Adding analytical horsepower to BI infrastructure

By Sylvain Pavlowski

Most companies have implemented a Business Intelligence technology in order to provide their users with indicators to measure the health of the business. The deployment of ‘BI 1.0’ infrastructures entailed the creation of centralised data warehouses to allow information collected from various business applications to be organised and aggregated. The differences and complexity of the underlying infrastructure involved in achieving this makes it necessary to create a semantic application layer. The purpose of this layer is to break down the complex structure of the data warehouse to make data available to users in a simplified format.

“This vision of 'everything centralised' is realised through application convergence or the deployment of SOA architectures in order to consolidate all enterprise data in a single enterprise-wide data warehouse.”
-Sylvian Pavlowski

This vision of 'everything centralised' is realised through application convergence or the deployment of SOA architectures in order to consolidate all enterprise data in a single enterprise-wide data warehouse. Information about a customer, for example, is compiled from several applications to supply the data warehouse via programmable interfaces (ETL).  BI tools then extract the data via SQL queries in order to format it into static reports. The reports are then sent to users in 'push mode'.

A structural limitation

The B.I '1.0' infrastructure has structural limitations. The centralisation of data into DW does not offer the flexibility that business requires today. Business users cannot easily access information in a format that is simple enough to support the creation or modification of existing reports. Business users are dependent on the IT department for any new reports, unable to add their own data to the analysis. In this type of arrangement, the user does not have the freedom to perform predictive analytics.

Informed decision making

With the advent of 'enterprise analytics' solutions, all those involved in the decision-making process are able to work together.

Returning centralised data control to the IT department is crucial to promoting and ensuring the quality of decision-making processes as well as data consistency. Users of solutions from vendors such as TIBCO Spotfire can extract data via a user-friendly interface accessible to everyone. The creation of aggregates calculated on the fly makes it possible to eliminate the semantic data abstraction layer in favour of business data views. These views allow users to extract any data from the data warehouse without the need for predefined dimensions by leveraging "free dimensional" analysis.

In addition to the static reporting application, users can look for the data they need, at any time, and import it to their client workstation (In-Memory). This vector database technology offers users a 'pull solution' in the decision-making process without the need for predefined dimensions. By having the capability to include any other data source on the fly, users go from more reporting to predictive analytics.

Winning strategy

As businesses are forced to shorten their decision-making processes, it is critical to re-think infrastructures in order to give users the flexibility and tools needed for greater adaptability and faster analysis.

Business users already have incredible processing power right on their desktops.  Since that entire horsepower is available, it should be put to work. The use of 'in-memory' databases gives users the flexibility to manage data locally without affecting the enterprise data warehouse's response time.

Today, new predictive analytics and data exploration tools like TIBCO Spotfire are the only alternative that enables IT departments to re-take control of enterprise-wide data while giving users the flexibility they demand.

Allowing both worlds - traditional reporting applications and predictive analytics and intelligent data exploration tools - to coexist is without a doubt the best solution to address these issues today.  When the people with first-hand knowledge of the data are the ones performing the analysis, it leads to better outcomes.

TIBCO Spotfire provides many companies their two-second advantage needed to be and stay ahead of their competition.

Biography

Sylvain Pavlowski is an IT veteran with over twenty years of industry experience vital to his role of VP EMEA Sales at TIBCO Spotfire, a position he has held since 2007. Prior to this, he was VP EMEA at UNICA where he was responsible for building and launching new territories and building the partner network across EMEA. Previously Sylvain had held the position of CEO of Digital Peach and managed EMEA subsidiaries for successful IT companies.