WhereScape Builds data warehouses right, now

Portland, OR  – October 25, 2010 – WhereScape, a Teradata Select Software Partner, announced today that the company’s flagship Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for managing data warehouses has been selected to play an integral role in Teradata’s end-to-end data warehouse demonstration that debuted yesterday at the 2010 Teradata Partners User Group Conference and Expo.  Delivered to a customer audience by Teradata staff, the demo features WhereScape’s agile ELT (extraction load transformation) tool.   Teradata’s “Data to Decisions” showcases end-to-end capabilities via data warehousing tools, products, services and third-party software offerings.  The hands-on Teradata workshop and demo suite was unveiled at the 2010 Teradata Partners User Group Conference and Expo currently taking place in San Diego, Calif.  WhereScape is demonstrating WhereScape RED in booth #425.

The “Data to Decisions” demonstration performs the entire data warehouse lifecycle; from the time data appears in an organization through the time decisions are produced.  In the demonstration, WhereScape RED is being utilized to expedite data delivery from the source systems and properly transforming it for loading into a Teradata data warehouse.  WhereScape’s framework explicitly supports Teradata normal-form model table methodologies, just as Teradata practitioners would generate if they were handcrafting the functionality.

WhereScape RED builds Teradata objects (tables, indexes, join indexes etc) and generates set based procedures and scripts.  It utilizes Teradata for both its ELT transformations and metadata storage. The software 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.  Companies such as Sirius Radio, United Rentals and Vodafone are utilizing WhereScape RED to rapidly build, deploy and maintain Teradata data warehouses and analytic platforms. 

According to Lance Miller, Director, Teradata Services Marketing who co-presented the workshop, “WhereScape RED provides a proven alternative for quickly prototyping, building and deploying Teradata data warehouses from multiple source systems that can be quickly adapted as business needs dictate.”

“We are delighted to be contributing the data delivery portion of Teradata’s end-to-end data warehouse demonstration,” said Mark Budzinski, general manager, WhereScape USA.  “Teradata customers worldwide have benefited from WhereScape’s agile approach to data warehouse development—one that significantly lowers the cost and time required to deploy, and just as importantly enables change to the warehouse as required.”

About WhereScape

WhereScape provides a product, WhereScape RED, which transforms traditional approaches to building and managing data warehouses with a truly Agile methodology. 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 350 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.

WhereScape is out and about in a big way over the next couple of weeks.  If you would like to find out more about agile data warehousing, or just want to see how to build data warehouses fast, stop by for a chat at any of the following events:

• Teradata Partners Conference & Expo – October 24-28 2010, San Diego Conference Center, San Diego, CA, where WhereScape is a Gold Sponsor.  Visit us at Booth 425 or attend session 2790 “Teradata Live: An End-to-End Demo of the Teradata Data-to-Decisions Value Chain”.
• IRM UK Data Management, Information Quality & DW/BI Conferences Europe 2010 -  November 3-5, Radisson Blu Portman Hotel, London, UK, where WhereScape is again a Gold Sponsor.  Visit us on the exhibition floor, or attend “Agile Data Warehousing Development – The New Approach” 15.20-16.05, November 4th.
• 2010 PASS Summit, The Premier Conference for Microsoft SQL Server Professionals – November 8-11, Seattle, WA.  Visit WhereScape on the expo floor.

In addition, WhereScape Distributor MIP is the Platinum Sponsor at the Data Warehousing & Business Intelligence 2.0 Summit and Exhibition, October 26-28 2010, Swissotel, Sydney, Australia.  See them at the Expo or listen to Steve Hitchman’s talk on “AGILE Data Warehousing Development – A New Approach” and Phil Considine on “AGILE Data Warehousing Implementation”.

Three continents in three weeks – every opportunity to come and find out what all the buzz is about.  If you can’t make any of these events but would still like to catch up, just contact us at info at wherescape dot com.

Portland, OR  – September 21, 2010 – WhereScape, developer of a comprehensive Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for managing data warehouses, today announced today that Information Management Magazine has named the company a “Vendor to Watch” for 2010.  WhereScape transforms traditional approaches to building and maintaining Microsoft SQL Server, Teradata, Oracle and IBM DB2 data warehouses with a truly Agile methodology

According to Information Management editors, WhereScape enables organizations to pick their database of choice and “speeds time to value with prototyping, automation and a lifecycle model that allows for changing business intelligence (BI) needs.”

