DataSolutions Blog

Meetings for the Austin Cloud User Group (ACUG) are officially underway!


The inaugural meeting took place this past Tuesday, July 27 here at the Pervasive offices with over 60 people in attendance. Represented were organizations such as National Instruments, The University of Texas Computer Science faculty, IBM, Dell, ServiceMesh and Apregato, along with many more. Also in attendance were Pervasive staff from various departments, including DataSolutions, DataRush, Integration and corporate marketing.

Oscar Padilla, the Software Development Manager of DataSolutions, started the meeting with first introductions allowing each person in attendance to briefly describe their cloud projects and what they want to get out of the Group. This was followed by a passionate interactive discussion on cloud vendor uptime, and it is a discussion that is still continuing on the Group Page here.

Don't worry if you missed the first ACUG meeting - the next one is scheduled for August 24 here at the Pervasive offices from 6 p.m.-8 p.m.

Michael Cote of Redmonk will start the meeting discussing trends he sees as he covers the cloud and other technologies and afterward, there will definitely be another interactive portion. Head to the Google Groups Page and start a dialogue or contribute to others and help decide exactly what is covered!

Tell all of your cloudy contacts about ACUG and encourage them to join the Google group. You can follow our Twitter List of members here.

Also, be sure to "Like" the Group on the ACUG Facebook and to follow us on the DataSolutions Twitter and let your tweets about the Austin Cloud User Group stand out with the hashtag #ACUG.

As we move forward, the DataSolutions team wants to take the time to look to you, our customers and followers, for feedback on possible additions to our solutions in the future.



Specifically, we are looking into the synching of Tax Items in DataSynch for QuickBooks and Salesforce.

First and foremost, we want to be clear that we are not asking about doing tax calculations or openly defining the tax amount on the fly within Salesforce. QuickBooks will always calculate the tax dollar amount.

This potential feature will allow DataSynch users to pull Tax Codes and Tax Items from QuickBooks into Salesforce in the 'Accounts' and 'Opportunities' tabs. Within Salesforce, you will then be able to say whether an Account or Opportunity is taxable or not via the new custom field called 'Tax Code.' You will also be able to set a Salesforce Account's Tax Item (from a dropdown already created by you in QuickBooks) for any Opportunities created for that Account, and also override that Tax Item if set on the Opportunity itself.

The 'Amount' field in Salesforce will still show the pre-tax amount and the 'QB Total Amount' field will still show the post-tax amount. The difference is now you'll have the power to choose whether a Customer or Sale is taxable and at what predetermined tax rate from within Salesforce.



Please follow the link below to take a survey regarding this feature. Your feedback will help decide whether or not this is a future addition to DataSynch and is important to us.

Click here to take survey

We will be sharing the results with you here after the survey has concluded and results are collected and analyzed.

Here at Pervasive Software, the DataSolutions team has been hard at work, as DataSynch OnDemand for FreshBooks and Salesforce was just announced by FreshBooks earlier today. This solution integrates FreshBooks and Salesforce CRM allowing users to manage both programs simultaneously. With two-way synchronization, you will not only find your business to be more efficient, you’ll also be able build customer relationships as your data is always up-to-date and available to all users in the company.

You can view the announcement from FreshBooks at http://www.freshbooks.com/blog/2010/07/20/create-freshbooks-invoices-from-salesforce/.

For more information on the solution and to get your free trial now, visit this DataSynch solution Product Page located at http://pervasivedatasolutions.com/home/Products/datasynch-ondemand-freshbooks-salesforce.aspx.

As you all are aware of by now, Intuit online services including  Intuit Merchant Service and QuickBooks Online have on going issues. Because the Intuit services are down, this will directly impact our ability to connect to them.

However our services are avilable, and as soon as the issues at Intuit are corrected, our processes should run as normal and all back data will be picked up since the last successful synch.

