The Open Book on BI

The New Factors of Production and The Rise of Data-Driven Applications

2012-01-26T10:02:00.000-08:00

For the last ten years, I’ve been partially obsessed with the notion that the formula for creating economic value needs to be updated. I’ve worked in the technology industry for 26 years and I’ve seen information systems radically change the landscape of competition and value creation. My most recent article on this topic appears in Forbes under the same title as this post.

Because this article represents just a fraction of my thoughts on this matter, I’d like to revisit the basic premise, which is captured in the excerpt below, and then describe how some of my current experiences at Jaspersoft corroborate this newly posited IT-driven economic theory.

“Classical economic theory describes three primary factors, or inputs, to the production of any good or service: land, labor, and capital. These factors facilitate production, but do not become part of the end product (as a raw material would). While these three factors have been much discussed and extended at different points in economic evolution, I believe that they, in any of the advanced economies of the world today, are vastly antiquated.

Sometime even prior to this new millennium, the primary factors of production have now assuredly become: Time, Information and Capital. I submit that the primary relevance of land and labor has diminished, not completely but measurably, from their prominence during agrarian and industrial economic times. In a sense, owning land and employing lots of people no longer highly correlate to a valuable and successful enterprise. Although in certain industries these two factors will remain prominent (think mining and energy production, for example). By and large, land and labor have yielded to two more important factors – time and information.”

I was very pleased when Silicon Angle asked to speak with me about my background and the thoughts that led to this newly posited IT-driven economic theory as well as the contributions Jaspersoft is making to this new economic landscape. I discussed how Jaspersoft’s mission is precisely to help its customers compete on the basis of time and information.

“From its very start, Jaspersoft was determined to build and advance the industry’s most modern, flexible, and scalable Business Intelligence (BI) software. To do this, we consciously chose the open source model of development and distribution, believing that the power and principles of community involvement and broad usage would prove continually more valuable (and it has). We knew time would be important to our business model to rapidly compete in a crowded software category.”

Jaspersoft focuses on delivering its modern BI software to those who are best suited to create value from it. We call these individuals “BI Builders” because they possess a powerful confluence of knowledge about data, analytics, and business (process, function, industry, etc.) that truly yields new value from insight. The result is thousands of commercially available software applications that include Jaspersoft technology. These software applications power the world and deliver faster, more effective insight into data. Jaspersoft’s open source model affords these applications very high quality reporting and analytic capabilities at a very low cost, so our customers create new economic value, arguably, where it could not have been created in the past.

In many ways, the BI Builder is the real hero in the equation that determines how companies can compete more effectively based on time and information. Jaspersoft simply becomes their partner and enabler.

Here’s a chance to continue this dialog at the intersection of economic theory and information technology. I offer an open invitation for comments. Your thoughts are appreciated.

Brian Gentile
Chief Executive Officer
Jaspersoft

Making Sense of it All

2011-11-08T09:00:00.000-08:00

I’ve been writing about how important it is to build and deliver big data projects that can succeed, because the opportunity to do so has never been better and the business reasons to do so have never been more compelling. Seems like each week, more tools and products are available to make big, complex data types useful for a variety of business purposes.

But, what about the unforgiving worlds of natural language and semi-structured data sources? Is there any hope to generate insight from them, even in this new big data world?

It’s one thing to make sense of more traditionally structured big data sources; its quite another to parse natural language and complex, industry-specific data types. To quickly understand the difficulties of these data environments, I recommend Brett Sheppard’s excellent blog post on this topic.

Informatica’s HParser to the Rescue

Enter Informatica’s HParser, announced last week. Now, accessing and then making sense of practically any data type has just become far simpler. You can learn more about this important new Informatica product here. HParser is a parsing technology that can run inside a MapReduce job and which allows users to structure the unstructured or semi-structured data in Hadoop and ready it for analysis. This takes a lot of the complexity out of creating custom scripts, which is what developers need to do today. HParser is available in both a community and commercial edition and features a visual development environment that, when combined with its myriad out-of-the-box parsers for semi-structured industry standard data, can eliminate up to 80% of the time it takes to turn this data into insight.

Integration with Jaspersoft

I’m thrilled that Jaspersoft has collaborated with Informatica to deliver rich reporting and analysis of natural language and semi-structured data, working directly with Informatica’s new HParser. Through integration with Jaspersoft’s BI server, creating any variety of reports and analyses is drag-and-drop easy. You can learn more about our work together through this brief video.

