Intelligent Enterprise

"Gaining traction" is a good description of Kognitio's Data as a Service message. I spoke to company execs at this week's Data Warehousing Institute Conference, and I reviewed results of a survey they released at TDWI. Signs are that Kognitio's DaaS positioning is helping the company define itself and carve a niche in the crowded and dynamic data warehousing-analytics market. That positioning may need tighter focus, but focus will surely come as the company signs some of the prospects it has gained since its February North American launch.

The Data as a Service pitch is the same as for other "as a Services": faster implementation, lower initial investment, focus on business concerns rather than IT. Kognitio's conducted its DaaS survey via the Business Intelligence Network (for which I cover text analytics), finding 40% respondent awareness of on-demand business analytics with 15% stating willingness to implement a DaaS-style service at their organizations. Twenty-three percent of respondents were aware of Kognitio, which isn't bad given that the company newness of the current marketing initiative.

I'd suspect that the numbers are actually lower than they'd have been if Kognitio had polled analytics-aware end-user analysts and executives. That's because an audience like B-Eye's (and TDWI's) is composed of folks invested in conventional, in-house-installed data warehousing and analytics. Those folks risk displacement if their internal business clients look outside for analytics support.

I've been aware myself of Kognitio's software, the WhiteCross predecessor of the current WX2 analytical server offering, since the mid/late '90s. The company is UK based and had until recently targeted only the European market. Kognitio President John K. Thompson and VP Marketing Sean Jackson state that the company has 8 prospects conducting proof-of-concept trials, albeit not all DaaS, which they claim nonetheless is a solid differentiator from established approaches to delivering analytical capabilities. They see the North American data warehousing market as "shockingly good," and I'll add that strong TDWI attendance supports that our corner of IT continues to do well.

That shockingly good market could lead to as-a-service customers for another TDWI exhibitor, e2e Analytix, that has recently rolled out an on-demand, hosted BI solution. The company's initial focus is healthcare, but that focus should broaden rapidly to other business domains where e2e Analytix has been delivering professional services and packaged solutions.

Kognitio's Thompson and Jackson say that about half of their company's sales opportunities are competitive. Kognitio runs up against Teradata and Netezza most often and occasionally Vertica or Greenplum. I believe that only Vertica has an as-a-service angle, in this case via an Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) connection. My only comment here is that the diversity of the competition & mdash; cost, technical approach, and depth of analytics — suggests that prospect do not yet have a clear, precise picture of Kognitio's capabilities. The non-competitive opportunities involve introducing new approaches at organizations that, according to the Kognitio execs, have hit a wall with conventional Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server data warehousing.

(In a separate at-TDWI conversation, Dataupia CTO John O'Brien told me that his company is experiencing a "pretty red hot" market of companies that have hit a data-warehouse performance wall with 2-4 terabyte Oracle DWs and companies that anticipate difficulty scaling their SQL Server DWs beyond the 500 gigabyte to 1 terabyte range. Not that I don't trust the folks from Dataupia or Kognitio or their competitors, but do plan to independently test all vendor claims of the type I've been reporting here if they matter to you.)

Thompson and Jackson say that Kognitio's prospects are coming to the company with diverse analytics needs. My own assumption has been that as-a-service models are best suited for relatively narrowly defined data sets and problems, to which Thompson replies that "WX2 is a very good data integration and data quality engine" and supports ELT (extract-load-transform) data preparation. He also points to the company's "vast amount of intellectual property" gained in supporting fraud, clickstream, and many other applications of analytics. Whether that experience will translate into effective support for heterogeneous on-demand, hosted analytics — an ambitious agenda for a relatively small company — remains to be seen.