Wherescape RED

[innovator]

I am beginning to hear more and more about this 'new' local BI vendor. Does anyone have personal experience of RED as a user?

Anyone from the vendor care to contribute?

[admin]

I know that RED has been around since at least 2003. Kiwi originally I think, but now also in the US (and Australia, of course). I believe that MIP is a local distributor. MIP has a good track record locally. They used to represent Informatica before that vendor opened-up their own local operation.

I hear that RED has been considered by some big banks, but I know of no live installations in 'the big end of town.'

Rumour is that a telco is installing RED.

Does anyone know otherwise?

[innovator]

I heard that it was Vodafone locally.

Not sure if they are actually live yet.

[Steve Hitchman]

Hi Everyone,

Actually RED has quite a few Big End of town users. MIP has distributed RED here for 5 months and we already have nearly 20 sites currently split between Sydney and Canberra. We also have a reseller network and regular monthly training courses.

We have distributed software for many years and this is the fastest growing product for us ever bar none. As RED runs on all major databases including Teradata we have interest across the board. We have 8 proof of concepts currently running as I type.

Its a very exciting product that does actually change the way data warehouses are built and managed.

3 case study sites in Australia are :-

Vodafone
Department of Defence
Westfields

RED has been around for nearly 6 years now and has 260+ customers. 95% of them are happy to be reference sites. The product also has a 94% maintenance renewal rate.

So yes, this is a very good product that is incredibly underestimted currently in the marketplace.

Regards
Steve Hitchman - MIP

[innovator]

That's pretty impressive Steve. Now I know this couldn't just be 'vendor-talk' Do you have any published case studies or presentations you can share with us?

My main questions about RED (as someone who has never used it) is whether-or-not it can truly handle complexity and scale. Nothing personal to RED, or yourself, of course. I would love to have something that radically cut down my BI development cycles!

Anyway, if you have any performance statistics, user feedback or case studies, I am interested to learn more.

Thanks for posting.

[Steve Hitchman]

Its interesting that we get this question all the time.

RED is a code generating product so if you are working on Oracle then PL/SQL is generated if you are working on Teradata then BTEQ code is generated. RED manages that code.

That basically means that any data mart or warehouse created is as scalable as your underlying data base. Its also means that there is nothing proprietory to RED.

Vodafone recently stated at the Marcus Evans BI Summit that they load 90 Million records a night using RED into their warehouse.

If anyone would like published case studies or whitepapers please feel free to email me on hitchman@mip.com.au.

One last point.....if you search the web you will not find one negative comment about the product.

I don't mean to be too vendor'ee' here guys its just enthusiasm.

[Clive Roberts]

I'm sure Steve is restraining himself from answering further questions too quickly - it'll look like he's pumping the stock...

I've been personally involved -albeit from the sales side - in a couple of Australian implementations - and now that I have set up a new company Wherescape will definitely figure in the plan.

Their marketing is a bit on on the quiet side, and they may not have permission to say more, but they do slip new users into their list

Now includes Perpetual, Vodafone, Westfield, for sure....and I think you'll find satisfied customers. Wherescape is an relatively inexpensive product that seems to do pretty much what it advertises.

[Steve Bennett]

Thanks Clive. Those new users are names I can relate to.

I am (maybe) being difficult but I still would like very much to know what data 'work' is being done in these installations of RED:

• How many transformations are involved?
• How many sources are there?
• How complex are the transformations?
• If I customize the auto-generated SQL, then how do I migrate to the next release of the RED software?

These are the most common reasons in the past as to why workbenches/front-ends/etc. have been unable to achieve the widespread market acceptance that the big vendors have.

Or am I completely wrong?

In any event, I for one liked what I saw and I would like to use RED next time I need to quickly understand data and show end users how we could 'make the data dance for them.' Any tool that makes me look good is good enough for me!

[Steve Hitchman]

Hi Steve,

Let me say first of all that you are certainly not being difficult and the questions you have raised are questions that we answer in most if not all of our proof of concepts.

I will specifically answer each question at the end of this post but can I mention here that we get many questions concerning ETL and I think that this is the case because most data warehousing professionals are bogged down in the ETL element of the data warehousing project. Yes it is a serious phase that in the current siloed approach to warehousing has to be absolutely spot on else months of effort is wasted.

With RED's Data Warehouse Lifecycle management approach the need for complete accuracies first time is less important. Whole data warehouse streams from ETL all the way through to cube development is done in one process in a matter of days not weeks/months and this is a paradigm shift that takes a bit of getting used to.

Ok to answer the questions :-

How many transformations are involved?

There are upward of 80 sites now within New Zealand. These sites range from small Health Districts to corporate wide installations such as Air New Zealand, Vodafone, Fronterra etc. Each site has its own constructs but the larger sites have many thousands of transformations running every night all managed by RED.

How many sources are there?

Once again Fronterra for instance have brought together all their many lines of business into the corporate data warehouse using RED. As they are the 3rd largest dairy company in the world this is many sources all of differing complexity.

How complex are the transformations?

How long is a piece of string. The tranformations are as complex as need be for an organisation such a Fronterra to be able to integrate data from multiple source systems from every line of business into a single enterprise data warehouse. So actually very complex but all managed by RED.

If I customize the auto-generated SQL, then how do I migrate to the next release of the RED software?

This is an interesting question that i would like to answer in two parts.

1) Any customized code that has been generated RED can be migrated to the new release of the software exactly the same way as any standard ETL product. Just like Informatica and DataStage, the new metadata repository structure is installed and then an upgrade program converts existing metadata repository entries into the new format. This is the standard anwer. But let me expand as well.

2) As I have outlined RED generates code to perform ELT work within the target data warehouse. We often get asked the question what happens if I manually change that code that RED generates. Well 99.9% of the time you don't need to. Most tranformations that you need can be generated out of RED. Its like asking :- if I generate an Informatica job stream how can I change the internal code it creates. Quite frankly you never would. I suppose that I could request from Wherescape that they make their job streams blackbox like the traditional ETL tools but I believe that it is good that they don't

If you really feel the need to change the generated SQL code and can find no way in which you can make RED generate the code that you require then you can make the changes directly. RED then allows you to compere all future code generated with you current code allowing you to copy your changes over if required.

We find that it is quite rare for developers to change the code generated by RED and once again I ask you to think about what your standard tool creates. I bet it hasn't even crossed your mind that you would want to break into the datastage of informatica internal code and change it. You would always use the tool to achieve your required results. Its the same with RED.

Plesae don't forget that the ELT element of RED is about 20% of the products in-built functionality and not where the productivity gains are and yet its funny how it seems to get 80% of the attention. Trying to break these Siloes is our hardest challenge, selling the product is easy !!

Sorry this was longwinded but i wanted to be thorough.

[Steve Hitchman]

Hi All,

Just thought i would update you all :-

There are now 22 Wherescape RED sites in Australia and currently 24, yes 24 sites that are trialling the product.