MicroStrategy Inc believes its recently announced DSS Broadcaster (CI No 3,372) will turn data warehousing on its head by broadening it out to hundreds of thousands of users. Sanju Bansal, the Vienna, Virginia-based company’s executive vice president and chief operating officer says the new product will provide a constant flow of information out to end users and consumers, turning around the typical view of decision support software that enables a limited number of highly analytical users to query the datawarehouse perhaps once or twice a day. DSS Broadcaster enables questions to be set up for individuals, which are then presented to the datawarehouse at intervals that can be specified by the user, and the results of the queries are then broadcast out to the individual either by email, fax, or to a mobile phone.
By Joanne Wallen
The Broadcast server works with the company’s existing DSS OLAP server, and basically stores a complex personal profile, including queries relevant to the individual, the distribution channels through which that individual wishes to receive the information, frequency of queries required, and it also enables rules to be stored, such as ‘report sales by area only if the change is plus or minus 5%’. It is this personalization engine which Bansal believes differentiates the product from any of the competitors, and which, he says, prevents the system from simply spamming individuals with irrelevant broadcast messages. De-skilling decision support consumption will dramatically drive up the number of users and questions answered, Bansal believes. Instead of waiting for people to ask questions of the system, Broadcaster will push answers out to them. The end user could be a business manager, a store manager or even a supermarket shopper. Bansal cites the example of a large cosmetics firm with franchises in large department stores pushing information out to its sales people about how they are performing against their peers, or their target, or offering tips such as: ‘if you sell two more lipsticks today you will make your bonus’. Similarly, a shopper in a supermarket could be issued with a pager on entering the store, and have relevant offers and information broadcast to him as he goes around the store. Bansal believes this opening up of the decision support system to thousands of users in this way will have a dramatic impact on a company’s return on investment, by not only increasing the number of people to benefit from the system but also by decreasing the costs of use. The system will use existing channels of distribution such as a user’s fax or mobile phone, and does not require complex client software and hardware. Also, Bansal believes there is real value in disseminating relevant information to all workers, enabling decisions to be taken where the operational work is actually done. The company has invested a lot of development energy into the personalization engine, Bansal says, with 25 developers working on the project for more than a year. The system also involves a lot of pipe fitting, with the need to interface to a lot of different fax, pager and email formats. However, Bansal says the unusual thing about DSS Broadcaster as a product for MicroStrategy, is that although the technology is fairly complex, the concept is relatively simple and easy for people to grasp. The technology currently supports conversion of numerical data to text, so that statistical information gleaned from the database is output as a meaningful sentence. Stage two for the product, Bansal says, will be to convert numerical data to speech, so that a voicemail message can be sent out to people. MicroStrategy is reviewing existing technology, and is looking for an appropriate industrial strength text to speech engine suitable for PC systems. It believes it will have the ability to output voicemail within twelve months.
