Posts Tagged ‘BI’

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MicroStrategy Takes BI Mobile – What are The Implications of Mobile BI for BI Platforms?

Thursday, July 8th, 2010

Having just got back from the MicroStrategy World Conference in beautiful Cannes, I thought I would cover what was announced this week at the event.  CEO Michael Saylor launched MicroStrategy Mobile for iPhone, iPad and Blackberry describing it as “the most significant launch in MicroStrategy history”.  In his opening keynote he talked about mobile as “the 5th major wave of computing” starting with mainframes, then mini-computers, then personal computers, desktop internet and now mobile internet.  Their vision here is a good one – BI all the time, everywhere and for everyone. Mobile device access to BI has been around for a while in some offerings but I was impressed with the work MicroStrategy have put into the mobile user interface on touch sensitive ‘gesture’ devices like Apple iPhones and iPads.   They have taken advantage of the full set of Apple gestures and also added BI specific gestures including Drill down and Page By.  They have also released an Objective C software development kit (SDK) for MicroStrategy Mobile.  This allows developers to build custom widgets and embed them in the MicroStrategy Mobile application or embed MicroStrategy Mobile in your own application.

Also it is possible to re-brand and re-skin MicroStrategy Mobile to fit your own corporate branding look and feel standards.  Overall, the user interface appears very interactive and very natural.  To support alerting, MicroStrategy Mobile is also integrated with the Apple push notification service so that personalised alerts are possible.  Also data can be cached so that when alerted users touch “view data”, the data is already there.

Architecturally speaking, MicroStrategy Mobile sits on top of the MicroStrategy Intelligence Server to allow BI to be made available to mobile employees, customers, partners and suppliers. Therefore all the capabilities of the MicroStrategy platform are still there.  I particularly liked the fact that the same design tool can be used for both web browser and mobile device access. Pre-built templates are also available to get you started quickly.  Getting started seems therefore fairly straightforward.  You can download the MicroStrategy Mobile App from Apple and point it at your own server.

One thing that was not covered enough in my opinion was the Portable Documents capability.  This allows you to build up a library of dashboards and re-use them across projects.  The reason this is important is consistency.  We all want trusted and consistent BI. In addition re-use is better than re-invention every time and so you can gain both from a productivity perspective as well as from a consistency perspective.

Implications of Mobile BI on Traditional BI Environments
Looking at this announcement there are several implications on any BI environment when implementing Mobile BI.  This includes the fact that the number of concurrent users is likely to increase significantly.  If you intend to make mobile BI available to external users like customers then the concurrent usage could skyrocket. So your BI platform and the underlying DBMS need to be able to scale to handle concurrent usage.  64-bit support in a BI platform will help a lot as more data can accessed in-memory. This together with caching will make a significant contribution to performance when handling more users. If your customers are worldwide and you make mobile BI available to them then it is very likely that you will also push your BI system into a 7×24 hour operating environment. High availability therefore starts to become critical.   I also believe that Mobile BI will become a ‘workhorse’ in business operations with many employees making use of it.  Therefore the number of on-demand BI requests from mobile devices is set to increase. The upshot is that workload management is going to be needed both in the underlying DBMS and in the BI platform to handle concurrent user requests from mobile devices as well as the traditional reporting and analysis taking place on a BI system.    Also if your mobile dashboards on an iPad are accessing data via data federation, there are implications here too.  There are likely to be many more federated queries and so caching matters here also.

Conclusion
Overall then, MicroStrategy has entered the mobile market with a robust implementation that exploits native interfaces to mobile devices.  With other BI vendors already in the mobile BI market the only question is how much of a differential will it have over its competition.  I like the offering. It also covers Blackberry which is more than Oracle BI 11g (announced yesterday) does.  MicroStrategy customers will no doubt exploit it.

