Ebay Considering BI SaaS To It’s Traders
November 3, 2008 12:04 am BI Infrastructure, BI Solutions, on Demand BIAs BI on Demand, also known as BI Software as a Service [SaaS] is a hot topic with most BI solution vendors, eBay is not being left behind. eBay’s own gigantic data warehouse, used for internal business intelligence (BI) analytics can be opened up to its trading customers to provide real time performance analytics. This emulates Amazons initiative with its family of Amazon Web Services. Most notable among these services are its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) application hosting service and its S3 hosted storage service.
eBay has a five petabyte Teradata data warehouse that adds 50TB of new data each day. This active data warehouse is capable of processing over a terabyte of data in just five seconds, allowing business analysts to build their own “virtual” data marts, currently used by about 5,000 business analysts in 100 groups inside eBay. A significant feature of these data marts is that whilst they run off the central data warehouse they were created without the help of central IT.
Business analysts create and upload their own mini-data warehouses using standard web and analytical tools such as those from Business Objects, SAS, Microstrategy and even Microsoft’s Excel. Once a prototype has run successfully for 90 days, they are converted by the data warehouse managers into production data marts with minimal rewriting. This process cuts the time to deploy by at least 50%, in many cases by up to 80%.
eBay are currently analysing problems that opening up the datawarehouse to outsiders will bring – such as how to minimise the time it would take customers to upload large amounts of data to eBay’s data warehouse. The solution appears to be to “couple analytics as a platform offering that has the data generating part sitting closer together”. Much of the self-service BI capability already came built in to the Teradata 5550 data warehousing software. The Teradata software provides workload management enabling “virtual” data marts to be partitioned and prioritised. All we need to do is build a web portal and simple interface.
Hence the possible hosting eBay’s BI-as-a-service on Amazon’s EC2 and storing users’ data on S3. Amazon is using EC2 to provide its own web-hosted database called SimpleDB.
Other current hot BI on Demand projects include Microsoft’s “Project Gemini” which plans to create an easy-to-use Excel-based tool that lets regular analysts build their own BI queries and dashboards.
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