Steve Nunn, The Open Group President and CEO, Discusses the Inaugural TOGAF User Group Meeting and Practical Role of EA in Business Transformation

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect discussion with President and CEO of The Open Group, Steve Nunn, on what to expect from The Open Group San Francisco 2016, January 25 to 28.
 
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the transcript. Sponsor: The Open Group.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect thought leadership interview coming to you in conjunction with The Open Group San Francisco 2016 event on January 25. We'll explore a new user group being formed about TOGAF, The Open Group standard, and how

this group will further foster the practical use of the TOGAF enterprise architecture aid for effective and practical business transformation.

Gardner

I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and I'll be your host as we set the stage for the next chapter in enterprise architecture (EA) for digital business success.

We are now here with the President and CEO of The Open Group, Steve Nunn. Welcome, Steve.

Steve Nunn: Thank you, Dana. Glad to be here.

Gardner: Before we get to the TOGAF User Group news, let’s relate what’s changed in the business world and why EA and frameworks and standards like TOGAF are more practical and more powerful than ever.

Nunn: One of the keys, Dana, is that we're seeing EA increasingly used as a tool in business transformation. Whereas in the past, maybe in the early adoptions of TOGAF and implementations of TOGAF, it was more about redesigning EA, redesigning systems inside an organization more generally. Nowadays, with the need to transform businesses for the digital world, EA has another more immediate and more obvious appeal.

It’s really around an enablement tool for companies and organizations to transform their businesses for the digital world, specifically the worlds of the Internet of Things (IoT), big data, social, mobile, all of those things which we at The Open Group lump into something we call Open Platform 3.0, but it really is affecting the business place at large and the markets that our member organizations are part of.

Gardner: TOGAF has been around for quite a while. How old is TOGAF now?

Nunn: The first version of TOGAF was published in 1993, so it's been quite some time. For a little while, we published a version every year. Once we got to Version 7.0, the refreshes and the new versions came a bit slower after that.

Nunn

We're now at Version 9.1, and there is a new version being worked on. The key for TOGAF is that we introduced a certification program around it for both tools that help people implement TOGAF, but also for the practitioners, the individuals who are actually using it. We did that with version 8.0 and then we moved to what we consider, and the marketplace certainly considers, to be an improved version with TOGAF 9.0, making it an exam-based certification. It has proved to be very popular indeed, with more than 50,000 certified individuals under that program to date.

Gardner: Now the IT world, the business world, many things about these worlds have changed since 1993. Something that comes to mind, of course, is the need to not just think about architecture within your organization, but how that relates across boundaries of many organizations.

I sometimes tease friends who are Star Trek fans that we have gone from regular chess to 3-D chess, and that’s a leap in complexity. How does this need to better manage Boundaryless Information Flow make EA and standards like TOGAF so important now?

Common vocabulary

Nunn: With the type of change that you talked about and the level of complexity, what standards like TOGAF and others bring is commonality and ability to make architecting organizations a little bit easier; to give it all a bit more structure. One of the things that we hear is most valuable about TOGAF, in particular, is the common vocabulary that it gives to those involved in a business transformation, which obviously involves multiple parts of an organization and multiple partners in a group of organizations, for example.

So, it’s not just for enterprise architects. We're hearing increasingly about a level of training and introductory use of TOGAF at all levels of an organization as a means of communicating and having a common set of terminology. So everyone has the same expectation about what particular terms mean. With added complexity, we need things to help us work through that and divide up the complexity into different layers that we can tackle. EA and TOGAF, in particular, are proving very popular for tackling those levels of complexity.

Gardner: So in the next chapter, these things continue to evolve, react to the market, and adjust. We're hearing that there is news at the event, the January 25 event in San Francisco, around this new user group. Tell me why we're instituting a user group associated with TOGAF at this point?

Nunn: It’s going to be the first meeting of a TOGAF User Group, and it’s something we have been thinking about for some time, but the time seems to be now. I've alluded to the level of popularity of TOGAF, but it really is becoming very widely used. What users of TOGAF are looking for is how to better use it in their day jobs. How can they make it effective? How can they learn from what others have done, both good and bad, the things to try and the things not to try or more the things that worked and things that didn’t work? That isn’t something that we've necessarily offered, apart from a few conference sessions at previous events.

So this really ends up getting a broader community around TOGAF, and not just those members of the Architecture Forum which is our particular forum that advances the TOGAF standard. It’s really to engage the wider community, both those who are certified and those who aren’t certified, as a way of learning how to make better and more effective use of TOGAF. There are a lot of possibilities for what we might do at the meeting, and a lot of it will depend on what those who attend would like to cover.

Gardner: Now, to be clear, any standard has a fairly rigorous process by which the standard is amended, changed, or evolves over time. But we're talking about something separate from that. We're talking about perhaps more organic information flow, sharing, bringing points into that standard’s process. Maybe you could clarify the separation, the difference, the relationship between a standard’s adoption and a user group's input.

This is the first time we've offered nonmembers a real opportunity, not necessarily to decide what goes into the standard, but certainly a greater degree of influence.

Nunn: That’s the key point, Dana. The standard will get evolved by the members of The Open Group, specifically the members of The Open Group Architecture Forum. They are the ones who have evolved it this far and are very actively working on a future version. So they will be the ones who will ultimately get to propose what goes in and ultimately vote on what goes in.