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BITunes on the Cloud? – The Emergence Of Subscription Based On-Demand BI

Tuesday, June 29th, 2010

As I research more and more into the world of Cloud-based BI, it is becoming pretty evident where we are headed. In my opinion we are moving down the road to an iTunes model for BI.   Yesterday I spent some time with Actuate in London looking at their BIRT On-Demand platform as a service (PaaS) solution (which is very easy to use). It was only a matter of minutes before I was up and running with a Mashboard.  A few weeks back in New Orleans I used Dundas Dashboard to quickly build a dashboard from pre-built components. Similarly Microsoft SQL Server 2010 has the ability in ReportBuilder 3.0  to quickly build up a library of components that can be dragged and dropped into a report. The  more I use these products to understand their capabilities the more I see a similarity to what is happening in the information management world.  Looking at cloud-based data integration solutions like Boomi, Informatica and SnapLogic for example, you can see that what these vendors are trying to do is to create a development platform for Information as a Service. In other words you build data integration jobs and then make the results available on subscription such that companies can subscribe to information which is supplied to them by cloud based data integration workflows running on the net.   So now apply this idea to the BI produced on cloud-based PaaS solutions.  Once your reports and dashboards are built then the next thing people are going to want to do is to publish these artifacts as on-demand BI services assuming the intelligence is of business value to others.

If you combine On-demand BI running on top of on-demand information you can quickly see where we are going.  In my opinion it is only a matter of time before we see lots of intermediate companies (maybe even PaaS BI and SaaS BI vendors) making BI available on-demand in something similar to an iTunes  store.  The point here is that the level of abstraction rises again such that it is the BI that is of business value while the PaaS BI or SaaS BI solution is almost forgotten about.  Think of it like this. Imagine selling intelligence on-demand for the World Cup. At $5 a subscription the fact that this is built on a specific BI PaaS or SaaS BI solution is almost irrelevant. The consumer doesn’t care, they just want the intelligence.  It is the insight that is of value. The trick is to make it really easy to share intelligence of value in the form or reports and dashboards or dashboard components once they are built so that others can consume them quickly and easily on a subscription basis.

So bring on the “BITunes” store where insight is available on-demand on a subscription basis.  You can apply this to BI services built on external data available on the public cloud as well as to BI services available inside the enterprise on a private cloud. Users can simply subscribe to intelligence available on-demand.  This is an iTunes model and what a model it is. The size of this market could be very very significant. I don’t think we are far off.

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Cloud Based BI – Understanding The Options Is the Biggest Barrier

Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010

Last week I was in Munich to present at the annual TDWI (The Data Warehouse Institute) conference on “Business Intelligence and Data Management in a Cloud Computing Environment”.  It was a very well attended conference with some great speakers and sessions.  My session focused on the following:

  • What is Cloud Computing and why use it as a deployment option?
  • Why Cloud BI? – What are the requirements for a public cloud or externally hosted BI system?
  • Understanding what is on offer – The Cloud BI Marketplace
  • Getting data into a cloud based BI system
  • Managing access to cloud based BI systems and analytic applications
  • Integrating cloud based BI systems with on-premise systems
  • Pros and cons of deploying on the cloud?
  • Getting started with Cloud based BI

Bear in mind that both public cloud and private cloud based BI were under discussion even though the hype seems all around public cloud or externally hosted BI systems.   Looking at these points it is the third bullet down that for me is the clear inhibitor to cloud based BI adoption.In other words the lack of understanding as to what exactly is on offer.  And there is a lot on offer. On the public cloud we have everything from plain Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)  all the way through to Software as a Service (SaaS) based packaged analytic applications. On the private cloud several BI platforms are already running on virtualisation software such as VMware and/or Microsoft Hyper-V.  However there seems very little in the way of best practice advice on do’s and don’ts when it comes to deploying BI systems on a private cloud based virtualised environment.

In total I came up with 6 options, the last of which is simply where many of us are today i.e. BI systems not deployed on a cloud (whether it be public or private).  The options are as follows:

1.     Public cloud based IaaS for a BI system

2.     Public cloud or externally hosted BI/DW PaaS for building your own cloud-based BI system

  • Multi-vendor or single-vendor BI PaaS offerings

3.     Public cloud or externally hosted SaaS BI packaged analytical applications

4.     Public cloud or externally hosted SaaS BI for operational reporting on cloud based operational data

5.     Private cloud based BI system running internally

6.     Dedicated hardware based BI system (this is what most companies have today)

Option 1 is simply subscribing to an IaaS vendor like Savvis, Amazon, Rackspace or GoGrid  where you pay as you use on hardware and systems software and then buying and deploying your own ETL, DBMS and BI software (assuming they have no restrictions on what they will support).  I am not sure that this is attractive enough on its own without a BI/DW Platform as a Service (PaaS) as well.