All Merchant Services requests queued will also be processed once the Intuit Merchant Service is available again.

for more information see http://community.intuit.com/category/online-services

In case you're unaware of how the DataCloud 2 and Pervasive DataSolutions are connected, let me give you a quick history. Pervasive DataSolutions was created as a division of Pervasive Software with the goal to build 'integration solutions' or 'packaged integrations.' What does this mean? It means that instead of building expensive custom integrations for each organization that needs one, we build an integration once then productize it and sell the same integration to as many people as we can. This allows us to sell an ultra high quality integration for an extremely affordable price.

During development of such 'integration solutions' we realized we were reinventing the wheel during every new development. We needed a way to quickly build an integration then deploy it to as many people as possible whether SaaS to OnPremise or SaaS to SaaS. Thus, the DataCloud was born. The DataCloud gives us and third party developers the ability to build integrations then quickly deploy them to anyone. Think of being an iPhone developer and the ease of being able to distribute your creation to the entire iPhone community in a click of a button...that's what we're aiming for with integration.

So now the DataCloud has matured into what we call 'DataCloud 2.' We also have a true roadmap and quarterly releases. With these releases we are creating a theme with specialized logos and desktop backgrounds. For Spring 2010 I bring you our beautiful new desktop background full of springy goodness. Enjoy!

Does anyone remember when the mainstream didn't know what a blog was? Blogging was confined to uber geeks that attended the SXSW Interactive Festival (which I proudly attend religiously). Then, slowly the blogging virus crept up on the rest of the world so much so that I heard a girl friend of mine last night say "I was so pissed about The Bachelor that I had to blog about it. I don't know how or where I blogged, but I blogged." My mom knows what a blog is. She can't set one up, but she knows what one is. Point made.

I feel there is that same tipping point coming for integration. Society evolves iteration-ally. 20 years ago, computers were impossible, now my grandmother has one. 10 years ago, the internet was used by less than 30% of the US population, today it's 74%. Now that everyone has figured out how the Internets can help them be more productive, what is the next logical step? Connection.

I have full confidence in this theory as I'm hearing very advanced requests from some very non-technical people on a daily basis. They use this app and that app, but they currently have to interface with each app individually. Let's call this type of interaction "app centric." With an iPhone, you go into one app then into another app, but you can't easily manipulate ALL the data sitting on the phone. Integration allows people to be more "data centric" where they can let each app handle what its specialty is, while their other productivity software can access it and have it available to them how and when they need it.

No fashion magazine will tell you, but black is out and brown is out, integration is in.

Something I've learned recently in business is no matter what product or service you may be selling, people will have their own perception of what it does and how it works.

I recently saw a girl try to work an iPod that has never owned one. It was amazing to watch her try and figure out this seemingly alien piece of technology. After chuckling to myself for a minute, I showed her how the click wheel worked and she immediately understood. It took all but 10 seconds for her to grasp the concept, but she still needed to be shown.

I'm trying to translate this experience to my work by not assuming everyone should just 'get' our software. Of course I know how it works, i've been exposed to it for over two years. I need to take that expertise and translate it to each potential customer and help them overcome the learning curve so they get the most value from our product.

This video is another great example of this concept...

 I read an article by Jay N. Nisberg (jaynisberg@snet.net) while on a recent flight.  Among other things, he said as a business leader it is your job to study and analyze business problems.  He also implied that to perform the in-depth analysis required in these uncertain times requires very rich data.

Mr. Nisberg is right, real analysis requires real data.  Data for a business can reside in a variety of repositories, CRM and accounting applications to name two.  I am particularly interested in those two applications since we provide an application integration package that connects them (Pervasive DataSynch). CRM applications (like Salesforce.com) record data that relates to customer activities leading up to and following the sale.  Accounting applications (QuickBooks) keep track of business transactions; they are essentially the till of the business.  Between these two applications a lot of basic business information is recorded.

