Drill to Detail - Drill to Detail Ep.11 'OLAP, Consulting & BI Past Present + Future' with Special Guest Graham Spicer

Episode Date: November 29, 2016

Mark Rittman is joined by Graham Spicer to talk about BI past, present and future including the history of Oracle OLAP, running and owning a consulting business over 30 years of changes in the industry, what's hot on the market today, and what skills and techniques are still relevant as we adopt big data products and new methods of analysis

Hello and welcome to Drill to Detail, the podcast series about big data, analytics and business intelligence today. And I'm your host, Mark Rittman. You can find show notes and links to previous Drill to Detail episodes on the website at www.drilltodetail.com. And we're on the iTunes podcast directory where you can subscribe for free and download past episodes. So if, like me, you're based in the UK and have a background in the Oracle world, you'll probably know that the annual UK Oracle User Group Conference is running around the time this episode goes live. I'm very pleased to be joined by a guest who's probably even better known than I am in the UK BI world. Someone who I'd say is the person who probably got me into BI consulting, taught me what most of what I know about the consultancy business, good and bad, and was the

person who encouraged me actually to speak many, many years ago at a user group event, first of all, then at a conference, and actually got me to write my first article for a magazine at the time. So I probably say he's probably the person who's most responsible for the career that I've got now. So let's introduce Graham Spicer. So Graham, thanks for coming on the show. Thank you very much, Mark, and thank you for those very kind words. I'm not sure how much I encouraged you or more. I actually probably just delegated. Yeah, and there's me thinking all these years it was mentoring and career development. So Graham, for anybody who doesn't know you, just a quick introduction, who are you and I suppose what's your kind of background and history? So I'm Brighton born

and bred, been in the world of BI 36 years, started out as a management accountant with the health service, got dragged into BI purely by accident and uh that all came about because working as a management accountant my boss was recruited to go and work for a time sharing company in london called funnily enough timeshare tym share and uh he was recruited to implement and sell business intelligence solutions which at that time were known as DSS decision support solutions to the public sector I had been at the house service for about 18 months and he dragged me along with him for a large sum of money wow I mean so I mean the reason I wanted you to come on the show is you know you're someone who

has been doing this kind of thing for a long time longer than me I mean you got me into it in the first place but you're also you know you're also doing stuff now so you're someone who has been doing this kind of thing for a long time, longer than me. I mean, you got me into it in the first place, but you're also doing stuff now. So you're actually kind of working with Cloud BI now and so on, really. And you've kind of seen, I suppose, the industry kind of change and evolve and so on over quite a few years now. And that perspective of having seen it but still working in it now I think is kind of very interesting. So tell us how you got started out in the world of BI and what were the products that you used at that time? Okay well my first exposure

was in 1980 but I think to set the scene you really have to go back to the 1960s if you're happy to bear with me. At that point in time it was time sharing and distributed computing that gave rise to what we now refer to as business intelligence or business analytics that all came about with the advent of decision support systems more latterly they become management decision systems MIS EIS multi-dimensional analysis query and reporting OLAP which I know we're going to speak about in a bit of detail later BI BA all have been used to support decision making. This all came about really because in the 1970s, there's a chap called John D.C. Little at MIT, and he started work on trying to identify criteria for computers that would support decision making he had four criteria

robustness ease of control simplicity and completeness of relevant detail i think you'd agree mark those are probably still relevant to the world of bi today yeah exactly and certainly it's interesting that you know you said that uh they were kind of timeshare systems and and so on and so forth i mean there's quite a lot of parallels, really, I suppose, with what's going on now. Yeah. Yeah. One thing that when you've been in the industry as long as I have, you see is that the world just completely turns circle. It's normally a situation, or it was for a good 20 years, of the power of hardware chasing the power of software and one catching up with the other and the other um having gone

full circle back to cloud which was was time sharing in those days which is basically providing computing resources that are so powerful that people can't necessarily afford to use them on premise and don't want them on premise it's going to be interesting to see what happens over the next 10 years. Yeah, exactly. Very interesting. Exactly. So how I came to know you was, I guess, through kind of OLAP and the product called Express and so on a few years ago.

So again, for anybody that's maybe more from the kind of big data background and maybe sort of newer to this, tell us about what Express was and OLAP was and why that was a particularly kind of like, particularly well-liked way of delivering BI back in the 80s and 90s. Okay, so by 1975, Mr. John D.C. Little had developed a tissue support system which he called BrandAid. Over the next year or so, this became a commercial product and went on to be the fourth generation language and modeling system that you and I knew as Express. Simultaneously to this there were a lot of other projects going on at other universities across the states and it probably 1975-76 is the birth of BI

as we know it. So Express back in the 80s had a reputation really as being a financial modeling product. It did go on to be that but in its infancy it was mostly used by large corporations to model and analyze large amounts of marketing and sales data. I guess that's probably why Mr. Little originally called it Brand Aid. At that point in time it gave companies like Mars, Unilever, Glaxo, Kellogg's huge competitive advantage over their competition. Products like Express could only be afforded by the wealthiest of organizations. Not only was the software really expensive, the hardware is really expensive, but projects for implementation and support were huge. But that was all about to change um and strangely enough despite express being decommissioned by oracle in what probably 1998 1990 i'm guessing one of those companies that i just referred to was still using the PC version of Express in 2010 for its brand analysis, completely unsupported.

