October 26, 2014

Datameer at the time of Datameer 5.0

Datameer checked in, having recently announced general availability of Datameer 5.0. So far as I understood, Datameer is still clearly in the investigative analytics business, in that:

Key aspects include:

Datameer use cases sound like the usual mix, consisting mainly of a lot of customer analytics, a bit of anti-fraud, and some operational analytics/internet-of-things. Datameer claims 200 customers and 240 installations, the majority of which are low-end/single-node users, but at least one of which is a multi-million dollar relationship. I don’t think those figures include OEM sell-through. I forgot to ask for any company size metrics, such as headcount.

In a chargeable add-on, Datameer 5.0 has an interesting approach to execution. (The lower-cost version just uses MapReduce.)

Datameer calls this “Smart Execution”. Notes on Smart Execution include:

Strictly from a BI standpoint, Datameer seems clunky.

Datameer does let you publish BI artifacts, but doesn’t seem to have any collaboration features beyond that.

Last and also least: In an earlier positioning, Datameer made a big fuss about an online app store. Since analytic apps stores never amount to much, I scoffed.* That said, they do have it, so I asked which apps got the most uptake. Most of them seem to be apps which boil down to connectors, access to outside data sets, and/or tutorials. Also mentioned were two more substantive apps, one for path-oriented clickstream analysis, and one for funnel analysis combining several event series.

*I once had a conversation with a client that ended:

Comments

7 Responses to “Datameer at the time of Datameer 5.0”

  1. dave on October 27th, 2014 1:24 pm

    “name for that feature” = “click across”.

  2. Curt Monash on October 27th, 2014 4:14 pm

    Interesting idea, Dave. Doesn’t seem to be used much in that context, however.

  3. Martin on November 18th, 2014 12:22 am

    Hi Curt, thanks as ever for an insightful article. Can you please elaborate a bit on the below statement?

    “However, I Datameer has evolved somewhat away from its original spreadsheet metaphor.”

  4. Curt Monash on November 19th, 2014 2:20 am

    Martin,

    I don’t think Datameer’s UI is particularly spreadsheet-like at this time. Do you disagree? I’ll confess to not having spent a lot of time with it.

  5. Martin on December 2nd, 2014 10:09 pm

    I don’t have anything to compare against, version 5 is the first time I am looking at Datameer. But I would say majority of analyst time is spent in the Workbook view, which seems fairly spreadsheet-like. Do you see Datameer moving away from this paradigm going forward?

  6. Fiorina on May 22nd, 2016 1:20 am

    Hi Curt,

    What in your opinion makes an analytics app store infeasible?

    Thanks,
    Fiorina

  7. Curt Monash on May 28th, 2016 2:17 am

    Hi Fiorina,

    Market size. Doing a particular analysis in a particular way using a particular base technology is rarely something for which there’s enough demand to support a major business.

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