Business analytics at the speed of thought

(an article in CXO Europe magazine)

We spoke to Roger about the breakthrough Ingres VectorWise technology which is transforming decision making by analyzing vast quantities of data at the speed of thought. Ingres VectorWise harnesses the power of modern chip technologies to deliver up to 100 fold performance improvements on simple inexpensive hardware. Businesses are using this speed to make data driven decisions at the natural speed of their business, replacing daily or weekly reports with real time analysis to increase revenues and to reduce costs and risk.

“Our customers and partners report 10X – 70XX performance benefits for analytic workloads. The queries which used to take them minutes can now be cut to seconds, leading to profound business implications.”
-Roger Burkhardt, President and CEO, Ingres Corporation

What kind of business issues does Ingres VectorWise aim to solve?

Ingres VectorWise enables businesses to keep pace with the explosive growth of business data and to gain competitive advantage by embedding analytic capabilities in their real time operations and improving management information systems.   No longer do businesses need to fall back on inadequate or summarised data sets because of database performance limitations.  Instead they can drill down into the data to the detail they need to make the best decisions possible.

For example Ingres VectorWise can correlate customer data across multiple channels including the vast new volumes of data from web and mobile interactions.  It also enables rapid compliance with the many new regulatory demands for deep analysis of financial and product data and it does so at a reasonable cost.   

What is Ingres VectorWise and what role does Intel play?

Ingres VectorWise is the result of collaboration between Ingres and CWI, the national computer science research institute of Holland, to bring to market breakthrough research in hardware conscious database design.  This delivers 100 fold efficiency improvements by unlocking the capabilities of modern chip technologies from companies such as Intel.

Intel invests over $ 6B a year in chip technology and has been a key partner in bringing Ingres VectorWise technology to market.  They recognized that it exploited the benefits of their technology investment for database workloads and have provided invaluable engineering support.  Ingres VectorWise exploits Intel's on-chip cache memory which is more than 100 times faster than RAM memory.  It also exploits the fine grained parallelism now available on each processor core which enables the processing of up to 100 instructions at the same time. The result; breakthrough performance in data analysis and lower IT costs for the enterprise.

Can you elaborate on the key benefits to businesses?

Our customers and partners report 10X - 70XX performance benefits for analytic workloads. The queries which used to take them minutes can now be cut to seconds, leading to profound business implications.

For example, financial institutions can now analyze the risks of their positions continuously throughout the day enabling better use of capital and higher profitability.  Investment managers can develop new models interactively and back test them immediately with years of detailed performance data. DbConcert, a Wall Street Systems Integrator reports that detailed position analysis was executed 10 to 50 times faster than competitive commercial databases.

E-commerce sites can respond to customer's click stream in real time to recommend purchases and customer service centres can analyze and up-sell during the duration of a service call.  German-based Rapid-I reports that VectorWise enabled their consumer prediction models to run faster than for in hand coded in-memory algorithms.

What benefits can be expected by the Ingres partner community?

The ability to analyze vast amounts of data on simple commodity hardware opens up new possibilities for revenue generating analytic applications that will deliver a competitive edge to both software providers and systems integrators.

The market is demanding new analytic capabilities from software providers in all industries and Ingres VectorWise provides them the ability to deliver advanced analytics with dramatically lower development and operational costs.  Cloud delivered analytic solutions can be created without daunting capital investments.  Datamatics is an example of a global provider who has realized up to 70 times performance improvements in their solutions.

Systems integrators report that they can halve the time to deliver meaningful results in analytic or BI projects by starting with the direct analysis of detailed business transactions without the costs and delays of transforming it to a "BI friendly" format.

Which vertical sectors do you think will be most likely to deploy VectorWise technology?

Ingres VectorWise is perfect for analysing large volumes of data and is therefore particularly relevant to organisations analysing huge amounts of historical data and for companies which rely on the speed, accuracy or frequency of turnaround for business results. The sectors I have in mind are e-commerce (e.g. web analytics), financial services (risk or asset management compliance), telcos (call data record analysis), media (TV viewing figure analysis) and retail (customer loyalty analysis).

To conclude, what is your key message to CXOs, CIOs and other decision makers?

Business now competes on the analytic capabilities of both their MIS systems and increasingly of their real time operational systems.  Business and IT leaders can gain a significant competitive edge through the performance gains that Ingres VectorWise delivers by unlocking the full processing power of today's sophisticated chip technology.   

Analytic business applications that were not previously feasible are now within reach and existing BI capabilities can now fully leverage Moore's law with the resulting reductions in hardware costs, project risk and complexity.

The simple self-tuning technology of Ingres VectorWise only requires three easy steps to get business results: Install, load data, and start running queries.  Business answers can now be delivered in a few hours instead of what normally take days or weeks of complex design and tuning.

Biography

Roger Burkhardt serves as president and chief executive officer of Ingres. Prior to Ingres, Roger was the chief technology officer and executive vice president of the New York Stock Exchange, where he led a global technology team of 2,000 colleagues through the most important business and technology transformation in the Exchange's history: the shift to electronic trading. Under his leadership, the NYSE embraced open source solutions, maintained world-class reliability standards.

 

 

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Disclaimer: All comments posted in a personal capacity