Building a BI Consulting Company Part II

Posted on May 21, 2013 by Phil Rack

In the previous post I mentioned that software costs and licensing can be a major impediment to offering a competitive consulting business. I’ve written numerous times demonstrating the cost between a WPS license and our competitor licensed product. You can see those articles here and here.

If you’re a small business and/or just starting an analytics business then cash flow is a major issue. You expect that there will be some significant startup costs but wisely choosing your products can have a major impact on whether you will be successful or not.

The same goes for what you can do with the license. For example, some software companies put the screws to you when you want to use their licensed software in a B2B fashion. This can be innocuous as creating reports and data sets for your customer. The vendor, if they realize it will then dramatically increase your license fees.

How about licensing issues between your company and the software vendor where they have a vested interest in a software solution and you want to offer a competing product? Or perhaps (and more likely) what if they develop a competing product to your solution and decide that they no longer want to provide your organization with a software license? This is a very possible scenario where software companies want to create or move into vertical market applications at the expense of their license holders.

So those are a few things to consider in regards to software costs and licensing. Do your research and ask questions of the vendor. It never hurts to be informed.

About the author: Phil Rack is President of MineQuest Business Analytics, LLC located in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Phil has been a SAS language developer for more than 25 years. MineQuest provides WPS and SAS consulting and contract programming services and is a authorized reseller of WPS in North America.

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Building a BI Consulting Company

Posted on May 5, 2013 by Phil Rack

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been engaged in a series of conversations regarding consulting and necessary hardware and software to run a successful consulting house. In the last year we’ve seen so many references to “big data” and many of us in the consulting field just shrug our shoulders and smirk because we’ve understood that “big data” is a lot of hype for most of us. If you want to be precise about it, the term (and what we should be concerned with) is actually “big analytics.”

As a BI consultant or consulting house, you don’t have to replicate your client’s systems or data warehouse to consult on “big analytics.” As a matter of fact, some of the most successful BI consulting going on today are with companies that have outsourced a portion of their analytics to a third party. For example, loyalty cards are a driving force in retail and many organizations have outsourced this to third party analytics firms. We also see a growing opportunity in health care for fraud detection and pricing of procedures and prescriptions.

So the question comes down to what is your consulting focus? Is it providing knowledge and programming expertise to a company and perform the consulting remotely (or even onsite) or is it more encompassing and moving in the direction where you have the client’s data on your systems and perform a daily/weekly/monthly service?

I’m inclined to argue that the more financially successful firms that are offering consulting are the ones that are taking client’s data and providing the analytics services away from the client. The rates and fees are higher than when you are on site and there is limited travel time and expense to deal with.

I often see quotes for servers that they have been solicited from Dell, IBM or HP when they are sizing hardware to run WPS. I am amazed at how reasonably an organization can purchase or lease hardware that is immensely powerful for processing data sets when running WPS. I’ve seen 16 and 32 core servers that can run dozens of WPS jobs simultaneously priced between $40K and $60K.

I’m convinced that if you have a good services offering (and a decent sales staff who can find you clients) that this is the golden age in analytics for smaller firms and firms considering jumping into this space. My observations with advertising agencies and others who offer such services bears out that the supply of talent is low and the demand is high.

Of course, hardware cost is just one factor in this line of business so in a future column we will talk about how software cost and licensing can constrain you to the point where you can’t provide any services to third parties or it can set you free and allow you to make significantly more money. Software licensing is a major component to running a profitable BI/Analytics service.

About the author: Phil Rack is President of MineQuest Business Analytics, LLC located in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Phil has been a SAS language developer for more than 25 years. MineQuest provides WPS and SAS consulting and contract programming services and is a authorized reseller of WPS in North America.

Posted in Business Intelligence, Consulting, Legal, Licensing, MineQuest Business Analytics, LLC, SAS Replacement, WPS | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Complexity and Cost

Posted on April 16, 2013 by Phil Rack

This past weekend, my wife and I went to a lovely wedding. This was a Catholic wedding that was amazingly short but the priest had a very interesting sermon on complexity and cost. He talked about complexity in our lives and the cost both direct and indirect that we each experience. One example that he gave was smart phones and how expensive they are in terms of outright cost of service as well as the indirect cost, that being how much time we take playing and looking at the gadgets at the expense of others and relationships around us.

Hi sermon got me thinking. This is true for software and business intelligence in particular. The cost of non-open source software can be pretty high. And the reason for that? Support cost, sales cost, maintenance cost, legal costs, etc…

I often see how companies have purposely fragmented their products so that they can charge more for additional libraries modules. This has increased cost tremendously for the consumer. Our competitor is a prime example of this. They send out a local or regional sales person to chat up the prospect. Often, they can’t answer the questions the customer has because of the complexity of the product. So they send out a Sales Engineer or two who visits the prospect to answer these questions and chat them up a second time. Now we have three people in the mix who are making a 100 grand a year (at least) involved in the sale. The price of the software product has to increase to the customer because of all the people involved in the sale.