Option 2 is the BI/DW Platform as a Service (PaaS) option on public cloud or even externally hosted.  Here you find another choice however. Should you choose a multi-vendor DW/BI PaaS or a single-vendor offering.  An example of a multi-vendor option is the RightScale/Talend/Vertica/Jaspersoft PaaS offering on Amazon EC2.  A single vendor PaaS offering (of which there are several on offer) would be GoodData, or SAP BusinessObjects On-Demand. Others include Birst, Indicee and PivotLink.  A key question here is going to be “Is Data Integration included?”  Clearly in the multi-vendor offering mentioned there is an ETL solution such as Talend in the above example.   Data integration is very much file based with BI/DW PaaS vendors i.e. you upload files of data and then there is some processing of that data to load it into the PaaS DW/BI database.  Several single-vendor PaaS offerings give you only fairly lightweight data integration once data is uploaded.  Certainly not full blown ETL with built-in data quality that you might be used to in a data centre. In fact if you are looking for full blown DQ you are going to be disappointed in most cases.  The ‘get out’ clause is you can add your own script but what about metadata lineage and auditability once the script writer has left for a better job?  A vendor like SAP (mentioned earlier) does have ETL (SAP BuisnessObjects Data Integrator) available but only if you subscrible to their Advanced Edition of SAP BusinessObjects On-Demand (there are 3 editions on offer).  I was even more surprised to see that SAPs BI/DW PaaS offering uses Microsoft SQL Server as the database and not BW.  I would expect that to change to SybaseIQ fairly soon. GoodData on the other hand have refreshingly recognised that you may want to go beyond the data integration you get out-of-the-box on subscription and have gone the extra mile to provide pre-built integration with cloud based data integration tools such as Informatica Cloud, SnapLogic and Boomi. Therefore you can use these tools to integrate your data before passing the data sets to them. The alternative to all of this is to do the lions share of the data integration in-house before uploading data files.

Option 3 is a fast growing market with many relatively new vendors (e.g. Cloud9 Analytics, Rosslyn Analytics, Lixto) as well as traditional mainstream vendors e.g. SAS, IBM Cognos.  The attraction here is a pre-built solution ready to go. These will clearly appeal to small and medium size businesses (SMBs) and even lines of business in some large organisations.  While we see horizontal applications looking at Salesforce.com data, spend analysis and pricing (to name a few), I am predicting that vertical analytic apps on the cloud will appear.

Option 4 is simply using a cloud based reporting system on operational data typically from a cloud based transaction processing system such as Salesforce.com.  In fact it would seem that Salesforce.com is dominating this space. An example here is SAP BusinessObjects CrystalReports.com for Salesforce.

Option 5 is private cloud based BI systems. The largest private cloud based BI system I know of is IBM’s internal Blue Insight which is based on IBM System Z and IBM Cognos 8 BI.  An estimated 200000 IBMers are using this.  IBM have since launched the Smart Analytics Cloud, a private cloud offering for large enterprises based on the same technologies.  However it is still early days for BI deployments on internal private clouds. There appears to be more support coming from developer forums than vendors at present.  From what I can see, companies are taking a ‘toe in the water’ approach to deploying on virtualized environments. No doubt, confidence will grow over time.  However does everything need to move to private cloud? Many companies with very large EDW initiatives may be reluctant to move to private clouds until they prove their scalability and lower TCO.   This issue here is should ETL, DBMS and BI platform all be on the same virtual servers? Should each have their own virtual server configuration? What is that configuration? Can I adjust it? etc. etc. I don’t think there will be a mad rush to put a 100TB DW on virtual servers.  I do like the fact that vendors like Microstrategy have given this some serious consideration and have released a private cloud enterprise edition of Microstrategy 9.  MicroStrategy components are packaged as Virtual Appliances and tuned for expected load. These Virtual Appliances contain fully configured software components and the number of running virtual appliances can be adjusted to accommodate specific performance goals. This is a damn sight better than just saying to a customer “it’s up to you, just deploy it and you figure out the virtual server configuration”  What Microstrategy have done is to allow you to adjust the underlying assigned physical resources to satisfy performance demands and have made available administrative facilities to control virtualized MicroStrategy environment.

It is early days in Cloud based BI. I recommend looking at your requirements and then match the options available to your needs

I would be interested if any of you have experiences in this area. Do’s and Don’ts. What works, what doesn’t.  Please share them by placing your comments.

