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Business Intelligence & Analytics

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PCQ Bureau
New Update

This year is a significant landmark in the history of BI. Many significant

acquisitions took place this year, which will have a tremendous impact on the BI

market in the future. SAP acquired Business Objects, a leading player in BA

solutions. Likewise, IBM recently acquired Cognos, one of the oldest players in

BA. Earlier this year, Oracle acquired Hyperion Solutions, and HP acquired

Knightsbridge solutions late last year. Microsoft also did a few acquisitions,

and added another element to its Microsoft Office 2007 suite, the

PerformancePoint Server 2007. It doesn't require any rocket science to figure

out why all the key IT players have done the same thing. So next year should be

really interesting.

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Evolving Trends



Apart from acquisitions, there are lots of exciting things happening in BA.

For one, it's no longer meant for just large enterprises. Every company, large

or small can benefit from BA. This has been possible because of two things. One,

there's a whole range of BA solutions available at various price points, and

two, BA tools have become easier to use. For instance, today you'll find BA

tools that mimic an ordinary spreadsheet, but are much more powerful. Microsoft

for instance, has released tools that allows you to to anlayze business data in

Excel. This is in strict contrast to the earlier days, where one had to pull out

data from a Business Intelligence software or a data warehouse, and give it to a

data analyst to generate reports.

The story so far:
  • Lots of company acquisitions happened in

    the BA domain this year by BI solutions companies, which will shape the

    market in the coming years.
  • BA tools are becoming more mainstream, and

    not just an exclusive domain of large enterprises.
  • More Intelligent BA solutions expected in

    the coming year

Another key trend in BA is that the tools are readily available off the shelf

for specific industry verticals. Earlier, it used to take ages to customize a BA

tool to an industry's requirements. This move allows task-specific knowledge to

be incorporated into the BA tools. For example, in a manufacturing scenario, the

BA tool would be able to analyze the supply chain data and quickly predict the

demands or other things from it.

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BA is a subset of the larger domain of Business Intelligence. In order for a

BA solution to work, a strong base for data reporting is required. This comes

from a robust data warehousing and data mining back-end. This area has also seen

many developments to make data management easier.

For instance, the third generation of data warehousing solutions support

technologies like Massively Parallel Processing(MPP) on commodity hardware like

blade servers, In-Memory Querying, and Query workload management. MPP is about

distributing the workload across multiple nodes and using a RDBMS with a strong

BI solution to manage it. In-Memory querying refers to pre-fetching the data

into memory that improves the performance of a BI solution. Query workload

management is of course about efficient handling of this setup.

Business Analytics software

comprises of several types of performance management tools, which work on

information from a Data warehouse
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Future Trends



We can all make our own guesses about what will happen in this market in the

future, given all the acquisitions. Just to ease the thought process, we'll put

down our own thoughts on this market.

In the coming two to three years, we'll see considerable momentum in the BA

market. For one, we will see lots of new BA tools released. Second, BA will not

remain the exclusive domain of top management and large enterprises. It will

trickle to the masses, and will be accessible to organizations of all sizes.

Third, large enterprises who have implemented multiple business applications

like ERP, CRM, etc, would require a solution that can analyze data across the

spectrum. That's because the data from these applications would be in different

data-stores. Such monolithic applications can provide reporting capabilities

within their own environment, but cross-platform data-querying and data-mining

is not possible. To enable different business processes and functions to

interact with each other, SOA based applications would be required. Such SOA

based analytics tool will gather data information across heterogeneous

application environments and then help in analysis. Next year, we'll see BI

systems becoming more SOA compliant.

Why

BA is an extension to BI?
This confusion is always there,

if BA and BI is one and the same thing. The fact is where the BI reporting

ends, BA begins. While BI is a tool which turns the organization's useful

data into useful business information, BA is a tool with which scenario

based and predictive analysis could be done on this information to analyze a

business opportunity better. BI traditionally works with aggregated data and

provides reports to monitor the assumptions and key performance metrics that

are part of long-term organizational plans. Business users cannot rely

solely on aggregated data coming from BI reports. They also need the

details. BI systems are based on pre-determined key-performance metrics and

planning assumptions on which automated reports are generated. BA tools are

not meant for simple report generation, but rather work and interact on data

from generated reports to do calculative analysis to aid the decision-making

process. By combining BA tools with an organization's BI system, a sales

representative could for instance, evaluate the probability of a lead by

doing predictive analysis (BA) on the data report. This data report is

generated by data-mining algorithms from the customer behavior database, so

as to detect customer patterns.

Another interesting trend is that BI solutions are becoming more mobile

device friendly. Intelligence is being built in BI systems to identify the type

of device that's sending BI query, so that the query report can be generated in

the appropriate format. This could for instance be an Excel file if the query is

coming from a PC, ora WAP compatible table if the query comes from a smart

phone. Or, it could be sent back as SMS if the query comes from a mobile phone.

We've seen some successful implementations of such solutions this year, and next

year we'll see them becoming even more intelligent.

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