Intelligent Enterprise

Some of the most interesting BI innovation of recent days has come from a, well, likely source: insiders itching for another go at BI, a chance to (re-)do it right. Ward Yaternick is a case in point. Ward led Cognos development teams, with lead responsibility for the PowerPlay OLAP engine. He created OLAP@Work, an Excel add-in to access Microsoft OLAP Services that he subsequently sold to Business Objects. Ward has been building a new company/product, nextanalytics, that unquestionably represents a fresh take on BI. Ward believes nextanalytics is now ready for prime time.

Ward and I had an extended conversation, by phone and by e-mail, in early May. He expresses frustration with conventional BI, so a few years back, he made a list of the analytics features he had always wanted to do. He founded nextanalytics in 2003 and set to coding. Referring to the dominant BI vendors, Ward says he "wanted to make a product that does everything they don't do."

Ward explains that his software excels at three things:

• data comparisons that reveal relationships among values in cells, rows, and columns of data tables,
• data normalization — functions such as n-tiles, thresholds, ranking, and top-N/bottom-N — which can clarify the distribution of data values,
• and a cell-label swap feature that turns conventional data tables inside-out.

Ward has released his client tools, which can be modified to access engines other than his closed-source server product, as open source. He provides Visual Studio (for .NET) and Netbeans (for Java) project files and code, and developer-users are free to adapt the code as needed. His engine run-time is free for developers with a modest deployment cost.

Ward does have an idiosyncratic understanding of open-source, but he appears to have revised his licensing model in recent weeks. He talks about interoperability between nextanalytics components and other open-/closed-source BI tools and engines — a key design feature, incidentally, of the SpagoBI framework — so it's clear that he gets the spirit of open source.

There's no denying that nextanalytics represents a fresh look at BI. Given Ward's experience and what I already see in the software, I'd encourage those of you who are BI developers to take a look yourselves.