Earlier this week, I spoke with John Thompson, CEO of Kognitio's North American operations. Kognitio, according to the company website, "provides solutions to business problems that require acquisition, rationalization and analysis of both large and complex data."
Thompson discussed with me Kognitio's WX2 analytical database, as well as DaaS -- or as Kognitio calls it, "Data Warehousing as a Service" -- and where this all fits into a cloud computing model. The big question on everyone's mind is: can their data be trusted when it goes into the cloud?
Hear Thompson's answer in the 4:03 podcast below (listen here or download):
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Kognitio has really staked out a position in the market with its deployment options for its WX2 database. What's the thinking behind that?
Well, that's a great question. Kognitio has been around for a number of years and we've gone through some different eras where we have offered proprietary hardware/software solution. We've offered our value as a service and we've offered also as a software-based solution as well. So really, what we try to avail to our customers is that they can pull the value out of our software and technology any way they want either as a service, software, or as a hardware appliance.
Now, let's focus a moment on DaaS or what you call Data Warehousing as a Service. It's a newer name but the implementation has been around for a while?
Yes, absolutely. We began offering Data Warehousing as a Service as an ASP service almost 13 years ago now. We've had one customer, British Telecom, or we refer to them as BT here in the US, they just renewed their contract. I think we've been doing it now for about 10 years with them and it will be 13 when this renewal runs out. So it has been around for a while but the evolution of the technology, broadband connections, and speeds of hardware and the software has really made it something that has grown in popularity as of late.
And does this fit into a cloud computing model?
It certainly does. We think of our data center operations in the UK and our partner operations here in the US as a trusted or private cloud where when you're putting up your mission-critical information that you're learning about your customers, and their transactions, and margins, and different kinds of analytical and intelligence factors like that you want that to be stored with a partner that you can trust and that you know that data is secure and has privacy considerations around it. But yes, we do consider DaaS model to be amenable and workable in a cloud environment.
Now WX2 as it's designed, is it really meant for intensive analytics?
WX2 is an interesting piece of technology. It is an analytical database that's optimized and is setup in a way that people can asked very simple questions of it. How many customers shopped in the store on this day and bought these kind of products, or you can go after it in a very intensive data mining predictive analytics way and asked some very intense questions. Do analyses then include forecasting and simulations and things of that nature? So yes, it was designed and meant for intensive analytics on a very economical basis but it's also used for very simple reporting and queries as well.
What size businesses would benefit fromWX2 most?
Well, we see different customers using different delivery models. In our DaaS service, there a small medium size businesses but also BT as I remarked is a large multinational corporation using DaaS as well. But the DaaS customers tend to skew towards the lower end of the range and then the appliance customers and the software customers are anywhere from the large or small and medium-sized businesses all the way up into multinational corporations so we have delivery models and value delivery mechanisms for anywhere from very small to very large.
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