In-Depth

Celequest Branches Out

Last month, Celequest notched a deal with NEC to develop a compliance appliance for the financial services industry.

• By Stephen Swoyer
• 07/12/2006

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.”