Where the role of the user community, both members and non-members -- but specifically the opportunity for non-members -- comes in is being able to give their input, put forward ideas that areas where maybe TOGAF might be strengthened or improved in some way. Nobody pretends it’s prefect as you use it. It has evolved over time and it will evolve in the future. But hearing from those who actually use TOGAF day to day, we might get, certainly from The Open Group point of view, some new perspectives, and those perspectives will then get passed on through us to the members of the Architecture Forum.

Many of those we expect to attend the event anyway. They might hear it for the first time, but certainly we would spend part of the meeting looking at what that input might be, so that we have something to pass on to them for consideration in the standard.

This is the first time we've offered nonmembers a real opportunity, not necessarily to decide what goes into the standard, but certainly a greater degree of influence.

It's somewhat of a throwback to the days where user groups were very powerful in what came out of vendor organizations. I do hope that this will be something that will enable everyone to get the benefit of a better overall standard.

Past user groups

Gardner: I certainly remember, Steve, the days when vendors would quake in their boots when user meetings and groups came up, because they had such influence and impact. They both benefited each other. The vendors really benefited by hearing from the user groups and the user groups benefited by the standards that could come forth and vendor cooperation that they basically demanded.

I recall, at the last Open Group event, the synergy discussions around Zachman, and other EA frameworks. Do you expect that some of these user group activities that you're putting forth will allow some of that cross pollination, if you will, people who might be using other EA tools and want to bring more cooperation and collaboration across them?

Nunn: I would certainly expect that to happen. Our position at The Open Group, and we've said it consistently over the years, is that it’s not "TOGAF or," it’s "TOGAF and." The reality is that  most organizations, the vast majority, are not just going to take TOGAF and let it be everything they use in implementing their EAs.

So the other frameworks are certainly relevant. I expect there to be some interest in tools, as well as frameworks. We hear that quite a lot, suggestions of what good tools are for people at different stages of maturity and their implementation of the EA. So, I expect a lot of discussion about the other thoughts or the other tools in the toolbox of an EA to come up here.

Gardner: So user groups serve to bring more of an echo system approach, voices from disparate parties coming together sounds very powerful. Now this is happening on January 25. This is a free first meeting. Is that correct? And being in San Francisco, of course, it's within a couple hours drive of a lot of influential users, start-ups, the VC community, vendors, or service providers. Tell us a little bit about why people who are within a quick access to the Bay Area might consider coming to this on January 25?

What people would get out of it is the chance to hear a bit more about how TOGAF is used by others, case studies, what’s worked, what hasn’t worked, the opportunity to talk directly with people.

Nunn: That’s another reason, the location of our next event. We were first thinking this is the right time to do a first TOGAF User Group, because you see there are a lot of users of TOGAF in the area or within a few hours of it. What people would get out of it is the chance to hear a bit more about how TOGAF is used by others, case studies, what’s worked, what hasn’t worked, the opportunity to talk directly with people, whether it’s through networking or actually in the sessions in the user group meeting.

We're trying to not put too much rigid structure around those particular sessions, because we won’t be able to get the most benefit out of them. So it’s really what they want to get out of it that will probably be achievable.The point of view of The Open Group is that it's about getting that broader perspective for the attendees, learning useful tips and tricks, learning from the experience of others, and learning a bit more about The Open Group and how TOGAF has evolved.

This is a key point. TOGAF is so widely used now and globally, and even though we have quite a few members in The Open Group, we have more than 350 organization participating in some way in the Architecture Forum, and more in The Open Group as a whole.

But there's obviously a much wider community of those who are using it. Hearing more about how it has developed, what the processes are inside The Open Group, might make them feel good about the future of something that they clearly have some investment in. Hopefully, it might even persuade a few of those organizations to join and influence from the inside.

Gardner: Now, there's more information about the user group at www.opengroup.org. You're meeting on January 25 at 9:30 a.m. Pacific Time at the Marriott Union Square right in the heart of San Francisco. But this is happening in association with a larger event. So tell us about the total event that's happening between January 25 and 28.

Quarterly events

Nunn: This is part of one of our quarterly events that we've been running for lot of years now. They take the form generally of a plenary sessions that are open to anyone and also member meetings, where the members of the various Open Group forums get together to progress the work that they do virtually. But it’s to really knuckle down and progress some of it face-to-face, which as, we all know, is generally a very productive way of working.

Apart from the TOGAF User Group, we have on the agenda sessions on the Digital Business Strategy and Customer Experience, which is an activity that's being driven inside our Open Platform 3.0 Forum, as a membership activity, but this is really to open that up to a wide audience at the conference. So, we'll have people talking about that.

Open Platform 3.0 is where the convergence of technologies like cloud, social computing, mobile computing, big data, and IoT all come together. As we see it, our goal is for our members to create an Open Platform 3.0 Standard, which is basically a standard for digital platform, so that the enterprises can more easily use the technologies and get the benefit of these technologies that are now out there. There will be quite a bit of focus on Open Platform 3.0.

The other big thing that is proving very popular for us, which will be featured at the conference is the Open Group IT4IT Reference Architecture, and there is a membership activity, the IT4IT Forum. They're working on standards. We published the first version of that reference architecture at our last quarterly conference, which was in Edinburgh in October last year.

There has been a lot of interest in it so far, and we are working on a certification program for IT4IT that we will be launching later this year, hopefully at our next quarterly event in London in April.

