Data warehousing 2.0

The global delivery capabilities of HP saw a leap forward recently when Ben

Barnes, Vice President and General Manager, Business Intelligence, Software and

Dan Holle, Chief Technology Officer, Business Intelligence Solutions, Software,

HP descended upon Bangalore to inaugurate the first ever Neoview Competency

Center — aimed at maximizing business output using HP's proprietary enterprise

data warehouse, the Neoview.

Stemming from the fact that the data stored in warehouses across the world

are in excess of 300 terabytes, and the fact that global information doubles

every 18 months, HP has also observed that in less than three years, there will

be a 6 fold increase in the total information available in the world — something

close to 988 exabytes. Operational Business Intelligence, as HP prefers to call

its new science of data warehousing, believes in knowing the customer and its

unique needs by using various forms of interactions across all 'touch points',

after which operational priorities and market signals are understood in order to

ensure that responds to business changes takes minimal time. To round this

process off, large volumes of data — structured or otherwise — are analyzed with

the view that leveraging current information will give a better understanding of

what information is coming your way.

Ben Barnes, VP & GM BI Software, and Dan Holle, CTO, BI Solution, HP, at Neoview Competency Center in Bangalore

From an Indian perspective, HP hopes to tap the huge BPO and call centre

market since the Neoview model will ensure real time responses to mission

critical queries by call centre agents on something like a credit card

transaction. It goes without saying then that the Banking and financial

verticals are the most important, followed by retail and manufacturing. Even

before the formal launch of the competency center, some 30 odd Indian engineers

have cracked the secret of loading online data in something like 2 and a half

hours in comparison to the industry average of 10 hours, in addition to reducing

the time taken for aggregation reports by more than an hour. All these

operations, in addition to ad hoc extraction of information and access by call

center agents occurs concurrently, making the Neoview one of the first data

warehousing theories that allows real time uploading of data thereby staggering

information flow into the system and reducing sudden spurts of heavy data, in

other words, work efficiently with uneven workloads. In addition, the competency

center also creates migration toolkits for legacy data, and claims to be

completely vendor neutral.

In its Bangalore competency center, HP has set up a datacenter with 8 HP

Integrity Blade servers, powered by 16 UPS systems, churning out 6 terabytes of

constant computing power. This is fully functional and HP hopes to use this

datacenter as a model to showcase to its potential customers, the capabilities

of Neoview Business Intelligence model.