New Tableau 8 Server features

In my previous post http://apandre.wordpress.com/2012/11/16/new-tableau-8-desktop-features/ (this post is the continuation of it) , I said that Tableau 8 introduced 130+ new features, 3 times more then Tableau 7 did. Many of these new features are in Tableau 8 Server and this post about those new Server features (this is a repost from my Tableau blog: http://tableau7.wordpress.com/2012/11/30/new-tableau-8-server-features/ ).

The Admin and Server pages have been redesigned to show more info quicker. In list view the columns can be resized. In thumbnail view the grid dynamically resizes. You can hover over a thumbnail to see more info about visualization. The content search is better too:



Web authoring (even mobile) introduced by Tableau 8 Server. Change dimensions, measures, mark types, add filters, and use Show Me are all directly in a web browser and can be saved back to the server as a  new workbook or if individual permissions allow, to the original workbook:



Subscribing to a workbook or worksheet will automatically notify about the dashboard or view updates to your email inbox. Subscriptions deliver image and link.

Tableau 8 Data Engine is more scalable now, it can be distributed between 2 nodes, 2nd instance of it now can be configured as Active, Synced and Available for reading if  Tableau Router decided to use it (in addition Fail-over function as before)Tableau 8 Server now supports Local Rendering, using graphic ability of local devices, modern browsers and HTML5. No-round-trip to server while rendering using latest versions of chrome 23+, Firefox 17+, Safari , IE 9+. Tableau 8 (both Server and Desktop, computing each view in Parallel. PDF files, generated by Tableau 8 up to 90% smaller and searchable. And Performance Recorder works on both Server and Desktop.

Tableau 8 Server introducing Shared sessions allows more concurrency, more caching. Tableau 7 uses 1 session per viewer. Tableau 8 using one session per many viewers, as long as they do no change state of filters and don't do other altering interaction. If interaction happened, Tableau 8 will clone the session for appropriate Interactor and apply his/her changes to new session:Finally Tableau getting API, 1st part of it I described in previous blog post about TDesktop - TDE API (C/C++, Python, Java on both Windows AND Linux!).

For Web Development Tableau has now brand new JavaScript API to customize selection, filtering, triggers to events, custom toolbar, etc. Tableau 8 has own JavaScript API WorkBench, which can be used right from you browser:

TDE API allows to build own TDE on any machine with Python, C/C++ and Java (see 24:53 at http://www.tableausoftware.com/tcc12conf/videos/new-tableau-server-8 ). Additionally Server API (REST API) allows programmatically create/enable/suspend sites and add/remove users to sites.

In addition to Faster Uploads andPublishing Data Sources, users can Publish Filters as Set and User Filters. Data Sources can be Refreshed or Appended instead of republishing - all from Local Sources. Such Refreshes can scheduled using Windows Task Scheduler or other task scheduling software on client devices - this is a real TDE proliferation!

My wishlist for Tableau 8 Server: all Tableau Server processes needs to be 64-bit (and they still 32-bit, see it here: http://onlinehelp.tableausoftware.com/v7.0/server/en-us/processes.htm ; they are way overdue to be the 64-bit; Linux version of Tableau Server (Microsoft recently changed very unfavorably the way they charge users for each Client Access) is needed, I wish integration with R Library (Spotfire has it for years), I want Backgrounder Processes (mostly doing data extracts on server) will not consume core licenses etc…

And yes, I found in San Diego even more individuals who found the better way to spend their time compare with attending Tableau 2012 Customer Conference and I am not here to judge:

New Tableau 8 Desktop features

I left Tableau 2012 conference in San Diego (where Tableau 8 was announced) a while ago with enthusiasm which you can feel from this real-life picture of 11 excellent announcers:



Conference was attended by 2200+ people and 600+ Tableau Software employees (Tableau almost doubled the number of employees in a year) and it felt like a great effort toward IPO (see also article here: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-12/tableau-software-plans-ipo-to-drive-sales-expansion.html ).  See some video here: TCC12 Keynote . Tableau 8 introduce 130+ new features, 3 times more then Tableau 7 did. Almost half of these new features are in Tableau 8 Desktop and this post about those new Desktop features (this is a repost from my Tableau Blog: http://tableau7.wordpress.com/2012/11/16/new-tableau-8-desktop-features/). New Tableau 8 Server features deserved a separate blog post which I will publish a little later after playing with Beta 1 and may be Beta 2.

A few days after conference the Tableau 8 Beta Program started with 2000+ participants. One of the most promising features is new rendering engine and I build special Tableau 7 visualization (and its port to Tableau 8) with 42000 datapoints: http://public.tableausoftware.com/views/Zips_0/Intro?:embed=y  to compare the speed of rendering between versions 7 and 8:



Among new features are new (for Tableau) visualization types: Heatmap, "Packed" Bubble Chart and Word Cloud, and I build simple Tableau 8 Dashboard to test it (all 3 are visualizing the 3-dimensional set where 1 dimension used as list of items, 1 measure used for size and 2nd measure used for color of items):



List of new features includes improved Sets (comparing members vs. non-members, adding/removing members, combining Sets: all-in-both, shared-by-both, left-except-right, right-except-left), Custom SQL with parameters, Freeform Dashboards (I still prefer MDI UI where each Chart/View Sheet has own Child Window as oppose to Pane), ability to add multiple fields to Labels, optimized label placement, built-in statistical models for visual Forecasting, Visual Grouping based on your data selection, Redesigned Mark Card (for Color, Size, Label, Detail and Tooltip Shelves).

New Data features include data blending without mandatory linked field in a view and with ability to filter data in secondary data sources; refreshing server-based Data Extracts can be done from local data sources; Data Filters (in addition be either local or global) can be shared now among selected set of worksheets and dashboards. Refresh of Data Extract can be done using command prompt for Tableau Desktop, for example

>tableau.exe refreshremoteextract

Tableau 8 has (finally) API (C/C++, Python, Java) to directly create a Tableau Data Extract (TDE) file, see example here: http://ryrobes.com/python/building-tableau-data-extract-files-with-python-in-tableau-8-sample-usage/

Tableau 8 (both Desktop and Server) can then connect to this extract file natively! Tableau provides new native connection for Google Analytics and Saleforce.com. TDE files now much smaller (especially with text values) - up to 40% smaller compare with Tableau 7.

Tableau 8 has performance enhancements, such as the new ability to use hardware accelerators (of modern graphics cards), computing views within dashboard in parallel (in Tableau 7 it was consecutive computations) and new  performance recorder allows to estimate and tune a workload of various activities and functions and optimize the behavior of workbook.

I still have a wishlist of features which are not implemented in Tableau and I hope some them will be implemented later: all Tableau processes are 32-bit (except 64-bit version of data engine for server running on 64-bit OS) and they are way overdue to be the 64-bit; many users demand MAC version of Tableau Desktop and Linux version of Tableau Server (Microsoft recently changed very unfavorably the way they charge users for each Client Access), I wish MDI UI for Dashboards where each view of each worksheet has own Window as oppose to own pane (Qlikview does it from the beginning of the time), I wish integration with R Library (Spotfire has it for years), scripting languages and IDE (preferably Visual Studio), I want Backgrounder Processes (mostly doing data extracts on server) will not consume core licenses etc...

Despite the great success of the conference, I found somebody in San Diego who did not pay attention to it (outside was 88F, sunny and beautiful):

Google+ extension of this blog: 4277+ followers

On May 3rd of 2012 the Google+ extension http://tinyurl.com/VisibleData of this Data Visualization blog reached 500+ followers, on July 9 it got 1000+ users, on October 11 it had already 2000+ users, 11/27/12 my G+ Data Visualization Page has 2190+ followers and still growing every day (updated as of 12/01/12: 2500+ followers.

