Here are a few of my conference observations:

Cloud computing is moving to the forefront of the Sage product strategy. In his keynote presentation, Himanshu Palsule, EVP of product strategy and marketing, called cloud computing one of two major trends to capitalize upon and introduced Sage North America’s cloud-based “connected services” as a key product strategy pillar. Connected services take “the richness of on-premise applications and connect to the reach of cloud-based services.” The launches of Sage SalesLogix Cloud and Sage Fundraising Online are examples of Sage dipping a toe in the “cloud” water (does that make it “rain”?)

Visitors at Indicee's booth at Sage Insights keenly interested in Cloud BI....or maybe Craig was sharing another uproarious story from trade shows past.

Business intelligence continues to gain in prominence within the Sage community. This year’s conference featured an entire presentation track dedicated to business intelligence, analysis, and reporting. And if the buzz at the Indicee booth was any indication, the opportunities for cloud-based analysis and reporting solutions are immense. Business partners outlined the challenges that clients are facing when it comes to creating and updating reports especially when the data resides in multiple systems such as Sage ERP MAS or Sage ERP Accpac and SageCRM. Conversations also revealed that the complexity and costs of typical on-premise BI solutions are often barriers to adoption.

Sage ERP Accpac – still near and dear to me – continues to garner much attention as the ERP of the future (very near future with Version 6 beta just around the corner); the slick user interface and improved workflow continue to impress. Kudos to the product team under the leadership of Scott Zandbergen, Erik Kaas, Alok Tyagi, and others.

The Simply Accounting group under the stewardship of Jamie Sutherland continues to be one of the most innovative teams in the Sage family. They have followed up on the success of Billing Boss, the online invoicing tool, with a mobile payment processing solution called Payment Boss.

Sage continues to be the “partner’s choice” for top vendor–forthrightness, integrity, and accessibility are a few of the words that come to mind to describe Sage. Speaking with fellow attendees and trolling the online forums, common themes are the positive feeling about the Sage team and a real bullishness about the Sage strategy.

A big shout-out to the entire Sage team for pulling off another successful Insights conference. Can’t wait until Sage Summit 2011 in DC.

Keep dialed into this channel for more Indicee news including the upcoming launch of our iPhone & iPad mobile reporting application (incidentally, Himanshu indicated that mobility was the other key trend influencing Sage product direction).

Scott Pledger

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Recently, someone kindly pointed out that B.I. is actually DETERMINISTIC as opposed to intelligent by its very nature…. being just a construct of rules and structure within an IT system.

This comment was brought about through a discussion around creating B.I. solutions, what is a good approach.

The talk actually ended sounding more like a Philosophy class than an IT group.  Inductive and deductive reasoning.  Asking questions.  Treating matters objectively.

Stuff about helping management understand their own strategy by questioning manifest business processes.  In order to arrive at answers to seemingly imponderable business questions.  Things like, “What are your business goals?”

Some Focus Points

- Let outcomes guide decisions

- Let goals guide focus

- Let value guide priority

* NORTH STAR Business Intelligence

The above-mentioned firm put on a talk through TDWI (The Data Warehousing Institute) in Vancouver last Friday and I was fortunate enough to attend.  For anyone local who is looking to better understand the B.I. space, these monthly meetings are a good start.  The local chapter is fairly “young”, but it’s been growing and I’ve got to say, the meeting was quite interesting.

Some other points that jumped out were:

- B.I. is a technical issue, but success is a human issue

- Always keep the broader vision in mind

- Understand that business processes, definitions, and meanings change over time

- Greenfield B.I. projects have an advantage [over existing systems (i.e. no baggage)]

- Think big picture, work the details

and – Choose for impact!

It appears the growing consensus in this group is that the technical barriers aren’t what is standing in the way of getting good B.I. spread all throughout the organization.  But it’s organizational psychology that sometimes stinks.

There’s a delicate balance that has to be struck.  Top management don’t want to feel like they are being lectured, or questioned.  But it’s education and Socratic inquiry that are required if the end B.I. solution is going to work.