So, I mean, Express and the products around that time, what we call multidimensional OLAP servers. Again, some people may not even know what they are. And interestingly, following the Hadoop world and some of the projects going on there, there's one called Killian, which is a kind of an olap server for for hadoop just again for the people on the on the podcast explain what an what an olap server is and why why it was yeah anyway why why it was so good really and why those companies chose to use it and as you said yeah might be still using it back in 2010 okay so in in those days it was all multiidimensional OLAP. There wasn't ROLAP per se that came about later. So if you imagine, let's look at a financial system, which is the easiest thing to do.

You tend to store your data by year, by line item, and possibly by branch. So what you have is a three-dimensional set of data. So what we were trying to do, or what the products were trying to do in those days, was to put the data into the format and store it in the format that users understood it. And the idea behind that was, if you could do put the data in the form

that they understood it, surely then it would be easier for them to get at it and to do the analysis that they wanted to do with it it was quite interesting that oracle went as far as they did to buy express and then to try to turn that actually incorporate that into into the RDBMS at the time. Obviously, history shows they kept it as OLAP. They went with ROLAP. And then they even bought Express's biggest competitor, S-Base,

which, whilst multidimensional in itself, was a very different way of storing the data. Yeah, I mean, I guess, I mean, I often refer to Oracle OLAP and the Express kind of, Express Story as being a really good example of a kind of software marketing disasters. It was kind of an interesting time. We'll get on in a bit into kind of, I suppose, the challenges of running a business around that time and so on as well.

But certainly for anybody that kind of, again, is new to this kind of area, and Graham, correct me if I get this wrong, you know, but Express was a product that was um in in broad terms was was kind of owned by a company called iri and then oracle did an acquisition back in 95 and they bought the software assets i suppose really or the express assets of iri to to to take that and make that into what they called oracle olap that's correct That's correct. Yeah, yeah, that is what they did. That was announced in Europe, in Barcelona, at the Express user group in February 1995, I believe. Yeah, I remember that. I remember you coming back into the office and telling us, actually. I remember you saying to us, and everything will be okay, remember you said at the time. Yeah. So again,

potted history, you know,acle bought bought uh bought the kind of the express product and then went through a process of the first thing they said was you know we're going to incorporate this into the oracle database and it was an interesting you know in hindsight i mean at the time it was it was certainly kind of uh interesting as you're saying quotes but in hindsight it was an interesting example of i suppose engineering building a product that actually probably didn't address a market or a problem that was kind of out there in other words dbas who mainly buy oracle databases probably my mind didn't see the value in olap and so first of all there was this kind of weird time

when when the the successor to express which was a multi-dimensional fast database was a was it was a relational kind of system running in in or Oracle database that was slow and so on. And then, you know, to my mind, there were lots and lots of years and energy put into kind of building a product and embedding it in there that nobody wanted. I mean, what was your view at the time? And in hindsight, was that a good thing, bad thing? Was it kind of ill-conceived or what? I wouldn't say it was necessarily ill-conceived. I would liken it a bit, and having seen Oracle repeat that on a number of occasions now, I would liken it to being a bit like Chelsea were a few years ago or Manchester City now,

that you buy all the best players just to stop everybody else from having them. So in effect, what you sometimes do is you take a product out of the market because it's competition to you and you know okay yeah that wasn't their main reason for doing it but it probably did them a lot of good not in the way they expected so a commercially good decision in the long run but the amount of money that they must have sunk into trying to build express as the molap engine within rdbms was would have been phenomenal you and i saw it firsthand and uh you know it wasn't for want of trying um but the the interesting thing was with that and i know times have changed quite a bit in terms of marketing and particularly with oracle oracle never really put a great deal of marketing effort behind it either

yeah it was interesting i think when when oracle ola oracle 9 ola came out there's a lot of activity around then around the 9i release because it was the release that was taking data warehousing etl into the database i mean i remember going out at the time speaking about you know etl and the database and and kind of you know the future of of 9 olap and so on and it was i don't know it was interesting i think again i mean none of us were cynical enough i think at the time to be saying we should do this and actually you know we didn't believe it i think all of us kind of felt it was the thing to do but it was interesting I think two things to my mind kind of in a way were I suppose the two factors that that kind of maybe made it less of a success certainly Microsoft coming into the business with Microsoft OLAP

and what was your I mean when when Microsoft announced Microsoft OLAP at the time what was your view on that and what effect did it have on the market? If I look at the market in terms of our business that we were running at that point in time I think it gave us an extra option and I also think it really didn't affect our business that greatly and I think that's because the company that we were was still fundamentally an express house even though Oracle was now the name behind it express was decommissioned as a product there were six or seven Oracle partners out there making a really good living and building good businesses out of still developing and supporting express applications so you know i think one thing that ms ola probably did is it probably

sort of made oracle realize well actually we're never going to embed this we need to think about what we're doing properly and uh you know i think that's probably right about the time they went out and started the acquisition of S-Base. Yeah, I mean, that was an interesting time. Because, I mean, I think at the time that, so just to recap on that. So Oracle, in the end, acquired Hyperion. So for the S-Base OLAP engine and their kind of financial planning tools and so on. But I remember at the time, that was when Oracle were putting a lot of effort into what they called enterprise planning and budgeting.

