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Purple Vero

Friday, January 11th, 2008 at 6:48 pm Written by:

Uh? What in earth is going on over at one of my favourite CAM software companies?

New venture for Vero

The company believes that there is a new market in the provision of a graphically enabled Business Intelligence tool that can analyse and present unique insights into very large sets of data. To that end it has licensed the leading data mining solution Mineset… Don Babbs, Chief Executive of VI says, “While Business Intelligence tools have become the norm for the financial and consumer markets the value within the ever increasing data belonging to the manufacturing industry has been largely overlooked. The formation of an experienced data mining team together with our source code applications based on the renowned Mineset engine will see the start of a process allowing manufacturing and industry users alike to unlock the benefits of their data collection systems.”

A quick bit of checking out sees that we have a block-copy of all the pages from Purple Insight (eg news 2004 of Purple Insight) to Vero Insight (eg news 2004 of Vero Insight).

The product retails at around $200 for a crippled version [link] and makes all kinds of incomprehensible claims, like:

Deployed network bandwidth grows 3X annually – suppliers and users can’t track all security threats or optimize efficiently. Cyber-terrorism has increased 50% in the last year.

Due to Mineset’s unique ability to manage and visualize vast quantities of data it has become an ideal tool for detecting Network Intrusion:

Network intrusion or ‘hacking’ is a common element of all networks, whether it is malicious or simply just for fun, as is often the case today – it still presents a massive threat to organizations. An article in Network Magazine in May 2002 highlights the potential for not only the immediate cost of a network outage from a ‘Denial of Service’ attack but also the attendant bad press, dissatisfied customers and business partners, and furious executives.

Me, I can’t see anything here that can’t be done with VTK combined with some nimble Python scripts, but not everyone can program.

Sure, you can throw up 3D splatter plots of grand and pointless consumer data, I mean, if the parameters are things like engine size, fuel consumption, acceleration, consumer spending over time by gender and age, the likelihood of having callerid for the various groups such as age, occupation and type of car driven, then this is not exactly going to get us to the future.

Meanwhile, the world-famous visual data animation demonstration is a system known as gap-minder, as demonstrated by this presentation here:

So, given that this is a well developed field, with all its own foibles and plodding development in interesting directions, but with no obvious connections to CAD/CAM whatsoever, why on earth is Vero having anything to do with it? After all, it was dumped by SGI a few years ago because it didn’t fit with their business.

Hmm. I see an explanation. The drive from Purple Insight in Quedgeley, Gloucester to Vero’s offices is 11.5 miles.

Now, the drive to Camtek, recently acquired, was pretty short too, but at least it was in the same business. Who knows what the rules of business are. Maybe when it’s too difficult to buy up companies in the sector internationally, you simply grab random ones that are in the immediate locale. Who am I to argue with this world? The customer is always right.

2 Comments

  • 1. Francis Irving replies at 12th January 2008, 2:20 am :

    This is totally hilarious.

  • 2. Freesteel » Blog Ar&hellip replies at 9th April 2008, 10:28 am :

    […] t 2007, “Chairman’s Statement”, Stephen Palframan, 6 September 2007 [7] Purple Vero, Freesteel Blog, 11 January 2008. [8] Notification of major interest in share […]

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