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.