And that, to me, I mean, that was an interesting product, wasn't it, Graham? Yeah, it was. And, you know, at that point in time, they already had all of those products from within the Express stable. And, you know, they took the view that that wasn't going to give them what they wanted. You know, I would say they've never ever thrown the express technology away because that still underpins olap and there are people out there using it not a great deal now and probably less so in the future but yeah um at the time that s base came into the stable as well that uh was very interesting to see within

oracle because you know the people at oracle were confused all of a sudden you had the two biggest competitors within the 4gl multi-dimensional database being owned by the same organization yeah it was i mean i think what i suppose one one good thing is that i think they learned the lesson with oracle o-lap and certainly with with airspace yeah the opposite thing has been done with it really you know it's been kept separate it's been you know a lot of the airspace a lot of the hyperion people are now kind of running parts of kind of bi and so on and i think it's you know it's an interesting lesson and also some of the people involved in it are still around you know obviously from the from the partner side like dan blamis and that lot still around

but you've got um bud endres is still within oracle and uh you know analytic from the from the partner side like Dan Blamis and that lot still around but you've got Bud Endres is still within Oracle and you know analytic views is his thing now it's um certainly OLAP is interesting and I think that you know it's as a concept um you know it's it's almost the opposite of what you do with kind of Hadoop which is that you the data goes in the form that is best suits landing it and then you apply schema as you need but obviously and so on but you know OLAP is the almost the opposite of that really but but you're seeing it coming now with things like killing and so on so it's it's an interesting you know but maybe in the end of historical kind of footnote but one thing that always struck me was every time we brought in a system to replace s base sorry express it was always worse than what we were than what we were replacing yeah

which was kind of interesting and from running a business that must be interesting as well yeah yeah and and if you look at the sort of solutions that um we as a company at that time developed for our customers um it's arguable as to whether people would say they were actually bi solutions you know electricity tariff pricing systems some of the marketing analysis systems some of the stuff we did for public sector. You know, they had an element of business intelligence about them, but they were successful purely because of the way that the data was stored and could be accessed and used at that point in time. Something that you couldn't do in an rdbms and you know we carried on and continued to be able to support and develop systems like that for a long time as i said

one of those four large consumer product goods companies that i previously mentioned were using that technology up until 2010 as far as i know they may still even be using it now i think are they are they in slough by any chance they are in slough i think i've been there as well actually yeah so they were certainly i think they might i think they might have moved to uh to um what was the one that was but what was the system that was even more complex that was bought by seagate one point holos they were using holos at some point as well oh right yeah yeah so so i mean the other thing that was interesting at that time and and again you know was a way you mentored me and so on was that the whole involvement with user groups and marketing and so on so to summarize that i'd say

that you know your attitude your approach to marketing was to to get out there and to spread the word and evangelize and speak to people and speak at conferences and you've always been a big supporter of user groups so tell us tell us what give us a bit of history in there and why did you always think that was a good thing to do why did you support us speaking user groups okay i think it started because of the fact that as a company we were always perceived to be a lot bigger than we really were purely because of the types of customers that we had you know every customer that we had was either in the fortune top 100 or top 500 at the time or was a large you know government organization so graham actually before we go any further tell us a bit about the company you had and the kind of business that you ran a while ago. for the major consumables companies,

the major electricity companies at the time of deregulation, government departments like the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, police complaints authority as they were at the time, Crown Prosecution Service. So they were all really, really big organizations. Because of that that i think we started to present ourselves as a far bigger organization than we really were because the people that we were competing with were companies like accenture anderson's pwc

coopers and librand at the time you time. They were the other sorts of organizations that were providing those types of solutions. At the time, Oracle themselves didn't have such a big consulting team. And we weren't really competing with them in such a way. And we had about 30 people working for us. We'd been through a couple of sales and resales but we were selling huge projects huge projects uh was it 98 or 99 that you joined us i think it's about 2000 actually i think yeah i think it's about 2000 actually yeah yeah so we we decided that if we were going to grow the company and continue to grow the company, and by 1996, we'd been acquired by an American company that was also in the express market.