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Microsoft Opens Up Collaborative and Self-Service BI

Monday, June 21st, 2010

Just over a week ago I was invited to attend an analyst briefing at the Microsoft BI conference in New Orleans that was running alongside the Microsoft TechEd conference.  The conference itself was very well attended with several thousand delegates.  Several things were on show at this event including SharePoint 2010, SQL Server 2008 R2, Office 2010,  PowerPivot, PerformancePoint services 2010. Also on show was  SQL Server Data Warehousing Edition (also known as the Madison project) – the massively parallel edition of SQLServer that will be shipped later this year.

The one thing that stood out for me was the seismic shift towards collaborative BI.   As my friend Colin White so aptly put it in the analyst briefing, “Microsoft have brought BI to collaboration rather than collaboration to BI”.  This is an important point because what it is says is that there is little point adding collaborative features to a BI platform if these are not the services associated with a mainstream collaborative platform.  There is far more value in integrating a BI platform with the company collaboration software to tap into things like collaborative workspaces, presence awareness, unified communication, shared calendar etc. etc.  In Microsoft”s case this is of course the SharePoint product which has become viral in most organisations.

It is no surprise therefore that Microsoft’s BI initiative is built around 3 main components and not just SQL Server.  These are:

  • Office,
  • SharePoint
  • Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2

Note that SQL Server 2008 R2 includes StreamInsight, Microsoft’s complex event processing (CEP) engine and Microsoft Master Data Services

While there we were take through an excellent demo to show the power of collaboration and what it can do when integrated with BI.  It even included the Microsoft Round Table device which although it has been available for some four years, was the first time I have actually encountered one.

What the demo showed me was the speed with which BI and BI ‘components’ can be spread among a community of users. My conclusion is that integration of SQL Server 2008 R2 with Sharepoint 2010 takes this to another level in that the rate that business intelligence can be shared it is almost ‘twitter speed’.  For those of you using twitter, you will know that as soon as something of interest breaks, re-tweets can spread it across masses of people in a matter of minutes.  This is the feeling I got during the demo.  It fuels mass sharing, mass reuse and mass development of BI applications and artifacts.  In particular reports and dashboards. It certainly fits with Microsoft”s vision of BI for everyone.

Several new features open up the flood gates for collaborative BI to share intelligence with other without the need for IT. For example,

BI reports can be managed by Sharepoint in document libraries. You can also preview reports before opening them up.

Also Microsoft is fueling development by business users on the back of what power users have done, thereby bypassing IT.  This is because there is now a capability whereby Microsoft ReportBuilder 3.0 can access PowerPivot workflows uploaded to SharePoint sites.  You can also export to Excel from PowerPivot.  Power users using PowerPivot (originally referred to as Gemini), can take data from different data sources (including newly supported Atom feeds), merge and join that data. Relationships between tables can be managed inside of PowerPivot.  PowerPivot power users can then create workflows that process this data and can upload these to Sharepoint sites.  ReportBuilder 3.0 (or any BI client) can then treat the PowerPivot workflow as a data source.  Not only that but ReportBuilder can create report parts which are sharable in a report part gallery do that other users can reuse them by simply dragging an dropping the report parts onto a new report for rapid development without having to know the detail underneath.

Hopefully by now you have got the picture – power users building their own workflows in PowerPivot, publishing them to SharePoint, other users using them as data sources in reports, report parts created, and a gallery of parts to be shared across a community of users.  Powerful stuff, and we are not done yet.

In Sharepoint 2010 there is a new site template called Business Intelligence Center.  What you can now do is create a new site in SharePoint using the Business Intelligence Center template. This template includes chart web parts and Excel services workbook access. It also includes a PerformancePoint library so that you can start building your dashboard very rapidly including access to reports and report parts. With is mechanism, Microsoft is opening up dashboard development to the masses and also allowing ‘social’ performance management whereby dashboards and/or dashboard components can be rated.  All this integrated with SharePoint and Office is in my opinion going to take self-service BI development to another level that it could easily have a ‘popcorn effect’ with masses of BI being produced rapidly and IT nowhere in sight.  There is no doubt that it opens up the flood gates for business innovation and sharing.  Personalised dashboard development using PerformancePoint Services 2010 integrated with SharePoint 2010.

A Question of Governance?