 “When we looked at all the current activity in the information management space it was a real challenge to narrow our list to 40 vendors. In the end, the best criteria was that each of the providers we selected offers timely products or services that fill an unmet need or answer a longstanding challenge in an elegant and useful way,” said Information Management Editorial Director Jim Ericson.

For a complete listing of Information Management’s 40 Vendors to Watch in 2010, please visit http://www.information-management.com/photo_gallery/1_4/.   

“WhereScape is honored to be named a company to watch by Information Management,” said WhereScape founder and CEO Michael Whitehead.  “For more than 10 years we have been focused and dedicated to helping developers build data warehouses fast and easily adapt them as business needs dictate.  We dedicate this award to the more than 350 WhereScape customers worldwide who use our solutions to help better manage their corporate data assets.”

About WhereScape

WhereScape provides a product, WhereScape RED, which transforms traditional approaches to building and managing data warehouses with a truly Agile methodology. 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 350 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.

We have just put up the archive of a webinar we did last month on a meta data driven approach to data warehouse development.

The webinar description is:

After nearly two decades, databases, development tools, and design approaches have matured greatly to support Business Intelligence. Yet, Data Warehouse projects still struggle to meet the needs of business users and often require resources beyond the reach of many companies. Agile development techniques address the underlying root causes of the roadblocks to success. Unfortunately, most BI development tools were not designed to support this approach. Presenters will illustrate the agile approach, using the industry’s preeminent agile data warehouse development platform, and motivate attendees to consider just how successful agile DW development can be for most businesses, regardless of size.

Why you should attend:

• Learn how to make your current data warehouse nimble and responsive to the dynamic needs of the business.
• Don’t have a proper data warehouse? It’s not as expensive and resource intensive as you think to build one.
• Doing too much via hand coding, without any documentation? A metadata generated approach accelerates the development process.
• Build faster, and manage more effectively by getting agile.

What you’ll take away:

• Free one-hour private consultation focused on your Data Warehousing challenges.
• Data Warehouse Prototyping Whitepaper

To access the webinar yopu will need to register and login here - it is hosted on a third party site.

Enjoy!

Enhanced Support for Agile Practices Highlight New Release of
WhereScape’s Data Warehouse Development Environment
Abano Healthcare Group using WhereScape RED to quickly build
 enterprise data warehouses and rapidly iterate as business needs dictate

San Diego, CA  – August 16, 2010 – WhereScape introduced today a new version of its Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for data warehousing that adds significant capabilities to better support common Agile data warehousing practices.  The announcement was made at the TDWI World Conference where TDWI is offering 15 full and half-day courses dedicated to “Creating an Agile BI Environment.”  WhereScape is demonstrating the new software release in Booth #106.    

WhereScape RED 6.5 supports common Agile practices including improved command line interaction for continuous integration testing, improved ability to back out changes, and better integration with source control and testing systems.  Significant Agile features of WhereScape RED 6.5 include: 

• Automated generation of standard code: error handling, status updates, documentation, parameters, naming conventions, indexing, etc.
• Automated development of standard BI logic: incremental data loads, slowly changing dimensions, surrogate keys, de-normalization.
• Integrated operations framework, with job scheduler, status and error reporting, dependency management, email notification.
• Complete version management for both stored procedures and database objects.
• Ability to load and back out changes from the command line.
• Multiple user definable windows to allow opening of testing or other browser based products.
• The ability to define tests and provide a standard procedure template for running tests in the integrated scheduler.

“Agility in data warehousing and business intelligence is established on a set of values, principles and practices that can apply to all BI projects ranging from canned reporting to data visualization to data mining, quantitative analytics and include data warehouse development,” said Ken Collier, founder and president of KWC Technologies, recognized as a leading Agile Business Intelligence (BI) practitioner since 2004. “WhereScape has admirably made efforts to enhance its rapid development environment to enable Agile data warehouse development, to help align it with effective Agile technical practices.”

“We purchased WhereScape RED and succeeded in building our data warehouses quickly and with close alignment to what the business wanted from their information assets,” said Peter Radich, CIO of Abano Healthcare Group, a healthcare organization operating 13 brands across five countries in Asia/Pacific.  “WhereScape RED 6.5 will enable delivery of our warehousing solutions even faster, with improved automation and quality.  We look forward to implementing it in the near future and reaping the benefits very quickly.” 