So they were a mirror image of us, but they were four times the size of us in the US. So we decided we were going to present ourselves as being much, much bigger. So the only way we could do that and the only way we could find at that point in time so pre-social media pre-email even what we had to find was a way of getting names contacts of people that were in the oracle environment the oracle community um the uk oracle user group was at that point in time and still it is the best way of getting qualified leads because if you attend a show like the one we're going to be at in birmingham there'll be 1500 to 2000 people in there there's a fair chance that you or i will probably already know 1200 of those but having said that everybody that you're being exposed to is in your marketplace

and they're already exposed to the software that you can implement solutions with the biggest The biggest difference between then and now is that the average project that we were working on in 98 through to 2001, 2002 was probably 15 to 18 months in length and probably generated us close on three quarters of a million to a million pound in revenue per project. Nowadays, the average project that i'm selling is six days yeah yeah and that will come on to that in a bit when we talk about kind of bi today really i mean one thing i'd just get your opinion on really was uh one of the challenges we know we i've always had in my company and i've heard around is to what extent you encourage kind of people to speak at events um you know in a way build a bit of a brand for themselves and and and spend time on these things because one of the things i'm most proud of is in a way the kind of the the the people that have come out of kind of my companies and and gone on to speak and build companies themselves and so on you know there is that kind of i suppose

there is that kind of you know uh balance isn't there between kind of building up people and building up a brand and and kind of and i suppose kind of those days being lost to consulting and so on I mean how did you always kind of what was your philosophy on that and thinking about how you how you I suppose balanced investment in people and marketing with with kind of you know actually going out and doing work yeah so being a privately owned company and being that most of the money that we put into things like marketing was coming out of my own pocket we didn't have huge amounts of money to spend but what we did have was skilled resources like yourself and other people so it was easier and cheaper probably slightly more disruptive but easier and cheaper to get people

like yourself to stand up and talk about what we did and at that point in time i don't think anybody had ever worked out that there was a risk that people could be building a brand for themselves i i think i think although you were probably the fourth or fifth person to leave me to go and start their own company you were the only one that did it in his own name so what do you think about bi now okay okay so bi now um you know i started in 83 i stepped away from the bi market in 2012 and i did that because i had become basically depressed with the products that were out there amongst other things I think there was a period when you were first with me

around about 2000 to about 2005 when BI had really really been dumbed down and it became BERT BI and reporting tool yeah I remember. I remember. I remember exactly. You know, looking at things like 9-0-LAP and relational things, it was just reporting, wasn't it? Yeah, it was. And it wasn't real business intelligence. It wasn't giving our customers that we had at the time what we'd done for them in the past. And, you know, it really annoyed me. But then, as you know, what was it 2005-6 that oracle acquired siebel

obie came along and basically through you i got my appetite back for it i think and uh that gave me a bit of a resurgence and uh you know i was hungry again because whilst I would not consider myself anywhere near on the technical spectrum where you are, I do consider myself that I understand customers' needs well and that I can not necessarily sell to them, but I can understand what it is they're trying to buy. And I think that's my biggest strength. And OBIE gave us that. And I think for a while we were in that position. But I think whilst Oracle have made OBIE a better job than they did with Express,

I still don't think they did enough quick enough. And I don't think that they followed the market. And I think that's probably because they've got fingers in so many other pies that they uh followed the market and i think that's probably because they've got fingers in so many other pies that they're trying to do all the time and i think other products came along tableau click view surpassed obie in terms of pricing in terms of performance you know domo burst products like that have come along and i think by 2012 i'd got depressed with the market again so i went off and did something different for a couple of years um but my appetite has been reawakened which is why i'm back now in the world of bi um i will give the product that i'm working

with a bit of a mention at the moment but it's not only that product there there are some really really smart products out there that are just coming on the market so you said to me about we spoke earlier about exhibiting and presenting and whatever I've been at four big data analytics events in the past four weeks um and at my age that is extremely tiring i must say if you think traveling to london every day is is bad enough you should do five exhibitions in five weeks it's a it kills you but some of the products that i've seen there are phenomenal and you know some of them are sort of in the first year, first two years of their life. Some of them have only just got VC funding and are about to be launched.

But the products that I would say are the future of BI are products like Stream, that's S-T-R-I-I-M, which is basically streaming integration and intelligence, Brightlight, which is B-R-Y-T-L-Y-T, Tipco Spotfire, and of course, I've got to mention it, EIS's own product, Splash BI. And for me, the big difference with those products is that they are incorporating integration and business intelligence into one product okay so why do you think that's why do you think that's that's important one thing that's key then really I mean I suppose first of

all who is the market for that who are the users for those kind of products well everybody in anybody so anybody that's already using bi anybody that's already using BI, anybody that's currently using anything, any form of unstructured data that they need to perform analysis on but are struggling to do so. But mostly people that want to bring all of their disparate pieces of data together for proper enterprise-wide business intelligence but isn't that isn't that isn't that the kind of pitch from from from all vendors over time i mean if you look i mean if you look at let's take let's take an example of one let's take an example one that i know for now we'll come back to the ones you said there so yeah so tableau tableau are kind of the are the kind of the the the polar opposite of say obi and i actually been working with tableau now on some work i'm doing at the moment.