There has been a lot of interest in it, and it's really a standard for running the business of IT. Oftentimes, IT is just seen as doing its own thing and not really part of the business. But the reality nowadays is that whoever is running the IT, be it the CIO or whatever other individual, to be successful they have to not just run IT as a business, with the usual business principles of return on investment, etc., but they have to be seen to be doing so. This is a reference architecture that's not specific to any industry and that provides a guide for how to go about doing that.

We're quite excited about it. There has been a lot of interest in it so far, and we are working on a certification program for IT4IT that we will be launching later this year, hopefully at our next quarterly event in London in April.

Gardner: I'll just remind our listeners and readers that we're going to be doing some separate discussions and sharing with them on the IT4IT Reference Architecture. So please look for that coming up.

Getting back to the event, Steve, I've attended many of these over the years and I find a lot of the discussions around security, around specific markets like healthcare and government really powerful and interesting. Is there anything in particular about this conference that you're particularly interested in or looking forward to?

Nunn: The ones I've already spoken to are the ones that I'm personally most looking forward to. We'll be having sessions on health care and security, as you say.

In the security area it’s worth calling out that one of the suggestions that we've had about TOGAF -- I won’t call it criticism, but one of the suggestions for future versions -- is that TOGAF is a bit light on security. It could do with beefing up that particular area.

The approach that we've taken this time, which people attending the conference will hear about, is that we have actually got the security experts to say what we need to cover in TOGAF, in the next version of TOGAF from a security point of view. Rather than having the architects include what they know about security, we have some heavyweight security folks in there, working with the Architecture Forum, to really beef up the security aspect. We'll hear a bit more about that.

Customer experience

Gardner: I also see that customer experience, which is closely aligned with user experience, is a big part of the event this year. That’s such a key topic these days for me, because it sort of forms a culmination of Platform 3.0. When you can pull together big data, hybrid cloud architectures, mobile enablement and reach, you can start to really do some fantastic new things that just really couldn’t have been done before when it comes to that user experience, real-time adaptation to user behaviors, bringing that inference back into a cloud or a back-end architecture, and then bringing back some sort of predictive or actionable result.

Please flesh out a bit more for us about how this user experience and customer experience is such a key part of the output, the benefit, the value, and the business transformation that we get from all these technical issues that we've discussed; this is sort of a business issue.

Nunn: You're absolutely right. It’s when we start providing a better experience for the customers overall and they can get more out of what the organizations are offering that everybody wins.

What we're trying to do from the organizational side is focus on what is it that you can do to look at it from the customers’ point of view, meet their expectations, and start to evolve from there.

From the group that we have working on this inside The Open Group, they are coming at it from a point of view that some of these new technologies are actually very scary for organizations, because they are forced to transform. The expectations of customers now are completely different. They expect to be able to get things on their cellphones or their tablets, or whatever device they might be using. That's  quite a big shift for a lot of organizations, and that’s not even getting into some of the areas of IoT, which promises to be huge.

What we're trying to do from the organizational side is focus on what is it that you can do to look at it from the customers’ point of view, meet their expectations, and start to evolve from there.

To me, it’s interesting from the point of view that it’s pretty business-driven. The technologies are there to be taken advantage of or to actually be very disruptive. So the business needs to know at a fairly early stage what those customer expectations are and take advantage of the new technologies that are there. That’s the angle that we are coming from inside The Open Group on that.

Some of the main participants in that group are actually coming from the telco world, where things have obviously changed enormously over the last few years. So that one is going to move quite quickly.

Gardner: It certainly seems that the ability to have boundaryless architecture is essential on that customer experience benefit. You certainly seem to be in the right place at the right time for that.

But the event in San Francisco also forms a milestone for you, Steve. You're now in your first full event as President and CEO of The Open Group, having taken over from Allen Brown last Fall. Tell us a little bit about your earlier roles within the standards organization and a bit more about yourself perhaps for those folks who are not yet familiar with you?

Quite different

Nunn: Yes, it will be quite different this time around. I've been with The Open Group for 22 years now. I was originally hired as General Counsel, and then fairly quickly moving on to Vice President of Corporate, Legal and Chief Operating Officer under Allen Brown as CEO. Allen was CEO for 17 years, and I was with him all of that time. It’s going to be quite different to have somebody else running the events, but I'm very much looking forward to it.

From my point of view, it’s a great honor to be leading The Open Group and its members into our next phase of evolution. The events that we hold are one small part of it, but they're a very important part, particularly these quarterly ones. It’s where a lot of our customers and members come together in one place, and as we have heard, there will be some folks who may not have been involved with one of our events before through the user group, so it’s pretty exciting.

I'm looking forward to building on the very solid foundation that we have and some of the great work activities that we mainly have ongoing inside The Open Group.

I'm looking forward to building on the very solid foundation that we have and some of the great work activities that we mainly have ongoing inside The Open Group.

Don’t expect great change from The Open Group, but just really more of the same good stuff that we've been working on before, having regard to the fact that obviously things are changing very rapidly around us and we need to be able to provide value in that fast changing world, which we are very confident we can.

Gardner: As an observer of the market, but also of The Open Group, I'm glad to hear that you're continuing on your course, because the world owes you in many ways. Things you were talking about 5 or 10 years ago have become very essential. You were spot on on how you saw the vision of the world changing on IT and its influence on business and vice versa.

