around the US and the world.  I hate to think what it is like to try and keep up with all the questions and conversations if you are not actually present.

The BBBT is held in Boulder, Colorado.  I had not been to Boulder before, and I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed visiting.  The Boulderado was a great hotel, and the restaurants and ambiance of the city was superb.

I may admit to sneaking in some geocaching the day before -always good to add a new state.  Dinner the night before with Claudia and the crew from B-eye-network was a highlight, and there may be some truth to the rumor it finished at a Tequila bar.

The actual presentation is pretty free format.  For the first half we choose to talk about WhereScape and WhereScape RED - why we started the company, what we wnated to achieve, who was buying our software, and what they were achieving with it.  All the way through there are tweets coming from around the world and in the room - sort of instant and constant polling of how interesting you are. 

For the second half we choose to talk about our future directions.  For us this was the interesting part.  We talked through our ideas of the market and the new things you will be seeing from WhereScape over the next year or so.  We are excited about our roadmap, and it was invaluable to get feedback and insights at an early stage from a bunch of savvy experienced people.

Overall the experience was great.  We got heaps of feedback and ideas, and I hope the analyst community gained a greater understanding of what customers can achieve with WhereScape.  Thanks to Claudia and Dave Imhoff for hosting the event, Shawn Rogers and Richard Hackathorn for their instant-blogs (both were up before the end of the session) and all the participants for their interest and comments.

The SUBWAY® Franchisee-Owned and Operated Company Is Using WhereScape RED to Build Its Microsoft SQL Server Enterprise Data Warehouse

SEATTLE–WhereScape, a provider of a comprehensive Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for data warehousing, announced today that IPC, an independent SUBWAY® franchisee-owned and operated purchasing cooperative, has purchased WhereScape RED to enable the rapid development and deployment of its Microsoft SQL Server-based enterprise data warehouse. The announcement was made at PASS Summit 2009, the premier event for SQL Server professionals, where WhereScape is exhibiting in Booth #514.

IPC, headquartered in Miami, Florida, is implementing its new SQL Server data warehouse to gain additional business insights from its terabytes of Subway® Card processing data, finance and supply chain data in support of SUBWAY’s 25,000 restaurants across the U.S. and Canada. IPC is responsible for procuring all of the SUBWAY food, packaging, equipment and services for the US and Canada through negotiating price, supply, and distribution terms while improving quality, enhancing competitiveness and ensuring the best value to SUBWAY restaurants and their customers.

“IPC looks at all supply chain opportunities that will result in better operations, savings or quality for SUBWAY franchisees,” said Anthony Ronconi, IPC Director of Information Technology. “This is a continuous process with IPC often receiving requests from its members to evaluate taking on new functions. As data volumes continue to grow, our enterprise data warehouse will be key in helping us provide timely data analysis and reports that enable management to make insightful and timely business decisions, benefiting all SUBWAY store owners.”

According to Ronconi, IPC’s initial data warehouse development efforts, while successful, proved too time consuming making it difficult to meet dynamic business requirements. This resulted in the company performing due diligence looking for a cost-effective solution to aid his team. “WhereScape RED’s ‘prototype and iterate’ data warehouse-building approach is ideal for IPC as our business requirements and needs are constantly evolving and changing. In addition, WhereScape RED has greatly increased the productivity of our developers and our results to date have impressed both our IT group as well as our stakeholders. We have been very pleased with the purchase and progress we are now making,” Ronconi said.

IPC’s enterprise data warehouse consists of several massive modules including card model, store model, finance and supply chain. For example, just one of the activity fact tables contains more than one billion records, with the enterprise data warehouse containing almost two terabytes of data and growing daily. “The data contained in each of these modules is quite complex, and WhereScape is enabling us to effectively manage that complexity,” Ronconi said. Two major modules?card model and store model?have completed testing and have been placed into production. The supply chain module is expected to be in production by year-end, and the finance data will be incorporated into the data warehouse in a multi-phased approach throughout next year.

Ronconi added that IPC has also been highly impressed with the metadata-based documentation-creating capabilities of WhereScape RED. “We have complex reporting relationships in the IPC data warehouse between business units and models, without which proper documentation is very hard to understand for a user, yet alone communicate to other IPC technical resources,” he said. “As we make changes to our data warehouse, WhereScape allows us to automatically regenerate the documentation to reflect the changes.”

