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PRESS COVERAGE
One to watch
Interactive Week
David Bowman thinks he can
make businesses smarter with smaller brains. "We're going from
the Cray-1 to a Pentium chip. It's that kind of a jump," he
says.
The founder of Virtual Strategy,
a 2-year-old Boston-area start-up, plans to tackle the market for
business intelligence (BI) software, primarily in banking and retail
markets. He has his work cut out for him. The market is controlled
by large established companies, such as Informatica, SAS Institute
and SPSS.
According to Bowman, formerly
chief operating architect at Wang Laboratories, most BI systems
are slow to install and expensive, costing hundreds of thousands
of dollars. Furthermore, they analyze data based on complex but
inflexible models that accept data only in preset definitions and
ways.
Bowman came up with an architecture
that breaks down large arrays of data into "microcubes"
that can be analyzed in many ways and updated in real-time. The
system is smaller, faster and less expensive, he says. It also appears
to be catching the attention of analysts like Ronni Marshak at Patricia
Seybold Group.
"Virtual Strategy has
a great idea on how to do things traditionally done in database-heavy
settings but in a much more real-time way," says Marshak, a
senior vice president at Seybold. She says her firm has not yet
encountered a company with a similar approach.
In less than two weeks of
part-time work, Ryan Fuller, Virtual Strategy's manager of product
development, says he assembled a prototype BI application for a
Boston bank that could show its most profitable products, customers
and branch offices, or its least profitable. He further demonstrated
how dropping one product line would still leave the bank ahead by
$89,000, even if it cost the bank all the other business from the
customers who used it.
"Because we don't have
to preprogram para meters, we can go down as deep as you want and
it comes back in seconds," says David Bowman, Virtual Strategy's
CEO.
While analysts call it an
interesting solution, they also say it faces tough, well-entrenched
competition. "The existing players in the space are pretty
big," says Lisa Williams, an analyst at The Yankee Group.
Virtual Strategy, Inc.
TechCTR@Boston
236 Huntington Ave. Suite 316
Boston, MA 02115
Contact: Peter Burton
Phone: 617.262.4500
Fax: 617.236.5560
pburton@virtual-strategy-inc.com
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