Intelligent BI

Typical situation

There is these days on the market available a large choice of quality technologies which can satisfy all possible requirements of a company in the area of business intelligence. There are powerful technologies for ETL, data storage, reporting, data quality management etc.

In the real life though, we see that often a quality solution built on top technologies and modern processes is implemented and deployed but such solution brings a lot of new elements into the company’s IT environment.

Risk

Among risks of using such method are:

Elevated costs of the run of technologies and applications
Elevated costs of user training
Division of systems into BI and “the rest”
The perception of BI being an isolated island within the company’s IT
Creation of ad hoc reporting applications without a link to the BI systems
Higher fragmentation of the IT environment instead of the so sought maximal unification

Minimizing risks

To minimize such risks, we offer cooperation in implementation of BI tools which

Make maximum use of technologies already supported within the standard IT company framework
Do not represent a compromise neither from the range of functionality point of view, nor from the availability factors
Users can benefit from without the need to learn new technologies
Save license and maintenance cost

Example of a solution I
Microsoft PowerPivot

PowerPivot is an add-on to the Microsoft Excel 2010. It enables fast manipulation of large data sets (millions of rows) which so far has not been possible within Excel. It allows for a more simple data integration and easy sharing of analytical outputs or creation of standard reports.

PowerPivot contains tools for reading of data from different sources such as OLAP database, text files, MS Excel files, database systems MS SQL, Oracle, Teradata, DB2 and other.

This data can be connected by logical relationships and later analysed.

PowerPivot comes in two versions:

In the basic version for direct work with data stored in a database or in data storage; this solution is particularly useful as a tool effectively supporting analysts
In the version for integration with SharePoint environment whereby a large user group gains access to a top BI tool incorporated into the SharePoint environment they are familiar with

Advantages:

Low incremental license cost
Low cost of user training – MS Excel is widely used by most analysts and other users
Flexibility based on open technologies
Creation of unified company reporting environment
Creation of new quality reports based on
- Combination of data from more source applications
- Wide use of powerful and intuitive analytical tool
Possibility of integration with SharePoint environment (if used)

Example of a solution II
Using open source technologies

A lot of user requirements in the area of business intelligence can be solved by using open source technologies which often represent a quality alternative to specialized BI tools. It is mainly true in the area of report creation.

The solution characteristics:

Standard Java application
Presentation layer based on JSF (Java Server Faces)
Database access through object relationship mapping
For example Apache Tomcat used as application server
Data stored for example in MySQL database or in PostgreSQL
One of the standard Java open source libraries such as BIRT or Jasper Reports is used for the creation of graphs and reports