Cloud Driving BI Mashups

September 16, 2009 BI Theory No Comments

I was just completing my upcoming book “Getting to Cloud” and decided to use BI as a great example as to how Cloud computing will enable more innovative BI.

One of the innovative developments Cloud enables, that supports self service BI is BI Mashups. Virtualization infrastructure enables a continuous background task to run searching for new data sources and fresh updates from existing sources to support BI mashups

Once a new data source is discovered, it is transformed to a common semantic model, and published to a BI-mashup registry. Users simply drag and drop BI reports, dashboards, and other analytics to their desktop.

Automated discovery is key to both the concept of BI mashup, and also to the concept of trustworthy data. It helps detect and remediate anomalies across disparate data sources.

Current vendors of automated source discovery include Composite Software and Exeros [recently acquired by IBM]. Other areas of innovation around BI will drive further consolidation in the BI market, as Cloud acts as the enabler of sourcing and transforming aggregated data into common formats for consumption across the complete set of BI tools.

Insights on Web 2.0 Adoption

September 3, 2009 BI Theory No Comments

Want a super cool way to look at how the different Web 2.0 technologies are being engaged by businesses, and which ones have grown in adoption over the past two years? McKinsey has recently launched a user definable, interactive to allow you to gain insight into many aspects of Web 2.0. For instance, find out the most powerful business tools in use today. Move the slider on the right
to see how each tool has gained in adoption since 2007.

Web2 Interactive

Go play for yourself.

How to Set Up BI in the Cloud

September 3, 2009 Cloud BI, Cloud Computing, Pentaho No Comments

I watch a lot of webinars and every now and then I come across one that really stands out. And one I really would like to recommend is:

A Guide to Building a Data Warehouse and Business Intelligence Solution in the Cloud

Recorded on July 9, 2009 by Open-source BI vendor Pentaho, Cloud DBMS vendor Vertica and BI Cloud systems integrator OpenBI, Ithe webinar provides a very insightful overview how any concerns around performance and security with Cloud have been overcome for use with BI applications. In particular, the webinar covers:

  • Cloud overview (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud)
  • Operational expense vs. capital expense project funding
  • Technology selection
  • Provisioning BI hardware and software in the Amazon EC2 with Vertica and Pentaho
  • How a BI demo was created and lessons learned using Pentaho and Vertica
  • New BI opportunities enabled by the economic advantages of cloud computing

A segment I found especially helpful was the configuration considerations when setting up BI in the Cloud. This included security, cost management, user access, ETL, performance etc.

View the Webinar [52mins] here