One of reasons of course is just a popularity of Data Visualization related topics and other reason covered in interesting article here:

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9232329/Why_I_blog_on_Google_And_how_ .

In any case, it helped me to create a reading list for myself and other people, base on feedback I got. According to CicleCount, as of 11/13/12 update, my Data Visualization Google+ Page ranked as #178 most popular page in USA. Thank you G+ !

Update 5/25/13: G+ extension of this blog now has 3873+ followers and as of  7/15/13 as of 4277+ followers):

 

Qlikview can go outside RAM, finally

Qlikview 10 was released around 10/10/10, Qlikview 11 - around 11/11/11, so I expected Qlikview 12 to be released on 12/12/12 but "instead" we are getting Qlikview 11.2 with Direct Discovery in December 2012, which supposedly provides a "hybrid approach so business users can get the QlikView associative experience even with data that is not stored in memory"

This feature demanded by users (me included) for a long time, but I think noise around so called Big Data and competition forced Qliktech to do it. Spotfire has it for a longtime (as well as 64-bit implementation) and Tableau has something like that for a while (unfortunately Tableau still 32-bit) . You can test Beta of it, if you have time: http://community.qlikview.com/blogs/technicalbulletin/2012/10/22/qlikview-direct-discovery-beta-registration-is-open

Just 8 months ago Qliktech estimated its sales for 2012 as $410M and suddenly 3 months ago it changed its estimates down to $381M, just 19% over 2011, which is in huge contrast with Qliktech's previous speed of growth and way behind the current speed of growth of Tableau and even less then current speed of growth of Spotfire. During last 2 years QLIK stock unable to grow significantly:

and all of the above forcing Qliktech to do something outside of gradual improvements - new and exciting functionality needed and Direct Discovery may help!

QlikView Direct Discovery enables users to perform visual analysis against "any amount of data, regardless of size". With the introduction of this unique hybrid approach, users can associate data stored within big data sources directly alongside additional data sources stored within the QlikView in-memory model. QlikView can "seamlessly connect to multiple data sources together within the same interface", e.g. Teradata to SAP to Facebook allowing the business user to associate data across the data silos. Data outside of RAM can be joined with the in-memory data with the common field names. This allows the user associatively navigate both on the direct discovery and in memory data sets.

QlikView developer should setup the Direct Discovery table on the QlikView application load script to allow the business users to query the desired big data source. Within the script editor a new syntax is introduced to connect to data in direct discovery form. Traditionally the following syntax is required to load data from a database table:

To invoke the direct discovery method, the keyword “SQL” is replaced with “DIRECT”.

In the example above only column CarrierTrackingNumber and ProductID are loaded into QlikView in the traditional manner, other columns exist in the data table within the Database including columns OrderQty and Price. OrderQty and Price fields are referred as “IMPLICIT” fields. An implicit field is a field that QlikView is aware of on a “meta level”. The actual data of an implicit field resides only in the database but the field may be used in QlikView expressions. Looking at the table view and data model of the direct discovery columns are not within the model (on the OrderFact table):

Once the direct discovery structure is established, the direct discovery data can be joined with the in-memory data with the common field names (Figure 3). In this example, “ProductDescription” table is loaded in-memory and joined to direct discovery data with the ProductID field. This allows the user to associatively navigate both on the "direct discovery" and in memory data sets.

Direct Discovery will be much slow then in-memory processing and this is is expected, but it will take away from Qlikview its usual claim that is is faster then competitors. QlikView Direct Discovery can only be used against SQL compliant data sources. The following data sources are supported;

• ODBC/OLEDB data sources - All ODBC/OLEDB sources are supported, including SQL Server, Teradata and Oracle.
• Custom connectors which support SQL – Salesforce.com, SAP SQL Connector, Custom QVX connectors for SQL compliant data stores.

Due to the interactive and SQL syntax specific nature of the Direct Discovery approaches a number of limitations exist. The following chart types are not supported;
• Pivot tables
• Mini charts
And the following QlikView features are not supported:
• Advanced aggregation
• Calculated dimensions
• Comparative Analysis (Alternate State) on the QlikView objects that use Direct
Discovery fields
• Direct Discovery fields are not supported on Global Search
• Binary load from a QlikView application with Direct Discovery table

Here is a some preliminary video about Direct Discovery, published by Qliktech:

It was interesting to me that just 2 days after Qliktech pre-anounced Direct Discovery it also partners with Teradata. Tableau partners with Teradata for a while and Spotfire did it a month ago, so I guess Qliktech trying to catchup in this regard as well. I mentioned it only to underscore the point of this blog post: Qliktech realized that it behind its competitors in some areas and it has to follow ASAP.

Spotfire 5 is announced

Today TIBCO announced Spotfire 5, which will be released in November 2012. Two biggest news are the access to SQL Server Analysis Services cubes and the integration with Teradata "by pushing all aggregations, filtering and complex calculations used for interactive visualization into the (Teradata) database".

Spotfire team "rewrote" its in-memory engine for v. 5.0 to take advantage of high-capacity, multi-core servers. “Spotfire 5 is capable of handling in-memory data volumes orders of magnitude greater than the previous version of the Spotfire analytics platform” said Lars Bauerle, vice president of product strategy at TIBCO Spotfire.

Another addition is "in-database analysis" which allows to apply analytics within the database platforms (such as Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server and Teradata) without  extracting and moving data, while handling analyses on Spotfire server and returning result sets back to the database platform.

Spotfire added new Tibco Enterprise Runtime for R, which embeds R runtime engine into the Spotfire statistical server. TIBCO claims that Spotfire 5.0 scales to tens of thousands of users! Spotfire 5 is designed to leverage the full family of TIBCO business optimization and big data solutions, including TIBCO LogLogic®, TIBCO Silver Fabric, TIBCO Silver® Mobile, TIBCOBusinessEvents®, tibbr® and TIBCO ActiveSpaces®.

Data Visualization Seminar at MassTLC 9/20/12

The Mass Technology Leadership Council (MassTLC) organized today the Data Visualization Panel in their series of "Big Data Seminars":

http://www.masstlc.org/events/event_details.asp?id=243502

and they invited me to be a Speaker and Panelist together with Irene Greif (Fellow @IBM) and Martin Leach (CIO @Broad Institute). Most interesting about this event was that it was sold out and about 150 people came to participate, even it was most productive time of the day (from 8:30am until 10:30am). Compare with what I observed just a few years ago, I sensed the huge interest to Data Visualization, base on multiple, very interesting and relevant questions I got from event participants.

Power View in Excel 2013

I doubt that Microsoft is paying attention to my blog, but recently they declared that Power View now has 2 versions: one  for SharePoint (thanks, but no thanks) and one for Excel 2013. In other words, Microsoft decided to have own Desktop Visualization tool. In combination with PowerPivot and SQL Server 2012 it can be attractive for some Microsoft-oriented users but I doubt it can compete with Data Visualization Leaders - too late.

Most interesting is the note about Power View 2013 on Microsoft site: "Power View reports in SharePoint are RDLX files. In Excel, Power View sheets are part of an Excel XLSX workbook. You can’t open a Power View RDLX file in Excel, and vice versa. You also can’t copy charts or other visualizations from the RDLX file into the Excel workbook."

But most amazing is that Microsoft decided to use the dead Silverlight for Powerview: "Both versions of Power View need Silverlight installed on the machine." And we know that Microsoft switched to HTML5 from Silverlight and no new development planned for Silverlight! Good luck with that...

And yes, you can add now maps (Bing of course), see it here:

LinkedIn Stats about Data Visualization tools

I used LinkedIn for years to measure of how many people mentioning Data Visualization tools on their profiles, of how many LinkedIn groups dedicated to those DV tools and what group membership is. Recently these statistics show dramatic changes in favor of Qlikview and Tableau as undisputed leaders in people's opinions.

