The Briefing Room with Claudia Imhoff and Birst Live Webcast April 9, 2013 What a difference a day can make! When Amazon announced their new RedShift offering – a data warehouse in the cloud – the entire industry of information management changed. The most notable disruption? Price. At a whopping $1,000 per year for a terabyte, RedShift achieved a price-point improvement that amounts to at least two orders of magnitude, if not three when compared to its top-tier competitors. But pricing is just one change; there's also the entire process by which data warehousing is done. Register for this episode of The Briefing Room to hear veteran Analyst Dr. Claudia Imhoff explain why a new cloud-based reality for data warehousing significantly changes the game for business intelligence and analytics. She'll be briefed by Brad Peters of Birst who will tout his company's BI solution, which has been specifically architected for cloud-based hosting. Peters will discuss several key intricacies of doing BI in the cloud, including the unique provisioning, loading and modeling requirements. Founded in 2004, Birst has nearly a decade of doing cloud-based BI and Analytics. Visit: http://www.insideanalysis.com

1. The Briefing Room

2. Twitter Tag: #briefr The Briefing Room
Welcome
Host:
Eric Kavanagh
eric.kavanagh@bloorgroup.com

3. Twitter Tag: #briefr The Briefing Room
! Reveal the essential characteristics of enterprise software,
good and bad
! Provide a forum for detailed analysis of today s innovative
technologies
! Give vendors a chance to explain their product to savvy
analysts
! Allow audience members to pose serious questions... and get
answers!
Mission

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APRIL: Intelligence
May: INTEGRATION
June: DATABASE
July: CLOUD

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Intelligence
Processing Monitoring Alerts/triggers/actionsIf it’s not accessible, it’s not achievable
COST
COMPLEXITY
PERFORMANCE
BARRIERS

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Analyst: Claudia Imhoff
Claudia Imhoff is the CEO
of Intelligent Solutions

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Birst
! Birst offers a SaaS-based, multi-tenant BI platform; it can
also be deployed on-premise
! The Birst solution is capable of unifying siloed technologies,
automating data management and providing agile
enterprise-class analytics
! Birst’s approach enables self-service analytics by allowing
business users to manage and add new data sources, create
custom dashboards and collaborate across the organization

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Brad Peters
Brad Peters is the CEO and co-founder of
Birst. Brad has spent the last 10 years building
analytics products and solutions. Prior to
working at Birst, he helped found and later
led the Analytics product line at Siebel
Systems, which forms the basis of Oracle’s
current OBIEE product family. Brad started his
career as an investment banker for Morgan
Stanley in the New York M&A practice. Brad
regularly blogs for Forbes.com where he
writes about Cloud and business software
related issues.

9. AMAZON
REDSHIFT
&
BIRST
A
NATURAL
FIT

10. AMAZON
REDSHIFT:
A
FRACTION
OF
TRADITIONAL
COMPUTING
COSTS
• Compare
$1,000/TB
per
year
to
on-­‐
premise
data
warehouse
• Ini%al:
RDBMS
license
+
Hardware
+
DW
Development
• Ongoing:
Maintenance
+
Staffing
• Commodity
Map
Reduce
only
20%
less
• OpPon
to
put
into
something
significantly
more
queryable
is
compelling
10
“The
average
)me
for
the
construc)on
of
a
data
warehouse
is
12
to
36
months
and
the
average
cost
for
its
implementa)on
is
between
$1
million
to
$1.5
million.”
Noumenal
Consul%ng
September,
2010

11. Faster,
Simpler
–
More
Agile
Big
Data
AnalyPcs
• Op%mize
data
driven
decisions
• Automate
the
data
transforma%on
tasks
• Enable
business
folks
to
do
what
they
do
best
• Answer
business
ques%ons
inside
of
data
FROM
DATA
TO
ANSWERS
Faster,
Simpler
–
More
Agile
Big
Data
Engine
• Op%mize
Query
and
I/O
• Automate
the
data
administra%ve
tasks
• Enable
data
stewards
to
do
what
they
do
best
• Ensure
data
is
accessible,
performant
and
secure
11

12. AMAZON
REDSHIFT:
BRINGING
BIG
DATA
TO
BUSINESS
RelaPonal
database:
business
analyst
• Flexibility
to
bring
different
data
types/sources
together
• Complex
dimensional
queries
–
on
the
fly
MapReduce,
Hadoop:
data
scienPst
• Complex
to
fully
leverage
data
• HiveQL
&
Hadoop-­‐only
tools
limited
• GeXng
beyond
simple
aggrega%ons
is
painful/not
possible
• Batch
process
makes
broad
access
untenable
12

