Project X Discussions

MicroStrategy World 2010 - What did You Learn

Had a great week Las Vegas this week at MicroStrategy World 2010.

Michael our VP Consulting and I went down with very different objectives, so I thought I would share with you the evaluation of how I did against objectives (rank is out of 10 with 10 being high).  Maybe you could share yours as well.

1. Spend Time and Support our Partner - MicroStrategy - Rank: 9
2. • Spent time with our alliance manager and the Canadian folks. 
   • Really enjoyed the time and opportunity to drive some good conversation both personal and professional
   • Started some discussion on strategy in some areas
3. Exposure to New Ideas and Concepts - Rank: 8
4. • Mapping and Visualization - really like the new opportunity to overlay with location
   • • BigDataLabs
     • Visual Crossing
     • KXEN
     • Agile BI
5. Discuss BI with Various Companies and Vendors - Rank: 7
6. • Customer Presentations
   • • Citi - MarkHubbard - talked about the SaaS architecture and their implementation.  It was good as he shared some good best practices on dealing with multiple stakeholders as well as some of their lessons learned.
     • McCain Foods - Roman Coba - talked about his Teradata and MicroStrategy vision.  He also did a great job discussing how he broke the re-platform project into it's components to allow for strong iteration in BI as well as standardized metrics.  Also interesting conversation on how he sold the approach to the business and got them on board.
     • A variety of other really interesting conversations throughout on best practices, challenges and general thoughts on BI in their organizations
7. Show Michael more about this area of our business - Rank: 9
8. • I think he almost fell off his chair when he saw the vision of BI.

CoffeeCAST #31 - Talking with Ellen Rubin of Netezza

Welcome to the 31st CoffeeCAST with Stephen Hayward of Project X.  Today I have Ellen Rubin, VP Marketing of Netezza joining me.  I would like to thank Brian over at Schwartz PR for helping set this up.

So here I am enjoying a cup of Starbucks brewed at home as we are doing this over the phone.  Today we had a chance to chat about:

• Introduction to Netezza
• Discontinuity in the marketplace between demand and data and disruptive innovation
• Value to customers
  • ad-hoc, what-if, simplify, drive cost out
  • eXtreme performance and ease of use
• The Conference (started yesterday)
  
  • Keynotes by Clayton Christensen (co-author of The Innovator's Solution a must read) and Edward Zander (Chairman and CEO of Motorola)
  • Some great topics and announcements
  • Discussion of 5000 series and it's value in the smaller scaled enterprise (disrupting the Oracle, Teradata, DB2 and now the SQL Server markets)
• And last but not least we compare Netezza to Apple as innovators and disruptors somewhat tongue-in-cheek.

So thank you Ellen who was a last minute stand-in for the new President and COO Jim Baum.  I really enjoyed the chat and appreciated the time.  I am hoping to be at the conference today, so may have some serious amounts of customer interviews and the like...

Download cc_31_talking_with_ellen_rubin_of_netezza.mp3

Listen in and we hope you enjoy and more importantly, hope you join in the conversation.  So drop a comment in the blog or send me an email and share your thoughts on the topic.

The Podcast is available on iTunes or here for download.  Have a great day and join the conversation.

Information as a Service

As I do every day I was reading some blogs in my RSS reader.  Morgan over at Architected Information wrote a great post yesterday called "Who will be the next VisiCalc".  So after I stepped out of my reverie of thinking back to Engineering school and using that tool on an old x86 PC I read his post.

Morgan talked about some new tools (which you can read about on his post) and the power of disruptive innovation.  As you may know that is a favorite topic for us here at Project X.  But the killer piece that he brings up is the idea of free software.

"Nothing in Life is Free" // OR // "You Get What You Paid For"
- someone once said

When implementing an Enterprise Application or solution the software and hardware are only a piece of the puzzle.  You have to get it in and running the way you like it.  Many software vendors when positioning their products with Systems Integrators talk about thing like for every $1 of software the client will need $3-$10 of services.  Whether this is over the life of the solution or just the implementation, suddenly the impact of the cost of the software is subtly different.

But take it further, in an Information as a Service (IaaS) offering or other Software as a Service (SaaS) offering you not only get the application, you get some best in class things (Services, models, processes ...).  This is an interesting paradigm and should force some interesting innovation from the existing players.  Microsoft with Microsoft Live as well as many others.

Thanks Morgan for getting me thinking on this again.  I had just been in a client dinner last night hashing this stuff around.

CoffeeCAST - CC#20 - A Year in Review

Welcome to the 20th Episode of the CoffeeCAST with Stephen Hayward of Project X.  So this CoffeeCAST happens to coincide with Project X's 1st Anniversary.

So as you can imagine, I grabbed Graham, my co-Founder and we decided to sit down and share a view of our year in review.  We focused mainly on our Data practice and not some of our Advisory work as it was the area that we shared in common and we also only had so long.  Today we talk about:

• Getting started over his picnic table
• Working with our first client and now being to five
• Evolution of our Thinking
  • Reference Architecture
  • Guiding Principles
  • Governance and Stewardship
  • Readiness
  • Rapid Results
• General Observations
  • Year of Data
  • Value vs Price
  • Metadata Management
  • Look to faster return on Enterprise platforms
• Working Data Store
• Active Data Warehousing
• Information as a Service

Download cc_20_pxltd_anniversary.mp3

Today we mention a bunch of different folks and companies so I will list them here so you can learn more:  Robert Schaffer, Teradata, Sunopsis, Ipedo, Netezza, Oracle, IBM, Informatica.

So I hope you have a nice coffee, we did.  Listen we hope you enjoy and more importantly, hope you join in the conversation.  So drop a comment in the blog or send me an email and share your thoughts on the topics.

The Podcast is available on iTunes or here for download.  Have a great day and join the conversation.