More than ever, it seems that IT and EA is destiny for businesses. So I'm glad to hear that we're having a long vision, and the future seems very bright for your organization as the tools and approaches and the mentality and philosophy that you have been espousing becomes essential to do some of these things we have been discussing, like Platform 3.0, like customer experience, and IoT.

In closing, let’s remind our audience that you can register for the event at The Open Group website, www.opengroup.org. The first day, January 25, includes that free user group, the inaugural user group for TOGAF, and it all happens at the Marriott Union Square, San Francisco, along with the General Conference, which also runs from January 25 to 28.

Any last thoughts Steve, as we close out, in terms of where people should expect The Open Group to go, or how they can become perhaps involved in ways that they hadn’t considered before?

Good introduction

Nunn: Attending one of our events is a really good introduction to what goes on in The Open Group. For those who haven’t attended one previously, you might be pleasantly surprised.

If I had to pick one thing, I would say it's the breadth of activities there are at these events. It’s very easy for an organization like The Open Group to be known for one thing or a very small number of things, whether it’s UNIX originally and EA more recently, but there really is a lot going on beyond there.

Getting exposure to that at an event such as this, particularly in a location as important to the industry and as beautiful as San Francisco is, is a great chance. So anyone who is on the fence about going, then jump over the fence and try us out.

Attending one of our events is a really good introduction to what goes on in The Open Group. For those who haven’t attended one previously, you might be pleasantly surprised.

Gardner: We'll have to leave it there I'm afraid. We have been talking about how a new user group is being formed around TOGAF, an Open Group Standard. We've heard how this group will be fostering practical use of TOGAF, gaining insights from the field, organic knowledge bubbling up into the standards process around TOGAF. This, of course, is essential for EA to support effective and practical business transformation.

This special BriefingsDirect discussion comes to you in conjunction with The Open Group Event this January in San Francisco. Join me now in thanking our guest. We've been here with Steve Nunn, the President and CEO of The Open Group. Thanks so much, Steve.

Nunn: Thank you very much, Dana, for this opportunity and I hope to see some of your listeners at the event.

Gardner: Very good. Also, a big thank you to The Open Group for sponsoring this discussion. And lastly, a big thank you to our audience for joining us.

This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator throughout these Enterprise IT Thought Leadership Interviews. Thanks again for listening, and do come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the transcript. Sponsor: The Open Group.

Transcript of a podcast with President and CEO of The Open Group, Steve Nunn, on what to expect from The Open Group San Francisco 2016, January 25 to 28. Copyright The Open Group and Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2016. All rights reserved.

You may also be interested in:

•  A Tale of Two IT Departments, or How Cloud Governance is Essential in the Bimodal IT Era
• Securing Business Operations and Critical Infrastructure: Trusted Technology, Procurement Paradigms, Cyber Insurance 
• Enterprise Architecture Leader John Zachman on Understanding and Leveraging Synergies Among the Major EA Frameworks
• Cybersecurity standards: The Open Group explores security and safer supply chains
• Explore synergies among major Enterprise Architecture frameworks with The Open Group
• Health Data Deluge Requires Secure Information Flow Via Standards, Says the Open Group's New Healthcare Director
• The Open Group Amsterdam Conference Panel Delves into How to Best Gain Business Value from Open Platform 3.0
• Healthcare Among Thorniest and Yet Most Opportunistic Use Cases for Boundaryless Information Flow Improvement
• Gaining Dependability Across All Business Activities Requires Standard of Standards to Tame Dynamic Complexity, Says The Open Group CEO
• Big Data success depends on better risk management practices like FAIR, say conference panelists
• Improving signal-to-noise in risk management

How SKYPAD and HPE Vertica Enable Luxury Retail Brands to Gain Rapid Insight into Consumer Sales Trends

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect discussion on how Sky I.T. has changed its platform and solved the challenges around variety, velocity, and volume for big data to make better insights available to retail users.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the HPE Discover Podcast Series. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator for this ongoing discussion on IT innovation and how it’s making an impact on people’s lives.

Gardner

Our next big-data use case leadership discussion explores how retail luxury goods market analysis provider Sky I.T. Group has upped its game to provide more buyer behavior analysis faster and with more depth. We will see how Sky I.T. changed its data analysis platform infrastructure and why that has helped solve its challenges around data variety, velocity, and volume to make better insights available to its retail users.

Here to share how retail intelligence just got a whole lot smarter, we are joined by Jay Hakami, President of Sky I.T. Group in New York. Welcome, Jay.

Jay Hakami: Thank you very much. Thank you for having us.

Gardner: We're also here with Dane Adcock, Vice President of Business Development at Sky I.T. Group. Welcome Dane.

Dane Adcock: Thank you very much.

Gardner: And we're here with Stephen Czetty, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at Sky I.T. Group. Welcome to BriefingsDirect, Stephen.

Sky I.T. Group
Retail Business-Intelligence Solutions
Get More Information

Stephen Czetty: Thank you, Dana, and I'm looking forward to the chance.

Gardner: What are the top trends that are driving the need for greater and better big-data analysis for retailers? Why do they need to know more, better, faster?

Adcock: Well, customers have more choices. As a result, businesses need to be more agile and responsive and fill the customer's needs more completely or lose the business. That's driving the entire industry into practices that mean shorter times from design to shelf in order to be more responsive.

It has created a great deal of gross marketing pressure, because there's simply more competition and more selections that a consumer can make with their dollar today.

