INTERVIEW WITH DATABEACON INC CEO, ANDREW COUTTS
by Tim Staub, managing editor

DSstar: Please tell us about your background. Who and what were the key influences in your life? How did you get your start, and how would you characterize the course of your personal development?

COUTTS: My career really spans punch-cards to the present day. I got my start in the Canadian division of Software AG, an early pioneer in the database business. In those days software was a highly centralized I.T.-driven world where the words "Knowledge Economy" were just beginning to gain currency. Yet to the average user the "knowledge" was pretty much controlled by a central authority that IBM aptly coined as the "Information Center."

In the mid-80s, I was given sales and marketing responsibility for the UNIX, VAX and VMS product lines at Software AG. What I saw occur was a certain degree of democratization, where individual departments started to want, and gain control of their line-of-business needs.

After that came the client-server wave of computing, which really began to engage end users in a meaningful, fulfilling way. Reporting still was a bit backwards though. Users still had to go to a central information authority, which by this time controlled the Data Warehouse, to get the reports they wanted or have Data Marts built for a select community of specified knowledge workers in the organization.

That was all running smoothly until the Web came along in the mid-90s. By this time I was COO at Software AG in Canada, and I.T. had moved from the Knowledge Economy, where it was revolutionary just to share digital information with a small community, to the "Idea Economy," which promised access not just for a specific department or workgroup, but for the entire extended enterprise -- employees, customers, suppliers, alliance partners, everyone. Those early days of the Internet and the Idea Economy were very chaotic. We're still blowing some of the excess steam out of the hothouse of hockey-stick-chart assumptions.

What's been left in the wake of the Idea Economy is what I'd call the Insight Economy. This economy is tougher to make a buck in, and requires a leaner, hyper-extended enterprise where more people than ever need to be accountable and equipped to make good decisions.

Away from the sock-puppet hype, we're seeing viable collaborative commerce applications proliferate, and that's creating a huge amount of new Internet-generated data. By its nature that data pushes beyond corporate boundaries, which creates a huge audience for it.

So today we have this huge audience with an equally huge appetite to create insight from this proliferation of e-commerce and e-business applications. And in a nutshell, that's why I was attracted to Databeacon in 1999. Getting insight out and across today's vastly extended enterprise is what the company does for a living. Our technology, which was well underway when I came to the company, delivers the goods to the Insight Economy.

DSstar: What are your current responsibilities, and how do you go about the business of fulfilling them? How do you see yourself and your firm within the IT community and the business community at large?

COUTTS: My role as CEO is to build Databeacon into a highly successful company that rewards shareholders, including our very committed employee shareholders, while accomplishing our mission: to be the de facto standard for data analysis on the Internet.

At the nuts and bolts level that means building repeatable processes within a scalable organization. The key thing I've tried to do to get that scalability is to hire what I think is a superior management team that in turn can attract and retain other talented people to inspire and manage our growth. I don't think you build a company by telling people what to do; you build a company by hiring intelligent people who know what to do and can pull together to focus on your goal.

One of the things I really admire about Scott McNealy and Sun Microsystems is his "all the wood behind one arrow" focus, and that company's willingness to remain focused over the years in the face of plenty of conventional wisdom that might have derailed it.

For us to fulfill our mission we also have to understand the Internet has provided us with a moving target that - all hype aside - I've certainly never seen move so fast in the I.T. marketplace since I've been involved in it. That requires our people to think hard and envision what business will be like on the Internet two, three and five years out, what customers will want, and plan accordingly. By doing that, we can ensure we have a growing and important role to play in serving the needs of customers participating in the Insight Economy.

DSstar: What are your views on the current business environment? What advice would you give to others who seek success?

COUTTS: Last year, I was out raising Databeacon's Series B financing. It was a wild time for a "traditional" software company. VC conversations were all about cyber land-grabs and eyeball counts. Turns out the servicing of eyeballs is best left to ophthalmologists.

The Databeacon story was we had a product, we had customers and we had revenues. Our business model was sound. It could be explained in half a minute and we were validated in the marketplace by Global 2000 customers and several Independent Software Vendor (ISV) partners that could have chosen any analysis technology in the world, but chose Databeacon as best of breed - Actuate is a good example of that kind of partner.

The business environment has changed substantially in the last year. For companies like Databeacon, it is very much business as usual. The companies facing the most challenges are likely those that have yet to secure a customer. Business models always look good on the whiteboard. It is getting key customers to buy in that is most important. So, the single most valuable piece of advice I can give to someone starting out would be to test the business early by trying to sell your service or software to a key customer. Everyone talks about total addressable market, market share, business models, etc. in their business plans. Being able to execute on the plan is what matters most. In our business, that means creating satisfied, reference-able customers.

DSstar: Where is your firm headed, and what are you doing to steer it in the appropriate direction. What are the greatest challenges you face in this task?