And, you know, it's very much about empowering the user. Funny enough, they're now talking about adding in, you know, some data rank and feeders into there. But taking Tableau, for example, you know, the big argument there to say that BI should be, for individuals, it should be about, you know, that person bringing data in and solving their own problems. Almost that kind of like, you know, the power user. Compare that to, say, the world of, say, you know, that person bringing data in and solving their own problems, almost that kind of like, you know, the power user. Compare that to, say, the world of, say, you know, enterprise BI. What's your take on the emphasis now on self-service and so on? I think that you can do both with the one set of products. I think that what's, again, so this circle of life that goes on in IT

and particularly in BI, what we've seen is that enterprise-wide systems you we started to call it BI and reporting so the focus became reporting so all of a sudden systems became siloed again and systems you know have become sort of and I know Tableau have a new version which does cross application reporting, but it's not, you know, some of these other products that you've seen, you know, that I would say that is probably Tableau's weakness.

If I'm looking at ClickView, I would say, can it really do real-time reporting? I don't know. So all of these products have this little glitch. And when they're in silos and when they're sold in silos, which historically I have to admit as a BI salesperson is the easiest way to sell BI rather than for an enterprise. But when they're in the silos, they do the job that is wanted.

But when you want something that takes data across all those silos, what do you do? Go and build a data warehouse again? How old is data warehousing? Yeah. I mean, certainly when I joined you, it was to start a data warehouse in practice. And I remember at the time, everyone was talking about enterprise data warehouses and so on.

I don't think we ever built a system that was a complete system for one business. I think it's always been like that. But I think certainly, you know, almost Hadoop is the kind of the opposite of kind of data warehousing in as much as, you know, in as much as you land it, you model it as you need it and so on there. I mean, but you can't get away from the need, though, for things to join up and add up can you really exactly you know um people want to be able to take data out of payroll out of hr out of finance out of their standard erps and applications but they want to be able to look

at that data in conjunction with unstructured data that can be anywhere do you think that's just a fad or i mean we sound structured and what do you mean by unstructured data that can be anywhere. Do you think that's just a fad or I mean you say unstructured and what do you mean by unstructured first of all? Well data held on Facebook, data held on social media, data in the news, anything, anything anywhere, any piece of information anywhere that an organization finds useful. So you said you're working with EIS, tell us about EIS and what it is. And I suppose, you know, why do you think it's a better solution than the things that it's self-service it's actionable intelligence uh it needs very little installation it needs very little by way of training so as i said most projects i'm selling these days are six days which is three days offshore installation three days on-site training or sometimes even offshore again and And then away the customer goes.

That's it. It's real time. It can pick up any data source. We've yet to come across a data source that we can't work with. And I'm seeing that in most other systems that we're now seeing that are starting to become competitive to us. So it's cross-application. It's device-ready. It's device agnostic it's data

agnostic and i think that's the way bi is going and i think that that really is and you will remember one of our sales people that we had gary many years ago and i think it was around about 2001 2002 that our marketing was based around a phrase power to the people which was taking our product that had then been developed by our us parent company a product called aos and selling it a fraction of the cost of the major products into big organizations, companies like Ericsson, Labbrooks, you know, there were quite a few of the big companies in the UK. And, you know, that was power to the people. Now, you actually said earlier, about 10 minutes ago, power to the user. Yeah, user yeah yeah i mean i think there's certain things that are inevitable i think people i think the way the industry is going is is people are

becoming more empowered they're used to doing more things themselves and so on so i think that genie is out of that bottle really um and um certainly but interesting you say about projects there as well so would you and would you start a consultancy in in today's market i mean is it is that is there a market for consultancies and service partners at rates that can work out i mean what's your what's your view on that really um i was wondering if i should ask you that question actually but we'll come back to that later um no um i think there is but i think it's different to what we had before. And I think the rates can be higher and can be greater, but I can see these consultancies as being very, very specialist,

four, five, six-man organizations, you know, that are as much about the data and the industry as they are the solutions and you know helping people to work out how to best use the data that the systems are supplying to them and that was one of the things that we used to be quite good at doing and i think that's you know was why we were a little bit different but the days of having a 30 40 man consulting company that um can implement and develop solutions no the days of having a 30 40 man consulting company that can support that can do managed services that can support cloud yeah and there were there is no doubt there is going to be a huge cry for resources that understand unstructured data once it's more and more organizations because if you think now bi is being used by companies that are turning over two three four million

pound a year because they can improve their business with it could they afford to start doing their own thing with hadoop and unstructured data and similar yeah i mean it's interesting and i think certainly from the from the consulting side as well i think there's two two things are feeding to that cloud um and and also you know maybe trying to sell consulting into the into the market that that is kind of happening now. So I'm working currently in product management for an organization around building analytics around big data. And something I've noticed being on the inside at the moment is how hard it would be to sell consulting into those kind of companies. Because actually the one, I think certainly something I found working with you in the past and in consulting was that seeing lots of different things and playing with the technology

and being exposed to the technology was the kind of, to my mind, was the thing that gave you an edge to a certain extent and just knowledge of the kind of business and knowledge of customers and so on. But the thing that you don't get as a consultancy now around big data, for example, is access to volumes of data and being able to run things like machine learning and models and is access to volumes of data and and being able to run things like machine learning and models and so on on volumes of data and it certainly strikes me that if i were ever to start a consultancy again which you know i don't wherever i don't know um it would be a different sort of thing to what we've got now and i think it's quite hard at the moment when you think that in a in a kind of an organization using big data probably the people in that organization