In short, we’ve worked with Informatica to ensure the Jaspersoft BI platform can provide analytic access to Hadoop for anyone who needs to access and understand data – whether its an executive who wants a summarized dashboard or a manager who needs a detailed operational report. And, our BI platform can handle both batch processing (through Hive) as well as direct, ad hoc and near real-time access to this data, which we uniquely provide through direct HBase access. That should satisfy even the most analytic end user.

Now there’s no reason not to consider any big data source. Toward the goal of genuinely harnessing the opportunity all this new (big) data represents, it’s good to see Informatica and Jaspersoft help lead the way. Your comments are appreciated.

Brian Gentile

Chief Executive Officer

Jaspersoft

Too Big (Data) to Fail

2011-10-25T10:00:00.000-07:00

Will we look back at 2011 and think of it as “the year of Big Data”? This does feel like the year when organizations can genuinely take advantage of the opportunity presented by big data – harnessing its volume, variety and velocity – in both concept and implementation.

The venture capital and investment community has been betting with its wallet. During the first three quarters of 2011, several high-profile acquisitions occurred and at least one dozen new, early stage investments were made. The key theme is big data analytics and the goal is big insights that drive new business decisions (presumably, decisions that couldn’t have been made without leveraging that big data).

The problem is that, currently, big data analytics is fraught with far too much data and far too little analytics. Should this continue without a more intelligent way to connect to and actually use all this data, the result will often be project failure.

The next generation of big data connectors must be more intelligent, providing views into these vast swaths of data, so the opportunity for big insights can be more commonly realized. Jaspersoft’s recent work and announcement this week with IBM and its InfoSphere BigInsights product take a major step in this direction.

IBM InfoSphere BigInsights

Building on the Apache Hadoop open source framework, IBM InfoSphere BigInsights adds administrative, workflow, provisioning, and security features, along with best-in-class analytical capabilities. The IBM software package comes in a Basic Edition (freely downloadable) and an Enterprise Edition. The Basic Edition includes the complete Apache Hadoop install, a web-based management console, and pre-built integration with IBM InfoSphere Warehouse, IBM Smart Analytics System, and DB2. The Enterprise Edition goes on to include text analytics capabilities with a rules engine, a spreadsheet-like browser-based tool (called BigSheets) for data exploration and job creation, a metric-driven scheduler, large scale indexing, a JDBC connector, LDAP support, and a query language that enables analysis of structured and non-traditional data types (called Jaql).

Finding insight from within all the data can be challenging. The BigInsights toolset is made far more useful with a modern, powerful BI server out in front of it. So, IBM’s partnership with Jaspersoft provides this critical component of a complete Big Data analytics solution.

2^nd Generation “Intelligent” Connectors

Connecting to a Hadoop-class data source is only useful if done intelligently. Running a query that returns millions of rows (and columns) of data probably won’t answer the business question being posed. Intelligently interrogating the data structure during the query is necessary. To accomplish this, Jaspersoft has delivered a 2^nd generation connector for the IBM InfoSphere BigInsights platform. This connector builds incrementally on providing data access via Hive and it builds exponentially on allowing direct and intelligent access to HBase. The Jaspersoft connector supports filters, delivers greater performance and usability, and enables yet unseen flexibility for interacting with Big Data.

1. Filters: Because HBase has no native query language, there's no automatic filtering capability. But there are filtering APIs. The new Jaspersoft connector not only supports simple filters (e.g., StartRow and EndRow) but also supports a wide array of complex filters (like RowFilter, FamilyFilter, ValueFilter, SkipValueFilter, and so on). In fact, the universe of supported Apache Hadoop filters is listed here.

2. Performance & Usability: In addition to the systems monitoring and management niceties provided by IBM, a Jaspersoft HBase query can specify exactly the ColumnFamilies and/or Qualifiers that are to be returned. This is particularly helpful for query performance tuning and usability, in that some HBase users have very wide tables, so accessing just the necessary fields offers a much faster and more usable solution.

3. Flexibility: To unpack data from HBase and make sense of it within a reporting tool, Jaspersoft’s connector supports a deserialization engine framework. The connector automatically understands HBase's shell and Java default serializations. Then, a customer can plug in existing or customized Java deserializers so the connector will automatically convert from HBase's raw bytes into meaningful data types. This delivers flexible support for the widest array of data within Hadoop’s HBase environment.