“We are pleased to welcome IPC to the WhereScape customer family and honored to be playing a key role in this high profile data warehouse development effort,” said WhereScape Founder and CEO Michael Whitehead. “WhereScape RED ensures that IPC and other organizations can not only quickly and cost-effectively develop data warehousing solutions, but also easily adapt and change the environment as business needs dictate. IPC is in good company, joining more than 100 other SQL Server customers enjoying the productivity, ease of use and cost benefits of the SQL Server and WhereScape combination.”

Fully Integrated with Microsoft SQL Server

WhereScape RED provides native support for SQL Server as well as IBM DB2, Oracle and Teradata. The same WhereScape integrated development environment is used to build SQL Server data warehouses as well as Analysis Services cubes. The benefits are simple – organizations only need to learn one development environment, end to end metadata from the source system through to the cube layer (and where supported the client tool as well), integrated workflow and scheduling for the data warehouse and the cubes, automatically maintained lineage information and documentation from source system extract through to the data warehouse and the cubes.

About IPC

IPC is an independent SUBWAY® franchisee-owned and operated purchasing cooperative. IPC negotiates the lowest cost for goods and services, while improving quality, enhancing competitiveness and ensuring the best value to SUBWAY® restaurants and their customers. Moreover, IPC is committed to delivering returns to its members year after year. By organizing as a cooperative, the business initiatives are set by the owner members and are benchmarked by the active participation of an elected Board of Directors. For more information, please visit, www.ipcoop.com.

About WhereScape

WhereScape provides a product, WhereScape RED, which enables organizations to ensure that the structure of their data always meets the changing needs of the business. WhereScape RED is the only comprehensive Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for data warehousing that supports the entire data warehouse management life cycle, integrating source system exploration, schema design, metadata management, warehouse scheduling and enhancement into a single, simple integrated design.

More than 300 customers worldwide are using WhereScape RED on a variety of platforms. Projects performed using WhereScape RED typically come in under budget, ahead of schedule, with improved performance, greater transparency and built on more solid foundations over the systems they replace. WhereScape has head offices in Auckland, New Zealand, Portland Oregon, and Wokingham, UK. For more information, please visit www.wherescape.com.

All products or company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

We are thrilled to have one of our newer customers, Dan Mosher from United Rentals (NYSE: URI), with us at the recent Teradata Partners User Group conference in Washington DC.

While he was there Dan very kindly sat down with Mark Budzinski, WhereScape’s Sales and Operations VP for North America and Shaun Rogers from the b-eye-network to record a podcast.

Some fo the great quotes include:

“WhereScape promised a lot and the product has delivered.  We are very happy with the amount of time it is saving us in development, as well as the documentation it is producing and the built-in scheduler.  I am very happy with the purchase.”
 
“We estimate the development lifecycle is 20-25% of what it was previously when we were hand-coding.”

 ”WhereScape also gives us the ability to utilize people who are not necessarily programmers, but people who are familiar with our data.  The majority of my staff has been with the company for at least 10 years so they are very familiar with where the data is coming from, and with their knowledge of SQL, knowing what they want to achieve.  It has been a good fit for us.”

 ”We always do documentation, but as most people find, we would make a change but often fail to go back to fix the documentation everywhere.  The ability to click a button and have it generate a web page that is reflective of our data warehouse has been great for us.”

You can hear the entire podcast here.

Conference season is in full swing, and we have just completed two conferences - Teradata Partners User Group in Washington DC and the DW 2.0 Asia Pacific Summit and Workshop. 

Teradata Partners was a great event.  It was a real pleasure to have Dan Mosher from United Networks with us there.  He took the time to meet with analysts including Claudia Imhoff and Colin White, and took part in a pod cast with WhereScape’s Mark Budzinski and Shaun Rogers from the b-eye-network.

DW2.0 took place in Sydney, Australia.  WhereScape in conjunction with MIP were Platinum sponsors of the event.

Coming up WhereScape is speaking and exhibiting at the Europe 2009 Data Management, Information Quality and DW/BI Conferences that take place on the 2-4 November at the Park Plaza Hotel in London.

At the same time we will be exhibiting at PASS (Professional Association for SQL Server) Summit Unite 2009 at the Washington State Convention and Trade Center in Seattle.

If you are passing through either of these conferences please look us for a chat.

