Recently on a Saturday I got a LinkedIn update from Mike Masciandaro, notifying me he was working on “an open source dashboard.” Mr. Masciandaro, a long-time friend and client, currently serves as the director of business intelligence (BI) at Rohm and Haas, a $9.6B specialty chemical company. He’s also known for his dogged pursuit of BI innovation. For example, a few years ago, he developed and deployed an SAP BW executive dashboard on BlackBerry devices.

When I first saw the message, my initial reaction was to question whether this was in response to issues with SAP’s pricing for Business Objects. We have seen a spike in calls from clients that feel they’re being asked to re-buy software they believe they’ve already purchased. In fairness to SAP, we have heard complaints about other BI vendors too.

A couple days after a volley of e-mails, we hosted a conference call with Mr. Masciandaro and two members of the project team, Brad Daniels and Jon Goldberg. When asked about whether they had considered Business Objects, or if this was designed as a way around that, they said SAP had approached the company nine months ago about licensing Business Objects for a proof-of-concept pilot. The price for the pilot when deployed was described as “a couple million dollars.”

For this project, the primary impetus was the need for a good visualization plug-in for BW 3.5. As Mr. Daniels explained, “We have done a lot of work with dashboarding. BW is very deep and capable, but it’s light on graphical and visualization tools.” Mr. Masciandaro added, “Our data warehouse is like a mountain of gold. There are veins everywhere, but we weren’t mining it as effectively as we could.”

The group first looked at Tableau, which offers a data visualization tool, but had a hard time embedding it into their framework. Using Google, they discovered amCharts, a small company founded in 2006 by Antanas Marcelionis in Vilnius, Lithuania. This turned out to be an ideal solution. AmCharts provides Adobe Flash charts that can display data in almost any desired form: stock charts; line and area charts; pie and donut charts; 2D-3D column and bar charts; scatter, waterfall and bubble charts; and radar and polar charts.

Pricing starts at “free”

For Rohm and Haas, amCharts provided two positive surprises: rich functionality and the pricing. When the team first contacted the firm, they were told the software was free, provided that users post the amCharts logo in the upper left hand corner. AmCharts has since developed a price list, with prices ranging from Euro 85 for a single website license, to Euro 2,300 for a developer license and source code. Rohm and Haas opted for the latter.

They did most of the work themselves over a three-month period. One of the first applications was for pricing optimization. Rohm and Haas had been using a third-party application that pulled all the data out of BW. The team plugged amCharts into their existing financial dashboard framework and were soon getting better reports for a fraction of the money the company was investing into the other vendor’s software.

More employees using it in the first six weeks

If there was a third surprise, it might have been how quickly Rohm and Haas employees have taken to the new visualization tool. There were more people using amCharts in the first six weeks than had even tried the price optimization product within the first year. Said Mr. Masciandaro, “Our users really like how these new visualizations fit right into our highly used and familiar dashboard portfolio. It makes it really easy for them to adopt.”

His users also have some new functionality too. In addition to the scatter diagrams that show customer profitability mapped to products, they integrated amCharts with Gapminder/Google Motion Chart. For example, if you wanted to see how customer profitability has changed over the years, you could do this by moving the slide bar at the bottom of the graphic to put the chart into motion.

The team has also integrated the free Yahoo! user interface (YUI) library toolkit. This adds pull-down menus and loads of widgets.

We asked if they had any trepidation about working with a small firm. They said they received “really good support” from the three or four questions posted to amCharts’ website and the requests they’ve made for new features. They also mentioned they generally get a response within a day or two.

Of more concern, though, is fear that SAP may make BW’s architecture more proprietary. They see BW getting a little more closed in 7.0.

The Rohm and Haas team was kind enough to send me sample screenshots of three applications: pricing analytics, product quality analytics, and a market tracker that maps the company’s sales performance against industry trends. If you’re curious, you can view them on The Future of Enterprise Software blog.

What do you think?

The Rohm and Haas use of low-cost, off-the-shelf tools represents part of the new movement that Ingres’ Tom Berquist coined The New Economics of IT. These types of tools have the potential to create a significant disruption to the high-end analytics market, assuming you have smart people like the Rohm and Haas team.

What are you doing to use the new economics? Do you have a do-it-yourself project using low-cost tools? Is the economy driving you to consider open source software for the first time or for a wider set of uses?

As always, I welcome your feedback and ideas—brichardson@amrresearch.com. We’ll also continue the New Economics of IT discussion with an interview with Tom Berquist on our The Future of Enterprise Software blog. Please join us there and add your voice.