I am pleased to write my first post for the Future of Data. I have seen many technologies over the past 30 years (which includes long stints with SAP and Oracle), and am looking forward to sharing my comments and observations, especially as they relate to analytics and the retail market, which happens to be my specialty. I’ll be posting regularly on the retail world and letting you in on how using analytics is changing the way retailers are doing business.

It seems every few years there is a new revolutionary technology or approach that can be highly disruptive and it has a radical impact on the norm. History is full of examples like client server computing, relational database management systems, the internet, and on and on. One such innovation is “Insight On-demand,” the topic for my first post.

For retailers, the shift to Insight On-demand has become a true game changer. As little as a few years back, insight into consumer shopping behaviors was driven by educated guesses, and rudimentary analysis of sales, merchandising, and product movements, as well as a plethora of marketing related assumptions.

Insight on Demand transcends conventional thinking around traditional data warehouse or database processes. Retailers are changing the paradigm by using an analytical architecture that is highly flexible, scalable and ultra fast. With this connection, the power of human thought can be leveraged systematically, harnessing the brain power of each associate in rapid fire succession, to solve the “what if”, “where at”, “how much”, “who did” and “whenever” in near real time.

Especially for retail, I have found that the primary reason most enterprise data solutions struggle to gain true enterprise acceptance is that they are just too slow or cumbersome to provide analysis that is instantly actionable. Most systems can handle the “tell me the same thing every day,” but when a new question comes along, they break down or do not have access to the right kind of data to answer the questions that have become top of mind.

Insight on Demand solutions are particularly suited for those who are using integrated back office and planning systems for their Merchandise Planning, Open to Buy, Markdown Optimization, Allocations, Loss Prevention processes, etc., all which require constant monitoring and tight integration to the POS systems to provide a continuous feedback loop. The ability to ask any question, get an immediate answer, generate additional questions based on the answer, is the foundation of true analytics and investigative thinking. Doing this kind of questioning against the lowest level of data regardless of the size or volume of the multiple data sets is the criteria for an Insight on Demand system. Insight on Demand Systems gives the user the power to do “true analytics” with enough speed to support the thinking of the individual. Insight on Demand systems will provide instant answers to all users and elevate the value they bring to their organizations.

The trend is a game changer for retail – it is extremely economical, which allows the retailer to invest their time and resources on anticipating (and sometimes predicting) what could happen next as opposed to constantly looking backwards.

Thanks for reading.

Well the answer to the question is “YES,” but its only staying for  a few days.

It must be trade show season because I’m off to Miami today to attend the ABS East Conference Sunday through Tuesday, one of the mortgage markets premier events.  One of our main application areas is financial services, particularly the mortgage market – which has been getting a lot of press lately!  The mortgage market makes particularly good use of our advanced analytical capabilities.  In fact we are the standard technology used to analyze mortgages.

1010data has speakers on three panels on Sunday that will be well worth attending. The first with our new director of capital markets business development, Perry DeFelice, then some very interesting topics with Jonah Green, the director of mortgage analytics at 1010data.

If you are attending, stop by Sunday; here’s the schedule.

2:00 – 2:50 Track A: ABS Concepts and Terminology: Securitization 101

2:50 – 3:40 Track A: Assessing Credit Risk in the MBS Sector

4:10 – 5:00 Track B: Valuation and Modeling for Assets

Our offering goes beyond simple technology; we offer a complete service, so getting involved with our customers and their business is an integral part of what we do.  These events are a good opportunity to catch up with customers and hear about their changing needs. I plan to meet with our partners and discuss how to bring new products to market.  I always look forward to sharing ideas with the best in the business.

I’ll try to find time to post my thoughts from the show.

The Gartner event in Orlando was very cloudy, that is to say everyone was talking about cloud adoption and strategies.  I’m glad I came to the show; it’s good to be a part of this conversation.  I always felt we were too far ahead of the curve.  I mean, we’ve been pushing the cloud model since 2000.  It seems our efforts have not been in haste and the world is moving in our direction!

