SAP creates LAVA 'design language' to heat up analytics

SAP's Business Objects BI (business intelligence) product line may soon begin receiving a visual overhaul based on a new "design language" or methodology called LAVA (Lightweight Applied Visual Analytics).

There are six design principles within LAVA, according to a recent post on an SAP blog.

One is "lean appearance," where analytic applications have a "clean, minimal display style that focuses on the data itself versus on irrelevant faux decorations like gradations, drop shadows, or reflective surfaces," according to the post by Anita Gibbings, director of BI solutions marketing.

LAVA also introduces "points," or "mini-charts" that deliver information in bite-sized pieces. "Think of them as chart tweets," she wrote.

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A related concept is "channels," which are "simple containers for displaying and navigating to multiple Points and Charts"; and "boards," a type of dashboard. "Initially these will be simple containers for Channels and free-standing charts, and will be expanded to provide templates suited to known analytic consumption purposes," according to the post.

LAVA's fifth element involves "lattices." These are "multi-layer, manipulable bar chart[s], enabling user-driven drill-down filtering and other operations," according to the post.

Finally, LAVA employs what SAP calls "Sn@p Navigation," which "enables the fluid creation and curation of visual analytic environments and collections," Gibbings wrote.

The question now is how quickly SAP manages to fully enmesh LAVA within Business Objects.

An initial step has already been taken, according to Gibbings. "Lean appearance is now the default for SAP visual analytics," she wrote. Some additional details could be released in "a month or so," she added.

That time frame coincides roughly with SAP's annual Business Objects user group conference. Further details couldn't be obtained from SAP on Friday.

One SAP BI expert praised LAVA, saying the approach will help tackle today's analytic challenges.

"The tools we have [in Business Objects] are extremely powerful and really good at visualizing data," said Greg Myers, analytics architect and member of the SAP Mentor program for especially involved community members. "What they're not so good at is visualizing vast amounts of data. That's where HANA and LAVA come into play."

HANA is SAP's in-memory database platform, which has become the central pillar of its software development efforts.

LAVA's design principles, which emphasize cleaner and simpler ways of getting at data, are also a response to the rise of mobile devices, Myers said.

Oracle ups memory, storage of Exalytics analytics appliance

Oracle is introducing a new generation of its Exalytics appliance for high-speed data analysis that comes with a slightly higher price tag but major increases in memory and storage capacity.

Exalytics In-Memory Machine X3-4, which was announced Monday, includes 2TB of RAM, 2.4TB of flash storage as well as 5.4TB of traditional disk storage. As with the first incarnation, released last year, the Exalytics box is certified for a range of integrated Oracle software, including BI Foundation Suite, the TimesTen in-memory cache, Hyperion Essbase and Endeca Information Discovery.

OracleOracle Exalytics Business Intelligence machine
All of those software products were recently updated as well, said Paul Rodwick, vice president of product management for Oracle Business Intelligence.

The initial version of Exalytics, X2-4, had only 1TB of RAM and 3.6TB of raw disk, although Oracle already introduced a 2.4TB flash expansion pack option.

Oracle has also maintained the same level processing power, including four 10-core processors in the rack. The company is planning to offer X2-4 users the ability to add more RAM to their machines, Rodwick said.

X3-4’s hardware lists for $175,000, compared to $135,000 for X2-4, according to an official price schedule.

Exalytics works in conjunction with Oracle’s original “engineered system,” Exadata, although the latter can run both transactional and analytic workloads in the same box.

Exadata is the most popular so far of Oracle’s engineered systems, but the company is now seeing customers buy multiple Exalytics machines at once as well as make subsequent purchases, according to Rodwick. He declined to provide current sales totals.

Oracle is betting big on the engineered system strategy. Officials have defended steadily-falling hardware revenues since Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems, arguing that the company is focusing on higher-margin products like Exadata and Exalytics, which also carry plenty of lucrative software licenses, rather than commodity servers.

Exalytics was linked to Oracle’s decision to cut the price of BI Foundation Suite significantly, from $450,000 per processor to $300,000, according to Rodwick. By doing so, Oracle hopes customers will be more inclined to license the software for every processor in an Exalytics box, as well as multiple boxes, he said.

“Companies run Oracle BI in mission-critical fashion,” he said. “There’s more and more interest in high availability for analytics. When the system is down, the company is essentially blind.”

Oracle is running into many companies that want to set up redundant Exalytics environments in order to ensure continuous access to analytics, he said.

Ex-Business Objects CEO's startup focuses on workforce analytics

After leaving his post as CEO of SAP’s Business Objects division about three years ago, John Schwarz had a revelation.

Before him, Schwarz said in a recent interview, was an opportunity to “redo BI from a clean sheet of paper.” That thought led to the formation of Visier, an analytics software provider where Schwarz serves as CEO.