Here’s another example of added complexity. Different pricing for the same product depending on how you use it. Take companies that are B2B in nature. Firms such as actuarial firms, claims processing, advertising etc… are often labeled as data service providers because they want to use the software in a B2B capacity. Sometimes this is as innocuous as being a Contract Research Organization providing statistical analysis. The cost here comes from a different license (think lawyers), people to audit the customer and employees to enforce the license. It all adds up!

That above examples illustrate everything that is wrong with traditional ways of thinking in terms of software. At MineQuest Business Analytics, we’re proud that we are able to help keep cost down for the customer. We don’t have such draconian licensing for companies that are DSP’s. We don’t have an organization that is setup to milk and churn the customer for every last cent. What we do have is a company that is dedicated to providing the best service and software at an affordable price.

About the author: Phil Rack is President of MineQuest Business Analytics, LLC located in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Phil has been a SAS language developer for more than 25 years. MineQuest provides WPS and SAS consulting and contract programming services and is a authorized reseller of WPS in North America.

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Cool and Useful Software

Posted on March 17, 2013 by Phil Rack

I always enjoy reading other folks blogs on how they work and the tools they use most every day. It’s a great way to learn about new tools and how to work more efficiently. I have to rave about the phone system we use here at MineQuest. We use VOIP and our provider is VOIPO out of Texas. The quality is tremendous as well as the support. The cost is amazing for what you get. The benefits of VOIPO are numerous for a small business, but the one I like the most is a softphone. I can travel and still be able to use my phone system almost as well as if I was in the office. You can visit the VOIPO web site to get pricing and view all the features that they offer.

Of course I use Skype. I can use Skype to call overseas and to text message with friends, family and business contacts. I have contacts that are almost always on Skype and the number of Skype contacts that I have just continues to grow. If you want or need to do business overseas, then Skype maybe the only way you can do so cost effectively. I hope to see more integration of Skype into other products and services and the availability of an easier to use API. If you don’t have at least a free Skype account, you should visit the Skype website and get Skype today.

I recently started to use a new Linux distribution called ZorinOS. I have version 6.1 and essentially, ZorinOS is Ubuntu Linux with the coolest GUI interface. With ZorinOS, you can change the interface to mimic Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Mac OS X and the Ubuntu Unity Interface. If you are a Windows User and want to start using Linux with minimum fuss and frustration, ZorinOS is something to try. Check out the ZorinOS website to learn more.

I also signed up for Microsoft’s Office 365. There are a number of plans available and you can see all of them at the Microsoft web site. But if you have multiple machines like I do, desktop, laptop and a Mac, Office 365 gives you five simultaneous installs for $100. This is an annual license and I love that I get Outlook on all my desktop machines. I love the simplicity and the fact that I get cloud storage to store my documents so I can access them from anywhere.

About the author: Phil Rack is President of MineQuest Business Analytics, LLC located in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Phil has been a SAS language developer for more than 25 years. MineQuest provides WPS and SAS consulting and contract programming services and is a authorized reseller of WPS in North America.

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Analytical Data Marts

Posted on March 12, 2013 by Phil Rack

Recently, there has been a conversation on what defines “Big Data”. It’s my position (among others) that Big Data is data that is so large that a single computer cannot process it in a timely manner. Hence, we have grid computing. Grid computing is not inexpensive and is overkill for many organizations.

The term “Huge Data” has been bandied about as well. In the conversations regarding what is Big Data, it was sort of agreed that Huge Data is a data set that sits somewhere between 10GB and 20GB in size. (Note: In about two years I will look back at this article and laugh about writing that a 20GB data set is huge for desktops and small servers.) The term Big Data is so abused and misused by the technical press and even many of the BI vendors that it’s almost an irrelevant term. But Huge Data has my interest and I will tell you why.

The other day I read a blog article on the failure of Big Data projects. The article talks about a failure rate of 55%. I was not surprised by that kind of failure rate. I was surprised that there were not solutions being offered. In the analytics world, especially in finance and health care, we tend to work with data that comes from a data warehouse or a specialized data mart. The specialized data mart is really an analytics data mart with the data cleaned and transformed into a form that is useful for analysis.

Analytical data marts are cost effective. This is especially true when the server that is required is modest compared to the monsters DB’s running on large iron. Departments can almost always afford a smaller server and expect and receive much better turnaround time on jobs than most data warehouses. Data marts are more easily expandable and can be tuned more effectively for analytics. Heck, I’ve yet to work on a mainframe or large data warehouse that could outrun a smaller server or desktop for most of my needs.