We’ve truly come a long way from the earliest days of Apache Hadoop, moving beyond the technical elite, on to the IT team (thanks to IBM) and now on to the business user (thanks to Jaspersoft). The result of Jaspersoft’s integration with IBM InfoSphere BigInsights is a complete Big Data solution, including the ability to manage and process large volumes of data and the ability to extract key information using flexible and easy-to-use reporting, dashboard and analytic views in one integrated solution. There’s plenty more to learn about Jaspersoft’s integration with IBM InfoSphere BigInsights.

The fastest path toward uncovering real analytic insight from Hadoop comes through a combination of proven, best-in-class software. Just in time, because the untapped potential for bold new insight from within the growing volumes of data is too big to fail.

Brian Gentile

Chief Executive Officer

Jaspersoft

Three Fundamental Lessons from Steve Jobs’s Apple

2011-10-13T10:18:00.000-07:00

So much has been written in the past week chronicling the life and leadership of Steve Jobs. One of my favorite articles actually distills 12 lessons from his life. No doubt, he created enormous value for his investors, customers, employees, and partners and literally enriched countless lives along the way. I hope to add another perspective to all the commentary as a nine-year Apple employee and an admirer of the drive, work ethic, and sheer productivity of what Steve was able to instill in those around him.

For me, there were three fundamental business lessons that Steve (primarily through Apple) instilled. These three lessons can be used to create value in any industry, and with Steve’s passing, I am reminded to exercise these lessons fervently in areas of my own interest (BI, open source, web-enabled applications). These lessons are important and widely applicable, but I leave it to you, the reader, to examine how they can be applied to drive superior results in areas of your own work or interest.

Long-Term Vision

In about 1989, Apple produced a short film called “Knowledge Navigator” primarily for internal use. This narrative film was set far in the future (estimated to be about 2011, by the way) and was designed to richly describe what the future of computing should be like, inspiring Apple employees to make the vision real. During the past week, this film surfaced and was heralded for its clairvoyance, because the iPad platform clearly resembles the Knowledge Navigator.

Further, this past week’s news about all-things Apple surfaced the fact that the company applied for patents consistent with the iPad design about 5 years prior to its debut. This type of long-term vision and beyond-the-quarter determination allows breakthrough value to be envisioned and created. This lesson reminds me that we too often look for quick, simple wins that provide only small, incremental gains. Aiming too far out is frightening and wrought with risk, but nothing else creates the leaps in capabilities that define new categories. May we all summon the courage required for long-term vision when it has the potential to make lasting change.

Disruptive Innovation

For a company to succeed once, it needs to disrupt the incumbents. For a company to succeed a second time, it must disrupt itself. This axiom, first said to me by Professor Gary Hamel and then conceptually popularized by Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School in his book “The Innovator’s Dilemma”, emphasizes the concept of disruptive innovation and the difficulty most successful companies face in disrupting their own success. Indeed, the economist Joseph Schumpeter originally authored the principle of creative destruction, owing its virtues to market capitalism itself.

Apple has a long history of disruptive innovation, most pointedly when Mr. Jobs was at the helm. The original Macintosh computer was a bold disruption not only to the emerging IBM-backed DOS computers of the time, but to Apple’s own products as well (the Apple II and Apple III, to be specific). Since Steve’s return, Apple has been a fountain of disruption – with the iPod alone transforming the personal electronics, music and gaming industries. Then, Apple used the basis of the iPod platform to disrupt the mobile phone market by creating the iPhone, essentially stealing it from the traditional handset manufacturers by recognizing a “smart phone” is actually a hand held, multi-network computer that happens to function as a phone when necessary. This was a radically different perspective that distinguished Apple from the incumbents.

Most recently, Apple once again disrupted itself by delivering the world’s most popular tablet computer, the iPad. Even when pundits worried the iPad could significantly cannibalize MacBook sales, Steve’s Apple powered forward -- placing greater value on defining and owning a new category of post-PC computing than maintaining its own status quo. That’s using vision to innovate disruptively.