know more than the consultants you're trying to sell in. But what they don't know often is analytics, they don't understand kind of like how to do analysis and that sort of thing. So I don't think a technology cell is necessarily the angle you'd have. But like you say, the knowledge of how to do analysis, which hasn't really changed over the years, you know, how to understand a business and how to use analytics. That's, I think think where there's kind of need really at the moment yeah yeah i'd agree completely with that i think that you know if i was thinking of starting out again now that that is what i would be looking at um but if i'm honest i you know i think for somebody like me with my background i have a far greater chance of, um, you know, earning the living that I, I need, um, by being in the market that I'm now in, which I guess in a way you'd almost call

commodity selling, you know? Um, so, so for basically with Splash BI is, you know, it's really easy for people to buy it, for them to trial it. And it is purely a product sale. You buy the box. It's no different to downloading an app. And it is that easy to use that self-service. And that's where I think a lot of the BI products are heading. I've actually got to ask you a question now because you might know more about this than I do

and I don't know a great deal only what I've read which is a lot but I can see products like Brightlight that I spoke about earlier so they have this product and you know this is their marketing literature but it will using GPUs they can outperform microsoft interestingly when we had

our axolytic server at the time um one of the guys in the data science team could get a better performance out of a couple of kind of like a box full of kind of gp of graphics cards running at home because r could be paralyzed a certain way and work that way i guess the kind of the the meta point out of that really is you know that the things that we used to pay a lot of money for you know lots of kind of like servers and iron and that sort of thing and lots of kind of like lots of very kind of expensive integration consulting they're things that that kind of whether you like it or not you know they're not needed now and and the days about i suppose the days of buying a server appliance and then paying two or three times as much to kind of get it running and so on, you know, the world has changed now, certainly in terms of people's expectations about being able to do things themselves.

And you said yourself, you know, it's more common now to sell a kind of five-day consulting project than a sort of a 500-day one. I think that, again, that in a way the kind of the market for very long consulting projects in general has gone away now. Almost you think about, you know, most people are in jobs as a manager for maybe a year, two years and so on. Are they really going to commit to an infrastructure spend in a project like that for those kind of years? Or, you know, are they going to say it's going to bite off the cloud and so on, really? I mean, it's but there's still there still is a massive demand for analytics out there. And whether it's I don't think that I think a lot of what we did in the past ground was probably you know infrastructure installs and it was things that were i've heard it mentioned you know empty calories they're things that customers they have to spend money

on because it's anywhere they can do things but it's not where they see the value and going back to your point earlier on about obi when it first came out the thing that struck me at the time with that was we actually spent our time building bi systems not in kind of wiring stuff together and and that for me apart from the kind of focus in terms of how it looked and all that, we suddenly, I remember blogged this at the time, I think it was on the, you know, your company blog, that it was, you know, suddenly now we could stop

trying to get the thing actually working and we could actually start building solutions for people. And that is, I think we're getting back to that again now, which is probably like you're saying earlier on, why you're enthusiastic again. You know, there was a great tweet a while from somebody that said, you know, as a BI system owner, you're not managing, you're not owning an infrastructure, you're solving a problem. And that's the, I think that's the kind of cycle we got back a bit to now, which is. Yeah, I agree with you totally, but I will qualify all of that because going back to my circle of life within the BI and within IT generally.

So when I was timesharing and I was a consulting resource at that point in time, people would pay for the software that they used and the power of the hardware they were using in the same subscription price price basically as people do now for cloud and the resource i.e me was giving away free of charge all right there was no there were no projects people didn't consider projects now i had an engineering customer that was probably one of the largest mining and engineering companies around the world at the time. They're no longer with us. And I would probably spend 70 or 80 percent of my working time working for that one customer and not one of my days ever got charged. And then when the advent of the PC came about and, you know, people would say that actually started to give power to the people and products moved away from time sharing. All of a sudden, my resource was important.

And that's how I started my business, because at the time, the time sharing company was acquired by McDonnell Douglas. They decided they didn't want express or focus or fcs eps for that matter so i approached my 12 express customers and said if i go out on my own i'll support you i'll strike up a partnership with mds which was the company before our iri that owned express and you pay me a fee and that's how i started so if cloud does not survive for the next 20 30 40 50 years there's every possibility that you may well find in the future the big projects will come along again it's interesting isn't it and i think it's like everything in life isn't it you get you get things go from one extreme to the other and i think certainly with with kind of you

know with self-service you know where's the report governance where's the kind of that where's the kind of the the the the single version of the truth and so on and i think it's a bit like politics really isn't it i know you and i put up different opinions on a lot of things to do with politics to put it lightly um but you know things kind of you know things the pendulum goes from one extreme to the other doesn't it really and so certainly to me and certainly i've found this working now on the product side yeah product management side it's a all you know you need to know about analytics is the key thing really the technology is is kind of passing really a lot of it is about understanding how to drive kind of like how to drive change how to kind of improve