My only concern with this is the issue of governance.  What Microsoft have done is to put mass development in the hands of the business.  If you think upi have seen anythng on self-service BI, just wait until SharePoint 2010, Office 2010 and SQL Server 2008 R2 move into production in your shop. You ain’t seen nothing yet.

However I see very little with respect to data governance. What about business glossaries? What about metadata lineage?  In a world of increasing regulation and legislation to prevent corporate catastrophes, can anything be audited? Can it be tracked back to where the data come from? How has the data been transformed by the power users? iWhat does the data mean?  I have as yet seen little from Microsoft in the form of metadata management and data governance despite the fact that Master Data Services is also delivered as part of this SQL Server release.  While there is no doubt that this is coming (confirmed by the Microsoft guys I spoke with on the exhibition floor booth) my only fear is will be too late.  Will the horses have already bolted with self-service BI unstoppable and off down a track without lineage to help users know that the data is trusted.

Equally, scorecard and dashboard development is bottom up. Everyone (with authority) can create their own scorecards and dashboards rapidly but there appears to be no framework whereby these can be slotted into a multi-level  strategy management unlike say SAP with SAP Strategy Management.  So what is the answer? Is it all bets are off and just let the business figure out the best way to manage on the back of socially rated scorecards and dashboards?  What happened to business strategy?  Many companies set a strategy at executive level and want enterprise wide business strategy execution.   This latter approach is top-down.  What Microsoft is fueling is bottom up.  My opinion is we need both and not one or the other.

Freedom Versus Governance – A Delicate Balancing Act

It is pretty clear then that setting aside the new SQL Server Data Warehousing Edition, this is very much a Collaborative BI release by Microsoft.  It is a major leap forward in what the business users can do for themselves.  We have two forces at work here.  Freedom versus governance.  We have to get the balance right.  Too much freedom and we could have chaos with no ability to audit what has been done or whether the BI is trusted. Too much governance and we put innovation in a straight jacket or kill it altogether.   All I would say is that IT had better get a data governance program underway soon to control data all the way out to data marts and cubes. If that is done then there is no doubt that the business can be empowered to innovate which is what should happen. Without a data governance program however, I think it is really going to be hard to get alignment with what the business is doing given the sheer speed of development that is now possible with this release.  Let’s hope governance, innovation and collaboration are a winning combination.

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Data Federation – Rapid Information Delivery in a Tough Economy?

Wednesday, April 1st, 2009

Increasingly as I speak with my clients and CIOs I meet at various speaking engagements around UK and Europe, it is becoming clear that data federation can potentially offer rapid value to IT budget constrained companies that just can’t find the resources for another major database project. It may be that if you work in IT you are seeing increasing demand from business users for more reports requiring BI and non-BI information to help them manage their area of business responsibility in a more dynamic way.

In a recent paper by Jeremy Hope on Transforming Performance Management he states that “Most organizations want to adapt rapidly to changing events, but find that they are handicapped because of fixed budgets and poor forecasts. Adaptive organizations are able to respond more rapidly by switching resources dynamically to meet new threats and opportunities… “.

In order to do this there is no doubt that companies have to deliver information more rapidly irrespective of whether or not the data is in a BI system. What many cannot afford is going through a formal time consuming process of data warehouse change to bring in all information necessary. Data federation is capable of sourcing data from several places one of which would of course have to be a data warehouse or data mart. But with increasing amounts of valuable information residing outside BI systems (especially on the internet) it seems that data federation has a role to play as a delivery platform rather than having to change data models, ETL processes and creating another cube or relational data mart. My expectation is that over the coming year we will see an increase in demand for data federation software.

Several BI tools have been shipping data federation software as part of the BI tool bundle for some time to allow quick delivery of integrated information. Note that we are not talking about virtual data warehouses – on the contrary, data federation software rapidly integrates historical DW data with other data sources (operational data, internet feeds etc.) to deliver higher value information more rapidly. Therefore I see data federation software as complementary to BI systems.   If you would like more information on data federation please see this article on how it works. There is also a white paper on Maximizing Business Value from Data Virtualization that talks about patterns and best practices to get the most out of this software. If you have already purchased data federation software or are considering it, let me know.

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Flexible Fact Tables – Best Practice or Rope To Hang Business Users With?