13. BIRST:
GIVING
BUSINESS
MEANING
TO
YOUR
BIG
DATA
Examples:
13
• “as-­‐is”
vs.
“as-­‐was”
• Common/conformed
dimensions
• Sophis%cated
hierarchies
• Cross
data
source
metrics
• Many-­‐to-­‐many
rela%onships
• Mul%-­‐pass
/
Mul%-­‐level
ques%ons
Must
do
two
things:
1. Organize
the
data
for
rich
ques%ons
•
Business
metrics
•
Dimensional
analysis
2. Enable
business
users
to
ask
rich
ques%ons
•
Interac%ve,
ad
hoc
capabili%es
•
Logical
layer

14. BIRST:
GIVING
BUSINESS
MEANING
TO
YOUR
BIG
DATA
14
Must
do
two
things:
1. Organize
the
data
for
rich
ques%ons
•
Business
metrics
•
Dimensional
analysis
2. Enable
business
users
to
ask
rich
ques%ons
•
Interac%ve,
ad
hoc
capabili%es
•
Logical
layer

15. BIRST:
THE
ONLY
END-­‐TO-­‐END
SOLUTION
FOR
AMAZON
REDSHIFT
Connect
to
Source
ApplicaPons
Automated
Data
Warehouse
Automated
Data
Model
Logical
Layer
De-­‐normalize
Data
Create
Dimensional
Model
Create
Business
Model
Distribute
Insight
Only
parPal
support
by
VisualizaPon,
Dashboard-­‐only,
and
other
Discovery
Tools
OLAP
BI
Tools
(e.g.
SAP
Business
Objects,
Microstrategy,
Oracle
BI,
IBM
Cognos)
ConvenPonal
AnalyPcal
ETL
tools
(e.g.
InformaPca,
etc.)

16. WAREHOUSE
AUTOMATION
Step
1:
Denormalize
and
cleanse
Step
2:
Map
into
dimensional
model
16

17. 17
Finance
Data
CRM
Data
Opera%ons
Data
More
Data
DW
Sandbox
Sandbox
Dashboards
Ad
Hoc
Reports
Unified
Logical
Model
ODS
Users
LEVERAGING
THE
POWER
OF
REDSHIFT

18. FROM
DATA
TO
ANSWERS
-­‐
IN
THE
CLOUD
Why
pull
data
out
of
Amazon
Redshia?
• Moving
data
across
the
cloud
is
more
expensive
and
slow
than
manipula%ng
it
in
place
Leverage
the
power
of
Amazon
Redshia
with
ELT
• Meaning:
Manipulate
the
data
IN
THE
DATABASE
Reap
benefits
of
mulP-­‐tenant
analysis
• Mul%ple
projects,
mul%ple
user
communi%es,
one
shared
infrastructure
18

19. 390,000,000
3,100,000
560,000
420,000
32,000
4,000
ENTERPRISE
CALIBER
BI
BORN
IN
THE
CLOUD
MB of Data
Dashboards
Dimension Tables
Fact Tables
Dashboard views a day
Organizations

20. 20
LEADERS
RELY
ON
BIRST
Enterprise
Cloud
Mid-­‐market

21. ABOUT
BIRST
• #1
Cloud
BI
Provider
Market
&
Product
Leader
• More
than
1,000
organiza%ons
rely
on
Birst
•
Founded
in
2005
21
“
No.
1
in
product
func0onality
and
customer
(that
is,
product
quality,
no
problems
with
so=ware,
support)
and
sales
experience.”
2013
Business
Intelligence
Magic
Quadrant
Challenger

22. DEMONSTRATION

23. LEARN
MORE
Join
us
for
a
Live
Demo
• Every
Tuesday
and
Thursday
at
11:00
am
PT/2:00
pm
ET
• Register
at
birst.com/livedemo
Try
Birst
with
Birst
Express
• birst.com/express
Contact
us
• Email:
info@birst.com
• Phone:
(866)
940-­‐1496

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Analyst:
Claudia Imhoff
Perceptions & Questions

25. Copyright © 2013, Intelligent Solutions, Inc., All Rights Reserved
Claudia Imhoff
President
Intelligent Solutions, Inc.
Founder
Boulder BI Brain Trust (BBBT)
A thought leader, visionary, and practitioner, Claudia
Imhoff, Ph.D., is an internationally recognized expert
on analytics, business intelligence, and the
infrastructures to support these initiatives. Dr. Imhoff
has co-authored five books on these subjects and
writes articles (totaling more than 100) for technical
and business magazines.
She is also the Founder of the Boulder BI Brain Trust
(www.BoulderBIBrainTrust.org), a consortium of
independent analysts and consultants. You can
follow them on Twitter at #BBBT.
Email: cimhoff@intelsols.com
Phone: 303-444-6650
Twitter: Claudia_Imhoff
25