In my view, part of the difficulty is that management doesn’t necessarily have their strategy worked out to the level of detail really required to get a “perfect” solution.  There’s a lot of moving parts regardless of business size.  But don’t look at me I’m just a software vendor.

Do you think I could be counted on to whip business strategy into shape?

Anyway you slice it, I think B.I. and strategy will always be inextricably linked.  As mentioned in the talk, these are tied into part of a feedback loop.

Helpful to remember this stuff.

Enjoy!

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With the entire office cheering him on via UStream, Mark brought his A-game and knocked it out of the park!

We were awarded the Judge’s Choice Award for the Analytics category!

It’s a privilege to receive this sort of recognition and we really appreciate it.

As well, we received some very kind words from the panel moderator, Jeremy Toeman - an expert in consumer lifestyle technology:

“I think Indicee’s website did the best job of the presenters now of radically, clearly saying what you do.  Specifically that is… Easy Business Intelligence Reporting.  Boom!  I get it! Done.”

The presentation included a bit of background on our team and B.I. pedigree, the challenges of B.I., the pain of spreadsheets, and the cure!

Here’s the presentation guys:

And the slidedeck:

Indicee_Under_the_Radar_v2.1_nobuild_opt –

And lastly, we’ve fished out some of tweets streaming during the Analytics session:

Enjoy!

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Overall, it was a very good event and shows a great deal of potential for the future!

The event was attended by 1000+ enthusiastic area business people.  It was a highly energized crowd and everyone was keen to learn and connect.  The conference really highlighted for me something I’ve noticed the past few years in Vancouver.  There seems to be a… realization, for lack of a better word, that NOW is our time to shine.  I think the organizers very successfully keyed in on this, no pun intended.

The line up of speakers and panelists was fantastic.

Tod Maffin, noted strategist, technologist, author, and speaker opened the show.  Although I missed the talk, based on the tweets I saw, I can only characterize his message as a cautionary tale.  I think Ferris Bueller said it best, “Life moves pretty fast, if you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.”

And Malcolm Gladwell closed the show.  Another cautionary tale, you can find details of his talk on Techvibes and the Vancouver Sun.  I think he sums up nicely when he says, the internet is a means to an end, not an end in itself.

I managed to make it to 2 panel sessions.

The first was on Cloud Computing where our very own, Mark Cunningham, contributed to a discussion on the technology.  Mark was joined by Howie Wu, CEO of Layerboom and by Ryan Storgaard, Microsoft’s Director of Cloud Services Strategy.  The moderator was Rajan Sodhi, VP of Marketing for the hosting company Peer 1.  Mark commented to me afterward that there probably should have been 2 Cloud sessions.  One that dealt with Cloud for Business Users and one that dealt with Cloud for Techies.  The result would be two very different discussions.  And I think that nicely sums it up.  You can find some of Indicee’s thoughts on cloud here, here, and here.  If I had to pick one thing from that a Business User would be wise to take away from the session, it’s Howie’s explanation that Cloud “turns fixed costs into variable costs”.

The second session I attended was a panel on Avoiding Start-up Pitfalls.  This was a bit self-indulgent on my part seeing as I work for a start-up and have worked for a bunch of start-ups over the past 5 years.  The panel was comprised of Ryan Holmes, CEO of Hootsuite - the Twitter client, Danny Robinson, Managing Director of Bootup Labs - the incubator fund, and Michael Fergusson, CEO of Ayogo Games - social and mobile gaming, and moderated by Carisa Miklusak, co-founder of SoMedios - social media consultancy firm.  This panel definitely wins the prize for best soundbites at F5!  Here’s a sampling (I’m paraphrasing a bit, still waiting on my tricked-out recording device):

Danny: Equity is rarely a 50/50 deal with co-founders. Have the conversation early when you have nothing to lose.

Michael: The CEO has to be the top salesperson in a start-up.

Ryan: Kill your customers with a dull pencil (avoid the customization trap).

All: Business plans are dubious at best.

Danny: Take the cheapest money you can get.    

And: It’s not the firm who funds you, it’s the partner at the firm.

Michael: The worse possible outcome is a lingering death.  If your start-up is going to fail, make sure to fail well.