Here is how many people mentioned specific tools (statistics were updated on 9/4/12 and numbers changing every day) on their profiles:

• Tableau - 18584,


• Qlikview  - 17471,


• Spotfire - 3829,


• SAS+JMP - 3443,


• PowerPivot - 2335

Sample of "People" search URL: http://www.linkedin.com/search/fpsearch?type=people&keywords=Tableau or http://www.linkedin.com/search/fpsearch?type=people&keywords=SAS+JMP

Here is how many groups dedicated to [in brackets a "pessimistic" estimate of total non-overlapping membership]:

• Qlikview - 169 [13000+],


• Tableau - 76 [6000+],


• Spotfire - 29 [2000+],


• SAS (+AND+) JMP - 23 [2000+],


• PowerPivot - 16 [2000+]

Sample of "Group" search URL: http://www.linkedin.com/search-fe/group_search?pplSearchOrigin=GLHD&keywords=Qlikview

Advizor Analyst vs. Tableau or Qlikview...

I feel guilty for many months now: I literally do not have time for project I wish to do for a while: to compare Advizor Analyst and other Visual Discovery products from Advizor Solutions, Inc. with leading Data Visualization products like Tableau or Qlikview. I am asking visitors of my blog to volunteer and be a guest blogger here; the only pre-condition here is: a guest blogger must be the Expert in Advizor Solutions products and equally so in on of these 3: Tableau, Qlikview or Spotfire.

ADVIZOR's Visual Discovery™ software is built upon strong data visualization technology spun out of a research heritage at Bell Labs that spans nearly two decades and produced over 20 patents. Formed in 2003, ADVIZOR has succeeded in combining its world-leading data visualization and in-memory-data-management expertise with predictive analytics to produce an easy to use, point and click product suite for business analysis.

Advizor has many Samples, Demos and Videos on its site: http://www.advizorsolutions.com/gallery/ and some web Demos, like this one

http://webnav.advizorsolutions.net/adv/Projects/demo/MutualFunds.aspx but you will need the Silverlight plugin for your web browser installed.

If you think that Advizor can compete with Data Visualization leaders and you have interesting comparison of it, please send it to me as MS-Word article and I will publish it here as a guest blog post. Thank you in advance...

Tableau as the front-end for Big Data

(this is a repost from my other blog: http://tableau7.wordpress.com/2012/06/09/tableau-and-big-data/ )

Big Data can be useless without multi-layer data aggregations, hierarchical or cube-like intermediary Data Structures, when ONLY a few dozens, hundreds or thousands data-points exposed visually and dynamically every single viewing moment to analytical eyes for interactive drill-down-or-up hunting for business value(s) and actionable datum (or "datums" - if plural means data). One of best expression of this concept (at least how I interpreted it) I heard from my new colleague who flatly said:

“Move the function to the data!"

I got recently involved with multiple projects using large data-sets for Tableau-based Data Visualizations (100+ millions of rows and even Billions of records!). Some of largest examples of their sizes I used were: 800+ millions of records and other was 2+ billions of rows.

So this blog post is to express my thoughts about such Big Data (in average examples above have about 1+ KB per CSV record before compression and other advanced DB tricks, like columnar Databases used by Data Engine of Tableau) as back-end for Tableau. But please keep in mind that as a 32-bit tool, Tableau itself is not ready for Big Data. In addition, I think Big Data is mostly a buzzword and BS and we are  forced by marketing BS masters to use sometimes this stupid term.

Here are some Factors involved into Data Delivery from main and designated Database (Back-ends like Teradata, DB2, SQL Server or Oracle) for Tableau-based Big Data Visualizations) into “local” Tableau Visualizations (many people still trying to use Tableau as a Reporting tool as oppose to (Visual) Analytical Tool:

• 
  

  Queuing thousands of Queries to Database Server. There is no guarantee your Tableau query will be executed immediately; in fact it WILL be delayed.

  
  


• 
  

  Speed of Tableau Query when it will start to be executed depends on sharing CPU cycles, RAM and other resources with other queries executed SIMULTANEOSLY with your query.

  
  


• 
  

  Buffers, pools and other resources available for particular user(s) and queries at your Database Server are different and depends on privileges and settings given to you as a Database User

  
  


• 
  

  Network speed: between some servers it can be 10Gbits (or even more), in most cases it is 1Gbit inside server rooms, outside of server rooms I observed in many old buildings (over wired Ethernet) max 100Mbits coming into user’s PC; in case if you using Wi-Fi it can be even less (say 54 Mbits?). If you are using internet it can be even less (I observed speed in some remote offices as 1 Mbit or so over old T-1 lines); if you using VPN it will max out at 4Mbits or less (I observed it in my home office).

  
  


• 
  

  Utilization of network. I use Remote Desktop Protocol - RDP to VM (from my workstation or notebook; (VM or VDI Virtual Machine, sitting in server room) and connected to servers with network speed of 1Gbit, but it still using maximum 3% of network speed (about 30 MBits, which is about 3 Megabytes of data per second, which is probably about few thousands of records per seconds.

  
  

That means that network may have a problem to deliver 100 millions of records to “local” report overnight (say 10 hours, 10 millions of records per hour, 3000 records per second) – partially and probably because of factors 4 above.

On top of those factors please keep in mind that Tableau is a set of 32-bit applications (with exception of one out of 7 processes on Server side), which is restricted to 2GB of RAM; if data-set cannot fit into RAM, than Tableau Data Engine will use the disk as Virtual RAM, which is much, much slower and for some users such disk space actually not local to his/her workstation and mapped to some “remote” network file server.

Tableau desktop is using in many cases 32-bit ODBC drivers, which may even add more delay into data delivery into local "Visual Report". As we learned from Tableau support itself, even with latest Tableau Server 7.0.X, the RAM allocated for one user session restricted to 3GB anyway.

Unfortunate Update: Tableau 8.0 will be 32-bit application again, but may be follow up version 8.x or 9 (I hope) will be ported to 64-bits... It means that Spotfire, Qlikview and even PowerPivot will keep some advantages over Tableau for a while...

Data Visualization tool is a Presentation Tool

(this is a repost from my other Data Visualization blog: http://tableau7.wordpress.com/2012/05/31/tableau-as-container/ )

Often I used small Tableau (or Spotfire or Qlikview) workbooks instead of PowerPoint, which are proving at least 2 concepts:

• 
  

  Good Data Visualization tool can be used as the Web or Desktop Container for Multiple Data Visualizations (it can be used to build a hierarchical Container Structures with more then 3 levels; currently 3: Container-Workbooks-Views)

  
  


• 
  

  It can be used as the replacement for PowerPoint; in example below I embedded into this Container 2 Tableau Workbooks, one Google-based Data Visualization, 3 image-based Slides and Textual Slide: http://public.tableausoftware.com/views/TableauInsteadOfPowerPoint/1-Introduction

  
  


• 
  

  Tableau (or Spotfire or Qlikview) is better then PowerPoint for Presentations and Slides

  
  


• 
  

  Tableau (or Spotfire or Qlikview) is the Desktop and the Web Container for Web Pages, Slides, Images, Texts

  
  


• 
  

  Good Visualization Tool can be a Container for other Data Visualizations

  
  


• 
  

  Sample Tableau Presentation above contains the Introductory Textual Slide

  
  


• 
  

  Sample Tableau Presentation above  contains a few Tableau Visualization:This Tableau Presentation contains a Web Page with the Google-based Motion Chart Demo

  
  
  
  
  1. 
     

     The Drill-down Demo

     
     
  
  
  2. 
     