“Organizations currently purchase WhereScape to build a data warehouse or project mart faster and more cost effectively, as well as our ability to rapidly interate, so it was a very small leap to move from ‘building data warehouses fast’ to ‘building data warehouses in an Agile friendly fashion,’” said WhereScape founder and CEO Michael Whitehead.  “WhereScape RED 6.5 has been engineered to align with the most common Agile practices and testing tools utilized today.”

Build Data Warehouses Quickly
WhereScape RED is focused on data warehouse developers who utilize the software to build data warehouses quickly and easily adapt them to keep up with the business. WhereScape RED can access source data from multiple environments, create procedural code, scripts, and tables, build cubes, schedule updates, and generate documentation in HTML format, all while maintaining existing BI front-end compatibility.

Pricing and Availability
WhereScape RED 6.5 is available immediately and priced on a per developer basis, beginning at $50,000 USD.
 
About WhereScape
WhereScape provides a product, WhereScape RED, which transforms traditional approaches to building and managing data warehouses with a truly Agile methodology. 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 350 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.

TDWI Booth #106                                                                                  

WhereScape Agile Development Environment Deployed by Coinstar

to Build and Refresh its New Corporate Data Warehouse

WhereScape RED enabled Coinstar to successfully deploy a

terabyte-sized Microsoft SQL Server data warehouse in six months 

San Diego, CA  – August 16, 2010 – WhereScape announced today that Coinstar, Inc., a leading provider of automated retail solutions, is using WhereScape’s comprehensive Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for managing data warehouses with a truly Agile methodology.  Coinstar has used WhereScape’s Agile development environment to successfully deploy two major phased releases of its new Microsoft SQL Server corporate data warehouse.  The announcement was made at the TDWI World Conference where TDWI is offering 15 full and half-day courses dedicated to “Creating an Agile BI Environment.”  Coinstar is participating in WhereScape’s Booth #106. 

Since deployment, Coinstar is now using WhereScape RED to perform nightly batch loads, consolidate and aggregate transactional, financial, configuration, and employee data from SQL Server source systems as well as occasional text file loads into the data warehouse.  In total, tens of millions of rows are loaded and processed each day over several hundred tables using WhereScape RED.

 New Data Warehouse Supports Growing Business

Integrating the data assets of multiple lines of business has increased Coinstar’s need for a centralized data warehouse and consolidated reporting system to serve the user community of business analysts, field operations, client managers and management. 

In 2009 the company embarked on a mission to build a corporate data warehouse using SQL Server that would consolidate common data elements between its Coin and DVD businesses.  The goal was to create a single view of the overall business, with the ability to deliver detailed reporting and analytics.  The Coinstar data warehouse runs Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Enterprise and Microsoft SQL Server 2008. 

In doing its due diligence, Coinstar sought out a solution that would provide efficiency in developing ETL code, building the data warehouse objects, integrating with operational jobs and producing documentation.  Because of the tight deadlines and budget constraints, the company felt a manual coding environment would not suffice and Coinstar selected WhereScape RED for its integration with SQL Server, metadata management and its ability to produce documentation as part of the development process.

According to Christi Liebe, Coinstar’s corporate vice president of information technology, “WhereScape RED enabled the development effort to be distributed more broadly across the team, allowing analysts and developers to approach the implementation process simultaneously, in a nimble, Agile way.  WhereScape RED reduces dependency on ‘tribal knowledge’ as the thought process can easily be captured and stored for later review and possible reuse,” she said.  “It enables Coinstar to focus more on best practices for designing the data warehouse, and to understand the data being stored in it, rather than on the actual build activities.” 

“WhereScape provides a unique and compelling alternative for quickly building and deploying SQL Server data warehouses as well as project marts that can be quickly adapted as the business dictates,” said Mark Madsen, founder and president of Third Nature, a research and consulting company specializing in business intelligence (BI), information delivery and open source technologies. “WhereScape can assist IT organizations not only with building out a data warehouse, but also keeping it updated and refreshed after deployment, an ‘Achilles heel’ for organizations that often run out of budget and reallocate resources once the warehouse is deployed.”   

Fully Integrated with Microsoft SQL Server

WhereScape RED provides native support for SQL Server as well as Teradata, Oracle and IBM DB2.  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. 

