(WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — The recent explosion in the popularity of business intelligence solutions is helping companies make more informed decisions by capturing, analyzing, warehousing and mining information. However, there is a certain level of trust needed when it comes to where this data is being stored, and who has access to it. Kognitio’s (www.kognitio.com) data warehousing as a service (or DaaS) solution is one where privacy and security is taken very seriously.
“We have a view that is a bit more oriented toward security and privacy than some of the other vendors,” Kognitio US chief executive officer John Thompson explained in a phone interview. “You can’t just go out there and willy-nilly throw out peoples’ financial data and have it sitting in virtualized environments where you can’t guarantee their officers have complete control over it. So, we have a trusted, private cloud based offering that takes care of those concerns and enables officers of the company to sign off on the documents that they’re required by law to sign off on saying, ‘the data is under control, the data is secure, the environment is assured, and is being handled in a responsible way.’”
Kognitio’s DaaS solution is powered by its fast analytical database architecture, Kognitio WX2, which is used worldwide by companies spanning a wide range of established and emerging industries such as telecommunications, biogenomics, consumer packaged goods, retail, media, marketing, financial services and utilities. It enables them to analyze and gain insights from multiple terabytes of information within seconds or minutes, instead of the hours, days or longer required by legacy database products.
Thompson says Kognitio provides a wide range of installation options: the software can be licensed on a global capacity basis; incorporated in a data warehouse appliance built on commodity-based hardware; or as a service.
“We started out many years ago as a vendor of a proprietary hardware and software platform called ‘WhiteCross,’” he says, “and over the years we decided that we wanted to have flexible delivery paradigms that we could get the value of the platform out to people, so we sold it (and we still do) as a piece of software, we sell it as a hardware and software data warehousing appliance, and we sell it as a service as well. So, we started out as an appliance vendor, moved into the software world supported by services: now we do all three.”
DaaS lets businesses quickly derive answers from data on an outsourced basis, at a fraction of the cost and time it would take for a company to buy and install the hardware and software required. It also provides clients with a greater amount of flexibility.
“Many organizations have a wide range of skill sets within their companies. Data warehousing and business intelligence require a pretty significant collaboration and coordination effort from the end-users, the technical people, the hardware and software, data management, and so on, and often they may have 60 percent of that skill set or 80 percent of that skill set, and we allow them to leverage what they have internally, while we augment what they don’t have,” Thompson says. “We allow that company to ring that forward, showcase those skills, and we support them by providing the hardware, the software, the technology, the expertise, the experience, and the areas of skills where they may be lacking.”
The DaaS solution has also been warmly embraced by resellers.
In late May, Kognitio signed a reseller agreement with BI and data warehousing specialist, Poslovna Inteligencija (www.inteligencija.com), which serves the Adriatic region, including Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia and Kosovo, allowing the Croatian company to market, sell and support Kognitio’s WX2 analytical database solution in the Adriatic region states, either as a software license, a data warehouse appliance, or as a DaaS offering.
“Kognitio’s offering in the data warehousing space with its in-memory analytical database, WX2, will enable enterprises in our markets to benefit from high-speed access to large volumes of data without having to fork out six-figure sums,” Drazen Orescanin, Poslovna Inteligencija’s head of strategy and development, says. “Companies understand that data warehousing and BI projects can be fraught with risk given that many are using old data warehousing architectures. Kognitio offers a fresh approach to deep-dive analytics that is scalable, flexible and safeguards a company’s investment for the future growth in data. We’re excited about adding Kognitio’s WX2 database to our BI and data warehousing portfolio and offering the power and performance of the solution to leading companies in our region,” he said.