This last point reminds me of a recent Globe and Mail video of Mark Evans interviewing Roger Martin on innovation.  According to Martin, “to innovate you have to court failure”.  Roger Martin is Dean of the Rotman School of Management at University of Toronto.

You know, this may actually sum up the whole conference.  To innovate you have to court failure.

We would like to sincerely thank the organizers of F5 Expo, and all the participants, speakers, sponsors, and everyone who helped make this event possible.  You guys did a great job and have continued to step up and take risk in order to bring out the best in Vancouver!

For more reviews from F5 check out:

Gillian Shaw: iPad apps: Made in BC

Middle Child Marketing: F5 Expo Review

Kiwano Marketing: Best of Social Media Metrics

Flickr: Jeremy Lim

Twitter: #F5Expo and #F5cloud

If you know of other URLs with F5 reviews, feel free to leave them in the comments.

Enjoy!

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The one-day conference is aimed at business executives interested in the latest trends in the online space.  This year’s focus is social media, search marketing, mobile applications, and (our favourite) cloud computing.

Our CEO, Mark Cunningham, will be joining a panel of local “digerati” in the cloud space to share insights into where cloud computing came from and where it’s going!

Tickets are still available! You can check out the Tradeshow, the Sessions, or the Full Meal Deal that includes taking in the Keynote Address on Innovation by Canada’s own Malcolm Gladwell!

Register here.

Enjoy!

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Here’s my thoughts on the day.

For the uninitiated, Cloudcamps are workshop-based events where the participants decide the curriculum at the beginning of the day.  Then, they spend the rest of the day talking about their main areas of interest with respect to “Cloud Computing“.  This can even include spirited, in fact heated, debate about how one defines Cloud Computing.

For our purposes, we can define Cloud Computing as what Indicee does! We deliver our software online through your browser.  And, our back office exists pretty much entirely on Amazon Web Services (EC2).  The Cloud. As a side note, I was delighted to hear that EC2 generously donates computing time to University of British Columbia (UBC) students to help build for the future.

That said, like a cloud, the definition is definitely nebulous and within the tech community it’s a moving target (to say the least). On Saturday, Dave Nielsen (Clouderati), stated a good working definition, I think.  Cloud is 1) managed, 2) self-serve and 3) on demand.  Dave is one of the founders of Cloudcamp.

Cloud is the essence of Software as a service, and we, Indicee, are the quintessential Saas provider.  We get all of our computing power and data storage metered like you get electricity from your local utility.

Destination Cloudcamp

So far over 15,000 people have participated in Cloudcamps worldwide.  The events are organized as an “unconference” which means, in short, Embrace The Chaos.  The organizers basically provide a blank canvas (within the context of Cloud) and with the help of an impromptu panel some topics are generated to fill up the breakout sessions later in the day.

Everyone involved brought their A-game so we were able to have a lot of fun collaborating on what the day would end up looking like.  The list of “official” organizers is here, but the cool thing about an unconference is that we ALL became organizers.

In the end seven sessions were defined:

- Intro to Cloud Computing
- Cloud Management & Interoperability
- Designing for the Cloud & Best Practices
- Cloud Computing for Large Enterprises
- Security, Privacy, and Trust
- Scaleable Data Management (SQL vs noSQL)
- Enterprise Integration

If I can, I’d just like to pick out one thing from each of the sessions I attended to give you the flavour of the day.  Looking at my word count, I’m already pushing the bounds of net-friendly postings.  For more info, you can check out the Flip Notes from the day here.

Session #1: Cloud Management & Interoperability

Troy Angrignon kept a blistering pace through this lively roundtable in order to get through the points in good time.  The question of Vendor Lock-in was the overriding concern by a wide margin.  IT-guys are uber-paranoid of being held hostage and having their data held hostage.  It makes sense.  Once bitten, twice shy.  IT has a ton of baggage from the last generation of computing.  I don’t have the hubris to say “it’s different this time”, but I would say the issue is less difficult in a Cloud world than it was in the client/server world.  I hadn’t realized how intense these concerns were.  Good to know.