Washington, D.C.  – October 19, 2009 – WhereScape, a Teradata Select Software Partner and provider of a comprehensive Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for data warehousing, announced today that equipment rental leader United Rentals, Inc. (NYSE: URI) has purchased WhereScape RED to ensure that the structure of its data continues to meet the evolving needs of its business and markets. The announcement was made at the 2009 Teradata Partners User Group Conference & Expo in Washington, D.C., where United Rentals is participating in WhereScape’s Booth #132.  

Dan Mosher, Director of Enterprise Data Warehousing for United Rentals, commented, “WhereScape’s rapid prototyping process enables us to quickly understand our data, get aligned with our business users, and build our Teradata data warehouse more rapidly, with the added benefit of metadata-based documentation automatically produced for our end-users and technical staff. We are delighted with the productivity afforded by WhereScape RED, and the more automated, repeatable and documented development environment it supports.”  
“WhereScape provides an attractive alternative for quickly prototyping, building and deploying Teradata data warehouses as well as dependent data marts for targeted BI solutions that can be quickly adapted as the business dictates,” said Claudia Imhoff, President of Intelligent Solutions, Inc., a leading consultancy on data warehousing and BI technologies and strategies.  “Most business users need a bit of help in ‘visualizing’ what a BI application can do for them, and WhereScape’s prototypes, or mockups of the application, have been proven to be most effective in fine-tuning the functionality of the application. We all recognize that prototypes save time and money and ultimately lead to a more successful project.”   

WhereScape RED provides native support for Teradata as well as IBM DB2, Oracle, and Microsoft SQL Server.  WhereScape’s framework explicitly supports Teradata normal-form model table methodologies, just as Teradata practitioners would generate if they were handcrafting the functionality. It builds Teradata objects (tables, indexes, join indexes etc) and generates set based procedures and scripts. 

WhereScape RED utilizes Teradata for both its ELT transformations and metadata storage.  It generates strictly native Teradata scripts (FastLoad, MultiLoad and TPT), set- based code and objects, which are all documented and all automatically included in WhereScape’s integrated and open metadata repository.

“We are delighted to welcome United Rentals as a WhereScape customer and are pleased with the role WhereScape is playing in the development and deployment of its Teradata data warehouse environment,” said WhereScape Founder and CEO Michael Whitehead. “WhereScape RED ensures that organizations like United Rentals are not only developing data warehousing solutions quickly, but that these solutions are easily adaptable and integrate into the existing IT infrastructure as well.”

About United Rentals
United Rentals, Inc. is the largest equipment rental company in the world, with an integrated network of over 580 rental locations in 48 states, 10 Canadian provinces and Mexico. The company’s approximately 8,600 employees serve construction and industrial customers, utilities, municipalities, homeowners and others. The company offers for rent approximately 2,700 classes of equipment with a total original cost of $3.8 billion. United Rentals is a member of the Standard & Poor’s MidCap 400 Index and the Russell 2000 Index® and is headquartered in Greenwich, Conn. Additional information about United Rentals is available at unitedrentals.com.

About WhereScape
WhereScape provides a product, WhereScape RED, which enables organizations to ensure that the structure of their data always meets the changing needs of the business. WhereScape RED is the only comprehensive Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for data warehousing that supports the entire data warehouse management life cycle, integrating source system exploration, schema design, metadata management, warehouse scheduling and enhancement into a single, simple integrated design.

More than 300 customers worldwide are using WhereScape RED on a variety of platforms. Projects performed using WhereScape RED typically come in under budget, ahead of schedule, with improved performance, greater transparency and built on more solid foundations over the systems they replace. WhereScape has head offices in Auckland, New Zealand, Portland Oregon, and Wokingham, UK.  For more information, please visit www.wherescape.com.

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 All products or company names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners.

Steve Hitchman from WhereScape Europe is to present at the Butler Group BI Symposium in London, October 07-08.

Details on his talk are:

The New Rools and Tools of Data Warehousing for BI: Steve Hitchman, Operations Director, WhereScape
Many a Business Intelligence initiative has run over time and over budget due to the Data Warehouse development failing to deliver data quickly enough for effective BI development. Projects over running and failing to meet user expectations and budget constraints. Discover now how new data warehouse tools and development can be truly agile for effective BI delivery.