“Why all the excitement” for cloud was the big question.  And the answers I was hearing included a mix of new vendors, more companies exploiting the advantages of cloud economics and of course broader acceptance of SaaS models.  From this show I hear that the cloud is finally gaining momentum in the marketplace beyond the marketing hype, something I’m seeing daily with our customers as well.  If implemented properly, cloud solutions are safe and secure and can be managed with much less stress and cost than an in-house option.

Companies that will gain most are the ones that adapt to using cloud solutions in lieu of managing things that aren’t their core competencies.  After all, why should a manufacture have to be an expert in data warehousing?  Gartner said that adoption of hosting services will be tied to company size; the progression will be small to medium to large over the next three years.

Gartner puts all the companies at the show into buckets and they listed 1010data as a Data Warehouse Service Host along with Kognitio.  Other companies we sometimes see like Vertica were listed as a Database Service Host along with Amazon and Google’s Big Table.  I agree with where Gartner put 1010data because we provide enterprise data warehouse solutions, not just data marts.

I was hearing some inaccurate things about SaaS, e.g., that there are no profitable SaaS vendors besides Salesforce.  Definitely not the case as we’re doing very well and growing as a 100% SaaS company!

Do you agree or disagree with Gartner, is this the year for cloud adoption?

Next week I’ll be at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2009 in Orlando, Florida.  The website for the summit calls it the industry’s largest and most important annual gathering of CIOs and their senior IT leaders, and since this is my first time attending in a few years, I’m interested to see if it lives up to the billing.  A majority of our leadership team will be at the show and we’re excited to be going.

I’ve been thinking about what people will really be talking about at the show and I think it’s still the economy, trying to figure out how to deal with limited budgets and resources in 2010.  I’ve heard going into the conference that about half of the attendees’ main focus is Business Intelligence.  I’ll be interested to see if this is true.  Leveraging deeper analytics should be at the forefront of CIO’s minds as they scramble to maintain and hopefully increase profitability.  I think that the CIO’s attending are looking to outsource more services than they have in the past, and so Software as a Service should be on the upswing.  We’ll see, stay tuned for updates from the show.

And hey, if you are attending stop by and say “Hi,” 1010data is in booth 216.

1010data is launching a blog, and I am pleased to author our first post.  We spent several weeks, and even held a contest to find the right name and theme for the blog. Why?  Because we think it is important to have a point of view and to bring something beyond the easy to ignore ‘corporate marketing speak’ to the conversation.

Once we found the right name, The Future of Data, other aspects of the blog started falling into place, and we already have quite a few ideas that we’re eager to share.

Why “the future of data?”  Because advances have led to a historic growth in data volumes, diminishing the effectiveness of traditional data warehousing and BI solutions and fundamentally changing the way people access and use their data.  As technology speeds the rate of business, we all need to act on data more quickly and glean deeper insights to stay ahead of the curve.

Cloud-based services are bringing sophisticated solutions to wider audiences and helping companies of all sizes explore their data and compete on a global scale.

It is an exciting time.  We believe that the age of data exploration is here. The sky is the limit and we are glad to be part of it and writing about it.

Over the next few posts we’ll share our backgrounds, advice and experiences.  We’ll discuss things we see in the market, reference news, commentary, events and share our views. We might go a bit off-topic on occasion, and post a link or two that makes us laugh, but mostly we’ll be talking about how people are interacting with data and share new ideas about how data analytics can add value to real dollars and cents business decisions.

Anyone dealing with huge or multi-source data stores should find our posts relevant and insightful; we especially encourage readers who come from the capital markets, retail and CPG worlds because that’s where we have the most experience.

We’ll have a few different contributors to keep it interesting.  We aren’t hiding the fact that the blog is authored by 1010data employees and we’ll probably mention our own products and customers on occasion but our real goal is to talk turkey about business intelligence, data warehousing and the future of data analytics.

Thanks for reading.