Let’s first talk about the name: Cogito Ergo Sumatra. In college, I was impressed with Descartes’ brilliant thinking. I liked that I could always remember him by one famous phrase. He had a huge impact on Western philosophy, but today I actually don’t know what he thought about.
Perhaps something like… “I’m thinking about whether I exist, and wondering if I do, and realizing that if I’m thinking this, it would seem reasonable that I do exist.” These days it sounds more like a Jackie Mason routine to me than 17th Century philosophy. If you take this thinking a step further, and move from “I think therefore I am” to “I think therefore Sumatra”, then you get down to the kernel at the center of my brain – “I think therefore I drink coffee.”
Yes – that’s what it’s all about. You need coffee in this business. You need something to stimulate your mind, to keep you going. I’ve been in the software business for a while – there have been major advancements, yet a lot has stayed the same. A lot of reinvention. A lot of re-cooking the same recipe. Of all the facets of this business that I’ve been involved in, the BI space is one of the most fascinating, but not because it’s that fascinating (I’m not that much of a propeller head), rather because it’s one segment of the software business that has such a terrible track record.
In ’08 the business analytics market came in at about $60B. That’s huge! The amazing thing about it is that 60% of this was services. That’s amazing! Does this stuff work? I mean think about this in its most rudimentary form: I buy an iPhone for $400 and it doesn’t work so I hire a consultant and pay him another $240 to make it work. What a beautiful world we live in. There’s no other planet in the entire universe, with the exception of possibly one in the Centaurus galaxy, that affords this level of opportunity.
Unlike most other areas of software, which provide solutions, BI typically provides a platform that lets you build a solution. This is why the BI business is so great. There are actually very few packaged BI solutions out there. That’s why the services component is 60%.
Now take this into consideration, every time there’s a management change the new regime wants to see something different. Every time the business hiccups you want to see something new. Every time there’s a competitive threat or market change you want to see the impact. Every time there’s a major management review or board meeting there are new requirements. This never ends.
On top of this, count on the fact that when you ask the business side of the house what they want and you’ve built them what they’ve asked for, you have to deal with the rude surprise that you didn’t build what they wanted. This is completely unending and of infinite potential!
Why else do you think that during the most dramatic economic downturn since the Great Depression that BI was one of the only tech categories that grew? Management just had to have more information, data, reports, and analysis to explain just how lousy things were. The infiniteness of the BI opportunity is a beautiful thing! I think we need Stephen Hawking to do some quantum mechanics calculations of just how big this monster really is and what the potential for black holes might be.
I don’t know what it really means to be a blogger, so I’m trying this out. There’s a certain cool aspect to this. I hate to admit I’m really not a web 2.0 guy who’s into social networking and stuff like that. I tried Facebook, but ultimately abandoned it – didn’t like the friend aspect of it. I’m on LinkedIn but only have 3 contacts – the individual who personally asked me to join and the two others who were in the room when he made the request. After my Facebook experience I was wondering about some antiface.com thing, but then I discovered one already existed. Imagine joining that – I don’t like social networking so now I’m going to network with people who hate me.
I hope to blog again.