     The Motion Chart Demo ( 6 dimensions: X,Y, Shape, Color, Size, Motion in Time)

     
     
  
  
  
  


• 
  

  This Tableau Presentation contains a few Image-based Slides:

  
  
  
  
  1. 
     

     The Quick Description of Origins and Evolution of Software and Tools used for Data Visualizations during last 30+ years

     
     
  
  
  2. 
     

     The Description of Multi-level Projection from Multidimensional Data Cloud to Datasets, Multidimensional Cubes and to Chart

     
     
  
  
  3. 
     

     The Description of 6 stages of Software Development Life Cycle for Data Visualizations

     
     
  
  
  
  

Data Science and Data Visualization

I am planning for a while to respond on Donald Farmer's comments on my recent blog post about Power View.

But instead I found myself thinking about relationship between Data Science and Data Visualization and yesterday Forbes (thanks to Dan Woods) published Donald's "explanation" about "What is a Data Scientist" and it forced me to write about it here before anything else.

Data Science was under radar until 2001, when various people started to use this term as an unifying umbrella for the set of predictive analytics algorithme, statistical methods, data mining technologies etc. like anomaly and trend detection, dependency and correlation modeling, clustering, classification, regression and summarization, pattern discovery etc.

Spotfire 4.5 is announced

TIBCO said Spotfire 4.5 will be available later this month (May 2012).

Among news and additions to Spotfire: it will include ADS connector to Hadoop, integration with SAS, Mathworks and Attivio engines and new deployment kit for iPad.

Tableau vs. Qlikview

Some people pushing me to answer on recent Donald Farmer's comments on my previous post, but I need more time to think about it.

Meanwhile today Ted Cuzzillo published an interesting comparison of Qlikview vs. Tableau here:

http://datadoodle.com/2012/04/24/tableau-qlikview/

named "The future of BI in two words" which made me feel warm and fuzzy about both products and unclear about what Ted's judgement is?

Fortunately I had a more "digitized" comparison of these 2 Data Visualization Leaders, which I did a while ago for a different reason. So I modified it a little to bring it up-to-date and you can see it for yourself below. Funny thing is that even I used 30+ criterias to measure and compare those two brilliant products, final score is almost identical for both of them, so it is still warm and fuzzy.

Basically conclusion is simple: each product is better for certain customers and for certain projects, there is no universal answer (yet?):

[googleapps domain="docs" dir="spreadsheet/pub" query="hl=en_US&hl=en_US&key=0AuP4OpeAlZ3PdHJ1eXZyWFJjUVoxbUl0cTlCVDlXU2c&output=html&widget=true" width="510" height="1060" /]

Power View: 3rd strike and Microsoft out?

The short version of this post: as far as Data Visualization is a concern, the new Power View from Microsoft is the marketing disaster, the architectural mistake and the generous gift from Microsoft to Tableau, Qlikview, Spotfire and dozens of other vendors.

For the long version - keep reading.

Assume for a minute (OK, just for a second) that new Power View Data Visualization tool from Microsoft SQL Server 2012 is almost as good as Tableau Desktop 7. Now let's compare installation, configuration and hardware involved:

Tableau:

1. Hardware:  almost any modern Windows PC/notebook (at least dual-core, 4GB RAM).


2. Installation: a) one 65MB setup file, b) minimum or no skills


3. Configuration: 5 minutes - follow instructions on screen during installation.


4. Price - $2K.

Power View:

1. Hardware: you need at least 2 server-level PCs (each at least quad-core, 16GB RAM recommended). I will not recommend to use 1 production server to host both SQL Server and SharePoint; if you desperate, at least use VM(s).


2. Installation: a) Each Server  needs Windows 2008 R2 SP1 - 3GB DVD; b) 1st Server needs SQL Server 2012 Enterprise or BI Edition - 4GB DVD; c) 2nd Server needs SharePoint 2010 Enterprise Edition - 1GB DVD; d) A lot of skills and experience


3. Configurations: Hours or days plus a lot of reading, previous knowledge etc.


4. Price: $20K or if only for development it is about $5K (Visual Studio with MSDN subscription) plus cost of skilled labor.

As you can see, Power View simply cannot compete on mass market with Tableau (and Qlikview and Spotfire) and time for our assumption in the beginning of this post is expired. Instead now is time to remind that Power View is 2 generations behind Tableau, Qlikview and Spotfire. And there is no Desktop version of Power View, it is only available as a web application through web browser.

Power View is a Silverlight application packaged by Microsoft as a SQL Server 2012 Reporting Services Add-in for Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 Enterprise Edition. Power View is (ad-hoc) report designer providing for user an interactive data exploration, visualization, and presentation web experience. Microsoft stopped developing Silverlight in favor of HTML5, but Silverlight survived (another mistake) within SQL Server team.

Previous report designers (still available from Microsoft:  BIDS, Report Builder 1.0, Report Builder 3.0, Visual Studio Report Designer) are capable to produce only static reports, but Power View enables users to visually interact with data and drill-down all charts and Dashboard similar to Tableau and Qlikview.

Power View is a Data Visualization tool, integrated with Microsoft ecosystem. Here is a Demo of how the famous Hans Rosling Data Visualization can be reimplemented with Power View:

Compare with previous report builders from Microsoft, Power View allows many new features, like Multiple Views in a Single Report, Gallery preview of Chart Images, export to PowerPoint, Sorting within Charts by measures and Categories, Multiple Measures in Charts, Highlighting of selected data in reports and Charts, Synchronization of Slicers (Cross-Filtering), Measure Filters, Search in Filters (convenient for a long lists of categories), dragging data fields into Canvas (create table) or Charts (modify visualization), convert measures to categories ("Do Not Summarize"), and many other features.

As with any of 1st releases from Microsoft, you can find some bugs from Power View. For example, KPIs are not supported in Power View in SQL Server 2012, see it here: http://cathydumas.com/2012/04/03/using-or-not-using-tabular-kpis/

Power View is not the 1st attempt to be a full player in Data Visualization and BI Market. Previous attempts failed and can be counted as Strikes.

Strike 1: The ProClarity acquisition in 2006 failed, there have been no new releases since v. 6.3; remnants of ProClarity can be found embedded into SharePoint, but there is no Desktop Product anymore.

Strike 2: Performance Point Server was introduced in November, 2007, and discontinued two years later. Remnants of Performance Point can be found embedded into SharePoint as Performance Point Services.

Both failed attempts were focused on the growing Data Visualization and BI space, specifically at fast growing competitors such as Qliktech, Spotfire and Tableau. Their remnants in SharePoint functionally are very behind of Data Visualization leaders.

Path to Strike 3 started in 2010 with release of PowerPivot (very successful half-step, since it is just a backend for Visualization) and xVelocity (originally released under name VertiPaq). Power View is continuation of these efforts to add a front-end to Microsoft BI stack. I do not expect that Power View will gain as much popularity as Qlikview and Tableau and in my mind Microsoft will be a subject of 3rd strike in Data Visualization space.

One reason I described in very beginning of this post and the 2nd reason is absence of Power View on desktop. It is a mystery for me why Microsoft did not implement Power View as a new part of Office (like Visio, which is a great success) - as a new desktop application, or as a new Excel Add-In (like PowerPivot) or as a new functionality in PowerPivot or even as a new functionality in Excel itself, or as new version of their Report Builder. None of these options preventing to have a Web reincarnation of it and such reincarnation can be done as a part of (native SSRS) Reporting Services - why involve SharePoint (which is - and I said it many times on this blog - basically a virus)?

I am wondering what Donald Farmer thinking about Power View after being the part of Qliktech team for a while. From my point of view the Power View is a generous gift and true relief to Data Visualization Vendors, because they do not need to compete with Microsoft for a few more years or may be forever. Now IPO of Qliktech making even more sense for me and upcoming IPO of Tableau making much more sense for me too.