While Schwarz was at Business Objects, customer satisfaction surveys found that the vendor’s BI software was well-liked among IT users, “but you talk to the actual business users and the results were far less satisfactory,” he said. “IT could get the tools up and running, but then they flipped it over to the end user and they said, ‘it’s too difficult.’”

Visier’s approach from the beginning was to “throw the whole BI technology idea out and start at the other end of the spectrum,” Schwarz said. “Start with the user and go back to the data. As long as you can start up a browser, you can use our application.”

Beyond creating an attractive user interface for Visier’s cloud-based software, Schwarz and his team sought to boost user productivity by initially focusing on a single domain: workforce analytics.

With the launch this month of version 10 of Visier’s software, the platform will contain some 300 prebuilt visualizations and analysis tools that cover “the top metrics and questions people have in the [human resources] world,” he said.

For example, the Visier system can help human resources staffers analyze which current employees may be at most risk of leaving the company, based on historical data regarding the attributes of workers who previously left.

It’s also possible to share the results of analyses with others by exporting information to slideshows.

Visier also promises customers a much speedier and happier experience on the implementation side. New customers can be up and running within four weeks, compared to more than a year for traditional on-premises BI projects, according to Schwarz.

The cost of Visier’s software is also “an order of magnitude” lower than a traditional BI project, he said.

Later this year, Visier will release a new application for workforce planning, which will allow users to model, predict and assess future staffing scenarios. The company is also planning to create analytic applications for additional domains, such as sales, marketing and finance, Schwarz said.

In addition, Visier will seek out third parties to build on top of its platform, which uses MapReduce along with a range of homegrown technologies under the hood, along with HTML5 and Flash on the front end, according to Schwarz.

Visier has about two dozen customers, most of them larger companies such as ConAgra. While Visier is capable of running globally, the company won’t have data center operations outside of North America until later this year, Schwarz said.

It competes with fellow workforce analytics specialist OrcaEyes, as well as products from BI platform providers such as SAP, Oracle and IBM.

While “it would be a bit of a stretch” to say customers can’t get capabilities like Visier’s anywhere else, the company has a “very strong product,” said analyst Stephan Millard, vice president and research director at Ventana Research. “What they’ve done is prepackaged everything people want in human capital analytics.”

One potential risk to customers is the possibility Visier will be acquired at some point by a larger vendor.

In general, the HCM (human capital management) software market “has been consolidating for a while,” and it stands to reason Visier will get looked at by SAP, Oracle, Workday, he said.

Splunk launches analytics software for HadoopBig data analytics firm Splunk has launched a new software product called Hunk, which enables organisations to explore, analyse and visualise data that is stored in Hadoop.

Big data analytics firm Splunk has launched a new software product called Hunk, which enables organisations to explore, analyse and visualise data that is stored in Hadoop.

While many organisations have managed to stand up a Hadoop cluster and get data into it, they are still struggling to get value out, according to Splunk, because there are not enough people with the right MapReduce programming skills to pull meaningful data out of Hadoop.

Hunk, which is currently in beta, aims to solve this problem by giving organisations insight into their data assets without the need for custom development, costly data modelling or lengthy batch processing iterations.

“We can point Hunk at a customer's Hadoop cluster, and within an hour they are able to explore and start analysing data. They love that kind of productivity,” said Sanjay Mehta, VP of Product Marketing for Splunk.

Built using Splunk's virtual index technology, Hunk abstracts away the analytics functionality from the storage layer. This means that the Splunk technology stack can be used to for interactive exploration, analysis and visualisation of data stored anywhere.

While many Hadoop-based query technologies require a schema to be declared at the point that the user starts collecting data, Splunk has a notion of 'schema-on-the-fly', which means that any interpretation of the data is deferred until the time the user queries it.

“That's a really key concept because if you have an understanding of the schema at the time that you're trying to collect data, then you're immediately imposing some restriction on that data,” said Mehta.

“Data is inherently unstructured, you don't know what it looks like and it can change. So you need to be able to defer those kinds of interpretations until the point where you actually ask the question.”

Unlike Hadoop connectors – which extract data from Hadoop, transform it and run operations against it in a data warehouse – Hunk enables organisations to analyse and explore data natively in Hadoop, without having to transform and load it into other systems.

Users can also connect data from external relational databases, using Splunk DB Connect, and correlate this data to spot trends, identify patterns of interest and enrich insights.

Hunk's visualisation tools allow organisations to build graphs and charts to make their data more meaningful, and create custom dashboards that can be viewed and edited on laptops, tablets or other mobile devices via secure role-based access controls.

“The goal here is to democratise access to data. What we want to do is lower the barrier for entry for any type of user to be able to gain intelligence from that data,” said Mehta.

Splunk's Hunk software works against Cloudera, Hortonworks and MapR commercial distributions of Hadoop, as well as the Apache version. Splunk also hopes to extend support to other big data technologies such as MongoDB and Cassandra over time.

Hunk will run in private beta for the next few months, and is expected to become generally available by the end of this year.

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