Friday, March 20th, 2009

Blogging occasionally offers up opportunity to open up a good debate. So here goes! Over the last several years I have observed data models in many different BI systems across different vertical industries where so called ‘generic’ fact tables have been designed with only one ‘generic’ measure. The objective of the design approach is that the measure in the fact table is supposed to hold ANY metric. Often this ‘generic’ measure column is then accompanied by some kind of type field to indicate what the measure actually is (what it means) and some other attribute(s) to indicate the level(s) in various dimension hierarchies that the measure stored is associated with.  This helps indicate the additive nature of the metric. Also if it is a monetary measure it may have a currency field and if it is a unit measure it may have a field to explain the kind of units used, e.g. centimeters, litres, cubic metres etc. The stated advantage of these kinds of approaches is flexibility. Adding new measures becomes easy to accommodate as no change to the design is necessary.  It is a perfectly good argument and certainly appears widely practiced by designers.

When it comes navigating such designs to develop queries (or even generate them) it is often the case that IT professionals developing reports for the business can figure out how to use retrieve the information required  (although even IT developers can struggle). However when it comes to business users developing their own ad hoc queries and reports I frequently see these users really struggling to navigate the ‘flexible’ design first trying to figure out what measures mean, if the measure(s) is/are additive and whatnot. More often than not I see this resulting in real frustration among business users who end up getting aggregations in reports wrong and then start to lose faith in their new BI system.  Of course IT steps in to rescue the situation by building more snapshot tables, more materialised views etc. burying generic ‘complexity’ to make the job easier for the user.  More often than not these users also often resort to switching back to Excel to hold data outside any data mart so that they can look at data in a form they understand.

Have you seen this in your organisation?  If so I want your feedback. Is it the case that so called ‘flexible’ design techniques are rope for end users to hang themselves with?  My question is this. What is the best way that you see to design fact tables so that business users become productive and can easily understand how to get at the data when building their own reports? I am not so sure that being so generic is of business value.  Sure it is flexible. But is it usable? What use is flexible design if a business user cannot understand it and make use of all that valuable data? Is it not better to have multiple metric attributes in a fact table (if multiple metrics are needed) with each attribute name saying what the measure actually is?  Let’s have your input!

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Trusted BI Critical in a Tough Climate

Tuesday, January 27th, 2009

It’s pretty clear that Business Intelligence is becoming even more strategic in this tough economic climate as companies seek to have greater insight to help them stay profitable and keep making money. By default almost it would seem that trusted intelligence has got to be there for BI to be reliable and support confident decision making. Therefore on the eve of the Data Governance conference which starts next week (Feb 2-5) in London I thought I would put in a plug for Enterprise Data Governance. This is a fast growing topic and requires organisational change, processes and technology to manage it successfully. Structured data needs to be formally defined and named (a shared business vocabulary) and BI systems (data models, BI tool business views, reports etc) need to be changed to reflect these commonly understood data definitions.

In addition, data in disparate systems needs to be identified and mapped to the common definitions so as to gather knowledge on how to turn disparate data into trusted data. At this point you can then make sure that data integration is done in a fashion that creates trusted data for use in BI systems. Overall it is critical that you build modular data integration jobs (e.g. 1 data integration job per dimension) so that you can re-use data integration ‘services’ if needs be to guarantee trusted data every time.  These days of course, data quality is built in to many data integration jobs and it is important to strive for this. When you have achieved this your data integration tool should provide a valuable set of metadata to support lineage should a user need to track data back to where it came from.  Once your trusted data is available then you can monitor it to keep quality high and take action if quality deteriorates over time.

I’d be interested in your thoughts on enterprise data governance. Let me know what you are doing in this space.

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Some BI Ideas for 2009

Wednesday, December 24th, 2008

So here we are at the end of 2008. Another amazing year in the area of BI. In the 18 years I have been specialising in this IT sector, I suppose you might wonder what else is there to do here. After all BI is a mature market, indeed many of my clients today could be classified as very mature users of business intelligence (BI). Some are on their second, third or even fourth generation of BI system implementations, with data warehouses and data marts, web enabled ad hoc query, reporting, and OLAP tools already deployed and well established across their user base.

Yet there is plenty more that can be done. A key question is how can companies with mature BI set-ups strengthen and evolve their existing investment? I still see lots of opportunity as we head into 2009.