the business through analytics really and those that plus the ability to understand and empathize with customers that is you know those are the key things and i guess it's probably why you're still here really after all these years which and still relevant and doing stuff now before we end there was two couple of products you mentioned there in your kind of thing on the future so you mentioned uh stream i think it was called and you mentioned spotfire and so on so you we've got the stream i think you said was a kind of streaming kind of streaming kind of product tell us about that and why you think that's interesting okay so it it's basically an end-to-end streaming integration and intelligence platform um it's developed by the team that are behind golden gate all right it's non-intrusive it's quick to deploy and easy to reiterate and it's real-time integration and streaming of analytics simultaneously

and it you know i've only seen it once and it is a competitor so you know um being as my bosses are going to hear this i've you know i have got to say that splash bi does very very similar in similar ways but we're talking about the market and the products are out there in general so yeah i think stream will be here for a long long time to come um bright light similar sort of product but bright light is the one that really is built around gpus and it's all about performance and everything so uh is that is that a hosted one is that a cloud one or is that kind of runs on premise or what uh both i believe from what i understand so uh looking at the architecture diagram i've got in front of me yeah both excellent and you mentioned spotfire so spotfire is the third of the three kind of products tableau and click isn't it that perhaps doesn't kind of get

the exposure why spotfire and for me at these four shows that i've been to recently and i've watched all the demos and the presentations and everything um it it looks the closest in terms of competitors to our own product splash bi and it it does everything that we do. The one slight difference and I think this is perhaps why it's not getting the same amount of coverage as Tableau in particular and it's a little bit like click in this term it requires more than one product. Okay and that's interesting in what way? How does it need more than one product then? So you have a visualization tool, you have an aggregation tool, you have an analytics tool. It's not just one product. Right, so it's more involvement from IT really and that sort of thing.

And those are the products that still require a project. So Graham, you mentioned you've been very, very good and not gone on about Splash BI too much. But I'm actually interested now so i have seen you talking about splash bi as an alternative to say obi for people upgrading from discoverer so just again for anybody kind of like you know new to this discoverer was the was the was the bi tool from oracle that i suppose i i was involved in when i worked with graham there's been obi is the is the kind of full the newer version of kind of you know BI from Oracle but you're talking about Splash BI being being an alternative tell us what the kind of the scenario is there and why you think that's a good solution okay so our the EIS company heritage is in Oracle

reporting okay so we have a reporting framework product that produces preceded content reports, 1,400 plus reports straight out of Oracle EBS. Like no ethics. Like no ethics, yeah, only better. But yeah, there are a number of products on the market that we're competitive with in that arena two years ago they started to develop the new product called splash bi and at the same time obviously it became aware we became aware that discoverer was going to be de-supported or stabilized support in sustaining support sorry they call it nowadays don't they in 2017 probably around about the middle of june time There's a lot of people out there still using Discoverer that have no guarantee as to what their future will hold

if they don't go to cloud, if they want to stay with EBS. You know, there's a lot of, I have been amazed with how many huge organizations I've come across in the past six to nine months that are using discoverer to report direct out of oracle database not necessarily out of apps okay so splash bi has a real proper discoverer migration utility so what does it do differently to maybe the standard oracle one no consulting okay no consulting required at all so we have a customer that i i can't name at the moment but if anybody wants to get in touch i will happily do so that operates in the healthcare business in the states and uh over a period of 42 days after after they had installed the product, they migrated 1,983 Oracle Discoverer workbooks

into Splash BI reports with a 98% success rate. Interesting, interesting. So, and you, just to kind of, I suppose, a good link back to the original kind of topic here, you're going to be at the conference around this time? Yes, yes, we will be on stand four. a good link back to the original kind of topic here. You're going to be at the conference around this time? Yes. Yes, we will be on stand four at the App 16 UK Oracle User Group Conference.

So, Graham, you've always made quite a splash in various kind of guises at the Oracle. So, Graham, the secret I've never told you, really, which is the kind of reason that I really kind of moved on from working for you, and that was because of the annual kind of humiliation of having to wear fancy dress at the at the UK Orkery user group kind of uh appreciation dinner so Graham do you want to kind of give us give us a bit of a kind of a background to your your marketing approach

at a conference yeah so our marketing approach as I said was be noticed i i can remember um i think probably the second or third year that um we were uh the main exhibitor and sponsor at uk because you'd have a bigger stand than oracle wouldn't you at the conference we had a big stand we had a bigger stand than ibm yeah you know and it was ibm that turned around and said who are you which was nice you know that's lovely let's get yourself noticed but you know you you needed to get yourself noticed all the time and uk og in those days was slightly different so uh companies like commshare dell um compact would sponsor a gala dinner or a big event and it would always be a theme so one theme was um mardi gras and most of the people attended in the sort of costumes that you would see on the streets of rio de janeiro during mardi gras um we had think, eight or nine people at the event

that year. We all turned up in Brazil football shirts. I think the year that you are referring to was about actors and actresses, famous shows. I think it was. It was fancy dress, wasn't it?

