August 29, 2008
BI Solutions, Cloud Computing
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Just as business intelligence is revolutionizing business logic; virtualisation and cloud computing are revolutionizing computing power.
Cloud computing is the latest method of accessing computing power and according to ICT analyst IDC “this will be the prevailing form of ICT service delivery for a couple of decades”. Cloud computing is also known as onDemand applications and Software as a Service [SaaS].
The computing model has been transformed from in-house systems to outsourced, centralised systems and is predicted to become the norm for all businesses over the next 20 years. Even in remote countries such as New Zealand, media giant Google is to provide access to applications via the internet to 50,000 students, staff and alumni.
Google Apps
Google is just one cloud computing front-runner, as yet the market has yet to be measured but as a sign, Google claims to have 500,000 business customers worldwide for its internet-delivered Google Apps, and is reportedly signing up new ones at a rate of 3000 a day. Google Apps is very popular with academia, with education customers provided with free access rights to Google Apps Education Edition, which includes email, Google Docs (word processing, spreadsheet and presentation software), a shared calendar, instant messaging, website creation software and the ability to create a customised web home page using their own domain. This is providing a far superior service to that currently offered by most Universities.
Commercial customers are charged US$50 ($71) per user, per year.
For all organizations, cloud computing removes the development and hardware overheads of standard corporate applications and frees the IT resources to concentrate on more strategic technology.
Speed
The main constraint is relying on fast, reliable Internet access. In many countries, such as New Zealand, India, South Africa and Australia this is far from a current reality. Speed is the number one thing to users in terms of such services.
Reliability
Many businesses also have a perception hurdle to overcome if the servers hosting the applications and corporate data are hosted outside of their own country. Im most cases, large vendors of such services have extremely reliable geographic fail over redundancy and the location of the primary server is of little consequence. It is more of a emotive issue than a technological one.
Even Google doesn’t disclose where its data centers are located but it does reveal that its services network is distributed across global infrastructure …”for redundancy and availability and ensuring continuity of service.”
Google attempts to overcome the connectivity issues by designing its service to be efficient across all kinds of connections and ‘Google Gears’ – a platform that allows users to take web services offline. They are also investing in infrastructure to the overcome service latency and ensure services can be delivered at high speed in the Asia-Pacific region.
Other Cloud Contenders
Other companies such as Microsoft, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, SAP, EMC, Cisco and Oracle are building massive cloud services delivery capabilities. We can expect a major market impact within the next 2 to 3 years.
The BI Cloud
Cloud computing offers a major boost for smaller businesses seeking the insight of business intelligence. Most do not have sufficient in-house infrastructure or budget to sustain their own BI hosted solutions. SaaS models offer a viable alternative, even if the feature set is somewhat constrained.
August 13, 2008
BI Solutions
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SAP is not playing slow in getting off the blocks to provide business intelligence solutions more suited to small business.
It has revealed a bundling of its Crystal Reports reporting software with the BusinessOne application for small businesses. The announcement, made on Tuesday at the Business Objects Influencer Summit in Boston signals a solid move by SAP’s Business Objects in to the SME market.
It also revealsed BusinessObjects Xcelsius Present, a new data visualization tool.
These applications are aimed for companies with 100 employees or less and will be sold through SAP’s channel partners. The BusinessOne-Crystal Reports package is good news for both small business owners and SAP channel partners. Many small businesses already have Crystal Reports deployed, and these can now be pulled together into a more consolidated reporting and analytics platform.
In addition, SAP are offering new and existing BusinessOne customers who are under maintenance agreements, a free basic version of Crystal Reports, the popular reporting software acquired by BO in 2003.
Small businesses need to transform their data into business insight as much as big business, but most struggle with the economics of implementing current enterprise scale BI solutions. The SME range now includes:
- Crystal Reports 2008 Visual Advantage – provides a view of information in multiple data sources
- Crystal Reports Server 2008
- BusinessObjects Xcelsius Present data visualization software – provides a way to convert static Microsoft Office Excel spreadsheets into interactive graphics that can be shared via Microsoft PowerPoint or Adobe PDF files. Currently available priced at $195 from BO Channel resellers.
- BusinessObjects EPM version 7.0 – analytics tool that extends CPM beyond finance to business operations. It is more tightly integrated with BusinessObjects XI 3.0 business intelligence system, SAP’s NetWeaver technology platform, and SAP’s applications for governance, risk and compliance management.
July 11, 2008
BI Solutions, Data
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To date the focus in BI has been on structured data. However, large volumes of information is contained within unstructured documents such as blogs, wikis, news feeds, transcripts, pdf’s, email, word documents, and multi media. In fact, one report I read suggested that 85 percent of that company’s data is unstructured data. Whilst this may be a little on the high side for many businesses, it does herald the increasing volumes of data that are not being captured in current BI tools.
In response to this trend, BI vendors are gearing up efforts in text mining capabilities. Both Google and Microsoft have published Enterprise Search solutions that parse unstructured data sources throughout the enterprise to provide results similar to those of Internet Search Engine results. However, this fails to provide the deeper answers that BI tools have become synomonous with. In other words, search can tell you what is happening, but not why it is happening.
Text mining takes unstructured data to this next level, by transforming text into a structured format. It automatically classifies documents and identifies key relationships that provide insight into the WHY. Such relationships are not possible with standard Enterprise Search.
Text Mining is much more than searching and filtering to find the right document – it needs to be able to extract key data and insights from such documents, and connect this with processes and tools used for mining structured data. To date, BI vendors have yet to achieve this capability. However, with the speed of progress being made in data mining, we can hold out hope that this will not be too distant.
June 5, 2008
BI Solutions
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For BI to be pervasive, it has to be affordable.
Conventional BI licensing models have high per-user costs—typically over $1,000 per user. This is providing opportunity for some BI solution vendors to be more creative in their pricing models.
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Bundling – Microsoft’s entry into the BI market has driven down pricing by bundling BI capabilities at low [~$195 per user] with the PerformancePoint Server.
- Active User Only Licence Models – Information Builders – does not require report users to have a license, licences are only required for core server and report developers. By using Ajax to deliver its Active Reports with a high degree of interactivity without requiring a connection back to a BI server makes BI affordable to deploy.
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Open source BI – vendors such as Pentaho and JasperSoft are providing information to a greater number of users without per user licence fees. For instance, JasperSofts FlightStats’ program is available to travellers as well as airlines, making traditional licence models impracticable.
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Software as a Service [SaaS] models – are slashing BI deployment and staffing costs. This model is becoming widely adopted by both established and new vendors. Business Objects CrystalReports.com provides online infrastructure for publishing and sharing reports. Specialty BI SaaS vendors such as LucidEra, PivotLink, and Oco offer pre-built, hosted applications.
BI is still a relatively immature market, and as more onDemand business solutions are becoming popular with large corporates as well as SMB, one can expect to see more radical changes in all software licencing models.
