Dashboard Insight's Maroushka Kanywani recently spoke with Foster Hinshaw, President and CEO of Dataupia about data warehouse appliances and product development at Dataupia.
Maroushka Kanywani: Good morning, Foster. I think a good place to start this interview would be with the article that appeared in the Boston Business Journal where you were upgraded from “Father of data warehouse appliances” to “data king.” Could you please tell me more about your involvement with data warehousing?
Foster Hinshaw: The “data warehouse appliance” thing is something I really love because it is a term I coined probably 6 or 7 years ago and got Gartner to accept it as a new category. Creating a new category is always a fun thing. It’s fun to have a new space – to have identified an area where there is a lot of pain and that we can create solutions for that pain.
MK: In layman’s terms, how would you define an “appliance?”
FH: Well, there are two things going on with appliances and people tend to put the two things together when actually, they are quite separate. One aspect is the ability to have an extreme scalability database so that customers can capture, use and make actionable decisions on large data.
The second aspect relates to how you package and deliver and this is where the appliance comes in. The first one attacks the problem of large data; what has happened is that as our ability to collect data has increased tremendously, the underlying infrastructure did not keep up with it. That market is growing at least 20% per year and the amount of data is increasing about every 9 months. For example each time you use your card in a store or in every poker chip in the new casinos, there is an RFID chip that tracks the movement of each chip. What customers use this information for is to be able to provide better products and services for the consumer in an effort to get closer and closer to that nirvana of personalized services. So the next time you call your favorite retailer, they are going to come to you with a suite of things that are more in line with what you like to buy.
That is what this is all about; we are providing the infrastructure for our customers to go through reams of data in order to be able to provide the individual consumer with targeted products and services.
MK: In line with that, what is your view on those who are concerned with privacy issues as they relate to such information?
FH: I’m a libertarian and I believe in New Hampshire’s motto: “live free or die.” The pendulum, some people say, goes back and forth – I hope it goes forth. I think a lot of people have become paranoid over what could be a real threat but on the other hand, one has to ask for instance with driving – if 40,000 people a year die driving, do we want to restrict people’s right to drive in favor of fewer people dying?
MK: So it’s about a delicate balance.
FH: That’s right; it’s about balance. So the question is: has our paranoid treatment of the security aspect gone overboard? Clearly there’s a threat; there’s no question that there’s a threat but have we overreacted to it?
MK: So is your data always encrypted?
FH: As far as privacy and encryption are concerned, our customers are extremely aware of all the issues and take fairly stringent measures to ensure that the consumer’s data is protected. There are different levels of encryption used by different people, depending on where they are.
MK: So the encryption doesn’t fall on Dataupia’s shoulders per se.
FH: It can and often does but there is a larger issue beyond encryption which is really the overall ruggedness of the security around a given environment. There is a need to make sure that people who are not authorized are not even starting to look at that data.
Some customers for example, will make the data autonomous early in the process so they strip off identifying information such as marketing companies, for example. On the other hand, you get some customers such as your favorite retailer, who will keep some of that data – maybe not your credit card information – but data about you so that they can give you the service that you want. That’s why I say there’s a range there.
MK: Could you please tell me about some of the new developments with Satori?
FH: The most recent development we announced was our dynamic aggregation, which by far, is the best in the world. Once again, this is all about access and the customer having data at their fingertips. It enables our customers to have data that is actionable.
With dynamic aggregation, you can do reporting on billions of rows of data and have about 4,000 or 5,000 concurrent users on that data, all being able to look at that data. No one in the world can come close to doing what we do there. We’ve brought a phenomenal capability into the market.
MK: Following that train of thought, how does Dataupia distinguish itself from other heavyweights in the data warehousing space?
FH: A distinguishing factor is what, in our parlance, we call “mixed workload.” Mixed workload is the capability for different people in different user groups to access the same data. For instance, we could have people who want real-time access, such as customer service reps who want to get onto the data right there and then. At the same time there could be people who at 7:55 each morning, want to do all their daily reports and in addition to that, other people who have bigger queries and needs and want to do analytics. At the same time, there would also be the historical folks who want to find out what has happened in the past 7 seasons so that they can design a calling plan for a particular individual.
Most of the solutions out there are targeted to one user group or another, which means you have to buy multiple systems to handle all the users that you have.
MK: Are you currently partnering with other companies?
FH: Definitely. We just made an exciting announcement with Cognos and we have ongoing relationships with most of the major vendors at this point. Our go-to-market strategy is that we work with existing Oracle, Microsoft and IBM platforms so customers don’t have to change their application – and that makes us very unique in this industry.