“We are delighted to welcome Coinstar as a WhereScape customer and to be an integral part of the company’s Agile data warehousing initiatives,” said WhereScape Founder and CEO Michael Whitehead.   “Coinstar is a great example of an organization that is not only developing its data warehousing solution quickly, but making it easily adaptable as business needs dictate.”

About WhereScape

WhereScape provides a product, WhereScape RED, which transforms traditional approaches to building and managing data warehouses with a truly Agile methodology. 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 350 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.

I got picked up for tweet I made recently during a webinar.   The webinar was Agile BI Made Easy: Two Proven Paths to Success that WhereScape put on with Composite Software.  This was a new concept for us – while Composite and we believe there are different and smarter approaches to solve common problems, our approaches are quite different, and people will generally end up picking one or other of us rather than both.  Makes for an a more interesting webinar, but that is another story.

Industry analyst Boris Evelson (@bevelson) was the headliner for the webinar, and he made a great pitch for how agile BI can be used in the face of deployment efforts that are often underestimated, have ever-changing user requirements, with a growing user base and rapidly growing volumes and complexity in the data.

I tweeted that it is not the “what” it is the “how” that is changing, which was my take on one of Boris’ slides.  I got picked up on it later by James Kobielus (@jameskobielus), who disagreed and gave a couple of examples that showed the “what” is changing as well.  Now of course he is right – there is a ton of new, innovative ”what” changing out there.  He gave the examples of predictive and current (I am sure he could have given more, but hey, he only had 140 characters).

So yes, he is right, but I still think it misses the point.  Thankfully there is constant innovation being carried out in the business intelligence space, and there is certainly room for a lot more.  But it was great to be actually talking about a problem that has been around for a long time and is generally ignored  – data warehouses take too long to build, and once they are built they are too hard to change.  This is a real problem in the data world.

There are a lot of reasons for this –data volumes, difficulties of scope control in enterprise data initiatives, hard to pin down requirements, refactoring large data sets etc etc.  But that doesn’t mean we should ignore the problem.  The current interest in agile bi and agile data warehousing techniques is overdue and healthy.   

It is great to see an age old issue being exposed and talked about.  And if we can do a better job of building, rebuilding and managing data warehouses it only makes the “what” story even better.

As an aside I can recommend Boris Evelson’s excellent research Agile BI Out Of The Box:  Reduce Development Time And Effort With Metadata-Generated BI Applications , which was the impetus behind the original webinar.  If you would like a copy contact us or leave a comment and we will send one through. 

Industry Analyst Boris Evelson Will Keynote a Free August 4 Web Seminar about Agile BI’s Challenges, Inhibitors, Practical Approaches and Use Cases

PORTLAND, Ore. & SAN MATEO, Calif.—July 27, 2010–WhereScape and Composite Software, Inc. announced today that Boris Evelson, vice president and principal analyst of Forrester Research, Inc., an independent research firm, will keynote a WhereScape and Composite-sponsored web seminar entitled “Agile BI Made Easy: Two Proven Paths to Success.” The free web seminar will be held on Aug. 4 at 2 p.m. ET. To register, please visit here.

“Agile BI Made Easy: Two Proven Paths to Success.”

Evelson, a leading Business Intelligence (BI) expert, delivers strategic guidance, helping enterprises define BI strategies, governance and architectures, and identify vendors and technologies that help them put information to use in business processes and end-user experiences. In his research, Evelson continues to explore emerging trends in next-generation BI, such as agile BI architecture and development approaches.

Evelson will draw upon his more than 25 years of experience with enterprise software and applications implementation, management consulting and strategic advisory skills to detail how agile BI can provide organizations with a competitive advantage in the face of deployment efforts that are often underestimated, ever-changing user requirements, a growing user base and rapidly growing volumes and complexity of the data.

In Forrester’s April 22, 2010 report “Agile BI Out of the Box,” Evelson wrote, “Complexity represents one of the toughest challenges facing traditional business intelligence (BI) applications…. Clearly a different approach is needed to make BI applications more flexible and able to react much faster to ever-changing business and regulatory requirements. Forrester refers to this methodology as ‘Agile BI’.” 

