Celequest Branches Out
Last month, Celequest notched a deal with NEC to develop a compliance appliance for the financial services industry.
- By Stephen Swoyer
- July 12, 2006
When Celequest Corp. launched three years ago, it predictably positioned itself as a business intelligence (BI) innovator, touting its dashboarding client software and back-end analytics server as a tailor-made Rx for the then-simmering business activity monitoring (BAM) market segment.
Notwithstanding its innovative, dashboarding-centric technology model, however, Celequest was first and foremost a software vendor. That’s still true today—sales of its Performance Dashboards, Application Workbench, and Analytics Server still comprise Celequest’s bread-and-butter revenue sources—but the company ventured pretty far afield of its software roots this April, when it launched Lava, its first-ever BI appliance.
And Lava, as it turns out, has taken Celequest even further afield from its software-centric, operational BI roots. Last month, Celquest notched a deal with NEC Solutions Inc. to develop an integrated analytic and regulatory compliance offering for the financial services industry.
NEC and Celequest are pitching a hardware, software, and services bundle which consists of the Lava appliance, NEC’s Information Technology Portfolio Management software, and NEC consulting services.
They position the combined offering as a “real-time compliance dashboard” which gives information consumers an at-a-glance view into key compliance metrics. NEC and Celequest aren’t just talking about static metrics, either: when they say real-time they mean real-time, or (at least) right-time: the Lava appliance uses a streaming data architecture—think of a trickle feed of fresh operational and historical data, typically from an operational data store—to integrate, analyze, and publish fresh data to users.
“For operational data, we have a number of ways to get at it. In some companies, the operational data is already being fetched and stored in an operational data store or even in a data warehouse; it comes down to how much latency they [customers] want to tolerate,” Celequest founder, president, and CEO Diaz Nesamoney told BI This Week in April. “In some cases, though, people want very up-to-date information directly from the operational systems, [and] in those cases we provide agents or directors that go into the operational systems.”
The Lava appliance can scale to support as many as 2,500 users on a single appliance, Nesamoney says, and can also be quickly deployed.
In its own sales and marketing efforts, Celequest puts its money where its mouth is: the company has its own riff on the Pepsi challenge of old, the Celequest Challenge, which promises customers a rapid time to deployment and full satisfaction—or they don’t have to pay for the Celequest technology.
“We’re actually willing to guarantee that we can get it up and running for a fixed cost of $125,000, and if we don’t, you don’t owe us a thing,” Nesamoney explains. “And this is something unique in the BI industry, where customers [often] have to sign up to a completely unknown cost that can take forever to implement …. So there’s a lot of fear for customers in taking the risk of going down an unknown path.” Celequest’s approach, he says, is very low-risk for customers: “If at the end of a 45 day period you don’t have what you want and you’re not satisfied with it, you don’t owe us anything.”
About the Author
Stephen Swoyer is a technology writer with 20 years of experience. His writing has focused on business intelligence, data warehousing, and analytics for almost 15 years. Swoyer has an abiding interest in tech, but he’s particularly intrigued by the thorny people and process problems technology vendors never, ever want to talk about. You can contact him at
[email protected].