Yes, Power View means new business for consulting companies and Microsoft partners (because many client companies and their IT departments cannot handle it properly), Power View has a good functionality but it will be counted in history as a Strike 3.

Palettes and Colors

(this is a repost from my Tableau blog: http://tableau7.wordpress.com/2012/04/02/palettes-and-colors/ )

I was always intrigued with colors and their usage, since my mom told me that may be ( just may be, there is no direct prove of it anyway) Ancient Greeks did not know what the BLUE color is - that puzzled me.

Later in my live, I realized that Colors and Palettes are playing the huge role in Data Visualization (DV) and it eventually led me to attempt to understand of how it can be used and pre-configured in advanced DV tools to make Data more Visible and to express the Data Patterns better. For this post I used Tableau to produce some palettes, but similar technique can be found in Qlikview, Spotfire etc.

Tableau published the good article of how to create customized palettes here: http://kb.tableausoftware.com/articles/knowledgebase/creating-custom-color-palettes and I followed it below. As this article recommended, I modified default Preferences.tps file; see it below with images of respective Palettes embedded.

For the first, regular Red-Yellow-Green-Blue Palette with known colors with well-established names, I created even a Visualization in order to compare their Red-Green-Blue components and I even tried to placed respective Bubbles on 2-dimensional surface, even originally it is clearly a 3 dimensional Dataset (click on image to see it in full size):

For the 2nd Red-Yellow-Green-NoBlue Ordered Sequential Palette, I tried to implement the extended "Set of Traffic Lights without any trace of BLUE Color" (so Homer and Socrates will understand it the same way as we are) while trying to use only web-safe colors. Please keep in mind, that Tableau does not have a simple way to have more than 20 colors in one Palette, like Spotfire does.

Other 5 Palettes below are useful too as ordered-diverging almost "mono-chromatic" (except Red-Green Diverging, since it can be used in Scorecards when Red is bad and Green is good). So see below Preferences.tps file with my 7 custom palettes.

<?xml version='1.0'?> <workbook> <preferences>
<color-palette name="RegularRedYellowGreenBlue" type="regular">
<color>#FF0000</color> <color>#800000</color> <color>#B22222</color>
<color>#E25822</color> <color>#FFA07A</color> <color>#FFFF00</color>
<color>#FF7E00</color> <color>#FFA500</color> <color>#FFD700</color>
<color>#F0e68c</color> <color>#00FF00</color> <color>#008000</color>
<color>#00A877</color> <color>#99cc33</color> <color>#009933</color>
<color>#0000FF</color> <color>#00FFFF</color> <color>#008080</color>
<color>#FF00FF</color> <color>#800080</color>

</color-palette>

<color-palette name="RedYellowGreenNoBlueOrdered" type="ordered-sequential" >
<color>#ff0000</color> <color>#cc6600</color> <color>#cccc00</color>
<color>#ffff00</color> <color>#99cc00</color> <color>#009900</color>



</color-palette>

<color-palette name="RedToGreen" type="ordered-diverging" >
<color>#ff0000</color> <color>#009900</color> </color-palette>

<color-palette name="RedToWhite" type="ordered-diverging" >
<color>#ff0000</color> <color>#ffffff</color></color-palette>

<color-palette name="YellowToWhite" type="ordered-diverging" >
<color>#ffff00</color> <color>#ffffff</color></color-palette>

<color-palette name="GreenToWhite" type="ordered-diverging" >
<color>#00ff00</color> <color>#ffffff</color></color-palette>

<color-palette name="BlueToWhite" type="ordered-diverging" >
<color>#0000ff</color> <color>#ffffff</color> </color-palette>
</preferences> </workbook>

In case if you wish to use the colors you like, this site is very useful to explore the properties of different colors: http://www.perbang.dk/rgb/

Free Tableau Reader enables Server-less Visualization!

(this is a repost from http://tableau7.wordpress.com/2012/03/31/tableau-reader/ )

Tableau made a couple of brilliant decisions to completely outsmart its competitors and gained extreme popularity, while convincing millions of potential, future and current customers to invest own time to learn Tableau. 1st reason of course is Tableau Public (we discuss it in separate blog post) and other is a Free Tableau Reader, which provides full desktop user experience and interactive Data Visualization without any Tableau Server (and any other server) involved and with better performance and UI then Server-based Visualizations.

While designing Data Visualizations is done with Tableau Desktop, most users got their Data Visualizations served by Tableau Server to their Web Browser. However in the large and small organizations that usage pattern is not always the best fit. Below I am discussing a few possible use cases, where the usage of Free Tableau Reader can be appropriate, see it here: http://www.tableausoftware.com/products/reader .

1. Tableau Application Server serves Visualizations well, but not as well as Tableau Reader, because Tableau Reader delivers a truly desktop User Experience and UI. Most known example of it is a Motion Chart: you can see automatic motion with Tableau Reader but Web Browser will force user to manually emulate motion. In cases like that user advised to download workbook, copy .TWBX file to his/her workstation and open it with Tableau Reader.

Here is an example of the Motion Chart, done in Tableau, similar to famous Hans Rosling's presentation of Gapminder's Motion Chart (an you need the free Tableau Reader or license to Tableau Desktop to see the automatic motion of the 6-dimensional dataset with all colored bubbles, resizing over time):
http://public.tableausoftware.com/views/MotionChart_0/Motion?:embed=y

Please note that the same Motion Chart using Google Spreadsheets will run in browser just fine (I guess because Google "bought" Gapminder and kept its code intact):
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AuP4OpeAlZ3PdC14OXU1RGJsV05uaDlxRV9GLXlTZXc#gid=2

2. When you have hundreds or thousands of Tableau Server users and more then couple of Admins (users with Administrative privileges), each of Admins can override viewing privileges for any workbook, regardless of designated for that workbook Users and User Groups. In such situation there is a  risk for violation of privacy and confidentiality of data involved, for example for HR Analytics and HR Dashboards and other Visualizations where private, personal and confidential data used.

Tableau Reader enables additional complementary method of delivering Data Visualizations through private channels like password-protected portals, file servers and FTP servers and in certain cases even by-passing Tableau Server entirely.

3. Due popularity of Tableau and ease of use, many groups and teams are considering Tableau as vehicle to delivering of hundreds and even thousands of Visual Reports to hundreds and may be even thousands of users. That can slow down Tableau Server, decrease user experience and create even more confidentiality problems, because it may expose confidential data to unintended users, like report for one store to users from another store.

4. Many small (and not so small either) organizations trying to save on Tableau Server licenses (at least initially) and they still can distribute Tableau-based Data Visualizations; developer(s) will have Tableau Desktop (relatively small investment) and users, clients and customers will use Tableau Reader, while all TWBX files can be distributed over FTP, portals or file servers or even by email. In my experience, when Tableau-based business will grow enough, it will pay  by itself for buying licenses for Tableau Server, so usage of Tableau Reader in n o way is threat to Tbaleau Software bottom line!

Update (12/12/12) for even more happy usage of Tableau Reader: in upcoming Tableau 8 all Tableau Data Extracts - TDEs - can be created and used without any Tableau Server involved. Instead Developer can create/update TDE either with Tableau in UI mode or using Tableau Command Line Interface and script TDEs in batch mode or programmatically with new TDE API (Python, C/C++, Java). It means that Tableau workbooks can be automatically refreshed with new data without any Tableau Server and re-delivered to Tableau Reader users over ... FTP, portals or file servers or even by email.

Panopticon partners with Qliktech

In unusual, interesting (what it means? is it promising or what?) move the two Data Visualization leaders (Panopticon and Qliktech) partners today, see

http://panopticon.com/Panopticon-Software-Partners-with-QlikTech-to-Provide-Real-Time-Visual-Data-Monitoring-and-Analysis-Dashboards

"to offer enhanced, real-time visualization capabilities for the QlikView Business Discovery platform".