Session #2: Designing for the Cloud & Best Practices

Without being too facetious, my main takeaway is probably that I was in the wrong session.  This one was more of a how-to with respect to understanding the technology layers that make up a Cloud App; when to expect bottlenecks, and what to do about them.  Looking at the Flip Notes I think the Large Enterprises session would have held more value for me.  Know for next time.  Trevor O and Dave did a good job, it just wasn’t my bag.

Session #3: Scaleable Data Management – SQL or noSQL

I was really looking forward to this session because it had the potential to turn into an epic nerdfight.  All it would have taken is the presence of one militant, dogmatic ideologue on either side of the debate.  Unfortunately, our group was exceedingly rational and brought nuanced and balanced views.  My friend and colleague, Ryan Prociuk, really showed his chops on the subject bringing a ton of knowledge and experience to the group.

I won’t burden you with the gory details of this one.  Suffice to say, database are not one size fits all.

For now, just know the complexities of SQL (Structured Query Language) could be compared to writing macros in Excel. Tricky.  Here at Indicee, we prefer to let users ask questions using plain English.  It cuts down on the angst.

The highlight of the session, and indeed the DAY, was clearly Dave’s anecdote about running 50 million users on only 1 Oracle database.  It takes a fair bit of “wizardry” to pull something like that off.

Like the saying goes: “Plan for failure”

Aloha

It was a great day.  To everyone who came out, good on ya.  To everyone I was able to connect with, good times.  And to the sponsors, thanks. Leave a comment!

Meeting of the minds

Great local art in the Venue foyer

Enjoy!

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The story was the same, time and again, regardless of location, job function or technology involved: people everywhere are wasting hours, days, weeks and even months cutting and pasting information from their applications into spreadsheets in order to analyze their businesses. Why are they doing this? Because they don’t have any other solution that is easy to use and cost effective to implement.

• The woman waving her arm in the air runs Sales Operations. Their accounting system is not integrated to their text-file-spouting, antiquated MRP system and their forecasting application is home-grown. The result is that they manually move data around into Access databases and worst of all, cut and paste into a 64MB spreadsheet that cannot be shared with the people who need it because of its size. She has already calculated the time spent on manually mashing this data is over 50 person-days per year!
• Manufacturer of RV’s who sells through a dealer network.  They have over 10 years of sales transactions by dealers and VIN number stored in Excel files and a separate application that tracks warranty information.  They recently implemented MAS so now they need to create reports from 3 separate systems and want to give their dealers access to reports.
• One IT Manager receives a daily stream of EDI information from distributors about sales. This information is processed as CSV and then imported into custom tables in their accounting system. On top of this, he has written over 120 Crystal Reports files that are scheduled and emailed to support requests for information from their 50+ sales reps in the field. The reps are compensated both on their sales and sales from the distributors. He cannot get enough reports built fast enough to satisfy their requirements, as the information requests change almost daily.
• A women from a Legal aid society said they receive hundreds of invoices every day from legal aid lawyers.  To figure out how to best spend a limited legal aid budget, she and her boss are spending hours each week manually importing then sorting, subtotalling and pivoting through the invoice data in Excel.

The most common request was for simple sales reporting.

• One senior project manager needs to get sales report to 70 in-house and field sales reps.  They have Business Objects internally and he said it was “overkill”  in terms of complexity and price for simple sales reporting.
• The controller of a medical clinic needs to analyze expenses which are coded by doctor, procedure and about 10 other categories.  Today she has to export the data to excel each month to understand expense trends and identify controls.
• CFO of a plastics company needs to provide sales reports for the company owner and the sales team composed of external manufacturers reps.  Today his only option is to e-mail excel reports which is time consuming because each rep needs a separate report.

The frustration is universal and has nothing to do with how Sage (or any other company) writes software, integrates their applications or add reports to their solutions.

• Companies will always have unique reporting requirements.
• Companies will always purchase and use applications that are not integrated with one another.
• Companies will always create custom solutions to satisfy their needs.
• Companies will always crunch data in spreadsheet, creating a whole host of issues

Indicee allows people and companies to make sense of all of this related but orphaned information. It was a great week. A terrific opportunity to get in front of a large number of people who all had similar stories to tell and to be able to deliver a product that switches on the light at the end of a long tunnel filling with countless hours of mouse-clicking.

