Intelligent Enterprise

Fueling an emerging trend toward more inclusive, ready-to-run data warehousing offerings, Kalido last week announced the KONA Information Appliance. Set to debut early next year, the package bundles Kalido's information management software and QlikTech reporting and dashboarding tools together on Netezza's TwinFin Appliance. KONA (Kalido On Netezza Appliance) will be sold and supported by Kalido as a single, pre-integrated product, and it will include industry-specific business information models initially targeting the pharmaceutical and insurance industries.

"In this economy, customers are asking for more specific solutions, so this isn't just another horizontal technology," says Kalido CEO Bill Hewitt. "We've taken our experience in a few key industries and built prebuilt models, prebuilt dashboards and prebuilt load processes specific for the types of data used to solve specific problems."

KONA will debut with two industry-vertical flavors: Kona for Pharmaceutical Sales and Marketing Analytics, and KONA for Insurance Sales and Distribution Analytics. Hewitt says these two industries account for more than 30 percent of the company's total customer base, and the respective applications address big changes taking place in these industries.

"Sales and marketing analytics in pharma is a very hot area because many of the manufacturers are changing their business models to do more team selling and private labeling," Hewitt explains. "And the insurance industry is getting incredibly competitive, with Internet-savvy companies challenging the way insurance is sold."

The KONA apps are aimed at assessing sales channel effectiveness, product profitability and evolving distribution strategies. Between the prepackaging of software and hardware and the customized nature of the industry- and application-specific content, KONA is expected to speed data warehouse deployment by as much as 50 percent from typical custom deployments, Hewitt says. In addition to the pharma and insurance offerings, Kalido is contemplating similar application-specific versions of KONA for the financial services, consumer packaged goods and retail industries, though Hewitt declined to predict when additional versions might debut.

Priced at $450,000, KONA is based on Netezza's 10-terabyte TwinFin Appliance. The BI software from QlikTech is a limited version of the QlikView server that includes 10 seat licenses for dashboard access (related reports can be shared with hundreds of users). In addition to Kalido's industry-specific data models and ETL software, KONA includes master data management (MDM) and data governance content. The pharma application, for instance, includes product data master capabilities, while the insurance application manages product and broker data dimensions.

Kalido's KONA packaging approach bears some resemblance to the IBM Smart Analytic Appliance announced last month. IBM also promises faster, easier data warehouse deployments with out-of-the-box appliances combining all required hardware and software as well as optional modules with IBM ETL/data integration software, IBM Cognos BI software, vertical-industry applications and third-party analytics.

You could say that Teradata and SAS were early champions of pre-integrated data warehousing and BI technologies, with joint offerings announced some two years ago. However, the marketing emphasis for these in-database query offerings is as much or more about data warehouse performance as it is about rapid, turnkey deployment.

It will be months before the market can declare the Kalido and IBM offerings a success. But there's little doubt that the short term will bring more vendors and more packages combining data integration, data warehousing infrastructure, BI and other related components of the total information management stack.