The process of analysis starts by rearranging data into ordered lists or graphical charts so that perspectives can be drawn and behaviors can be predicted that are not readily apparent in the default state of the data.  Most CRM packages deliver pipeline reports, lead generation reports, marketing campaign reports, order history reports and plenty more out of the box.  Accounting applications allow you to report on inventory levels, sales, outstanding invoices, vendors, payables, and of course receivables and much more.  While these canned reports provide some valuable and in many cases required business insights, there is more interesting intelligence available when the data is combined.

Application integration can get the accounting data from your business into your CRM; and application integration can get CRM data from your business into your accounting application.  Once the data is combined, new reporting can be leveraged.  How about a report that shows outstanding invoices by sales rep?  Or a report that shows the current inventory levels, but filtered by the order history of a set of customers in a specific geographic?  Or, how about sales, by region, with current inventory levels linked to a marketing campaign, performed last year at the same time?  Ok, I think you get the point.

Normally this type of hybrid data would mean some type of batch job run to extract the data from both systems, then another job used to combine it, and finally a third process to actually produce the report.  Or it could mean you have a person whose sole job is to copy sales orders into your accounting application. Ouch!  Application integration not only eliminates the extra work, but it means that the reports can calculate in real time things like sales commissions to date or for a specific range, as soon as you decide you want to know, not when the IT guy gets time pull your data for you.  Or better yet, a dashboard with the critical business values could be sent to your mobile device as you travel from client to client.

I am about to pitch our product and tell you to buy.  Not quite, I am pitching an idea. I am giving you a new toolset to take to work tomorrow. I am not even going to say you have to use my tools, but you should look into this.  If you have not connected your business applications; you can’t being doing your job as effectively as those who have.  

What are you waiting for?  Get to work!

I am impressed and have new hope for the world today. 

First, this was the most participation I have had yet in a survey.  Admittedly, I ran it longer than many of them, but the responses were an order of magnitude higher.  

Secondly, the results were amazing.  A whopping 90% plus of you said the Cloud's time has come. 

 

 

 

If this survey had been run three weeks prior to when it was, I would not have been that moved, but the survey was run during a period when Rackspace experienced two major outages in it's Dallas data center.  I would have thought that might have shaken some of the confidence in the Cloud as a resource for real business. I know for us at DataSolutions we had some questionable moments, so did our customers. 

But in the end the Cloud persevered, and so did Pervasive DataCloud.   It just so happened right before the second outage we moved the DataCloud to an elastic architecture on Amazon.  This not only gave us better scaling ability, it allowed us to miss the problems at Rackspace all together.  Now I am not saying that Amazon is any more reliable than Rackspace in a single point of failure infrastructure, but the ability to configure availability zones ourselves open ups some real options for some one like our team without an army of engineers running around.  In short our customers were still moving data between Salesforce, QuickBooks, NetSuite, Ryma and all our other end points as well as running Monte Carlo Simulations to predict their sales as the Pervasive DataCloud expanded and contracted.

In the next few weeks I will start spending some time on describing what we have created.  In that time I will run surveys centered around Cloud based computing.  Once we get through some in depth coverage on the Pervasive (elastic) DataCloud I'll return to some more basic business issues.

In keeping with the Cloud theme, this week's survey question; I know a lot of you are trusting applications to the Cloud, but I wonder how many of you are trusting your data to the Cloud.  In a percentage range, how much of your company's data exists in the Cloud?

0 to 10%
10% to 35%
35% to 65%
65% or greater

Now that we are on a two week schedule I get a few more responses to the survey.  I do not think 50 to 60 responses constitute a statistically significant sample, but it does give an indication that is worth noting. 

I asked you how you invoice you customers. 85% of you answered from your accounting application.  9% said you use a specialized invoicing application, and the remaining 6% said you used "other".  I have to nullify one of the "other" answers and actually add it back into the accounting application group because it was a limited accounting application, but an accounting application just the same.



What surprised me most is that no one, not one, invoices your customer from your CRM.  I would have thought that someone out there would have built a Force.com or a NetSuite application that sends an invoice to the customer.  But I guess not.  More about a way to accomplish that later.