There are several areas emerging to enhance and build on existing BI investment that can offer more value to a business. These include:

  • Integration of BI with Information Management infrastructure for trusted data
  • Integration of BI with Performance Management software to roll up metrics into higher level KPIs
  • Capturing of additional insight from unstructured content (e.g. customer emails) and from external information on the internet (e.g. about market intelligence and about what people are saying about your products and services)
  • Event driven and on-demand Operational BI – a hugely exciting area for 2009 to continuously monitor operations and deliver right -time BI in the context of process activities for continuous business optimisation
  • Integration of Enterprise Search with BI to open up broader access to intelligence via a search interface
  • Exploitation of appliances for lower total cost of ownership on specific workloads
  • Integration of BI with social software and collaboration workspaces to facilitate sharing and exploitation of knowledge in a collaborative environment. This is particularly relevant for those of you wishing to exploit products IBM Lotus Quickr quickplaces as well as Microsoft SharePoint workspaces. Integrating BI here will become increasingly important in 2009

These are just some of the ideas I will be discussing in the coming year and in a tough economic climate BI has never been more important. I wish all of you the best for the holiday season.

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Oracle Enters The DW Appliance Market

Thursday, September 25th, 2008

Well now – has the inevitable happened? Larry Ellison, Oracle’s CEO finally recognised the value of the hardware/software combination in the business analytics marketplace. This market, pioneered over 20 years ago by Teradata and now thriving with many other players including Netezza, ParAccel, Datupia, ExaSol, Vertica and others, has now become a target for Oracle who have clearly had enough of competitors eating away at the Oracle database with lower TCO DBMS offerings optimised for analysis and reporting. With the recent acquisition of DatAllegro by Microsoft, IBM with its Balanced Warehouse and now Oracle entering the database machine market it certainly seems that the DW Appliance market is now becoming a hot competitive battleground.

The newly announced Oracle Exadata DW Appliance is jointly developed by Oracle and HP and will be sold directly by Oracle. The Exadata server runs the Oracle parallel server on Oracle Enterprise Linux. It has 8-HP Proliant DL360 G5 database servers, with

  • 2 quad-core Intel Xeon Processor E5430 (2.66GHz)
  • 32GB memory
  • 1-HP InfiniBand Dual Port HCA
  • 4-146GB SAS 10K hard disk drives
  • 4-24-port InfiniBand switches
  • 14-HP Exadata Storage Server Hardware–each is an HP ProLiant DL180 G5, with 2 quad-core Intel Xeon Processor E5430 (2.66GHz)
  • 8GB memory
  • 1-HP InfiniBand Dual Port HCA
  • 12-300GB SAS or 12-1TB SATA disk drives

My question on this announcement is given that HP are jointly in on the Exadata product offering with Oracle, what does this mean for HP’s own DW Appliance offering – the HP NeoView Appliance? This is also a parallel DBMS product that competes with Oracle. I assume that with HP playing in both markets (its own DBMS product on its own hardware plus the hardware behind the Oracle Exadata offering) that it is seeking to maximising the revenue it can take by covering all bases. Time will tell. In my opinion it is clear that with so many vendors now in the DW Appliance market it is going to take a lot more than just TPC-H benchmarks to get a differential. It certainly means customers will have to look closely at performance claims. Everyone will claim they are the fastest which could easily result in prospective customers demanding more to distinguish one vendor from another. For this reason I believe that analytic application appliances have to happen (analytic application pre-installed on a DW Appliance). Vendors who go deep on vertical analytic application appliances could carve out a very lucrative business when you combine this with the attraction of low TCO DW Appliance offerings.

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BI Vendor adoption of Web 2.0 Emerging

Wednesday, April 9th, 2008

Following my recent series of articles on Web 2.0 and BI on the B-Eye-Network, it is exciting to see BI products pushing their way into the BI market embracing web 2.0. Several vendors such as Information Builders and SAP (Business Objects)< have released BI Mashup tools recently but the one vendor that caught my eye is Antivia, a small Australian company based in Sydney that is really embracing communities and social networking with their product.

As web 2.0 edges towards becoming mainstream in the BI market (probably 2009 timeframe) expect to see more adoption of richer interaction in user interfaces and more collaboration capability to share BI for joint decision making. If you are already using Web 2.0 in BI applications and tools in your organisation please share your experiences on what works and what doesn’t.

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