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A recent ebizQ Webinar guest estimated that by the year 2010, the world's data volume will reach one zetabyte -- a 1 with 21 zeroes after it. To state the obvious, that's a lot of data, and it's also an obvious challenge for corporations  that want to find ways to use that data to business advantage. Bath, U.K.-based CopperEye is one company that hopes to help solve that problem.

Complications and Costs of Data Management

The first challenge of data management is obviously being able to find the data you want, points out CopperEye CEO Kate Mitchell.

"As companies have been continuing to increase the size of the database they are adding larger hardware platforms so that performance remains constant, both on the transaction side and the analytical side," she says.

But databases are growing so large that hardware costs and data center footprints, along with power requirements, are becoming unmanageable and companies are starting to have trouble finding highly skilled DBAs to manage everything.

In some industries, traditional solutions can still keep pace with data needs, but in others you cannot just throw money at the problem, Mitchell says. The explosion in data is too dramatic. And furthermore, she points out, regulatory issues are forcing companies to keep more data for longer and be able to provide specific responses to inquiries sometimes in 24 hours or less.

Data Management in Industry Verticals

The telecommunications sector tends to have complex data needs, says Mitchell. "They are heavily regulated and in this case, aiding to combat terrorism - they need to find very specific information on individuals that are potential criminal suspects -- to be able to find calls they made, when they made them, where they were, who they called, how often they called."

In business, issues like 3G are creating loads of data, as are services like cell phones for audio/video shopping and so forth. The financial industry tends to have particularly intensive data needs as well. And as websites are being asked to track visitor information, that creates massive amounts of data as well.

Scaling with the Data Explosion

Relational databases have weaknesses in managing huge amounts of data, says Mitchell. Relational databases were designed to manage data that's changing. "There's no better approach for concurrency with hundreds or even thousands of users inside an organization and outside an organization and making sure you've got all of the capability for transactional integrity whether that's two-phase commit or row-level locking," she says. "That's exactly what the database was designed for."

But in data that's not changing, such as transaction or event data, sometimes you may not need the overhead or complexity of a relational database. An alternative is to keep such static data in a lower cost, scalable location such as a simple flat file -- but without giving up immediate and precise access to that data.

"That's what CopperEye is finding that our customers are pleased with as a new innovation in managing this vast volume of data without giving up very precise and immediate access to the data," she points out.

CopperEye takes the flat file system and tries to use the best attributes of that -- the low cost and high scalability along with simplicity and indexing, almost cherry picking through the IT stack.

Case Studies - A Wireless Provider and a Messaging Company

One CopperEye customer, Orange (a UK wireless provider) needed to track anomalous calling patterns for revenue tracking and for regulatory compliance with the EU. Orange found that storing all that data was not feasible in a relational database model, so they worked with CopperEye to find a way to store the data in a flat file instead.

"We added up the other day that we've handled 500 billion transactions for them over that period of time [seven years]," Mitchell said.

Orange went from storing call records in a relational database, where it could only afford to keep ten percent for two days, to keeping the records in a flat file where it could keep 100 percent for 40 days. "Just to put that in perspective, to meet the new EU mandates, rather than keeping all this data for 40 days, the guideline is to keep it for a minimum of a year and some EU member countries, like Ireland are saying that data needs to be kept for three years," said Mitchell.

In another example, a CopperEye customer called Message Labs had over 13,000 corporate customers with 35 million email accounts and about 8 billion emails per month. The company needed tot rack these emails across twelve data centers around the world with a 24-hour service level agreement that Message Labs would locate missing emails within 24 hours.

"Their network help desk would notify their operations people," she said. "Their operations people would actually be trolling through these log files trying to find literally that needle in the haystack; that one email out of the billions that they handle in any particular month."

And customers wanted turnaround faster than 24 hours a lot of the time. Message Labs implemented CopperEye and got direct access to log files. Now, within a few seconds, customers can go online and enter recipient or sends or subjects and retrieve information on a particular email within a few seconds. This has improved customer service and lowered costs for Message Labs.

Flat Files and Vocabulary Search

Mitchell is quick to point out that flat files are not a cure-all for all data storage needs. "This approach is not for text or word documents or web pages," she says. "CopperEye is focused on data that would otherwise live in the database -- scalar data."

For e-discovery and searches for documents and Web pages, companies like Endeca, Fast, Google, and Yahoo tend to be most optimized. "They pre-build all the indexes based on every important word or relevant word in any particular language," she explains. "That's not possible to do at huge volumes if you've got 15 billion combinations of transaction ID or customer ID based on combinations of alphanumeric characters. So that's one distinction that we make right up front with the prospect."

Executive Summary by Krissi Danielsson

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Bob Carter will regularly respond to any comments posted below.