I also thought that I would have seen more responses using applications or services like FreshBooks, an online invoicing service. 

When it comes to accountants, you guys are hard to change.  I am working with one right now, I want to add monthly billing instead of annual invoicing.  Ughhhh.  I get the idea simple transactions are cleaner.  But still, isn't it about what the customer wants?  Or does that change because it is accounting, GAAP and all I suppose.  I digress, but I leverage this point to make the point that when it comes to accounting, innovation is not moving at the speed of light.

Getting back to invoicing, there is a lot of common sense that goes into invoicing from an accounting application, but I was reading some information on the FreshBooks site and talking to my friends at CloudTrigger.  CloudTrigger uses Conga Merge to create an invoice from closed/won opportunities out of Salesforce.com.  The point of both of these solutions is the invoice can be customized for each customer.  Granted Conga is a more general merge utility and FreshBooks is specific to invoicing, but they both have some distinct advantages over sending invoices directly form accounting.  It may be worth look.

New Bjacaruso Survey

One of the things that stuck out in the survey is the trust issue.  Accountants are risk adverse by nature.  I started thinkng about that and the question for this survey came easily.

A lot of services are now being offered through the Cloud now, accounting is coming, CRM has been there for a decade.  But are you really ready to trust the cloud with your business? Besides the possibilities of outages, the fact that in the cloud model you data is normally stored somewhere else.

Do you think Cloud Computing is ready for prime time?

I wanted to know how many of you used business apps from your phone.  I found out!  66%, that's how many!  That's a lot of you.

I am actually not that surprised.  I write a weekly blog on my exploits to become software independent.  This week my theme centered on the idea the less software we install, the more varied our devices can become.  It's true what Apple says, "there's an App for everything".  I am not sure if they are all iPhone Apps, but between the mainstream choices for smart phones, I bet that Apple is right.  We can literlly run our businesses from the Palm (pun intended) of our hands.


But this proliferation of computing devices only drives home the importance of data being accessible from everywhere.  Application vendors take very different approaches to this problem.  Some good, some not so good.

I am not a particular fan of the way that Salesforce handles the mobile version of their app.  Lots (and I mean lots) of data has to be downloaded to my device before I can use the app.  That means a lot of room on my little hand held is taken up by look up tables.  I understand why they do it, and I am not saying I have a better answer, I am just saying I don't like the idea of so much static data being stored on my hand held. 

I do however like the integration of Facebookwith my address book on my Blackberry.  This is integration at it's best.  I can see my contacts pictures and other FB info while I am using my Rolodex.  How cool is it to call a customer and be able to say, "congratulations on the new arrival ... (car, boat, child, gold club)" .  This is what CRM was meant to be, not, "hey, I see you have not bought anything from me in a while, is your credit ok?"

Now I am not about to suggest that Facebook on my Blackberry is about to take the place of Salesforce mobile, but you have to wonder if somewhere deep in the back offices at Facebook, someone hasn't pointed out how much more information they have about your customers than Salesforce does.  My guess is that the people at Salesforce are working to bring this about in the Service Cloud and will extend it to the Sales Cloud if it is not already there.  But the larger point is the smooth integration of Faceboook data makes using it invisible.  To me that is how integration should work, it should be non-intrusive. 

I have another app on my Blackberry that is well integrated, its called UberTwitter.  Granted not everyone thinks of Twitter as a business applications, but leaving that aside this app does a noice job integrating on a handheld.  I can take a picture with my phone camera, store it on UberPic, assign the local geo code for my current location then create an entry on Twitter, all within UberTwitter.  Nice!  So if I have a customer that is Tweeting about an a issue and I am in the area (or not) I can send them a photo of some possible solution and they will know that I am on the way.  It is a no brainer for service organizations.  I nkow I am reaching here, but this is where it is headed, the only reason it is not there today is becuase the integration makes a scenerio like this anything but transparrent.



