About 2 years ago both Tal Cohen and I embarked on a new adventure. We left a big company (Cisco) and had an idea to create a search engine for databases. At Cisco, we spent a substantial amount of our time working with data, its analysis and collaboration. In many cases we ended up using code to accomplish what we needed result in expensive engineering time and longer time to complete. Why can’t we simply talk to a database … we asked ourselves and this is where we started.
Today, we are extremely grateful for the experience that we had gone through, the planning, development, testing, meetings with potential prospects, the feedback, the pitch, the sale moments and much more.
It’s funny, but we first introduced our solution over a SAP event for startups and it reminded us the feeling of working with a big company with endless resources and opportunities.
At the same day, SAP employees were asked to explore several startup offerings and invest virtual money in the company product they like the most. We didn’t win the first place, but we were very happy to be announced the second. It provided us a huge trust from the audience. We knew that people liked the idea of getting powerful and yet simple interface to business data. It closed the loop.
So what PrimeQue is doing? We created a platform that allows a quick transformation of database schemas into a really easy and intuitive formal and yet flexible language.In other words, we provide a very similar Google-like experience over business data, but unlike Google Search, PrimeQue understands the meaning behind the question.
In fact, our first customer - ConteXtream, needed so bad a solution like ours that in one week, the system test manager, Gal Kleinman had asked more than 300 queries, and then scheduled automated runs that result in another 300 queries.
With PrimeQue Gal Kleinman was able to get a clear picture of company test and development progress without going through endless forms, using Excel or ask someone else to do it for him.
“I don’t know what I would do without PrimeQue; the ability to ask direct questions and immediately get an answer is amazing. People are asking me questions and I simply open the favorites choose a question, and modify it a bit if needed. In fact, I got a call from the CEO asking me to create an account for him, he didn’t want me to spend time on reports that he can create himself”, says Gal.
Surprisingly, more than 90% of the feedback that we received was not regarding the
PrimeQue language, but additional feature requests for better manipulation of results - in other words, the core of our technology - which is the language - works! Gal Kleinman is using more than 90% of the product features including the ability to define groups of people and ask about them, the ability to build his own trends, or even the ability to combine multiple charts together, etc.
With HANA we loaded 8 tables with total of 28 million rows of movies data and got an exceptional performance results. Complex queries were faster by a factor of ~ x300 than a traditional disk based DB.
It is clear that the ability to converse with business data using a simple yet powerful tool such our language is a must have solution for any organization. The implications could go far beyond the ability to ask questions and could affect the entire company, as more people get direct access to business answers they become more influencers, it will shorten meeting preparations, and encourages people to ask questions ultimately providing the company better chance to respond to business challenges.
Yossi Shani.
PrimeQue integration PoC on HANA was shown to Dr Vishal Sikka, SAP CTO and Board member during his visit to SAP Lab Israel last month
PrimeQue is a participant of the first cycle of Start Up Focus Program in Israel
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