The cost for a WPS server license on a four, eight or even sixteen core analytics data mart is quite reasonable. With WPS on the desktop and a WPS Linux server, analyst can remotely submit code to the data mart and receive back the log, listings and graphics right back into their desktop workbench. But the biggest beauty of running WPS in your data mart platform is that WPS comes with all the database access engines as part of the package. If you have worked in a large environment with multiple database vendors, you can see how this can be very cost effective when it comes to importing data from all these different data bases into an analytical data mart.

About the author: Phil Rack is President of MineQuest Business Analytics, LLC located in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Phil has been a SAS language developer for more than 25 years. MineQuest provides WPS and SAS consulting and contract programming services and is a authorized reseller of WPS in North America.

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Being Small Business Friendly

Posted on March 5, 2013 by Phil Rack

We recently put together a WPS vs. SAS Server Cost Comparison. Interestingly, this is one of the most downloaded documents from the MineQuest website. For the first time, smaller companies can afford to run the language of SAS on a server at reasonable prices.

Many companies however don’t have the resources, either financial or technologically to implement a server solution for their organization. And that’s OK too. Using WPS on a desktop is a great way to utilize a WPS license at a reasonable cost. So today, I want to talk about WPS on a desktop and how a smaller organization or department can implement WPS in a cost effective manner.

Being Small Business Friendly

I like to think that we are very Small Business Friendly in terms of our pricing structures. We don’t have high upfront charges to start using the product. We feel this is nothing more than a lock-in strategy and punishes start-ups and small businesses and would result in organizations shying away from using WPS.

Being small Business Friendly goes beyond just pricing. If you run an analytics consulting company and primarily find yourself involved in the B2B sector (and who isn’t?) you may be a Data Service Provider as defined by our competitor. The whole concept of being a DSP is just a ruse to extract more money out your organization.

Your customers and partners are yours. We don’t jump in and demand names of companies that you are doing business with and up-charge you for the use of the software to deliver reports and data sets created with our software. We don’t force you to sign a license agreement that demands if an existing customer drops a license that you are responsible for making up the difference. And, we don’t force you to make quarterly reports of who your customers are so that we can them market to them.

So in the spirit of good competition, I’ve put together a short pricing comparison of WPS on a desktop vs. SAS on a desktop. I used the Analytics Pro pricing from SAS because that seems to be the biggest bang for the buck in terms of pricing. I also added in two access engines to the mix. Most users would want to be able to read and write to Excel and Access as well as say SPSS. Of course, these are included in WPS but are an additional cost from our competitor.

I also included pricing from the GSA schedule. The GSA (Government Services Administration) is an organization that exists to get best pricing. According to the GSA, best pricing is at least 16% below the commercial pricing. So I thought it would be interesting to include those figures too. I know a lot of state and federal agencies read this blog so it’s informative for them to see how much money they can save if they decide to swap out SAS for WPS.

Table 1. Single License – First Year License Fee Comparison of WPS vs. SAS on a Desktop.

Desktop Product WPS SAS SAS Govt (GSA)
Analytics Pro $1,266 $8,700 $6,870
PC File Formats Included $3,000 $2,176
ODBC/OLE DB Included $3,000 $2,176
Total

$1,266

$14,700

$10,739

 

Table 2. Five User License: First Year License Fee Comparison of WPS vs. SAS on a Desktop.

Desktop Product WPS SAS SAS Govt (GSA)
Analytics Pro $6,330 $34,800 $24,468
PC File Formats Included $6,600 $4,463
ODBC/OleDB Included $6,600 $4,463
Total $6,330 $48,000 $33,394

By the way, all the prices above are readily available on the Internet. The prices shown were prices listed on March 4, 2013.

About the author: Phil Rack is President of MineQuest Business Analytics, LLC located in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Phil has been a SAS language developer for more than 25 years. MineQuest provides WPS and SAS consulting and contract programming services and is a authorized reseller of WPS in North America.

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2013 WPS and SAS Server Pricing Comparison

Posted on February 26, 2013 by Phil Rack

It’s that time of the year again. We’ve updated our ever popular WPS vs. SAS Pricing Comparison document for 2013. As in previous years, we pulled data for SAS pricing from the GSA schedule. As most of you who have read previous years pricing comparisons, WPS continues to stay significantly less expensive than our competitor.

The pricing differential for even our most entry level server product in contrast with our competitor is stunning. For example, with the money you can save in the very first year in licensing WPS over SAS on just a two core server, you could:

  • Buy 5 Kia Souls.
  • Pay for food for a family of four for 7.5 years.
  • Will buy four years of in-state tuition and room and board at Ohio State University.
  • Buys 27 years worth of gasoline for the average U.S family.
  • You could add an employee to your company.
  • Buys 24 months of a high end vacation rental home that has a Jacuzzi and lap pool.

OK, you get the point! Click the following link for the updated Pricing Comparison Document in PDF format.