Bjacaruso's Fortnightly Survey:

There are many ways to get paid, but most of them require you to invoice your customer.  Our fortnightly question is:

What application generates your business invoices:

1. Accounting
2. CRM
3. Specialized Invoicing
4. Other


NOTE: I had to skip last week's survey write up as a result of an illness.  As a result I learned waiting a week more than doubles my responses.  As of this week my surveys will now be fortnightly (once every two weeks).

This week I asked if you were interested in statistics as they related to Twitter.  I should have asked if everyone answering the emails were breathing, the results would have been the same, 100%. 

Everyone seems to be interested in Twitter.  But even more, they are interested in statistics on just about anything.  People love to know the numbers.  How fast, how slow, how many, how much, who is the best, who is the worst?  For some reason we are fascinated by this type of thing.  It does not seem to matter if it is Twitter or thoroughbreds, if people think they may profit from knowing, they want raw numbers.

I was at 140tc last week, The Twitter conference in Mountain View.  The top presentation was from @Al3x concerning the Twitter API.  But a close second was a panel where statistics were presented.  There were statistics concerning Re-Tweetability, Contribution, Community Standing, Strength of Followers.  If you could place an number on it someone was reporting on it.  I want to spend a little time on some applications I saw.

First Twitalizer.  This group leverages statistics to produce the value of contributors on Twitter.  Twitalizer fits Twitter statistics into the neat boxes of Influence, Generosity, Signal, Velocity and Clout.  The boxes are defined by Twitalizer, but the data is derived from Twitter.  They have a good idea, I am not sure that I want this to determine who is the most influential Twitter user.  It will not take long, as Google found out, for the SEO community to form an secret army that follows,unfollows and Tweets in mass so they may game the system.  Twitalizer stressed a couple of times that they were not "Google for Twitter", but I could not help notice that @Scobleizer and @GuyKawasaki stats looked a lot like Walmart and CitiGroup page rankings.  It will be interesting to see how this site moves forward.
 

Next we looked at TwitterStats.  This appears to be a more than a single application, one to check your TweetStats, others to compare your stats with everyone else.  The creator, Damon Cortesi, is more than happy to share his view on statistics.  That's a good thing, Damon is one of those people that loves to dig through the numbers to uncover a hidden gem of a fact.  Damon has some really cool graphs to measure exactly how often and in what volume you Tweet.  One of the moe interesting statistics he has, in my opinion, is the measurement of who you are retweeting.  In other words are you simply rebroadcasting the same person over and over?  I was surprised at my results, and no, it was not Scobleizer!

Finally a gentleman named Dan Zarrella presented his efforts.  He also is interested in the "retweetability" factor, but from the other side of the mirror.  Dan takes a look at users that are being retweeted and uses math to come up with a number that defines their propensity to be retweeted. Dan refers to this quality as their "infectious power" of their Tweets.  Dan describes himself as a social media scientist, I agree.  I spoke with him briefly after his presentation at 140tc and it was like talking to a young Oppenheimer of the social media rat pack.


There are many more initiatives working to produce statistics on Twitter.  Even here at Pervasive we have leveraged some hyper-parallel threading software to comb through the massive feed at Twitter.  One of our early experiments is focused on extracting the signal from all the noise.  We took the feed and looked within it to find people talking about two items, "Austin" and "SXSW".  Easy enough, we could have accomplished that with Twitter search, but what we really wanted to know was not only who was talking, but when they were talking.  We took the results and compiled them into 24 bars on a chart, each representing an hour of the day.  We made the bars drill down capable, so now we not only knew who, and when, we can also see exactly what was said. 

Twitter has a lot of buzz right now, but I think analytics and statistics are what are really going to be the buzz for the coming years. There is more and more data being created everyday.  Mixing that data and extracting meaningful information is the next big thing.  Look at the push behind Web 3.0 and other initiatives focused on the data.  Even at Twitter, that team is more focused on the content then the number of users generating it than ever.  I predict that a new wave of statiscal and analytical applications will be published this year that will view data in a whole new way.

