At last month's Gartner BI Summit in Washington, D.C., the first person I sat down to chat with was John Evans, Director of Product Marketing at Kalido, a Boston-area-based BI warehousing and MDM solutions company. Evans was kind enough to agree to do a live podcast with me, and so we did...only to discover afterward that my MP3 recorder didn't actually record our discussion.
 
Technical difficulties aside, the talk Evans gave me was great, and luckily he agreed to re-record once we returned to our respective offices.

Hear Evans discuss what effective BI is and why it's so important in today's economy, his company's recent partnership with Netezza, the hot BI topic of data governance and more in this podcast.

---TRANSCRIPT---

So we met a couple weeks ago at the Gartner BI Summit in Washington, DC and there you told me a little bit about Kalido's partnership with Netezza. Can you tell me a little bit more about that and what it means for each party?

Sure. Yes. So earlier in March at the summit, we announced a strategic partnership with Netezza. And what this means is customers will now be able to get a high-performance data warehouse solution in automated and flexible architecture with a low total cost of ownership. And what Kalido brings to this equation is the second part so the flexibility and the automation.
 
Our product is the Kalido Information Engine and it's known for its ability to quickly capture the requirements for the warehouse using a business model. And then, Kalido automatically builds the warehouse based on that model. And, of course, Netezza is a very fast-performing, very scalable warehouse appliance and we ported our database to run on Netezza appliances. So for customers that need the scale, and the query speed, and are faced with lot of change in their business that makes it hard for their warehouse and BI environments to keep up-to-date, then together Kalido and Netezza have a really great offering.
 
We also announced as part of our partnership that we'll collaborate to develop industry specific solutions and those will be based on best practices of both companies and they'll also include some prebuilt business models, load processes and dashboards.

Okay, that sounds really great. The next question is how would this partnership impact customers, which I'm sure listeners want to know?

Sure. Well, there are a couple really nice benefits to customers. First, is the combination of scale, and performance, and flexibility in a single appliance so customers no longer have to choose between those attributes in their warehouse solution. But more specifically from a Kalido point of view, customers can save costs and deploy a lot faster compared to taking a more traditional warehouse development steps so our approach and automation in our technology mean less hand coding, less database administration work, and much less BI tool configuration.
 
So there is a faster time to value, there's much less cost, and a platform that can be quickly changed when the business changes. And then, of course, on a scalable vast warehouse appliance platform, we think this is a really very compelling offering. And the solutions that we will deliver will help customers get a head start on solutions to some very specific industry problems.

And is this type of effective BI more important now given the tough economy?
Yes, absolutely. We saw from the Gartner BI Summit where we announced this partnership with Netezza that Gartner survey indicated that BI remains a top technology interest for companies. And I think part of the reason for that is organizations need to keep on top of the indicators they use to run and manage the business. And when time gets tough, there's even more scrutiny on this information.
 
So BI helps deliver it throughout the organization and if he asked them the right questions, and can get the right data, then you have a better chance of making informed decisions about how to respond to these changing market conditions. Now, the other thing we're seeing is even though BI is important, companies are taking a really focused and tactical approach to investing in technology.
 
So for example, rather than pursuing a broad enterprise wide deployment, they're looking at smaller more focused projects or problems to address and then building a business case and getting a return on their investment quickly. So even if someone has budget, they're not necessarily going to spend it unless they can demonstrate a way to get business value quickly from that investment.
 
Right. Exactly. And last time we spoke, you told me about Kalido's business driven models to BI. Can you tell me why this is important?

Yeah. The business model approach that we have has been really important for our customers. And they use the business model to create this conceptual view of what they want to analyze and how all that information interrelates with IT working collaboratively with the business stakeholders this way they can get their requirements and quickly generate a prototype warehouse and it'll automatically generate the BI queues from that.
 
And if they need to change the warehouse to get the right views, or the requirements change, or if there were some misunderstanding, or something going on in the business, they can just change the model and the new view of the business ripples up to the BI tools. So it's a much more responsive environment. It's much easier to implement and manage and just helps customers get better BI faster.
 
Typically, we're able to get something going within four to six weeks or so. Then after a few iterations on the model, getting it just so, they can easily put that prototype into production so this can say several months compared to a more traditional approach to building these systems.

That sounds excellent. I've also noticed that Kalido has been talking a lot lately about data governance, can you tell me where data governance fits into this whole process?

Sure. Well, of course, you want to make sure that you're putting data into the warehouse that's accurately and consistent. And unfortunately, you can't control all the information coming in because some of it might be from external sources so it's not going to match, you're going to have to do something to get it aligned with your internal data. And you can try and clean up that data before you load it, but there's always going to be something you can't fix with technology.
 
In other words, some person is going to have to be involved to determining whether that information is valid. So we recommend a data governance program and have a technology that can help you set it up. And we see there are three pillars of what you need in any technology that's going to help drive your data governance program. First, is the business rules of what is the data standard? What makes up the valid data? The second is governance processes and delivered by an embedded workflow so you can make sure that the data stewards are doing what they need to do, keeping track of those processes.
 
And the third thing you need is some sort of audit and tracking and controls in place around security, around seeing who did what when, and keeping track of prior data values so you could have the bulletproof audit trail for compliance purposes. So we think having this sort of data governance capability is good, generally, but it's also really important to have data governance for your data warehouse, because after all, you think about it that's a lot of really high value information, aggregated information that you're putting into your warehouse that needs to be accurate and consistent and valid. And then, using that information again to help you make the right kind of informed choices during these difficult times.