In the web seminar, Evelson will discuss:

·         Challenges and inhibitors to agile BI success

·         Components needed to achieve BI success

·         Next generation technology and topology choices

·         Practical approaches and recommendations

·         Use cases and examples of successful agile BI

WhereScape Vice President and General Manager Mark Budzinski and Composite Software Executive Vice President of Marketing Robert Eve will join Evelson to detail use cases and examples of successful agile BI implementations.

About Composite Software, Inc.

Composite Software, Inc. is the data virtualization gold standard at ten of the top 20 banks, six of the top ten pharmaceutical companies, four of the top five energy firms, major media and technology organizations; and multiple government agencies. These are among the hundreds of global organizations with disparate, complex information environments that count on Composite to increase their data agility, cut costs and reduce risk. Backed by nearly a decade of pioneering R&D, Composite is the data virtualization performance leader, scaling from project to enterprise for data federation, data warehouse extension, enterprise data sharing, real-time and cloud computing data integration. Composite Software is a privately held, Silicon Valley-based corporation. For more information, please visit http://www.compositesw.com. Or follow Composite on http://twitter.com/compositesw.

About WhereScape

WhereScape provides a product, WhereScape RED, which transforms traditional approaches to building and managing data warehouses with a truly agile methodology. 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 350 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.

For WhereScape:

Humphrey Strategic Communications

Scott R. Humphrey, 503-644-9709

or

For Composite Software:

Margaret Pereira, K/F Communications, Inc., 925-989-8109

WhereScape, in conjunction with Forrester and Composite Software, is running an Agile BI webinar.  As well as our very own Mark Budzinski, the other presenters will be Boris Evelson, VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research and Rorbert Eve, EVP of Marketing with Composite Software.

The idea for the webinar really came about from the research Boris conducted on Agile BI, and more specifically meta data driven development of data warehouses,  which featured both WhereScape and Composite.

WhereScape and Composite have totally different approaches to solving the same set of problems.  It should make the event interesting as both vendors will have to articulate our own value propositions in a manner that clearly differentiates our offerings.  This can only be useful for people looking at different approaches to being agile.

The webinar is on Wednesday August 4th, 11am PT/ 2PM ET.  More information and registration is provided here.

So I will admit I am little behind on my reading…but I just got around to looking at a blog posting on the BeyeNETWORK from Bill Inmon entitled “Incremental Data Warehouse Development – The Only Way to Fly”

I totally agree with what he says.  The SDLC approach for data warehousing doesn’t work, never has worked, and never will work.  How can you use an approach predicated on solid requirements when you know you cannot get them? 

The more I read articles like this, the more I am convinced that WhereScape is on the right track building in support for agile data warehousing practices.  This doesn’t need to mean Agile with a capital “A”, but agile in the context of small, fast pieces of work.  Watch this space – as well as working on a huge amount of new functionality in WhereScape RED to make it even faster to build data warehouses, we have a new product under development as well.  More on that later, but I can say it will be totally focused on helping developers build data warehouses faster.

And thanks to Raphael Klebanov for sending the link through.

We are moving away from the concept of the free Practitioner License of WhereScape RED.

The original idea was that we would happily provide free copies of WhereScape RED to individuals, but would charge organizations if they wanted to go into production with the output.  I guess we should have anticipated it, but whereas the majority of people respected this, the minority have caused an issue.  We have now had too many instances where people have used the free software to build entire data warehouses.  We were pretty relaxed when this was an individual practitioner doing this, but fair to say we got up tight when BI consulting companies were charging for projects, using our software to build solutions faster, and leaving the end customer with an unlicensed solution.

So…from V6.1 (which is in beta now) the practitioner keys will no longer work.  Evaluation Keys are not impacted.

If you have a practitioner key you can continue to use it (within the original restrictions) with pre 6.1 versions.

If this is going to cause you a real pain, and you were using a practitioner key for valid reasons, then give us a call.  We will see if we can come up with a solution that works for you.

WhereScape has made the finals of the the Duncan Cotterill Innovative Software Product of the Year category at the New Zealand Hi Tech Awards.  We do our development out of New Zealand, and these awards are about as big as they come in that part of the world (in tech anyway, some would argue the Young Farmer of the Year is bigger – after all they get televised, and are held in Gore).

Compeition is hot, with four software companies still standing.  Judging happens in April, with the winners announced at a gala dinner on 7th May in Auckland, New Zealand.

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.

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