This Weeks @BJacaruso One Question Survey

Beyond the data and content their is the idea of delivery.  Was thinking about how iPhone says "there's an app for everything."  Made me wonder how many are using the phone (i or otherwise) to do business.

Do you use your phone to access business applications?

First of all, sorry for the late post, the holiday and 140TC wreaked havoc with your regularly scheduled programming. But...

 

Wow.  That's all I can say.  WOW!  Two thirds of you DO NOT profile your data.  I have to laugh.  LOL. 

I feel bad about laughing, but I knew what you were going to say before you answered the survey.  Not many people take the time to discover that their data is in pretty bad shape. 

In fact most people don't care.  That is until they go to use it.

 

  

First it is the mass email they send out...."Why did 45% bounce? they ask.  Maybe it is because 20% moved or quit, or got laid off, or discontinued use of that specific email address.  But what about the remaining 35%? 

Most likely it is because bill@jackson.com was entered as bill@jacson.com or bill@jacksons.com. 

Then there are phone numbers.  A sales person is asked to call into a list, but a large part of the numbers have no area code, or a partial four digit code. 

These examples are only the beginning.  There are web sites, account numbers, credit card numbers, and so on and so on. 

But 66% of you just don't care.  At least until you want to actually leverage the data that you have collected over the course of normal business. 

I was curious how bad the problem is.  So I took a look at some data where I work.  Our company would not want me to release the actual numbers.  But, I can tell you in the database I sampled over 50% of the data had problems.

I looked at one record type; accounts.  I also looked at standard data fields, things like email, web sites, zip codes, etc.  Half of all records had an issue with one or  more of the fields I sampled.  This is not as bad as it seems but it is not good either. 

My guess is our data is not an exception but more the rule.  In fact I know for a fact a concerted effort to clean some of these issues was made a few years ago.  But now here we are a few business cycles later and we have essentially the same problem.

I am not here today to sell you on profiling or on the idea of the remediation.  However both are available from Pervasive.  The profiling is pretty straight forward and a great place to start.  You cannot solve a problem that you cannot identify.  Remediation of data can be a little more challenging but with the correct strategy it is possible.  We offer several solutions. 

I would encourage you to look into your data, find out whats inside.  Then you can decide for yourself what you want to do about it, or if you care at all.

This weeks @BJacaruso One Question Survey

I am attending the 140 Twitter Conference ( #140tc). There was a session this afternoon showcasing Twitter stats tools.

Featured were Twitalyzer, TwitterStats and some tools from Dan Zarrella. It was enlightening to see what Twitter statistics peaked people's interest.

Do you use anything to measure Twitter statistics?

The good news is that 66% of you do use some form of payment directly from Salesforce.com.  But the bad news ia obvious, 33% of you, when taking payments, jump out of Salesforce.com , either call in, or worse, write down the customers credit information, and then process the opportunity. 

I would love the see the results of a follow up survey that asks, "how do your account managers access payment history information?".  My guess is they put the customer on hold, call someone in finance, only to get voice mail.  Do they then tell the customer they will call them back?

 

Guys, this is a no brainier.  Either you are empowering your salesforce or you are not.  There are just too many options for this not be using something. 

I'll admit this weeks blog is a little self serving, but I watch the reports month,I see a customer review like this , and I think about the other people that are still managing this entire process by hand.  Come on people, it is 2009, and you have already committed to automating your processes.  I am not going to rant any further.

This weeks @Bjacaruso One Question Survey will get a little more general:

Your data is dirty!  I can say that with absolute certainty!  I don't really care what kind of data it is, I am right and your data is dirty.  If you don't think so, get in touch with me and I'll show you just how filthy it is.  I can find it in the snap of a mouse click by using a profile tool.  I want to know how many of you use one too.

Are you is are you using any tools to profile your data?