Gardner: Is there anything specific to the retail process around luxury goods that is even more pressing when it comes to this additional speed? Are there more choices and  higher expectations of the end user?

Greater penalty

Adcock: Yes. The downside to making mistakes in terms of designing a product and allocating it in the right amounts to locations at the store level carries a much greater penalty, because it has to be liquidated. There's not a chance to simply cut back on the supply chain side, and so margins are more at risk in terms of making the mistake.

Ten years ago, from a fashion perspective, it was about optimizing the return and focusing on winners. Today, you also have to plan to manage and optimize the margins on your losers as well. So, it's a total package.

Gardner: So, clearly, the more you know about what those users are doing or what they have done is going to be essential. It seems to me, though, that we'rere talking about a market-wide look rather than just one store, one retailer, or one brand.

How does that work, Jay? How do we get to the point where we've been able to gather information at a fairly comprehensive level, rather than cherry-picking or maybe getting a non-representative look based on only one organization’s view into the market?

Hakami: With SKYPAD, what we're doing is collecting data from the supplier, from the wholesaler, as well as from their retail stores, their wholesale business, and their dot-com, meaning the whole omni channel. When we collect that data, we cleanse it to make sure its meaningful to the user.

Hakami

Now, we're dealing with a connected world where the retailer, wholesalers, and suppliers have to talk to one another and plan together for the buying season. So the partnerships and the insight that they get into the product performance is extremely important, as Dane mentioned, in terms of the gross margin and in terms of the software information. SKYPAD basically provides that intelligence, that insight, into this retail/wholesale world.

Gardner: Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn’t this also a case where people are opening up their information and making it available for the benefit of a community or recognizing that the more data and the more analysis that’s available, the better it is for all the participants, even if there's an element of competition at some point?

Hakami: Dana, that's correct. The retail business likes to share the information with their suppliers, but they're not sharing it across all the suppliers. They're sharing it with each individual supplier. Then, you have the market research companies who come in and give you aggregation of trends and so on. But the retailers are interested in sell-through. They're interested in telling X supplier, "This is how your products are performing in my stores."

If they're not performing, then there's going to be a mark down. There's going to be less of a margin for you and for us. So, there's a very strong interest between the retailer and a specific supplier to improve the performance of the product and the sell-through of those products on the floor.

Gardner: Before we learn more about the data science and dealing with the technology and business case issues, tell us a little bit more about Sky I.T. Group, how you came about, and what you're doing with SKYPAD to solve some of these issues across this entire supply chain and retail market spot.

Complex history

Hakami: I'll take the beginning. I'll give you a little bit of the history, Dana, and then maybe Dane and Stephen can jump in and tell you what we are doing today, which is extremely complex and interesting at the same time.

We started with SKYPAD about eight years ago. We found a pain point within our customers where they were dealing with so many retailers, as well as their own retail stores, and not getting the information that they needed to make sound business decisions on a timely basis.

We started with one customer, which was Theory. We came to them and we said, "We can give you a solution where we're going to take some data from your retailers, from your retail stores, from your dot-com, and bring it all into one dashboard, so you can actually see what’s selling and what’s not selling."

Fast forward, we've been able to take not only EDI transactions, but also retail portals. We're taking information from any format you can imagine -- from Excel, PDF, merchant spreadsheets -- bringing that wealth of data into our data warehouse, cleansing it, and then populating the dashboard.

So today, SKYPAD is giving a wealth of information to the users by the sheer fact that they don’t have to go out by retailer and get the information. That’s what we do, and we give them, on a Monday morning, the information they need to make decisions.

As these business intelligence (BI) tools have become more popular, the distribution of data coming from the retailers has gotten more ubiquitous and broader in terms of the metrics.

Dane, can you elaborate more on this as well?

Adcock: This process has evolved from a time when EDI was easy, because it was structured, but it was also limited in the number of metrics that were provided by the mainstream. As these business intelligence (BI) tools have become more popular, the distribution of data coming from the retailers has gotten more ubiquitous and broader in terms of the metrics.

But the challenge has moved from reporting to identification of all these data sources and communication methodologies and different formats. These can change from week to week, because they're being launched by individuals, rather than systems, in terms of Excel spreadsheets and PDF files. Sometimes, they come from multiple sources from the same retailer.

One of our accounts would like to see all of their data together, so they can see trends across categories and different geographies and markets. The challenge is to bring all those data sources together and align them to their own item master file, rather than the retailer’s item master file, and then be able to understand trends, which accounts are generating the most profits, and what strategies are the most profitable.

Visit the Sky BI Team
At The 2016 NRF Big Show!
Get More Information

It's been a shifting model from the challenge of reporting all this data together, to data collection. And there's a lot more of it today, because more retailers report at the UPC level, size level, and the store level. They're broadcasting some of this data by day. The data pours in, and the quicker they can make a decision, the more money they can make. So, there's a lot of pressure to turn it around.

Gardner: Let me understand, Dane. When you're putting out those reports on Monday morning, do you get queries back? Is this a sort of a conversation, if you will, where not only are you presenting your findings, but people have specific questions about specific things? Do you allow for them to do that, and is the data therefore something that’s subject to query?

Subject to queries

Adcock: It’s subject to queries in the sense that they're able to do their own discovery within the data. In other words, we put it in a BI tool, it’s on the web, and they're doing their own analysis. They're probing to see what their best styles are. They're trying to understand how colors are moving, and they're looking to see where they're low on stock, where they may be able to backfill in the marketplace, and trying to understand what attributes are really driving sales.