We are thrilled that Claudia Imhoff will be joining WhereScape on a webinar tomorrow.  The topic is “Time and Money Lost: What Have We Learned Over 20 Years in BI?”.  Claudia will be talking about what has been learned over the past 20 years, and all attendees will receive a free copy of her latest white paper.

Registrations are at:

 https://event.on24.com/eventRegistration/EventLobbyServlet?target=registration.jsp&eventid=161142&sessionid=1&key=E6ECB5B97A75E74DCCD5563EED7F9AFE&partnerref=2+&sourcepage=register

The full information is: 
Event Date: 10/08/2009 02:00 PM EDT
 
Business intelligence (BI), as it turns out, is not an oxymoron. Companies today are enjoying the fruits of successful BI implementations. Some firms have been at it for 20 years, learning over that period how to get the most out of their BI implementation to maximize value to the business. But for many others, time has been lost and money has been wasted…building robust BI systems has been challenging.

Why have some succeeded while others have yet to figure it out? The key to business intelligence sustainability is a solid data warehouse infrastructure that will support the business intelligence effort. Until the data warehouse is properly implemented, not much good can come from the BI system. And those that have done it well know that data warehouses are living, breathing systems that demand constant change management in order to be effective. Data warehouse projects are not like traditional software projects in the sense that they are never done. They evolve, change, and grow.

Smart BI practitioners and managers build on the experience of successful organizations and use technology that helps to automate the entire data warehouse life cycle, including the elusive documentation so critical to ongoing management. With this approach, they gain confidence that their data warehouse environments will enable them to reap the benefits of business intelligence for years to come, while optimizing the constraints of time and budget along the way.

Attend this event featuring industry expert Claudia Imhoff to learn:
What has 20 years taught us?

What works…and what doesn’t.

How top-notch BI consulting companies have tuned their practices for modern day success.

Secrets of success from world-class BI experts.

All attendees will receive a copy of the Claudia Imhoff white paper, “Best Practices for BI: What We Have Learned in 20 Years”.

The New Zealand Business Intelligence Summit is being held at the Rendezvous Hotel in Auckland on October 8th.

We are pleased to see that there are three WhereScape Software customers talking at the event:  ASB Bank, Courier Post and Sky City.

If that was not exciting enough, I am also talking, with the fine topic of:

Setting the scene: What is the current economy doing to the BI space, and how is BI evolving to adapt to changing corporate customer needs?
Investment in Business Intelligence is growing, despite the economic downturn.  At the same time the market is evolving, with vendor consolidation and changing emphasis.  This presentation will cover the state of the BI market:  the players, the categories, the splinters and the consolidations.  It will also cover what types of projects are likely to be funded and what are not, both internationally and in New Zealand.

This year’s Teradata PARTNERS User Group Conference and Expo is at the Gaylord National Resort in Washington DC from Sunday 18th October to Thursday October 22nd.

WhereScape has taken a Gold sponsorship and will be showcasing the lastest version of WhereScape RED for Teradata.

If you are going to the conference please stop by and say hello.

We have been busy podcasting with the guys from BeyeNETWORK.  Shaun and the team do a fantastic job of putting together podcasts - the production value is always high, and their turnaround time is phenomenal.

You can hear Michael Whitehead, WhereScape Founder and CEO, talk with Claudia Imhoff from the Pacific Northwest BI Summit 2009.  The subject of this discussion is the emerging category of rapid data warehouse development. This one was a challenge - inside while at a beautiful location with the temperature over 100.

Michael Whitehead and Claudi Imhoff from the Pacific Northwest BI Summit

A week later Mark Budzinski, VP and General Manager of US Operations spoke with the BeyeNETWORK team from TDWI in San Diego.  He provides an update on Version 6 as well as his perspective on the movement toward building specialized marts, reporting and analytical systems off of enterprise data warehouses to respond to pressing business needs.

Mark Budzinski from TDWI San Diego

Next up…we are going multimedia with a video shot from the deck at the Weasku Inn during the Pacific Northwest BI Summit.  We will post it once the BeyeNETWORK team have done their magic with it.

WhereScape will be speaking and demoing at the IBM New Zealand Insight Forum 09.  This is IBM New Zealand’s premier event of the year.  It is taking place in three cities:

WELLINGTON

     Tuesday 18 August

     Wellington Convention Centre

AUCKLAND

     Thursday 20 August

     Sky City Convention Centre

CHRISTCHURCH

     Tuesday 25 August

     Christchurch Convention Centre

To RSVP either visit ibm.com/events/nz/ibmforum or call Event Registrations on 0800 778 724.