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This is my 10th year of attending Sage conferences and I’ve yet to be disappointed in the content, the venue and the people involved. On occasion, they can even arrange for the excitement of a tropical storm to pass our way and lend a little credibility to the overall agenda.

Last night, we were treated to a visit to the Georgia Aquarium, the world’s largest and most engaging aquarium, according to their website. What interested me most were the promises of the presence of the only whale sharks in captivity outside of Asia and the only 2 Manta rays in captivity. I was not disappointed.

The evening started in “the belly of the beast”, the Atlanta Marriott Marquis hotel. Certainly no “beast” in the traditional sense, but a feeling of being Jonah inside the whale when one considers the interior architecture of the building and its surreal, ribcage-like appearance. I wonder if architect John Portman was perhaps a fan of HR Giger’s alien imaginings when he created the building.

From there, we were treated to the driving rains and howling winds of Tropical Storm Ida, recently blown in off the coast from her brief reign as Hurricane Ida. The 10 foot walk from cover to the bus drenched us to the bone, as though tossed through the blowhole of the whale.

Entering the Georgia Aquarium is like being transported fathoms beneath the waves. The massive glass viewing window dwarfs us landlubbers and we are awestruck by the sheer beauty of the underwater realm we are so privileged to witness. Sea creatures of all shapes and sizes drift by, apparently in slow motion, unaware of or unimpressed by our presence. In short course, out of the darkness appears the massive shape of a whale shark, flying towards the glass. A giant Manta ray appears beneath, flying low to the ground, massive mouth agape and moving softly back into the shadows.

Every turn of a corner in the aquarium held new treasures and experiences, more fantastic food and drink and great memories to be made. It seemed fitting somehow to end the evening in the company of pirates, considering we had survived a visit to the depths of Davy Jones’ Locker and returned unscathed.

So what does this have to do with reporting and analysis? Nothing. I suppose I could have made some bizarre leap to try to imagine someone at Sage using a spreadsheet to calculate attendance and food and and … never mind. That would have been a little gratuitous and frankly, we simply had a great time.

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New monitors in hand, ready for action

12 years on the road – you’d think I’d learned my lessons by now but there’s always a way to teach an old dog new tricks. This year, I thought I’d gotten clever. I beat the system and combined the art of promotion with some green thinking and practical savings. I bought new monitors for the trade show. That doesn’t sound particularly inventive, but it is when you consider the money spent and how it’s used. We could have spent $500 renting monitors for our booth. Instead, we bought 2 brand new monitors for about $440 and are giving them away as prizes. Ya, ok, we’re still shelling out the money, but this way, two attendees at the show walk away with great prizes – a much better result than putting the money into the hands of someone charging near-criminal fees to rent equipment.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m all for free enterprise and those in the rental business deserve to make a good living off of their services, but I do draw the line at the decidedly outrageous.

We ordered internet service to our booth for the show. It cost more for 3 days of service than the average household spends on high-speed internet for 3 years. I can live with that. This stuff takes a lot of work to set up for a show. I paid extra for a second line because the instructions mentioned things like being cut off for bringing your own hub. I left the hub at home.

We arrived at our booth to find only one internet line hanging from the ceiling. I called the Internet people and was assured that all I had to do to engage the second line was to attach my hub and cables – the ones I had left at home for fear of being disconnected. I mentioned this and they offered to rent them to me for approximately $440, with a $149 credit after the show.

I was close to buying a hub and cables at the store earlier that day when I bought the monitors. I wanted to extend our hotel room’s archaic single-line internet connection (maybe I’ll get to that story in another post) but thought the $65 expense was a little much and left without them. I did the math, got in the cab, headed back to the mall and now own a small hub and two cables.

Apparently, I’m in the wrong business. Why bother with this software stuff when I can make people’s lives better by renting them stuff for upwards of 1000% more than the retail price? Seems like a good plan to me.

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