About the author: Phil Rack is President of MineQuest Business Analytics, LLC located in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Phil has been a SAS language developer for more than 25 years. MineQuest provides WPS and SAS consulting and contract programming services and is a authorized reseller of WPS in North America.

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Taking in the Southwest

Posted on February 26, 2013 by Phil Rack

We’ve been spending some time in Tucson, trying to escape the Midwestern snows and cold. Since the time difference between Grand Rapids and Tucson is two hours, it’s also a good way to contact potential customers out west. All-in-all, Mother Nature has been a bit cooperative. We’ve had a few nice days where you could go to the pool – it’s been that warm. There was also a freak snow storm that blew through the area last week. The locals were pretty amazed and took the kids out to play in the snow and photograph the spectacle.

I found the mountains to be the best part of the snow. We are literally a short walk to Sabino Canyon which is one of the most picturesque places I’ve ever seen. As a matter of fact, the picture at the top of the blog is from a hike last year through Sabino Canyon.

Below is a picture of snow blanketing the upper elevations of the Catalina Mountains.

IMG_1149

If your business or organization is in the Tucson or Phoenix area and you are interested in a demonstration of WPS in the month of March, give us a call at (614) 457-3714. We can setup a time to demonstrate the software and discuss how you can save money each year by licensing WPS instead of SAS.

About the author: Phil Rack is President of MineQuest Business Analytics, LLC located in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Phil has been a SAS language developer for more than 25 years. MineQuest provides WPS and SAS consulting and contract programming services and is a authorized reseller of WPS in North America.

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Sending SMS Text via WPS

Posted on February 22, 2013 by Phil Rack

As mobile has become ubiquitous in our culture, it’s become more of the norm to utilize cell phones and tablets in both our business and personal life. There’s a seismic shift in personal computing that has impacted us in both the work place as well as at home. Our phones and tablets are basically used as a consumer device. As a consumer device, I mean a gadget that we don’t program on to do various things, but a device to alert us and to keep us informed.

One of the interesting applications that can be done with WPS is the use of email from within your WPS application. For example, you can format a report and send it via email to those folks who need to see it as opposed to having to send emails manually. One cool thing is that you can also use WPS to send a text message via the WPS application.

There could be a use for sending a SMS message via your WPS program. For example, one use could be to notify you that a long running job has run to completion or has thrown an error code.

To send a text message, you need to find your cell phone’s gateway before you can send an SMS message. Below is a table with the four largest carriers in the United States with their respective gateways.

 

Table 1. Major Carriers SMS Gateway Addresses.

AT&T

number@txt.att.net

Sprint

number@messaging.sprintpcs.com

T-Mobile

number@tmomail.net

Verizon

number@vtext.com

Here is the basic code to send a text message via email using WPS. Of course, you could enhance the functionality of the code below and wrap it in a macro to make it even easier to use. 

   1: FILENAME mail EMAIL "5555555555@vtext.com"

   2:          SUBJECT="Message from WPS: ";

   3:  

   4: data _null_;

   5:   file mail;

   6:   PUT "Program DAILY-BUILD has completed. Check log file for errors.";

   7:   PUT "!EM_SEND!";

   8: Run;

One issue that you are likely to encounter is that you will receive a message from Outlook or Windows Mail confirming that YOU are trying to send an email as opposed to a rogue program attempting doing it.

You can overcome this validation by using Context Magic’s ClickYes application or alternatively MapiLabs Outlook Security application.

image

You can overcome this validation check by using Context Magic’s ClickYes application or alternatively MapiLabs Outlook Security application.

About the author: Phil Rack is President of MineQuest Business Analytics, LLC located in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Phil has been a SAS language developer for more than 25 years. MineQuest provides WPS and SAS consulting and contract programming services and is a authorized reseller of WPS in North America.

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An Interesting Fact on Pricing

Posted on February 15, 2013 by Phil Rack

When you license WPS from MineQuest Business Analytics, you don’t pay a sales tax on your purchase unless your business has a nexus in the state of Michigan. Now there are a lot of businesses that don’t have nexus in this state. Our competitor however does have offices in many states (including Michigan) and thus must charge you sales tax for your home state.

If you look at the pricing comparison for a two core WPS server vs. a two core SAS server, the amount of sales tax you pay on that SAS license is often as much if not more than the cost of the WPS Server! So, at 6.4% sales tax, a two core SAS server at $85,423 for the first year license fee, you pay ~$5,467 in sales tax. That’s more than what a two core WPS Server on x86 hardware cost.

It’s hard to argue that a SAS Server license is not over priced.

 About the author: Phil Rack is President of MineQuest Business Analytics, LLC located in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Phil has been a SAS language developer for more than 25 years. MineQuest provides WPS and SAS consulting and contract programming services and is a authorized reseller of WPS in North America.

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