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By Jo Best, 3 November 2008 13:20

COMMENT

You've been talking a lot about analytics around unstructured data. What about social networking?
Social networking isn't unstructured data. A telco might want to take all of the phone calls made from a cell phone and connect all those numbers together and work out which ones are being called and link them together.

There's a group of 40 or 50 people who predominantly do nothing but call each other. If you can identify the links - figure out who's in the middle, the dominant person, if you can use that to influence them, to convince them that a product or service is really good then you've got a lot of influence.

Is that something your customers are asking for?
We have some telcos that are doing that. We are using fraud analysis - looking for groups of people that for some reason have the same address or the same telephone numbers. Or they have the same name but live at difference places - they're working in one place but their daycare is off in another direction. That makes it impossible.

There's a lot of interesting things there. What we call a fraud ring or social networking - it's the same thing: a network of people that are somehow related to each other and you want to investigate the relationships between them.

What's the last piece of technology that really impressed you?
The iPhone, until the battery went dead in two hours. I got one of those 3G iPhones. The phone won't last a day and my fingers are too big to type on the screen. Most of us have given up and gone back to our BlackBerrys.

It's some gee-whizz technology I had to have - it's 'let's see, show me the nearest Starbucks'. It's a great feature but if you have GPS on it totally drains the battery.

What keeps you awake at night?
Nothing keeps me awake at night.

Not even all the megavendors that are now in the BI space?We have always competed against IBM, competed against Cognos. We've competed against SAP for many years. We have more than 400 companies we come up against every day because of the broadness of our products.

There is little that could happen out there that could keep me awake at night. We have a wonderful revenue model.

What are your plans for cloud computing?
We use SaaS [software as a service]. We're talking about a big server farm and you pick what jobs to run. It's no big deal, it's nothing new - somebody just came up with a new name for it.

It's eating up lots of electricity and creating lots of waste power. It's un-green. Think of cloud computing as companies that don't care about the environment!