Furthermore, these relationships go into working partnerships, which is what is great about them. Dataupia becomes a significant part of what those major companies are doing with our system. We enable them to get into data sets that they never could before. Take your typical Oracle SQL server or IBM system; once you get above a few terabytes, you find that they are not designed to scale. And this is because of the architecture beneath it – not the companies themselves – but the symmetric multiprocessing architecture that we’ve had for the last 20 years.
What we’re adding to that is massively parallel capability so that SQL Server, DB2 and Oracle can work on a massively parallel architecture and that’s very unique.
Once again, I’d like to point out that I think the fun part is what we enable our customers to do with that data because now they can look at their consumers in ways they could not do before and they can give their consumers services they never had before.
In the telco arena for instance, companies typically lose between 4 and 15% of their potential income in what is called “leakage” and that’s stuff they never billed for. Now they can bill for it and that changes things. Think about the last time you called Amazon, L.L. Bean or Staples; wouldn’t you like it if they knew the types of things that you like? I called L.L. Bean just before Christmas within hours of the FedEx cut-off date and from my standpoint as a consumer, this was great. I called them up for a green sweater but they said they didn’t have the sweater in green however they informed me that from the information they had, my wife also likes teal and they had a teal sweater in stock. I told them to go ahead with the order. Think about the systems underneath that; that’s what we’re enabling our customers with.
If you look at companies like Staples, Google, Amazon, eBay, Wal-Mart, one of the primary reasons why these companies are winning is that they have really good knowledge of their customers – what they like and don’t like. This is what differentiates them from everyone else. You can actually go through and find the big companies in the world with good business intelligence and those without and the ones with good business intelligence are all winning.
MK: I understand that this past June, Dataupia conducted a survey at a TDWI conference where respondents indicated that expanding data warehouse capacity was a top data management priority. Could you tell me more about this, please?
FH: It all comes down to efficiency. Even in a downturn and especially during a downturn, businesses have to be more efficient. If you look at the applicability of an efficiency tool, which is really what we have, you would want it – whether the economy is growing or not. I’ve seen that with previous companies and actually with downturns, it was a great opportunity for us at Dataupia because a lot of people pulled back but we were still going strong just because the market demand was so high.
MK: I’m glad you brought up the issue of economic downturn and the demand for solutions. What would you say you see in your crystal ball as far as the BI industry in general and the data warehousing space in particular are concerned?
FH: I think BI is continuing very fast and at a strong pace and we saw that even with the tech downturn. Again, the core thing of business success is to understand the customer and the supply chain and their own infrastructure and getting that to be more and more efficient.
It is ironic that if the economy is growing year after year at a rate of about 3%, people do not really care about efficiencies. But when you start hitting zero growth, minimal growth or a downturn, efficiency becomes the number one criteria in the world.
So Dataupia does well be it during exploding growth or in a very moderate-downturn growth. In either situation, our customers try to make their operations work better and they’ve got to do more with less – and we provide those tools.
MK: Where are you located?
FH: Our headquarters are in Cambridge, Massachusetts and we use Boston as our catchall.We’ve also got offices in the UK and Colorado.
MK: How do you market your solutions and what do you do with your sales force team to help them out?
FH: I think we’ve got the best marketing in the industry and we’ve been able to really communicate to our prospects the value that we bring to the table and what we can do to help them be more efficient. I think that’s the key to marketing – what problem do we solve, how do we solve it and why us.
Our thing, for the most part, is being able to educate the customer that they can handle huge data and get the same type of analytics out of huge data that they’ve been seeing historically if they had only a few million rows or two of data. It becomes an awareness of the tools that are available to them because up until now without being able to have massive parallel architecture you really couldn’t access that data in any useful fashion.
We also do some fun things as well, which I think bring a little bit of light to this market. Too often people are sometimes staid and boring and this is not a staid or boring market. We did FreeYourData.com, which is about doing whatever you want with your data, instead of being conscripted by it.
MK: Going back to the article in the Boston Business Journal, could you tell me about what led you into the data warehousing space?
FH: Definitely. I had the opportunity as part of the Y2K, to visit probably a third, if not more of the major companies in the Boston Metropolitan Area and all of them had the same data management problem – quite apart from the Y2K issue. The problem they had was managing large data because at that time no one was providing a good solution for that
If you think about the “big elephants” in our space, their bread and butter is from transactional data and that’s where they’re making all their money. The large data space hasn’t really attracted them so they’re not providing good solutions for large data problems. My Y2K experience and the number of companies I saw were all having the same issue with large data just confirmed that.
MK: Thank you for your time, Foster. It was a pleasure speaking with you.
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