If you are passing through San Diego, California or Sydney, Australia you can check out WhereScape at TDWI events.

WhereScape is exhibiting at the TDWI World Conference in San Diego from August 2-7.  Showing unprecedented support for TDWI, we are also taking part in the Australia TDWI chapter meeting on August 4th in Sydney, Australia.  At this meeting WhereScape CEO and Founder Michael Whitehead will be on a panel discussing ETL tools.  This should be fun as the other panelists are the traditional ETL vendors.

Chris Anderson’s recent article in Wired Magazine (“Tech is too cheap to meter”) makes the provocative case that we are wasting a lot of time and money trying to manage technology resources for efficiency.  Disk space, processing cycles and bandwidth are so cheap now that managing them as limited resources is just a waste of time.

Anderson gives the excellent example of the phone system where your mailbox “fills up” after a hundred messages and you are forced to sit down and take a half an hour and delete things.  This of course annoys the user (who, on a public phone system, is a CUSTOMER) to no end.  In a business, it takes up valuable employee time.

And what exactly is being saved here?  How much disk does a garbled thirty second voicemail message take up, anyway?   Well, we can figure this out.  A low-fi VOIP call needs a bandwidth of 30 kbits/sec, or about 4 kbytes/sec.  For a 30 second message, that’s 120 kbytes, or about one-tenth of a megabyte.  If I have a hundred messages in my voicemail box, it’s taking up about one megabyte. (Of course it should be much less, but we’ll assume this company has never heard of compression).

What does my clogged inbox cost the company?  I recently bought a terabyte drive for about $200.  Of course the price went down the next day, but let’s be generous and use the $200 figure.  That calculates out to about a thousandth of a cent per megabyte.

If you spend half an hour cleaning out your voicemail,  the cost in lost labor is going to be somewhere between four dollars and four thousand dollars, depending on where you are in life.  And what did you save the company? One thousandth of one penny.

What does this have to do with Data Warehousing, you ask?  A few things.  The truth is that Data Warehousing is very much a child of cheap technology, which means the cheaper it gets, the better our systems should be able to deliver good information.

First off, we are no longer allergic to redundant sets of data.  Most DW professionals have long ago seen the benefits of denormalizing dimensional data and aren’t worried that every single attribute isn’t tucked off into its own uniquely-valued table somewhere.  But more important than that, we are less conservative about creating downstream data marts, cubes, summaries, and extracts.  If we can save some financial analyst time and headache by giving them a custom data mart then we are happy to do it, even if the marketing department asked for a similar-but-not-quite extract the week before.

More important still is the change to our development model.  Software development projects often go through lengthy and expensive requirements phases, with extensive user interviews and fat specification documents written up.  Back in the 1990s, DW projects did the same thing.  In fact, many DW project STILL do the same thing, despite the evidence of the benefits of Agile methods.  But what exactly are we saving through a lengthy requirements and design process?  Disk space?  You may as well clean out your voicemail box.  Programmer time?  Not if you’ve got the right tools.  User reports and dashboards are created by drag-and-drop now, as is the back-end data warehouse, thanks to WhereScape RED.

“Technology too cheap to meter” is an opportunity for us.  Why go through a lengthy requirements phase?  Why not have a workshop instead where you roll out a dozen reports or data marts to your user group and see which one tickles their fancy? It will take less time than interviews and writing specifications and probably have better results.

Yes, deploying and managing many downstream data objects can be a royal headache, but WhereScape RED is the perfect tool for this new environment.  As you can drag and drop to create new downstream objects, RED tracks each aggregate, summary, data mart and data cube that you create and makes sure that they will be loaded and updated appropriately and included in the documentation.  RED allows you to be generous with information while still maintaining a simple and manageable environment.

WhereScape RED has picked up another award;  this time a Consensus Software Award.  These awards recognize software that is “Innovative, delivers performance benefits to the user, and has further potential for product or market development”   

As is customary with awards there are people to thank.  In this case it is the engineers for building such a great product, our customers for their enthusiastic support, the entire WhereScape team for adding so much value to the product and IBM who sponsored this event and our entry.  Thanks.

The photos are of Perry accepting the award and Perry with Phil from IBM.