COUTTS: We want to bring data analysis to the mass audience that considers the Internet as the touch-point of their extended enterprise. Data analysis has often been regarded as a somewhat arcane market offering limited benefits to a highly trained, select group in the organization. To communicate our differentiation from this traditional market, we challenged ourselves to define our category in today's analysis market. We call it Information Outreach, or "the delivery of self-personalized, interactive information and analysis capabilities to large Internet-based user audiences."

Information Outreach applications should not require users to install, train on or consult a manual to do meaningful data analysis.

Beyond this we defined several other mandatory requirements to achieve category leadership. The first requirement is scalable ease-of-use. Scalable ease of use simply allows our customers to tailor their use of our technology through the use of profiles or what we internally refer to as analytic skins. With a few clicks they can step themselves up from novice to intermediate to advanced levels of interaction with their analysis software. So they start wherever they're comfortable, and progress from there.

The next challenge we faced was how to deploy an interactive analytics experience to extremely large audiences by traditional standards.

While both traditional analytics and Information Outreach analytics are data intensive, Information Outreach is dissemination intensive as well. With Information Outreach, even though the operational data store may be terabytes, the individual user really only wants and justifiably should only be allowed a very minute slice of that information. This information is often very narrow in scope and the user often has metadata that IT departments can't gain access to. For example, deploying billing analysis for a Telco's business customers involves perhaps one or two hundred thousand potential customers. While a centralized IT department could certainly fashion some generic reports such as time of day usage, it would have difficulty fashioning more specific reports for individual customers, such as a cost-center breakdowns of each bill. Databeacon can do that.

As well, in Information Outreach applications, not all customers use analysis at the same time or same frequency. Clearly the traditional batch approach of building large cubes that are shared is pretty much meaningless for the applications we are involved in.

Our solution to this problem is to provide a "billions served" architecture, that builds both cube definitions and the cubes themselves in real-time. This is something we call "cubes on the fly." By delivering both the cube and the analysis software for analyzing it down to the browser we are able to take a significant load off of the server. Rather than running multiple user sessions, the server is tasked with the real-time delivery of cubes out to the multitude of users.

Our biggest challenge has been to make Databeacon easy to deploy and integrate. We did this by building our software from the ground up in JAVA. Being free of client-server legacy code has given us a substantial boost in meeting the needs of the Insight Economy.

DSstar: How would you characterize BI today; what is the "state of the art"? What will BI become, and what will it take to get there?

COUTTS: Well, first of all, there is the term Business Intelligence itself. We prefer to simply refer to what we do as data analysis. There are two reasons for this. One, not everyone out there is familiar with the term Business Intelligence. For these people, data analysis is far more descriptive and understandable than the term Business Intelligence.

The second reason we shy away from BI is that most BI deployments with companies are to limited groups of trained users. I recently talked with one analyst who was completing a study of BI within the enterprise showed that the average deployed number of users for a given BI application was 15. The market we are addressing is broad deployments to large audiences of users; customers, suppliers, partners and employees. BI applications have been very successful in addressing data intensive analytic applications. They have largely been unsuccessful in addressing dissemination-intensive applications.

So, what is "state of the art" for BI today? We believe that two tracks for analysis will emerge. We expect that the traditional vendors of BI technology will continue to look for those data intensive applications where more heavy lifting by power users is required. We believe their focus on e-commerce applications such as CRM, SCM, etc. will continue to bring large benefits to a small audience of trained users.

The second track for data analysis will address dissemination intensive applications. In order to bring analysis to an audience that won't tolerate training or manuals or an install for that matter, you have to obey Internet laws, which boil down to "I want something meaningful to happen in a few clicks or I want it to go away." What good is capability if it goes unused? So, we focus first on usability and then on function. Databeacon will continue to improve our support for self-service data infrastructures aimed at disseminating information to mass audiences.

DSstar: Please offer any concluding thoughts on topics you consider most relevant.

COUTTS: Despite everything that has transpired over the last five or six years, it really is early days for e-commerce and the Internet in general. I recently read a Forrester report talking about the X Internet. This they define as a post-Web Internet where users will be provided interactive experiences through disposable pieces of code. Well, this is in fact what Databeacon has already achieved for data analysis.

Currently the broad audience of users on the Web is fed data via static HTML tables and charts. Interactive analysis is almost non-existent. Ultimately, analysis is about taking raw data and creating information and then using this information to gain insight. With the recent economic downturn, CEO's are frequently referring to a "lack of visibility."

Ultimately they want more people to get more insight out of the systems the company has invested in, so serving this insight up to groups averaging 15 in number isn't really answering that call. The challenge in 2001 is delivering insight to a far broader audience across the extended enterprise, and that's why we're here.

Contact Nathan Rudyk, nrudyk@databeacon.com, for Databeacon Inc.