Expect Greatness

Steve’s management and leadership style has been on review since the early ‘80s. The Steve that returned to lead Apple in 1997 was a very different man than the one who left in 1985. He had learned so much in the course of his career, building NeXT and Pixar. But one thing surely didn’t change: Steve always expected greatness from himself and all those around him. In his more mercurial moments, he unwaveringly demanded greatness, believing that anything worth doing is worth doing well (or in Steve’s case, doing insanely great). Past articles describe Steve’s total undressing of an initially unsuccessful MobileMe team, replacing the team’s leader unceremoniously and immediately. Greatness had been expected but not delivered.

In that expectation lied an important leadership lesson. If you don’t expect greatness, how will it occur? Steve showed me it won’t and that sometimes the bar just has to be raised. Having the courage to raise that bar for yourself and others and not yield to mediocrity is exhausting but necessary. Without the courage of these convictions, bold long-term visions and disruptive innovations are few and far between. Expecting greatness provides the canvas upon which the bold vision and disruptive innovation can be realized.

Steve’s death endows every technology leader with a deeper sense of responsibility to create a richer, simpler and (therefore) more powerful experience for customers. We can no longer simply look to Steve’s Apple for its exclusive magic to fill the void so often left by technology companies as they deliver mediocre products into the marketplace. I hope these three fundamental lessons help pave the way.

Brian Gentile

Chief Executive Officer

Jaspersoft

Advancing Mobile Business Intelligence

2011-09-27T08:48:00.000-07:00

I read on Twitter recently that talking about “mobile BI” will soon sound silly. We don’t talk about “mobile email” or “mobile calendaring”, so why should our access to critical data through reports and analytic views be any different? It shouldn’t.

The traditional BI vendors have recently put much energy into delivering mobile access techniques in their enterprise software offerings, creating an array of applications for the most popular devices. Their logic is to provide for a majority of the expected end-user features (reports, analytic views, etc.) on a mobile device but optimized for the reduced screen real estate. That sounds sufficient, right? Wrong.

Today, Jaspersoft makes available mobile BI access for the new IT world, along with a new version of our BI platform, v4.2. This new platform version delivers an array of improvements, including one of the most usable advanced filtering feature sets for ad hoc reporting and analysis that I’ve ever seen as well as support for a variety of new platforms (from app servers to databases and more). But, this release is all about mobile access – and herein lies the distinction between Jaspersoft’s approach to mobile BI and that of its traditional competitors.

Jaspersoft v4.2 delivers the BI industry’s first mobile SDK for creating native iOS (iPhone or iPad) applications. This SDK includes a sample iPhone app to enable a BI Builder to create a customized mobile application from an advanced starting point. Version 4.2 also includes elegant, fully-featured iPad enhancements that deliver a rich, browser-based experience for users of the world’s most popular tablet computer. Why did we provide mobile client capabilities in both native and browser-based formats?

Go Native

If we’ve learned anything after 8 years as a commercial open source company, it’s that our community and customers are incredibly clever and creative (BI Builders, every one of them). We know that trying to accurately predict everything that a modern BI user will want to do with a mobile computing device is not possible. By providing an iOS SDK and sample application to vastly simplify the job of creating native, custom mobile applications, we arm our customers with the tools and techniques to truly deliver a properly featured mobile app that solves their users’ needs. We expect this native approach to appeal especially to those who embed BI into other applications. Our native mobile client approach allows those embedded developers to extend and customize the feature set to suit the unique needs of their end users. Isn’t that what this new, mobile, cloud computing IT world is all about?

Simple & Consistent is Better

Because the iPad provides a lot more screen real estate than an iPhone, this device is well-served by some special browser enhancements that work exactly the way an iPad user expects. Which means multi-touch, gesture-based interaction with the full feature set of JasperReports Server entirely through a web browser. Report and dashboard creation as well as viewing and editing. Full access to the report repository (when granted by the Administrator) and multidimensional analysis for on-the-fly data exploration. All this functionality is made available simply by adhering to pure, web-based design principles. This simple, consistent method of accessing the Jaspersoft server enables the BI Builder to shine as the real hero, better satisfying the needs of the business users that require iPad tablet access to their critical data.

Mobile BI shouldn’t be different and separate. It should be normal, simple, consistent and delivered in a way that delights the user. Importantly, for mobile BI to be broadly used, it must conform to the application area of which it is part – which will likely require some integration and customization. Though the traditional BI providers have quickly delivered mobile client software, we all remember that the first email offerings weren’t the best. So Jaspersoft is pleased to extend the thinking and the model to help take mobile business intelligence to the next level.

Brian Gentile

Chief Executive Officer

Jaspersoft