Panopticon's press-release looks overly submissive to me:

"As a member of QlikTech's Qonnect Partner Program for Technology Partners, Panopticon supports QlikView desktop, web, and mobile interactive dashboards and allows users to filter and interact directly with real-time data. By integrating Panopticon into their systems, QlikView users can:

• 
  

  Federate reference and real-time streaming data as well as conflated time series data sets;

  
  


• 
  

  Connect to virtually any relational or column-oriented database, including tick databases;

  
  


• 
  

  Connect to real-time message queues;

  
  


• 
  

  Connect to Complex Event Processing (CEP) engines; and

  
  


• 
  

  Make full use of Panopticon’s library of visualizations designed specifically to analyze financial data.

  
  

The combined Panopticon-QlikView platform is now available for immediate installation."

Panopticon integration into QlikView dashboards utilizes QlikView UI extension objects within the web browser. The extension object calls Panopticon "web parts" and creates a Panopticon extension object with a number of pre-defined properties. The defined context/data is passed into the Panopticon extension object. The Panopticon "web parts" call a Panopticon EX Java applet and renders the requested Panopticon visualization workbook within the context defined by the QlikView user. The Panopticon component executes parameterized URL calls and parameterized JavaScripts to update the parent QlikView display.

Qliktech is trying to be politically correct and its Michael Saliter, Senior Director Global Market Development - Financial Services at QlikTech said, "Our partnership with Panopticon allows us to incorporate leading real-time visualization capabilities into our QlikView implementations. We recognize the importance of providing our clients with truly up-to-date information, and this new approach supports that initiative. Our teams share a common philosophy about proper data visualization design. This made it easy to develop a unified approach to the presentation of real-time, time series, and static data in ways that people can understand in seconds."

While I like when competitors are cooperating (it benefits users and hopefully improve sales for both vendors), I still have a question: Qliktech got a lot of money from IPO, had a lot of sales and hired a lot of people lately; why they (Qlikview Developers) was not able to develop real-time functionality themselves?

Hugh Heinsohn, VP of Panopticon, said to me: "we (Panopticon) don’t see ourselves as competitors – and neither do they (Qliktech). When you get into the details, we do different things and we’re working together closely now"

Another indirect sign of relationship between Panopticon and Qliktech is the recent inclusion of Måns Hultman, former CEO of QlikTech into the list of advisors for Panopticon's Board of Directors.

Other questions are rising too: if Qliktech suddenly is open to integration with Panopticon, why not to integrate with Quantrix and R Library (I proposed integration with R a while ago). Similar questions applicable to Tableau Software...

Sad News about Andreas Lipphard

Founder of BonaVista Systems (Bona Vista = Good View) Mr. Andreas Lipphard, tragically died: http://www.xlcubed.com/the-news/136-sad-news and BonaVista website said that his products are not available anymore: http://www.bonavistasystems.com/

RIP

to read or to write? - that is the question

I was silent for a while for a reason: I owe myself to read a big pile of books, articles and blog posts by many authors - I have to read it before I can write something myself. List is huge and it goes many weeks back! I will sample a sublist  here with some relatively fresh reading materials in no particular order:

1. Excellent "Clearly and Simply" blog by Robert Mundigl, here are just 2 samples:

• http://www.clearlyandsimply.com/clearly_and_simply/2012/02/6-famous-paintings-in-tableau.html


• http://www.clearlyandsimply.com/clearly_and_simply/2012/03/create-your-own-filled-maps-in-tableau.html

2. Interesting site dedicated to  The Traveling Salesman Problem:

• http://www.tsp.gatech.edu/index.html

3. Excellent QV Design blog by Matthew Crowther, here are a few examples:

• http://qvdesign.wordpress.com/2012/02/29/upcoming-new-qlikview-chart-types-inspired-by-tableau/


• http://qvdesign.wordpress.com/2012/01/18/activity-ribbon-chart/


• http://qvdesign.wordpress.com/2012/01/23/new-qlikview-indexed-explosion-quadrant-chart/


• http://qvdesign.wordpress.com/2012/01/31/brilliant-qlikview-parallel-co-ordinates-chart/


• http://qvdesign.wordpress.com/2012/03/05/associative-radial-chart/


• http://qvdesign.wordpress.com/2012/03/07/beautiful-design-chart-innovations-from-qliktech-and-the-elephant-in-the-dashboard/

4. Good article by James Cheshire here:

• http://spatialanalysis.co.uk/2012/03/fast-thinking-slow-thinking-visualisation/

5. Interesting blog by Josh Tapley: http://data-ink.com/

6. A must read blog of Stephen Wolfram, just take a look on his 2 last posts:

• http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/02/launching-a-democratization-of-data-science/


• http://blog.stephenwolfram.com/2012/03/the-personal-analytics-of-my-life/

7. Nice post by my friend John Callan: http://community.qlikview.com/blogs/theqlikviewblog/2012/03/09/why-discovery-really-matters

8. I am trying to follow David Raab as much as I can:

• http://customerexperiencematrix.blogspot.com/2012/02/sas-unveils-high-performance-analytics.html


• http://customerexperiencematrix.blogspot.com/2012/03/bi-vendor-qliktech-reveals-qlikview.html

9. As always, interesting articles from Timo Elliott:

• http://timoelliott.com/blog/2011/03/business-analytics-vs-business-intelligence.html


• http://timoelliott.com/blog/2012/02/what-i-found-interesting-about-gartner-bi-summit-2012-london.html

10. Huge set of articles from variety of Sources about newly released or about to be released xVelocity, PowerPivot2, SQL Server 2012, SSDT (SQl Server Data Tools), VS11 etc.

11. Here is a sample of article with which I disagree (I think OBIEE is TWO generations behind of Qlikview, Tableau and Spotfire), but still need to read it:

http://www.projectedconsulting.com/index.php/component/wordpress/2012/03/qlikview-versus-bi-applications-and-obiee

this list is go on and on and on, so answer on my own question is: to read!

Below is a prove (unrelated to Data Visualization, but cannot resist to publishing it - I did the spreadsheet below by myself) - rather for myself, that reading can help to avoid mistakes (sounds funny, I know). For example if you will listen last week's iPropaganda from iChurch, you will think that new iPad 2012 is the best tablet on market. But if you read carefully specification of new iPad 2012 and compare it (after careful reading) with specifications of new Asus Transformer Pad Infinity, you will have a different choice:

[googleapps domain="docs" dir="spreadsheet/pub" query="key=0AuP4OpeAlZ3PdEwyYzFIOTNsRFlVd0o1a2xaSkxvNmc&output=html&widget=true" width="510" height="600" /]

Tableau to IPO in 2013? rumor or ...?

Dan Primack, Senior Editor at Fortune, posted today at http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2012/02/22/tableau-to-ipo-next-year/ a suggestion that Tableau can go public next year and I quote:

"Scott Sandell, a partner with New Enterprise Associates  (the venture capital firm that is Tableau's largest outside shareholder) told Dan "that the "board-level discussions" are about taking the company public next year, even though it has the numbers to go out now if it so chose. Sandell added that the company has been very efficient with $15 million or so it has raised in VC funding, and that it shouldn't need additional pre-IPO financing".

Mr. Primack also mentioned an "unsolicited email, from outside spokesman: "Next week Tableau Software will announce its plans to go IPO"...

I do not have comments, but I will not be surprised if somebody will buy Tableau before IPO... Among potential buyers I can imagine:

• Microsoft (Seattle, Multidimensional Cubes, integration with Excel),


• Teradata (Aster Data is in, front-end for "big data" is needed),


• IBM (if you cannot win against the innovator, how about buying it),


• and even Oracle (everything moving is the target?)...

