Joe Pusztai, GM for Cubewise North America, brings an electrical engineering background and extensive experience from Northern Telecom and Nortel. Transitioning to sales forecasting during the dot-com boom, he encountered challenges with complex data in spreadsheets. Discovering IBM Planning Analytics (TM1) in the 1990s revolutionized his approach to managing multi-dimensional data. Joe emphasizes the need for increased accessibility to IBM Planning Analytics (TM1) for users to explore and experiment, which sparked his lightbulb moment on the benefits of IBM Planning Analytics (TM1).

(disclaimer: this transcript has been automatically transcribed so it may contain errors)

I’m Joe Pusztai, the General Manager for Cubewise North America. My background is in electrical engineering, and my first job out of school was with a telecom company called Northern Telecom. It renamed itself later to Nortel. And eventually I kind of left the pure engineering realms, testing and stuff like that, and I became a customer engineer, which was configuring networks and systems for large customers. And then from there, I got into a few career steps later, I was in a sales forecasting position.

And this was in the late nineties, just around the time the dot com boom was booming and the optical networking boom was booming. And all of a sudden, the Nortel business, which had, historically, it’s a hundred year old company, or was, it’s no longer in business, but it was a 100 year old company. And historically they had maybe a dozen customers. You know, it’s a Canadian company, so every province is a telecom, you know, regulatory outfit.

And MCI, I think, was like one big one in the US. But the point is the. The customer dimension, or customer access, was almost static. And the same thing with the product dimension. Products. The product lifecycles were five years, maybe longer. And all of a sudden, this kind of older, dinosaur type company was dropped into this fast moving Cisco Internet.com stuff. And up to that time, they were, I guess, relatively successfully using spreadsheets to run the business.

And all of a sudden, that was just not viable anymore, not tenable. And I was unfortunately sort of in the middle of caught between that rock and hard place of having to use spreadsheets to manage an ever increasing complex business. And in my desperation, this was back 1990, whatever. There was no Google back then. There was an Internet, but there was no Google. And I searched for, I remember vividly the multidimensional spreadsheet is what I typed into the search box.

And I think there was two hits. There was a product called Wings at the time, I don’t know if you remember, it was like a three tabs in the workbook and TM1 popped up at the top of that search list. And I was like, oh, let’s take a look. There was a free to download trial version right on the website. I downloaded it, installed it, and ladies and gentlemen, that was my light bulb moment, because it was exactly, exactly what I had been envisioning, right?

A way to manage multi dimensional data over time, products, customers, scenarios. We had various sales and marketing programmes that let customers buy sort of the backplane today and fill it up over time. And, you know, the revenue cycles were. There was lots of leads and lags. So anyway, I hired a local consultancy who was a reseller of that product of TM1. They helped me develop my first application.

During that process, I learned how to use the tool myself, and the rest is history. The future of IBM and TM1 is extremely bright. I would say if I looked at it a bit pessimistically for a moment. You know, I’m concerned that people like me will never have one of those light bulb moments again, because download and try it before you buy it and just sort of experience it.

That’s been a word that I’ve used often. It’s very hard to explain the magic of TM1 and the blue light of TM1 until you’ve actually used it. And the easier we can make it, an IBM can make it to use and try and experiment and kick the tires, the better. I think that kind of those barriers have been increasing over the years, even with Planning Analytics Cloud, it’s not as visceral and it’s not as immediate as downloading a piece of software onto your laptop.

Now obviously the world’s going in a cloud direction. IBM is doing that, the containerization, there’s a lot of great new technology, much more scalable. So when I started using TM1 you were lucky if you could get 20 users concurrently on a server. Right now it’s 2000 or whatever it is. So IBM, obviously enterprise vendor, is moving into the larger scale direction. But I hope they don’t lose sight of the fact that it’s guys like me who sort of made the TM1 market what it is.

In the universe of TM1, the light bulb moment is described as the phenomena of clarity that a business developer or manager has, once encountering the advantages of TM1. We asked Cubewisers to share their light bulb moments. This is what they had to say.