But of course, they always have questions about completeness of the data. When things don’t look correct, they have questions about it. That drives us to be able to do analysis on the fly, on-demand, and deliver some responses, "All your stores are there, all of your locations, everything looks normal." Or perhaps there seems to be some flaws or things in the data that don’t actually look correct.

Not only do we need to organize it and provide it to them so that they can do their own broad, flexible analysis, but they're coming back to us with questions about how their data was audited. And they're looking for us to do the analysis on the spot and provide them with satisfactory answers.

Gardner: Stephen Czetty, we've heard about the use case, the business case, and how this data challenge has grown in terms of variety as well as volume. What do you need to bring to the table from the architecture and the data platform to sustain this growth and provide for the agility that these market decision makers are demanding?

Czetty: We started out with an abacus, in a sense, but today we collect information from thousands of sources literally every single week. Close to 9,000 files will come across to us and we'll process them correctly and sort of them out -- what client they belong to and so forth, but the challenge is forever growing.

Czetty

We needed to go from older technology to newer technology, because our volumes of data are increasing and the amount of time that we need to consume to data in is static.

So we're quite aware that we have a time limit. We found Vertica as a platform for us to be able to collect the data into a coherent structure in a very rapid time as opposed to our legacy systems.

It allows us to treat the data in a truly vertical way, although that has nothing to do with the application or the database itself. In the past we had to deal with each client separately. Now we can deal with each retailer separately and just collect their data for every single client that we have. That makes our processes much more pipelined and far faster in performance.

The secret sauce behind that is the ability in our Vertica environment to rapidly sort out the data -- where it belongs, who it belongs to -- calculate it out correctly, put it into the database tables that we need to, and then serve it back to the front end that we're using to represent it.

That's why we've shifted from a traditional database model to a Vertica-type model. It's 100 percent SQL for us, so it looks the same for everybody who is querying it, but under the covers we get tremendous performance and compression and lots of cost savings.

Gardner: For some organizations that are dealing with the different sources and  different types of data, cleansing is one problem. Then, the ability to warehouse that and make it available for queries is a separate problem. You've been able to tackle those both at the same time with the same platform. Is that right?

Proprietary parsers

Czetty: That's correct. We get the data, and we have proprietary parsers for every single data type that we get. There are a couple of hundred of them at this point. But all of that data, after parsing, goes into Vertica. From there, we can very rapidly figure out what is going where and what is not going anywhere, because it’s incomplete or it’s not ours, which happens, or it’s not relevant to our processes, which happens.

We can sort out what we've collected very rapidly and then integrate it with the information we already have or insert new information if it's brand-new. Prior to this, we'd been doing this by hand to a large-scale, and that's not effective any longer with our number of clients growing.

Gardner: I'd like to hear more about what your actual deployment is, but before we do that, let’s go back to the business case. Dane and Jay, when Vertica came online, when Steve was able to give you some of these more pronounced capabilities, how did that translate into a benefit for your business? How did you bring that out to the market, and what's been the response?

Hakami: I think the first response was "wow." And I think the second response was "Wow, how can we do this fast and move quickly to this platform?"

Prior to this, we'd been doing this by hand to a large-scale, and that's not effective any longer with our number of clients growing.

Let me give you some examples. When Steve did the proof of concept (POC) with the folks from HP, we were very impressed with the statistics we had seen. In other words, going from a processing time of eight or nine hours to minutes was a huge advantage that we saw from the business side, showing our customers that we can load data much faster.

The ability to use less hardware and infrastructure as a result of the architecture of Vertica allowed us to reduce, and to continue to reduce, the cost of infrastructure. These two are the major benefits that I've seen in the evolution of us moving from our legacy to Vertica.

From the business perspective, if we're able to deliver faster and more reliably to the customer, we accomplished one of the major goals that we set for ourselves with SKYPAD.

Adcock: Let me add something there. Jay is exactly right. The real impact, as it translates into the business, is that we have to stop processing and stop collecting data at a certain point in the morning and start processing it in order for us to make our service-level agreements (SLAs) on reporting for our clients, because they start their analysis. The retail data comes in staggered over the morning and it may not all be in by the time that we need to shut that processing off.

One of the things that moving to Vertica has allowed us to do is to cut that time off later, and when we cut it off later, we have more data, as a rule, for a customer earlier in the morning to do their analysis. They don’t have to wait until the afternoon. That’s a big benefit. They get a much better view of their business.

Driving more metrics

The other thing that it has enabled us to do is drive more metrics into the database and do some processing in the database, rather than in the user tool, which makes the user tool faster and it provides more value.

For example, maybe for age on the floor, we can do the calculation in the background, in the database, and it doesn't impede the response in the front-end engine. We get more metrics in the database calculated rather than in our user tool, and it becomes more flexible and more valuable.

Sky I.T. Group
Retail Business-Intelligence Solutions
Get More Information

Gardner: So not only are you doing what you used to do faster, better, cheaper, but you're able to now do things you couldn't have done before in terms of your quality of data and analysis. Is there anything else that is of a business nature that you're able to do vis-à-vis analytics that just wasn't possible before, and might, in fact, be equivalent of a new product line or a new service for you?

Czetty: In the old model, when we got a new client we had to essentially recreate the processes that we'd built for other clients to match that new client, because they're collecting that data just for that client just at that moment.