Qlikview Prices

Qliktech made its price list public on its website. In a move that calls for "other enterprise software and business intelligence vendors to follow suit, QlikTech is taking the mystery out of purchasing software".

I expanded this post with comments and comparison of pricing from Qlikview and Tableau.

I have to mention that Tableau has pricing on its website for years. I wish Tableau will publish on its website the pricing for Core License (for Tableau Server) and more detail for Tableau Digital and Server pricing, but other than that, Tableau is a few years ahead of Qliktech in terms of "pricing transparency"... Also talking with Qliktech sales people until today was more time consuming then needed and I hope that public pricing will make it more easy.

One note about Qlikview pricing: Qliktech has a very weird requirement to buy a Document License ($350 per named user, per 1 (ONE) document) for each document is a potential time-bomb for Qlikview. But they are very good at sales  (Total Q4 2011 revenue of $108.1 million increases 33% compared to fourth quarter of 2010, see http://investor.qlikview.com/secfiling.cfm?filingID=1193125-12-65355&CIK=1305294) and not me, so I will be glad if Qliktech will prove me wrong!

 Again, for now, just review this:

http://www.qlikview.com/us/explore/pricing

I tried to compare the cost of average Deployment  for Qlikview-based and Tableau-based Data Visualization Systems using currently Published prices of Qlikview and Tableau (I actually have an estimation for Spotfire-based deployment too, but TIBCO did not published its pricing yet). See prices in table below, and comparison of average deploymnet after/below this table:

[googleapps domain="docs" dir="spreadsheet/pub" query="hl=en_US&hl=en_US&key=0AuP4OpeAlZ3PdFJYRUNwOXZ6VHdrczFyeDE3a3k5S2c&output=html&widget=true" width="508" height="440" /]

I took as average the deployment with 46 users (it is my estimate of average Qlikview Deployment), 3 desktop clients, 10 documents/visualizations available to 10 (potentially different) named users each, 1 Application Server and maintenance for 3 years.

.

My estimate of total cost for 3 years came up as about $118K for Qlikview Deployment and $83K for Tableau Deployment (both before discounts and taxes and both do not include any development, training, consulting and IT cost).

Note 3/8/12: you may wish to review this blog post too:

http://i3community.com/blogs/entry/qlikview-user-license-named-client-access-license-cal

16 Data Visualization Vendors are squared

Since Gartner keeps doing its "Magic Quadrant" (MQ; see MQ at the very bottom of this post) for Business Intelligence Platforms every year, it forces me to do my

"Yellow Square for DV, 2012"

for Data Visualization (DV) Platforms too. I did it last year and I have to do it again because I disagreed with Gartner in 2011 and I disagree with it again in 2012. I have a few different (from Gartner) views, but I will mention 3.

1. There is no such thing as Business Intelligence as a software platform. It is a marketing term, used as an umbrella for multiple technologies and market segments. Gartner released its MQ for BI at the same time it had "BI Summit 2012" in London on which it practically acknowledged that BI is not a correct term and suggested to use the term "Business Analytics" instead, see for example this article: http://timoelliott.com/blog/2012/02/what-i-found-interesting-about-gartner-bi-summit-2012-london.html

2. I personally is using - for many years - the term Data Visualization as a replacement for BI, as much more specific. Because of that, I removed from consideration a few vendors present in Gartner's MQ for BI and added a few important DV vendors.

3. I used for my assessment 3 groups of criterias, which I already used on this blog before, for example here:

http://apandre.wordpress.com/2011/12/18/dv-comparison-2011/

and here:

http://apandre.wordpress.com/tools/comparison/

As a result, I got a very different from Gartner the placement of "Data Visualization Platforms and their vendors":

.

For reference purposes please see below the Magic Quadrant for BI, published by Gartner this month. As you can see our lists of Vendors are overlapping by 11 companies, but in my opinion their relative positioning is very different:

Data Visualization page on Google+

I started recently the new Data Visualization Google+ page as the extension of this blog here:

https://plus.google.com/111053008130113715119/posts

.

Internet has a lot of articles, pages, blogs, data, demos, vendors, sites, dashboards, charts, tools and other materials related to Data Visualization and this Google+ page will try to point to most relevant items and sometimes to comment on most interesting of them.

.

What was unexpected is a fast success of this Google+ page - in a very short time it got 200+ followers and that number keeps growing!

.

SpreadheetWEB 3.3 is released

New version 3.3 of SpreadsheetWEB with new features like Data Consolidation, User Groups, Advance Analytics and Interactive Charts, is released this month by Cambridge, MA-based Pagos, Inc.

SpreadsheetWEB is known as the best SaaS platform with unique ability to convert Excel spreadsheets to rich web applications with live database connections, integration with SQL Server, support for 336 Excel functions (see full list here http://wiki.pagos.com/display/spreadsheetweb/Supported+Excel+Formulas ), multiple worksheets, Microsoft Drawing, integration with websites and the best Data Collection functionality among BI tools and platforms.

SpreadsheetWEB supports Scripting (Javascript), has own HTML editor, has rich Data Visualization and Dashboarding functionality (32 interactive Chart types are supported, see http://spreadsheetweb.com/support_charts.htm ),

See the simple Video Tutorial about how to create a Web Dashboard with Interactive Charts by publishing your Excel Spreadsheet using SpreadsheetWEB 3.3 here:

SpreadsheetWEB supports Mapping for a while, see video showing how you can create Map application in less then 4 minutes:

as well as PivotTables, Web Services, Batch Processing, and many other new features, see it here: http://spreadsheetweb.com/features.htm

In order to create a SpreadsheetWEB application, all you need is Excel and free SpreadsheetWEB Add-in for Excel, see many impressive online Demos here: http://spreadsheetweb.com/demo.htm

Tableau 7.0 has 40+ new features, I wish 4 more

This is a repost from my Tableau-dedicated blog: http://tableau7.wordpress.com/2012/01/17/tableau-7/ ...

2011 was the Year of Tableau with almost 100% (again!) Year-over-Year growth ($72M in sales in 2011, see interview with Christian Chabot here: http://www.xconomy.com/seattle/2012/01/27/tableaus-10th-year/ ), with 163+ new employees (total 350 employees as of the end of 2011) - below is the column chart I found on Tableau's website:

and with tremendous popularity of Tableau Public and Tableau Free Desktop Reader. In January 2012 Tableau Software disclosed the new plan to hire 300 more people in 2012, basically doubling its size in 2012 and all of these are great news!

Tableau 7.0 is released in January 2012 with 40+ new cool features, I like them, but I wish 4+ more "features". Mostly I am puzzled what wizards from Seattle are thinking when they released (in 2012!) their Professional Desktop Client only as a 32-bit program?

Most interesting for me is the doubling of the performance and the scalability of Tableau Server with 100+ users deployments (while adding multi-tenancy, which is the sign of the maturing toward large enterprise customers):

and adding "Data Server" features, like sharing data extracts (Tableau-optimized DB-independent file containers for datasets) and metadata across visualizations (Tableau applications called workbooks), automatic (through proxies) live reconnection to datasources, support for new datasources like Hadoop (since 6.1.4) and Vectorwise and new "Connect to Data" Tab:

Tableau's target operating system is Windows 7 (both 64-bit and 32-bit but for Data Visualization purposes 64-bit is the most important), Tableau rightfully claims to complement Excel 2010 and PowerPivot (64-bit again), Access 2010 (64-bit), SQL Server 2012 (64-bit) and their competitors are supporting 64-bit for a while (e.g. Qlikview Professional has both 64-bit and 32-bit client for years).