26. Copyright © 2013, Intelligent Solutions, Inc., All Rights Reserved
General Cloud BI Advantages
§ Low-cost, low-risk, low-maintenance and fast development
§ Usage-based billing and predictable monthly costs
§ On-demand capacity – easy to deploy, grow & shrink users
§ Secure and high availability
§ New product features delivered rapidly
§ Can also be used for developing in-house solutions
§ Vendors support only one platform / one version of app
§ Cloud BI model gives vendor a predictable cash flow
26

27. Copyright © 2013, Intelligent Solutions, Inc., All Rights Reserved
General Cloud BI
Disadvantages
§ Cloud model produces less upfront vendor revenue but
higher customer set up costs
§ May lead to stovepipe Cloud systems with limited controls
§ May involve complex integration with existing systems
§ May involve complex customization and tuning for large
projects
§ Customers still need ability to integrate Cloud application
data with other enterprise data
27

28. Copyright © 2013, Intelligent Solutions, Inc., All Rights Reserved
Enter Redshift
§ Fast, fully managed, petabyte-scale DW service
§ Optimized for datasets from few 100 gigabytes to a
petabyte or more
§ Delivers fast query and I/O performance using columnar
storage technology (ParAccel)
§ Automated most common admin tasks around provisioning,
configuring, monitoring, back-ups, and security
§ Pricing is simple – an hourly rate based on node type and
number of nodes in a cluster – no upfront prices
§ Compatible with industry standard ODBC and JDBC
connections and Postgres drivers
28

29. Copyright © 2013, Intelligent Solutions, Inc., All Rights Reserved
Good News About Redshift
§ Now have ability to provision huge database volumes
§ No long, protracted procurement process to get HW/SW
and no maintenance cost
§ Ability to grow as you do – perhaps beyond petabytes!
§ Potentially huge cost savings over years versus cost of
own HW/SW
§ Great elasticity in terms of adding/subtracting users
§ Great performance for complex analytics – return results
very quickly
29

30. Copyright © 2013, Intelligent Solutions, Inc., All Rights Reserved
Things to Think About with
Redshift
§ Possibility of an outage – it s happened before – need
service-level agreements
§ Costs of data migration and integration – you need
massive bandwidth to transmit data or lots of USB drives
§ Very new processes – no established best practices yet
(but Amazon has a very thorough getting Started Guide)
§ Potentially higher costs than on-premises over time
§ Per user pricing can become expensive for large numbers
§ You pay for all the data whether you use it or not
30

31. Copyright © 2013, Intelligent Solutions, Inc., All Rights Reserved
Birst on Redshift
§ Birst has all the necessary components for BI solution
§ ETL, semantic layer of business terms, multiple deployment
methods (dashboards, reports, mobile devices)
§ No DBAs required to create tables and write load scripts
(scripts are generated by Birst)
§ Tight integration with Redshift means fast data processing
– maximized speed, scale and performance
§ Analytic results returned quickly so buisness can act quickly
My bottom line: Redshift and Birst gives traditional
data warehousing players a run for their money.
31

32. Copyright © 2013, Intelligent Solutions, Inc., All Rights Reserved
Questions
§ What suggestions do you have for your customers to mitigate or
eliminate the potential for “silos” of data—integrating their on-premises
data warehousing system and data now in cloud deployments?
§ What have been the significant benefits your customers have received
from moving to the Redshift offering?
§ What are the realistic deployment times for a Redshift + Birst
implementation?
§ Still a question today is “Will organizations trust in a cloud solution for
critical analytics?” How do you answer that?
§ Every company likes to think of itself as unique. How do you
accommodate this uniqueness in a cloud-based solution
(customization capabilities)?
32

33. Copyright © 2013, Intelligent Solutions, Inc., All Rights Reserved
Questions
§ What do you say to the bandwidth problem?
§ Do you have best practices for new customers moving to Redshift and
Birst? What are they?
§ When does it not make sense for a company to move to the Redshift +
Birst combination but stay with an on-premises deployment?
§ How easy will it be to move from Redshift back to an on-premises
version? What would be the reasons for such a shift?
§ What do you see for the future of your partnership with Amazon?
33

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April: INTELLIGENCE
May: INTEGRATION
June: DATABASE
Upcoming Topics
www.insideanalysis.com

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Thank You
for Your
Attention
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