Please note the script of the presentation is below so you can read along with the video if you like.
(Note. We have swapped my photo for the cartoon character. I hope you like it!)
Hello and welcome to our latest blog post.
I am really pleased you have come back to see our latest news!
I am pleased to bring you some news that I hope will interest you.
I am Mihai Neacsu and I am the business development manager here at BIDA.
Today we have some really big news for former Metaphor employees and customers.
We have been very busy on a number of fronts.
One of those fronts is this.
We have been trying to find a way to create “Meta5 as a black box”.
I am very pleased to report that we have been successful.
We are, literally, putting the finishing touches on how this works.
We wanted to let the former Metaphor community know about this sooner, rather than later.
So, if you are a former Metaphor employee, or customer?
Please read on or listen on.
Introducing Meta5 As A Black Box
Those people who have used Metaphor back in the 1990s know and understand that it empowered business users to make decisions to improve the profitability of their company.
People who used it know how good it is and the difference it can make.
But Metaphor kind of got lost in the world of IBM.
We would like to “Make Meta5 Great Again”, if we can use that term in the US where so many people are so polarized about politics.
One of the areas where we have been investigating is the idea of making Meta5 available to the mass market.
Today, Meta5 has added many features that make it a great complementary tool to Excel.
So our investigation work has centered around making Meta5 a mass market product of great value to companies who like to do their reporting in Excel.
So please allow me to explain what is now possible.
Please let me apologize for the formatting of the ordered list on blog post.
It seems WordPress does not allow good spacing inside an ordered list.
These are the top 10 features of what is now possible:
- The SQL that can be sent to the data source can be up to 64K per statement.
- The SQL can be hand written and as complex as the database can support.
This is very important because with CTEs supported in most databases today it is possible to create very complex statements that ordinary users can not write for themselves.
These are SQL statements so complex that that Excel itself can not send them into databases. - The SQL statements can contain placeholder parameters which can be set to real parameters before the SQL is sent to the data source.
This is very important. For example, if a retailer has 20 region managers and each region manager wants his/her own suite of reports containing just his/her data?
There would be one set of SQL.
Each SQL statement would contain a variable for “region-manager” and then that can be set at run time.
Meta5 will deliver, say, 10 reports to each region manager, for a total of 200 reports.
Most likely these will be delivered by one drive. - PowerShell commands can be executed by Meta5.
This means that pretty much any function that needs to be executed on Azure, or involve Azure, can be executed from Meta5 or the BIDA scheduler.
For example reports can be sent to one drive using PowerShell without the server itself being logged into one drive. - Meta5 Capsules can be entirely self contained.
This is very important.
Each Meta5 capsule has 208 variables that can be set.
Usually these are set by a site and vary from customer to customer.
Historically, capsules were never moved from customer to customer.
Historically there was never an effort to create Meta5 capsules and sell them on the market.
We have changed that.
Now we have the ability to set a “master parameters” database at the desktop level.
All 208 parameters are retrieved from the master parameters database.
This means that one capsule can be written that can run on many companies data because the variables will be retrieved from each companies own master variables database.
If a company runs out of variables at 208 they can simply create a second set of 208 variables and start using them.
But any single capsule is restricted to 208 variables. - Each capsule can have it’s own variables that over-ride the company global variables.
Most capsules have their own internal variables that they need to use that over-ride the global company variables.
Or they may over-ride reserved variables.
For example there is a now a variable called capsule-name.
This is a reserved global variable that is set by each individual capsule.
The result of 5/6 is that we can write one capsule for an ERP like Business Central.
We can then put it into the business central store and sell it to ANY installed BC account.
Other members of the former Metaphor community might wish to do the same. - Meta5 can schedule capsules on at timer.
Meta5 has a feature to schedule capsules to run at a certain time.
Meta5 also has a feature to start a capsule based on a windows command.
So a user can run a capsule simply by double clicking the command to run it. - A capsule can wait for a “signal file” from the data source to tell it that it has finished processing.
Say an ERP is running late in processing and the capsule is scheduled for, say, 4am, but the ERP has not completed processing.
What is available is a feature for the ERP to ftp a signal file to somewhere the Meta5 server can see it when data is ready.
The Meta5 capsule can wait until that file has arrived before running.
This use of signal files is standard across most ERP implementations to let downstream systems know they are finished processing certain data. - The signal file deletion is optional.
If the customer wants a capsule to run on it’s schedule every day there is a feature to turn off the deletion off the signal file.
The signal file would be created at capsule installation time and never deleted. - Removal of temporary workbooks from Excel.
Having retrieved data from any ODBC source, including any CDATA ODBC source, we can send that into Excel workbooks.
We can then load it from the excel workbooks into the power pivot models.
We can then refresh all reports/dashboards with the new data in the power pivot model.
We can then delete the workbooks where the data was sent into Excel so they do not need to be “hidden” from the user.
The user then gets a workbook with his/her data ONLY in the power pivot model and no redundant worksheets in the workbook.
Given all of the above?
We, or you, can write a capsule once, and then sell that one capsule many times over to many customers.
When you put all this together it means that we now know how to create much more valuable dashboards in Excel, sourcing data from common operational systems.
The “barrier to entry” is deep knowledge of the operational system that you are writing the dashboards against.
But this will work for ANY system, and that includes ANY large system that is widely used.
All we (or you) have to do is develop dashboards better than the vendor has delivered, and better than other people doing the same have delivered.
Of course, if you are a former Metaphor employee or customer, then you might very well have an interest in having your company investigate this whole idea of “Meta5 as a black box”.
There are a number of angles to investigate this from.
Firstly, in using Meta5 inside your company to generate Excel dashboards that you have not been able to get to work any other way…yet.
Or Secondly, we are sure there are some other Meta5 literate people out there who would like to create capsules and sell them to customers on the open market.
We will be doing Business Central and the InfoSys Finacle banking system.
So we would prefer no competition in those spaces for a while.
But there are a lot of large common operational systems (as well as installed data warehouses) where “Meta5 as a black box” would be a very sellable item.
At least we hope so!
I hope that this blog post has been interesting to the former Metaphor community.
Please pass this blog post along to those you know who used to be a part of the Metaphor community.
The idea of “Meta5 as a black box” means that Meta5 could be widely used again to the great benefit of Meta5 customers.
We hope all those people who were once part of the Meta5 family will have an interest in promoting this idea.
If you are interested and would like to be notified when we bring out the demo?
You can contact me on our “Contact Us” button below.
And with that?
I would like to say thank you very much for reading or listening to our blog post today.
I really appreciate your time and attention.
We hope you found this blog post interesting and informative.
We would love to hear your comments, so please feel free to use the comments section below.
I wish you a great day.
Thank you.
Mihai Neacsu
BIDA Business Development Manager.
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