Even Tableau's own in-memory Data Engine (required to be used with Tableau Professional) is the 64-bit executable (if running under 64-bit Windows). I am confused and hope that Tableau will have 64-bit client as soon as possible (what is a big deal here? don't explain, don't justify, just do it! On Tableau site you can find attempts to explain/justify, like this: "There is no benefit to Tableau supporting 64-bit for our processing. The amount of data that is useful to display is well within the reach of 32 bit systems" but it was not my (Andrei's) experience with competitive tools). I also noticed that under 64-bit Windows 7 the Tableau Professional client is  using at least 4 executables: 32-bit tableau.exe (main Tableau program), 64-bit tdeserver64.exe (Tableau Data Engine) and two 32-bit instances of Tableau Protocol Server (tabprotosrv.exe ) - looks strange (at least) to me...

You also can find on Tableau's site users are reporting that Tableau 6.X underuses multi-core processors: "Tableau isn't really exploiting the capabilities of a multi-core architecture, so speed was more determined by relative speeds of one core of a core 2 duo vs 1 core of an i7 - which weren't that different, plus any differences in disk and memory speed". Good news: I tested Tableau 7.0 and it uses multi-core CPUs much better then 6.X !

Of course, most appealing and sexy new features in Tableau 7.0 are related to mapping. For example I was able quickly create Filled Map, showing the income differences between states of USA:

Other mapping features include wrapped maps, more synonyms and mixed mark types on maps (e.g. PIE instead of BUBBLE), the ability to edit  locations and add new locationsas well as using Geography as Mark(s), like I did below:

etc.

Tableau 7.0 supports new types of Charts (e.g. finally Area Charts) and has new Main Menu, which actually causes a lot of changes where user can find menu items, see it here: http://kb.tableausoftware.com/articles/knowledgebase/new-locations

Tableau added many analytical and convenience features for users, like parameter-based Ref.lines, Top N filtering and Bins, Enhanced Summary Statistics (e.g. median, deviation, quartiles, kurtosis and skewness are added):

Trend models are greatly improved (added t-value, p-value, confidence bands, exponential trends, exporting of trends etc.). Tableau 7.0 has now 1-click and dynamic sorting, much better support for tooltips and colors.

I hope Tableau will implement my other 3+ wishes (in addition to my wish to have 64-bit Tableau Professional "client") and will release API, will support the scripting (Python, JavaScript, VBScript, PowerShell, whatever) and will integrate with R Library as well.

QLIK: How to lose a Billion Dollars in 6 months

On Friday July 8, 2011, the closing price of Qliktech's share (symbol QLIK) was $35.43. Yesterday January 6, 2012, QLIK closed with price $23.21. If you consider yesterday's price as 100% than QLIK (blue line below) lost 52% of value in just 6 months, while Dow Jones (red line below) basically lost only 2-3% :

Since Qliktech's Market Capitalization as of yesterday evening was about $1.94B, it means that Qliktech lost in last 6 month about 1 billion dollars in capitalization! That is a sad observation to make and made me wonder why it happened?

I see nothing wrong with Qlikview software, in fact everybody knows (and this blog is the prove for it) that I like Qlikview very much.

So I tried to guess for reasons (for that lost) below, but it just my guesses and I will be glad if somebody will prove me mistaken and explain to me the behavior of QLIK stock during last 6 months...

2011 supposed to be the year of Qliktech: it had successful IPO in 2010, it doubled the size of its workforce (I estimate it has more than 1000 employees by end of 2011), it sales grew almost 40% in 2011, it kept updating Qlikview and it generated a lot of interest to it's products and to Data Visualization market. In fact Qlliktech dominated its market and its marketshare is about 50% (of Data Visualization market).

So I will list below my guesses about factors which influenced QLIK stock and I do not think it was only one or 2 major factors but rather a combination of them (I may guess wrong or miss some possible reasons, please correct me):

1. 
   

   P/E Ratio (price-to-earnings) for QLIK is 293 (and it was even higher), which may indicate that stock is overvalued and investors expectations are too high.

   
   


2. 
   

   Company insiders (Directors and Officers) were very active lately selling their shares, which may affected the prices of QLIK shares.

   
   


3. 
   

   56% of Qliktech's sales are coming from Europe and European market is not growing lately.

   
   


4. 
   

   58% of Qliktech's sales are coming from existing customers and it can limit the speed of growth.

   
   


5. 
   

   Most new hires after IPO were sales, pre-sales, marketing and other non-R&D types.

   
   


6. 
   

   Qliktech's offices are too diversified for its size (PA, MA, Sweden etc.) and what is especially unhealthy (from my view) is that R&D resides mostly in Europe while Headquarters, marketing  and other major departments reside far from R&D  - in USA (mostly in Radnor, PA)

   
   


7. 
   

   2011 turned to be a year of Tableau (as oppose to my expectation to be a year of Qlikview) and Tableau is winning the battle for mindshare with its Tableau Public web service and its free Desktop Tableau Reader, which allows to distribute Data Visualizations without any Web/Application Servers and IT personnel to be involved. Tableau is growing much faster then Qliktech and it generates a huge momentum, especially in USA, where Tableau's R&D,QA, Sales, Marketing and Support all co-reside in Seattle, WA.

   
   


8. 
   

   Tableau has the best support for Data Sources; for example, which is important due soon to be released SQL Server 2012, Tableau has the unique ability to read Multidimensional OLAP Cubes from SQL Server Analysis Services and from local Multidimensional Cubes from PowerPivot. Qlikview so far ignored Multidimensional Cubes as data sources and I think it is a mistake.

   
   


9. 
   

   Tableau Software, while it is 3 or 4 times smaller then Qliktech, managed to be able to have more job openings then Qliktech and many of them in R&D, which is a key for a future growth! Tableau's sales in 2011 reached $72M, workforce is 350+ now (160 of them were hired in 2011!), number of customers is more then 7000 now...

   
   


10. 
    

    I am aware of more and more situations when Qlikview is starting to feel (and sometimes lose) a stiff competition; one of the latest cases documented (free registration may be required) here: http://searchdatamanagement.techtarget.co.uk/news/2240112678/Irish-Life-chooses-Tableau-data-visualisation-over-QlikView-Oracle and it happened in Europe, where Qlikview suppose to be stronger then competitors. My recent Data Visualization poll also has Tableau as a winner, while Qlikview only on 3rd place so far.

    
    


11. 
    

    In case if you miss it, 2011 was successful for Spotfire too. In Q4 2011 Earnings Call Transcript, TIBCO "saw demand simply explode across" some product areas. According to TIBCO, "Spotfire grew over 50% in license revenue for the year and has doubled in the past two years". If it is true, that means Spotfire Sales actually approached $100M in 2011.

    
    


12. 
    

    As Neil Charles noted, that Qliktech does not have transparent pricing and "Qlikview's reps are a nightmare to talk to. They want meetings; they want to know all about your business; they promise free copies of the software. What they absolutely will not do is give you a figure for how much it's going to cost to deploy the software onto x analysts' desktops and allow them to publish to a server." I tend to agree that Qliktech's pricing policies are pushing many potential customers away from Qlikview toward Tableau where almost all prices known upfront.

    
    

I hope I will wake up next morning or next week or next month or next quarter and Qliktech somehow will solve all these problems (may be perceived just by me as problems) and QLIK shares will be priced higher ($40 or above?) than today - at least it is what I wish to my Qliktech friends in new 2012...

Update on 3/2/12 evening: it looks like QLIK shares reading my blog and trying to please me: during last 2 months they regained almost $9 (more then 30%), ending the 3/2/12 session with $29.99 price and regaining more then $550M in market capitalization (qlik on chart to get full-size image of it):

I guess if  QLIK will go in wrong direction again, I have to blog about it, and it will correct itself!