In the current model, where we're centered on retailers, the only thing that will take us a long time to do in this particular situation is if there's a new retailer that we've never collected data from.

So 99 percent of it is the same as any other client, but one percent is always different, and it had to be built out. On-boarding a client, as we call it, took us a considerable amount of time -- we are talking weeks.

In the current model, where we're centered on retailers, the only thing that will take us a long time to do in this particular situation is if there's a new retailer that we've never collected data from. We have to understand their methodology of delivery, how it comes, how complex it is and so forth, and then create the logic to load that into the database correctly to match up with what we are collecting for others.

In this scenario, since we’ve got so many clients, very few new stores or new retailers show up, and typically it’s just our clients on retail chain, and therefore our on-boarding is just simplified, because if we are getting Nordstrom’s data from client A, we're getting the same exact data for client B, C, D, E, and F.

Now, it comes through a single funnel and it's the Nordstrom funnel. It’s just a lot easier to deal with, and on-boarding comes naturally.

Hakami: In addition to that, since we're adding more significant clients, the ability to increase variety, velocity, and volume is very important to us. We couldn't scale without having Vertica as a foundation for us. We'd be standing still, rather than moving forward and being innovative, if we stayed where we were. So this is a monumental change and a very instrumental change for us going forward.

Gardner: Steve, tell us a little bit about your actual deployment. Is this a single tenant environment? Are you on a single database? What’s your server or data center environment? What's been the impact of that on your storage and compression and costs associated with some of the ancillary issues?

Multi-tenant environment

Czetty: To begin with, we're coming from a multi-tenant environment. Every client had its own private database in the past, because in DB2, we couldn't add all these clients into one database and get the job done. There was not enough horsepower to do the queries and the loads.

We ran a number of databases on a farm of servers, on Rackspace as our hosting system. When we brought in Vertica, we put up a minimal configuration with three nodes, and we're still living with that minimal configuration with three nodes.

We haven't exhausted our capacity on the license by any means whatsoever in loading up this data. The compression is obscenely high for us, because at the end of the day, our data absolutely lends itself to being compressed.

Everything repeats over and over again every single week. In the world of Vertica, that means it only appears once in wherever it lives in the database, and the rest of it is magic. Not to get into the technology underneath it at this point, from our perspective, it's just very effective in that scenario.

With the three nodes, we've had zero problems with performance. It hasn't been an issue at all. We're just looking back and saying that we wish we had this a little sooner.

Also in our DB2 world, we're using quite costly large SAN configurations with lots of spindles, so that we can have the data distributed all across the spindles for performance on DB2, and that does improve the performance of that product.

However, in Vertica, we have 600 GB drives and we can just pop more in if we need to expand our capacity. With the three nodes, we've had zero problems with performance. It hasn't been an issue at all. We're just looking back and saying that we wish we had this a little sooner.

Vertica came in and did the install for us initially. Then, we ended up taking those servers down and reinstalling it ourselves. With a little information from the guide, we were able to do it. We wanted to learn it for ourselves. That took us probably a day and a half to two days, as opposed to Vertica doing it in two hours. But other than that, everything is just fine. We’ve had a little training, we’ve gone to the Vertica event to learn how other people are dealing with things, and it's been quite a bit of fun.

Now there is a lot of work we have to do at the back end to transform our processes to this new methodology. There are some restrictions on how we can do things, updates and so forth. So, we had to reengineer that into this new technology, but other than that, no changes. The biggest change is that we went vertical on the retail silos. That's just a big win for us.

Gardner: As you know, Vertica is cloud ready. Is there any benefit to that further down the road where maybe it’s around issues of a spike demand in holiday season, for example, or for backup recovery or business continuity? Any thoughts about where you might leverage that cloud readiness in the future?

Dedicated servers

Czetty: We're already sort of in the cloud with the use of dedicated servers, but in our business, the volume increases in the stores around holidays is not doubling the volume. It’s adding 10 percent, 15 percent, maybe 20 percent of the volume for the holiday season. It hasn’t been that big a problem in DB2. So, it’s certainly not going to be a problem in Vertica.

We've looked at virtualization in the cloud, but with the size of the hardware that we actually want to run, we want to take advantage of the speed and the memory and everything else. We put up pretty robust servers ourselves, and it turns out that in secure cloud environments like we're using right now at Rackspace, it's simply less expensive to do it as dedicated equipment. To spin up a machine, like another node for us at Rackspace, would take about same time it would take for virtual system setup and configure to a day or so. They can give us another node just like this on our rack.

We looked at the cloud financially every single time that somebody came around and said there was a better cloud deal, but so far, owning it seems to be a better financial approach.

Gardner: Before we close out, looking to the future, I suppose the retailers are only going to face more competition. They're going to be getting more demand from their end users or customers for user experience for information.

We looked at the cloud financially every single time that somebody came around and said there was a better cloud deal, but so far, owning it seems to be a better financial approach.

We're going to see more mobile devices that will be used in a dot-com world or even a retail world. We are going to start to see geolocation data brought to bear. We're going to expect the Internet of Things (IoT) to kick in at some point where there might be more sensors involved either in a retail environment or across the supply chain.

Clearly, there's going to be more demand for more data doing more things faster. Do you feel like you're in a good position to do that? Where do you see your next challenges from the data-architecture perspective?

