Business intelligence (BI) solutions haveevolved beyond the traditional query, reporting,and dashboard tools that tell you howyour business performed in the past. Cutting-edgeanalytic and predictive capabilities,and visualization and delivery enhancementsare examples of the advances of the pastfew years. But these new choices can seemdaunting to customers seeking to implementa new BI strategy or to rationalize their existingBI toolset. Oracle’s observations on howleading edge companies are implementing BIcan help other organizations focus on what’simportant when researching BI solutionproviders.
Improving access to trusted information andextending the BI environment across the enterpriseis driving better decisions and businessperformance at Rite-Hite Corporation.
SAP AG recently announced its businessintelligence (BI) product roadmap and notsurprisingly, it is based upon the businesswarehouse (BW) foundation—along with anoptional hardware appliance—a BI Accelerator—to enhance query performance.
Corporate data warehousing has seen dramaticincreases in volume and complexity over the last several years. Increasingly stringent regulatory requirements coupled with dramatic business success stories have catapulted organizations towards low-cost DW appliances to manage VLDW (very large data warehouse) projects. Indeed, VLDW projects in the hundreds of terabytes are increasingly commonplace. There are considerationsbeyond speed and price, however. The processes,methods, and resources required to successfully realize an enterprise VLDW deployment on these appliance technologies must keep pace with the eye-popping performance metrics.
TDWI’s Best Practices Awards recognizeorganizations for developing and implementingworld-class business intelligence and datawarehousing solutions. Here are summariesof the winning solutions for 2008.
The key factors to Pitney Bowes’ successin implementing a comprehensive businessintelligence solution include gatheringfeedback directly from the business users,delivering the information that the businessusers were requesting, availability of theright information to the right people at theright time, and ease of use of the businessintelligence tools. Pitney Bowes created over400 reports by a staff of one in a matter of afew months—a very rapid and cost effectivebusiness intelligence deployment.
The explosive growth of information, coupled with increasing demands for customer service, has left many companies looking for more efficient ways to keep data actionable.
The stack of service level agreements (SLAs)seems to grow as fast as the processingslows. Deadlines slip away unmet and thehead scratching begins. Knowing it’s not apermanent fix, you hammer out a few codetweaks and slap in just enough hardwareto stay within budget. But as hundreds ofthousands of records turn into millions, youquickly realize that your “quick fix” amountsto little more than “a lick and promise.”