It was fancy dress. Yeah. I believe there was about 14 of us. was it was fancy dress wasn't it it was fancy dress yeah yeah yeah yeah so um and i believe there was about 14 of us i'll pick up the story now actually it's kind of interesting so so so great so just so so picture the scene it was i think it was there probably tuesday night and uh and graham would graham as ever and always had basically picked an outfit for all of us to wear and um me being me i think i was in the bar i think i was in the bar with the rest of the staff until about 10 minutes before we meant to be down at the actual kind of the actual event in the evening so ran to my room and put this put the outfit on that

he gave me which which which when i wore it downstairs to the it was and i won't i won't even describe it because people will search for it on the internet and so on there are pictures out there i can only describe it as like an obscene publication in the end it was it was it was it was an outfit that was too small and skin tight and and uh I just remember at the time you know in the kind of waiting area and drinking drinks and wine and so on to go in and and you know it was it was funny really at the time and certainly you know I think certainly I mean in a way it was funny at the time actually I did it's hilarious you know but you made a splash at the time and certainly I think it was um it's quite interesting to see I suppose the conference now it doesn't quite I've got my own views on

this I think it was a shame that they split it into kind of into into kind of tech and apps I don't know if you're on that but certainly you know I'm glad it's back in Birmingham there's a lot of good people there and a lot of good exhibitors and so on there. I suppose the actual event, the main event now in the end of the show, isn't quite as big now, though, is it? What's your involvement with the user group now, Graham? Basically, just as a partner member. So I'm a partner member, obviously, through EIS, and my own independent company is also an independent partner member.

I speak to a lot of the people there on a regular basis. You know, EIS has sponsored there for probably close on 9, 10, 11 years now, I would think. So they're very similar to the company that I was. They like to make a big splash as well. They like to put a lot of money into their marketing. We've done a lot of other events this year for the first time. But UKOUG will always be important because untilacle is no longer at the core of what we do and that will happen because as i said splash bi is data agnostic so we will gradually move away

but at the moment we have a sweet spot you know there is a lot of as most sales people would say a lot of low-hanging fruit with the discoverer migration needed. So, yeah, you know, we'll be there. We'll be bright. And we'll be loud. And we'll be brash. Exactly. And as anybody seeing Graham Spicer at the Oracle user group would expect.

No, it's great. I mean, I'm always a great advocate of the user group. I think that it can't be the be-all, end-all of of i suppose of marketing but also of user you know community stuff as well and i think something i've found you're talking about kind of um i suppose in a way being reinvigorated and and the meetups for me have been a reinvigoration i've done a lot of work graham you might know this out of um in brighton there's the kind of wide sussex so i've been involved i'm actually on wednesday this week i I'm hosting the big data meetup in there I think there I think I see meetups as being a little bit incubators really they're self-organizing

groups of people that could in time maybe sort of like become part of the user group or become a new user group but what I think is fantastic is to see community and I'll always you know the user group in the UK always always support them because I think it's always good to try and sort of do that it's always interesting balance between you know the financial side of it as well you know to what extent you end up focusing on partners versus customers and all that kind of stuff that's in topic in itself really but but certainly you know i'm always massively supportive and also that the ace thing they do there as well the ace dinner and so on and so forth is always good yeah you know so yeah i think the the one

good thing that i've noticed with events that i've been attending this past year both uk og events and others is that there are a lot more younger people than there were two or three years ago yes yeah without a doubt yeah without a doubt. And I think that's partly because with partners, the salespeople that they're bringing in are younger. It's a different approach. Even Oracle have got a different approach to that. But again, that's a different subject oracle community should if they've never been before get a guest pass for one day and go to the uk og in birmingham and see what it's all about and and there are a lot of people that don't because you know um from when i was a director of the uk og so three years ago nearly now at that point in time oracle had 8 640 something corporate customers in the uk only about 1400 of those were members of the uk og so there's a lot of people out there that either don't know about it or ignore it yeah it could do them a lot of good yeah i mean i

yeah definitely definitely definitely so um okay well graham absolutely brilliant speaking to you as usual i mean it's just really good yeah i mean there's obviously so much we can talk about as well there's so many kind of topics to build out there and so on but certainly for me i mean it's it's as i say you're the person i felt that got me into this kind of business and and you know the basics and and just inspired me and so on but the fact is you know the fact you're still doing it now and you're doing stuff that cutting edge now and you know you've got this perspective going back is kind of pretty unique, really. I think there's only a few of us that I know, you know, in this area. And it's nice to talk to someone who knows more about the business in a way than I do, really.

But what's also interesting is kind of the circle of things, really. You know, I think that like in life in general, you know, you see the same patterns reemerging and you see kind of like the same needs there and so on. And, you know, a successful BI practitioner and a successful BI business is about, I guess, understanding the customer, understanding their business, and knowing about kind of how analytics can make changes really and prove things. Yeah, without a doubt. Excellent. Excellent. Well, thanks, Graham. Thanks for coming on. And take care. Thank you very much, Mark.

See you soon. Appreciate the opportunity. Thank you. See you soon. Bye.