You've probably heard of Six Sigma, but have you heard about how it relates to business process management? ebizQ's Gian Trotta recently spoke with Bob Carter, a senior consultant with the Raytheon Company, about this very issue. Carter will be making a presentation on the subject at the IOPC's Upcoming Seventh Annual Business Process Conference.

"I think by achieving the right what/why/how balance, organizations can focus their new business investments on the right projects and innovations," he said. "Lean Six Sigma is a powerful methodology to enable this balance, especially in innovation where success depends not only on finding the critical idea but in turning it into reality."

Lean Six Sigma's Role in Business Process Management

According to Carter, many Six Sigma and Lean Six Sigma tools can help to manage ideas that might make a difference and then reduce time to market once the critical few are identified. If Lean Six Sigma is a bridge between the current and desired future state, he said, innovation is the same thing.

"The only main difference between the two is that Lean Six Sigma solves problems and innovation helps to introduce something new, it develops the opportunity," he said.

One example of the how this works is in what Carter called the "channel strategy" to turn early, quality information into important business ideas. Channel strategy channels the idea into the part of the organization that can act on that idea. Carter plans to discuss this concept in the upcoming conference.

Human or Process Oriented BPM

Both human and process-oriented BPM is important, said Carter.

"You might know what to do, you might even know how to do it, but if for some reason, you don’t really understand the reasons why and if you haven’t made the emotional connection with the people that you’re helping, then it’s unlikely really that you’ll be addressing the right issues for them," he explained.

And all BPM is really all about the team anyway, Carter continued, and finding a way to harness the creative power of a mixture of right and left brain oriented thinkers.

Future of BPM and BI

BPM will need to address the strategic needs of a business or organization, said Carter, and leaders need to be prepared to think and act with strategy and tact, addressing both top and bottom line growth with focus on customer success in both a macro and a micro viewpoint.

"I believe that BPM has got a great role to play, innovations got a great role to play and through customer success our organizations will become more successful," he said.

Executive Summary by Krissi Danielsson

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BPM may be all the rage, but sometimes implementing the BPM tools out there means loads of various expenses and consulting fees. From the land down under, eVision hopes to change that with its MessageXchange.com solution, which delivers integration and business process management through the Software-as-a-Service model -- a model which eVision co-founder John Delaney says can take a lot of the pain out of BPM.

EVision got its start back in 1996 with a business focus of business-to-business integration. It offers its services on MessageXchange.com both directly to customers and through licensing to service providers.

Using SaaS for Integration and BPM

"People may be surprised that Software-as-a-Service can be used for integration and BPM," he says. "But I think they will quickly become excited by what they can do and how easy it is to use."

SaaS has long been used in other areas like CRM, such as is the approach of companies like Salesforce.com. Delaney points out that SaaS works the same way for integration and BPM as it does for those applications -- customers have the functionality hosted for them without the need for infrastructure and with a pay-as-you-go approach that is scaled to individual usage needs and amount of features used. For BPM, that means a monthly message volume fee and per-seat user fee.

"The removal of the up-front capital expenditure and on-going operational and maintenance costs significantly reduces the total cost of ownership," Delaney points out. "It also means the ROI can be achieved in months rather than years."

Software-as-a-Service also has a faster speed-to-market, Delaney points out, with reductions from 10-30% as compared to a conventional software application, and is future-proof since enhancements and new functionality are added without the need for customers to purchase upgrades.

Case Studies

If you're wondering how SaaS-based BPM might be used, one existing eVision customer is a financial services company that has an outsourced mortgage processing service running on MessageXchange.com.

"Their developers use the web portal and have created the messages and processes that integrate mortgage brokers, banks, credit rating agencies, legal services and government departments," Delaney says. "They also monitor and support their customers’ usage via web portal. This service enables them to take a mortgage application and automatically process it."

Another example is a telecommunications company with a 200-retail shop network with call centers and  adealer network. This company uses MessageXchange.com to integrate the front of house systems with the back-end and the outsourced warehouse and other partners.

Future of SaaS

The future of SaaS is now, says Delaney, and he predicts it will become the dominant way of delivering software thanks to its ability to allow any sized project to quickly achieve ROI.

"In the software product model, most integration and BPM applications remained the preserve of larger organizations. They have the critical mass to achieve a return on the up-front capital costs and on-going running costs associated with those projects," he says. "The SaaS model means SME’s and smaller projects can also access the same if not better functionality and achieve a return since they only pay for what they use."

Delaney predicts a proliferation of SaaS applications starting strongest in the SME end of the market but then with larger organizations following suit -- similar to how client server applications overtook mainframes.

"Our ever more competitive and changing world will require a rapid, flexible and lower cost model, which is why Software-as-a-Service will become the popular choice," he says.

To learn more, including eVision's future plans for MessageXchange.com, listen to the entire podcast.

Executive Summary by Krissi Danielsson

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