Czetty: Not to disparage too much the industry of luxury, but at this point, they're not the bleeding edge on the data collection and analysis side, where they are on the bleeding edge on social media and so forth. We've anticipated that. We've got some clients who were collecting information about their web activities and we have done analysis for identifying customers who are presenting different personas through their different methods as they contact the company.

We're dabbling in that area and that’s going to grow as it becomes so tablet-oriented or phone-oriented as the interfaces go. A lot of sales are potentially going to go through social media and not just the official websites in the future.

We'll be capturing that information as well. We’ve got some experience with that kind of data that we’ve done in the past. So, this is something I'm looking forward to getting more of, but as of today, we’re only doing it for a few clients.

Well positioned

Hakami: In terms of planning, we're very well-positioned as a hub between the wholesaler and the retailer, the wholesaler and their own retail stores, as well as the wholesaler and their dot-coms. One of the things that we are looking into, and this is going to probably get more oxygen next year, is also taking a look at the relationships and the data between the retailer and the consumer.

As you mentioned, this is a growing area, and the retailers are looking to capture more of the consumer information so they can target-market to them, not based on segment but based on individual preferences. This is again a huge amount of data that needs to be cleansed, populated, and then presented to the CMOs of companies to be able to sell more, market more, and be in front of their customers much more than ever before.

Gardner: That’s a big trend that we are seeing in many different sectors of the economy -- that drive for personalization, and it really is a result of these data technologies to allow that to happen.

Last word to you, Dane. Any other thoughts about where the intersection of computer science capabilities and market intelligence demands are coming together in new and interesting ways?

Adcock: I'm excited about the whole approach to leveraging some predictive capabilities alongside the great inventory of data that we've put together for our clients. It's not just about creating better forecasts of demand, but optimizing different metrics, using this data to understand when product should be marked down, what types of attributes of products seem to be favored by different locations of stores that are obviously alike in terms of their shopper profiles, and bringing together better allocations and quantities in breadth and depth of products to individual locations to drive better, higher percentage of full-price selling and fewer markdowns for our clients.

So it’s a predictive side, rather than discovery using a BI tool.

Czetty: Just to add to that, there's the margin. When we talked to CEOs and CFOs five or six years ago and told them we could improve business by two, three, or four percent, they were laughing at us, saying it was meaningless to them. Now, three, four, or five percent, even in the luxury market, is a huge improvement to business. The companies like Michael Kors, Tory Burch, Marc Jacobs, Giorgio Armani, and Prada are all looking for those margins.

I'm excited about the whole approach to leveraging some predictive capabilities alongside the great inventory of data that we've put together for our clients.

So, how do we become more efficient with a product assortment, how do we become more efficient with distribution and all of these products to different sales channels, and then how do we increase our margins? How do we not over-manufacture and not create those blue shirts in Florida, where they are not selling, and create them for Detroit, where they're selling like hotcakes.

These are the things that customers are looking at and they must have that tool or tools in place to be able to manage their merchandising and by doing so become a lot more agile and a lot more profitable.

Gardner: Well, great. I'm afraid we will have to leave it there. We've been discussing how retail luxury goods and fashion market goods providers are using analysis from Sky I.T. Group and how Sky I.T. Group heads up its game through using HPE Vertica to provide more buyer behavior analysis faster, better, and cheaper.

And we’ve seen how Sky I.T. has changed its platform and solved the challenges around variety, velocity, and volume for that data to make those better insights available to those retail users, allowing them to become more data-driven across their entire market.

So please join me in thanking our guests. We have been talking with Jay Hakami,  President of Sky I.T. Group in New York. Thank you so much, Jay.

Visit the Sky BI Team
At The 2016 NRF Big Show!
Get More Information

Hakami: Thank you, Dana. I appreciate it very much.

Gardner: And we've also been talking with Dane Adcock, Vice President of Business Development at Sky I.T. Group. Thank you, Dane.

Adcock: It’s great to have the conversation. Thank you.
Gardner: I've enjoyed it myself. And lastly, a big thank you to Stephen Czetty, Vice-President and Chief Technology Officer there at Sky I.T. Group. Thank you, Stephen.

Czetty: You're very welcome, and I enjoyed the conversation. Thank you.

Gardner: And I’d also like to thank our audience as well for joining us for this big-data use case leadership discussion.

I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of Hewlett Packard Enterprise-sponsored discussions. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect discussion on how Sky I.T. has changed its platform and solved the challenges around variety, velocity, and volume for big data to make better insights available to retail users. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2016. All rights reserved.

You may also be interested in:

• Redmonk analysts on best navigating the tricky path to DevOps adoption
• DevOps by design--A practical guide to effectively ushering DevOps into any organization
• Need for Fast Analytics in Healthcare Spurs Sogeti Converged Solutions Partnership Model
• HPE's composable infrastructure sets stage for hybrid market brokering role
• Nottingham Trent University Elevates Big Data's role to Improving Student Retention in Higher Education
• Forrester analyst Kurt Bittner on the inevitability of DevOps
• Agile on fire: IT enters the new era of 'continuous' everything
• Big data enables top user experiences and extreme personalization for Intuit TurboTax
• Feedback loops: The confluence of DevOps and big data
• IoT brings on development demands that DevOps manages best, say experts
• Big data generates new insights into what’s happening in the world's tropical ecosystems
• DevOps and security, a match made in heaven
• How Sprint employs orchestration and automation to bring IT into DevOps readiness