Rocana
Rocana, formerly known as ScalingData.
Splunk engages in stupid lawyer tricks
Using legal threats as an extension of your marketing is a bad idea. At least, it’s a bad idea in the United States, where such tactics are unlikely to succeed, and are apt to backfire instead. Splunk seems to actually have had some limited success intimidating Sumo Logic. But it tried something similar against Rocana, and I was set up to potentially be collateral damage. I don’t think that’s working out very well for Splunk.
Specifically, Splunk sent a lawyer letter to Rocana, complaining about a couple of pieces of Rocana marketing collateral. Rocana responded publicly, and posted both the Splunk letter and Rocana’s lawyer response. The Rocana letter eviscerated Splunk’s lawyers on matters of law, clobbered them on the facts as well, exposed Splunk’s similar behavior in the past, and threw in a bit of snark at the end.
Now I’ll pile on too. In particular, I’ll note that, while Splunk wants to impose a duty of strict accuracy upon those it disagrees with, it has fewer compunctions about knowingly communicating falsehoods itself.
1. Splunk’s letter insinuates that Rocana might have paid me to say what I blogged about them. Those insinuations are of course false.
Splunk was my client for a lot longer, and at a higher level of annual retainer, than Rocana so far has been. Splunk never made similar claims about my posts about them. Indeed, Splunk complained that I did not write about them often or favorably enough, and on at least one occasion seemed to delay renewing my services for that reason.
2. Similarly, Splunk’s letter makes insinuations about quotes I gave Rocana. But I also gave at least one quote to Splunk when they were my client. As part of the process — and as is often needed — I had a frank and open discussion with them about my quote policies. So Splunk should know that their insinuations are incorrect.
3. Splunk’s letter actually included the sentences Read more
| Categories: Hadoop, Parallelization, Rocana, Splunk | 4 Comments |
Differentiation in business intelligence
Parts of the business intelligence differentiation story resemble the one I just posted for data management. After all:
- Both kinds of products query and aggregate data.
- Both are offered by big “enterprise standard” behemoth companies and also by younger, nimbler specialists.
- You really, really, really don’t want your customer data to leak via a security breach in either kind of product.
That said, insofar as BI’s competitive issues resemble those of DBMS, they are those of DBMS-lite. For example:
- BI is less mission-critical than some other database uses.
- BI has done a lot less than DBMS to deal with multi-structured data.
- Scalability demands on BI are less than those on DBMS — indeed, they’re the ones that are left over after the DBMS has done its data crunching first.
And full-stack analytic systems — perhaps delivered via SaaS (Software as a Service) — can moot the BI/data management distinction anyway.
Of course, there are major differences between how DBMS and BI are differentiated. The biggest are in user experience. I’d say: Read more
| Categories: Business intelligence, Buying processes, ClearStory Data, Data mart outsourcing, Pricing, QlikTech and QlikView, Rocana, Tableau Software | Leave a Comment |
Rocana’s world
For starters:
- My client Rocana is the renamed ScalingData, where Rocana is meant to signify ROot Cause ANAlysis.
- Rocana was founded by Omer Trajman, who I’ve referenced numerous times in the past, and who I gather is a former boss of …
- … cofounder Eric Sammer.
- Rocana recently told me it had 35 people.
- Rocana has a very small number of quite large customers.
Rocana portrays itself as offering next-generation IT operations monitoring software. As you might expect, this has two main use cases:
- Actual operations — figuring out exactly what isn’t working, ASAP.
- Security.
Rocana’s differentiation claims boil down to fast and accurate anomaly detection on large amounts of log data, including but not limited to:
- The sort of network data you’d generally think of — “everything” except packet-inspection stuff.
- Firewall output.
- Database server logs.
- Point-of-sale data (at a retailer).
- “Application data”, whatever that means. (Edit: See Tom Yates’ clarifying comment below.)