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Next-Gen Business Intelligence
Business Intelligence (BI) isn't just for power users anymore. It now heads to more people throughout the organization to help them do analytics job. Tools and applications that allow cross-enterprise, inter-enterprise and external data to be integrated and analyzed form the basis of next-gen Business Intelligence
Rahul Sah
Thursday, September 03, 2009
Over the last few years, BI has proved to be a competitive differentiator for
enterprises that relied on BI tools for decision making. BI helps an enterprise
to improve its business performance by providing it the ability to achieve their
mission objectives by making smarter decisions at every functional level of the
business. Though the landscape of BI matured over years, it has come of age from
simple reporting and dash-boarding capabilities to incorporate analytics tools
as well. Analytics tools make a difference for organizations, by giving them
insights into the facts presented by reporting tools and then supporting them in
taking actions based on those facts. With the meteoric increase in data in
organizations, enterprises can now make those data accessible and useful by
tapping into the power of BI technologies. Today, BI systems are emerging in
every aspect of enterprise, ranging from large scale enterprise BI environments
that are deployed to support thousands of people, to smaller departmental BI
systems that cater to the needs specific to that department. The maturity of BI
adoption can be seen in new industry verticals like telecoms, retail,
health-care and BPO sectors.
For an enterprise to successfully implement BI, it becomes imperative to have
proper information management architecture in place. BI tools have to fetch for
information coming from various data stores across departments in an enterprise.
A BI tool sits atop all the data stores as a common layer. However, there always
remains a gap, because BI solution and the information management system, which
incorporates data-warehousing come from different vendors. This gap could be in
terms of compatibility of a BI solution with certain type of underlying
data-store or because of the fact that organizations avoid handling different
vendors and prefer one who can provide a single solution stack. This has
resulted in many joint ventures between BI solution providers and enterprise
solution providers, like MicroStrategy with Sybase, or acquisitions of BI
providers by enterprise solution providers, like BusinessObjects by SAP to
mention a few. This way, an enterprise can have a single solution that would
manage its information and also provide business intelligence solution. Apart
from having a singular stack solution for their BI needs, enterprises also want
BI solution to cover their whole enterprise and provide them with timely
information in an easy-to-interpret way with functional analytics that can help
enterprise make better business decisions. Systems that can provide such
information from cross departments and in faster time limits, are the part of
next gen BI tools. Here are few of the trends that are taking BI to a newer
landscape.
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Sanjay
Deshmukh,
Vice President, for Business User Group, SAP India subcontinent |
The 'Cloud' is an emerging deployment model for software applications. SaaS
represents the highest level of the three layers of the cloud and consists
of applications and services that are made available to users via Internet.
SAP believes that Cloud computing is a natural, complementary extension to
on-premise and on-demand business applications. So it promises more agile
and cost-effective deployment of business capabilities for our customers.
SAP anticipates that as cloud computing matures and is more broadly adopted,
it will enable us to deliver new classes of applications and to extend our
on-premise applications. For example, it will be possible to integrate
community-based cloud data sources with internal business systems that could
bring the wisdom of crowds to bear on business issues that will ultimately
improve business performance.
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BI on Cloud
Cloud computing is one of the hottest trends in the industry today. Many
solution providers who used to serve on Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform
are now exploring Cloud as a platform to offer their services. In
business-economic terms, SaaS is predominantly driven by the wish to deploy IT
resources quickly and flexibly, at a time when organizational structures and
product portfolios are increasingly modified to comply with changing market
conditions. Cloud due to its benefits of auto-scalability and elasticity becomes
the next logical step for many to move into.
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Sunil
Jose
Managing Director India & Sub-Continent, Sybase |
A singular stack BI-EDW solution is the key to an organization's information
management. The BI tools reside on a presentation layer that comprises of
data from various sources. The data from all these data stores goes through
the process of modeling, cleaning, profiling, matching and are loaded into
the repository, and the BI tools reside on this presentation layer. Today
enterprises have number of applications and their data sources are
disparate. For an enterprise BI solution to work, it becomes dependent on
how well the information management is done. A singular stack solution will
help an organization addressing the issues to manage all the data sources of
various apps and form a well structured repository for BI tool to access
enterprise wide information and not confine to information coming from an
application suite.
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Though companies like SAP offer BI solutions (BusinessObject) on SaaS
platform as On-Demand offering, the likes of Google and Amazon have cloud
computing hardware infrastructure already. It's interesting to see how BI
companies would foray into this new domain and use such Cloud platform to
deliver their products. Already there were announcements from companies like
JasperSoft and Talend that they would expand their services on Cloud
infrastructure. Pehtaho has recently released its Cloud based BI product based
on Amazon EC2 platform. However, how enterprises adopt this remains to be seen.
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Shankar
Ganapathy,
World Wide Vice President, Asia-Pacific, MicroStrategy |
Metadata is where the BI tool interacts with the underlying data layers; the
information stored in the database tables and columns is translated into
business terms by BI tool which forms the metadata that is unified across
all of the spectrum of users. Once that is done, the user regardless of his
expertise level, can have access to those defined business terms which are
presented in form of dashboards, that are visually easy to interpret and
attractive. Later the same user can investigate further through these
dashboards, drill down reports and gather more intelligence and can even set
event alarms and alerts. They can also do true data discovery through the
Web interface.
Creating reports was considered to be a complex IT job. We want the users
to do self-service, i.e. IT to be out of dealing with reports. Their job is
towards managing and creating the infrastructure and let the business users
themselves do what they want to do with the reports and have a platform with
which they can create their own reports. |
One drawback in a Cloud is that you lose control over the data which is
extremely sensitive and crucial to the decision making for an organization. You
can't risk landing your confidential data in the Cloud. What if the data reaches
your competitor's hands? That depends on how the Cloud environment matures up as
a enabler technology platform for providing On-Demand services.
| Open Source BI solutions are considered more affordable
than proprietary BI solutions and its adoption may pick up with
subscription-based model that avoids an initial large payment for the
software license. Open source BI platforms are getting designed to appeal to
developers, who can take the software and embed data analysis into
applications they develop. But enterprises have the typical fear,
uncertainty, and doubt (FUD) for open source solutions over intellectual
property liability, quality, security, scalability and support. Still
organizations where there is a specific need and a defined budget are going
ahead and exploring open source options. Sudhanshu Jain, AVP & Chief
Architect – BI Solutions, Path Infotech |
BI coming out of Silos
For an enterprise, analysis and reporting of data have become an integral part
of its decision making processes and actions. However, each organization has a
number of departments and each department has a BI solution which is specific to
its requirements. For instance, finance department might have its own BI system
residing on the financial information data-store. This makes viable sense for
having department wise BI, which in essence are the packaged BI tools that comes
along with the application. But when it comes to a BI solution that pans through
each of the processes of an enterprise, then it becomes necessary for the BI
solution to access various data-stores of different enterprise applications like
ERP, or SCM and provide cross functional reporting and analysis ability. This
cross departmental reporting and information analysis capability can be achieved
through new tech like multi-source. Page(s) 1 2
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