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Joachim Schirra on

Hello,

I just came across ARIS Mashzone around two weeks ago. So, I was curious and checked out, what you now are putting into the market. Having checked the product just superficially so far, I admit that it interests me quite a bit. So, in the next days, I guess I will start to examine it a bit more in depths. But so far I would like to make the following annotations and arising from these I also have some questions:

1. The product - in a certain way - partly offers  capabilities like a true datawarehouse solution e.g. data sourcing capabilities usually known in the industry as ETL (Extraction - Transformation - Loading). At least your datafeeds look like this. It was a kind of "Wow" - effect when I found out that your product even enables the user to combine data records from different sources containing common fields/columns via a "true" JOIN - and not only a UNION statement. This is indeed very remarkable given the low release level of Mashzone. I even know fairly mature data warehouse solutions which still struggle to offer this capability in an easy (!) way... ;-) 

However, I was wondering whether you will in future offer an interface to extract data from MS Access solutions. The reason for this idea is fairly simple: In the last two years I worked more on the business side instead of IT departments and I was fairly surprised to see the amount of MS Access solutions which are still used by business users even in case that there have already existed incredible powerful Data Warehouse solutions since many years in these companies. I was so surprised to see such sophisticated and amazing MS Access solutions (in which  much effort has been invested) that I tried to understand the reasons why the business created and maintained them. I finally realized that - despite of all IT efforts to overcome these bypass solutions via central datawarehouses - there will always be such solutions on the business side. And I also started to understand that it sometimes indeed makes sense which is very tough to admit, especially for me being a convinced BI consultant. ;-) However, even the most sophisticated MS access solutions lacked the capability to be distributed in an easy way via the intranet. I therefore could imagine that a kind of MS access connector in Mashzone could stimulate your Mashzone sales. Any plans regarding such an interface for the next releases?

2. The interactivity of Mashzone apps - according to my current understanding - is limited to filtering. Any plans on your side to offer some kind of "Pivot" functionality also known as "Slice" and "Dice" in future relases? I know, this is not so simple due to the necessary underlying data model (Star Schema) you then need to consider. But this leads me to my next, more important question...

3. How does Mashzone manages/keeps/stores the data extracted via data feeds? I guess, there is database file underneath. Or do you just keep the data in a simple file (hopefully not...)? If there is no database underneath, any plans to do this in future?

4. The product surprised me. However, I guess the success clearly depends on a clear positioning in the market.

What do you try to target? I do not assume that you try to compete with powerful datawarehouse solutions such as SAP BI, IBM Cognos, Oracle Hyperion... I also assume that you do not try to create yet another kind of Portal functionality... What you call "Self service BI" for the Business user, that sounds interesting at first glance. "Quick and agile" BI - solutions overcoming these incredible long lasting project times of BI projects (in average between 6 months and 2-3 years depending on scope and scale) could attract frustrated business users.

A platform offering  business departments the ability to realize a limited, but quick solution for analytic applications/questions which usually do not get enough awareness and high priorities from IT side (due to the very specific business question which might be not so interesting for other departments)? Is this what you want to offer? If so, fine. There is indeed a need in the market. 

Integrating internal and external source data quickly on department level without the need to create a time consuming  IT investment proposal and - in case of approval - to wait a couple of months, if not even years for the realization. Stunnning idea...

However, the typical "use cases" need to be clarified. A clearer distinction from other, more powerful solutions need to be made, also for the reason that IT is usually looking with very "critical" eyes on such "submarine"-solutions. Usually whitepapers containing use cases could explain theses scenarios in a good way. Anything in the pipeline?

5. "Transposer" functionality for two dimensional excel tables. I read the discussion about this feature and I understand the request of the user who started the discussion. This is indeed a weak point of Mashzone - at least currently. If a business user needs to manually transform the excel tables into a flat file, this reduces the benefit of Mashzone significantly. Expecting the user to write a VBA skript or a VB macro is also somehow reducing the goal of the application to offer a quick and agile BI end user solution and requires a certain development knowledge on business user level.  I of course know and agree that even some of the more sophisticated datawarehouse solutions such as SAP BI also still lack this functionality... but some other tools have this ability... Any plans for the future?

6. Files/Annotations. Any plans to enable to attach documents such as Word/PPT/PDF etc. to a Mash? Any plans to enable a kind of functionality to make comments/annotations to specific figures (cell based of course... ;-)  )? 

7. Delta mechanism: It sounds a bit nasty/ugly... I know... But are there any possibilities to upload only the changes of a file since the last extraction or does the end user needs to make sure, that the file only contains the changes and not also the old values... ? I know... crazy idea, but a very common scenario...

8. The functionality of the datafeed in terms of data enrichment (e.g. calbulations) looks very promising. Aggregation, concation, calculation, all this is very nice and fine and certainly appreciated. However, in case of many necessary transformations/enrichments, the current way to do this graphically might be a bit time consuming. Maybe a more efficient way to do the mapping respectively to enter the enrichment rules would be good... Any plans?

9. How frequently do you plan to offer new releases? Once in a year? More frequently?

Let me finally say, the product really surprised me in an enjoyable way - at least at first glance. I never expected IDS Scheer to enter the BI market (I am not talking about the PI (Process Intelligence) market). There might be indeed a niche in this huge market to empower the business user who needs a tool to provide sophisticated reporting solutions on departmental level integrating data from different internal and external data sources in an easy and quick way without the help of the IT department. However, there might be a clash with well established solutions on the market... Nevertheless, I wish you Good luck.

Looking forward to hearing your opinion regarding the suggestions/questions made above.

Best regards,

Joachim Schirra

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