Some pure play business intelligence (BI) vendors have long been providing BI platforms, which offer complete sets of tools for the creation, deployment, support, and maintenance of BI applications. Pure-play vendors attempt to sell these platforms to original equipment manufacturers (OEM) and independent software vendors (ISV), and even to IT organizations and end users that are information technology (IT) savvy enough to build their own applications on top of it. These BI platforms logically combine many database access capabilities like structured query language (SQL), online analytical processing (OLAP) data manipulation, modeling functions (what-if analysis), statistical analysis, and graphical presentations of results (charting) to create data-rich applications. The applications have customized user interfaces (UI), and are organized around specific business problems that target business analyses and models.
Part Three of the Business Intelligence Status Report series.
Most BI platform vendors also offer their own BI applications as the BI platform's validation. These enterprise BI application suites are the descendants of basic query-and-reporting tools, which they tend to displace or extend. The suites provide support for varying levels of users, with a variety of query, reporting and OLAP capabilities, all available with the idea of minimal training.
The BI market is currently crowded with a number of vendors with adept product suites. Some players in the market include MicroStrategy, Informatica, Information Builders, Oracle, IBM, SAP, Microsoft, Teradata, and Ascential, which was reunited with its short-term foster parent Informix, when Ascential was acquired by IBM, and See IBM Buys What's Left of Informix). Other vendors include Applix, arcplan, ProClarity, Siebel Systems, OutlookSoft, CombineNet, and SPSS. Obviously, these vendors have different origins. Some are traditional database vendors and enterprise application vendors; others were BI suite vendors, pure players in certain niches (such as enterprise reporting), while some have evolved to cover multiple bases.
Lately most of these vendors have updated their client/server tools with a Web-based UIs. Many BI software providers create standards-based portlets, sometimes using Web services, to expose BI functionality and information when more than viewing is required, and to be consistent with other portal add-ins. The advantage of portlets over simple hyperlinks (which have initially been leveraged) is a richer, more interactive experience and a more uniform integration approach. Otherwise, a portlet is a Web-based component that will process requests and generate dynamic content. The end user essentially sees a portlet as being a specialized content area within a Web page that occupies a small window in the portal page. The portlet provides users with the capability to customize content, with the appearance and position of a portlet.
Incidentally, current portlet standardization might help Web enablement and portal environment integration efforts, as most BI vendors are currently and cautiously developing products that will adhere to JSR 168, a standard that enables portlet interoperability. Since a JSR 168-compliant portal should be compatible with all Java-based portal solutions, it should alleviate the development burden on BI vendors. As a result, vendors can then focus on more advanced BI functionality rather than on porting their solutions to the individual, commercially available enterprise portal products. Thus, because of a strong Web similarity associated with BI application suites, some vendors describe their offerings as BI portals, whereby these portal offerings typically provide a subset of the counterpart client/server functionality via a Web browser. However, the vendors have been steadily increasing this functionality to come closer to that provided by rich, Microsoft Windows-like client desktop tools.
There are those who always want more due to the many pressures that demand the need and investment in data management and integration. The trend of massive growth in data volumes continues with no end in sight, while enterprises have to manage and share large amounts of data across diverse regions and lines of businesses (LOB). The introduction of new data generating technologies, such as radio-frequency identification (RFID), will only accelerate this growth and the subsequent need for real time BI. Traditional BI systems use a large volume of static data that has been extracted, cleansed, and loaded into a data warehouse (DW) to produce reports and analyses. However, the need is not just reporting, since users need business monitoring, analysis, and an understanding of why things are happening.
The demand for instant, on-demand access to dispersed information has grown as the need to close the gap between the operational data and strategic objectives has become more pressing. As a result, a category of products called real-time BI applications have emerged. These can provide users, who need to know (virtually in real-time) about changes in data or the availability of relevant reports, alerts, and notifications regarding events and emerging trends in Web, e-mail, or instant messaging (IM) applications. In addition, business applications can be programmed to act on what these real-time BI systems discover. For example, a supply chain management (SCM) or enterprise resource planning (ERP) application might automatically place an order for more "widgets", for example, when real time inventory falls below a certain threshold, or when a customer relationship management (CRM) application automatically triggers a customer service representative and credit control clerk to check a customer who has placed an on-line order larger than $10,000.
The first approach to real time BI uses the DW model of traditional BI systems. In this case, products from innovative BI platform providers like Ascential or Informatica provide a service-oriented, near real time solution that populates and the DW much faster than the typical nightly extract/transfer/load (ETL) batch update does. The second, commonly called business activity monitoring (BAM) is adopted by pure play BAM and or hybrid BAM-middleware providers such as Savvion, Iteration Software, Vitria, webMethods, Quantive, Tibco (particularly after the acquisitions of Staffware and Praja) or Vineyard Software. It bypasses the DW entirely and uses Web services or other monitoring means to discover key business events. These software monitors or agents can be placed on a separate server in the network or on the transactional application databases themselves, and they can use event- and process-based approaches to proactively and intelligently measure and monitor operational processes.
For more on these diagnostic BI tools, see Business Activity Monitoring—Watching the Store for You. The most advanced of these applications not only optimize users' time and the information they receive, but also provide the context for them to take appropriate action.
Part Three of the Business Intelligence Status Report series.
Most BI platform vendors also offer their own BI applications as the BI platform's validation. These enterprise BI application suites are the descendants of basic query-and-reporting tools, which they tend to displace or extend. The suites provide support for varying levels of users, with a variety of query, reporting and OLAP capabilities, all available with the idea of minimal training.
The BI market is currently crowded with a number of vendors with adept product suites. Some players in the market include MicroStrategy, Informatica, Information Builders, Oracle, IBM, SAP, Microsoft, Teradata, and Ascential, which was reunited with its short-term foster parent Informix, when Ascential was acquired by IBM, and See IBM Buys What's Left of Informix). Other vendors include Applix, arcplan, ProClarity, Siebel Systems, OutlookSoft, CombineNet, and SPSS. Obviously, these vendors have different origins. Some are traditional database vendors and enterprise application vendors; others were BI suite vendors, pure players in certain niches (such as enterprise reporting), while some have evolved to cover multiple bases.
Lately most of these vendors have updated their client/server tools with a Web-based UIs. Many BI software providers create standards-based portlets, sometimes using Web services, to expose BI functionality and information when more than viewing is required, and to be consistent with other portal add-ins. The advantage of portlets over simple hyperlinks (which have initially been leveraged) is a richer, more interactive experience and a more uniform integration approach. Otherwise, a portlet is a Web-based component that will process requests and generate dynamic content. The end user essentially sees a portlet as being a specialized content area within a Web page that occupies a small window in the portal page. The portlet provides users with the capability to customize content, with the appearance and position of a portlet.
Incidentally, current portlet standardization might help Web enablement and portal environment integration efforts, as most BI vendors are currently and cautiously developing products that will adhere to JSR 168, a standard that enables portlet interoperability. Since a JSR 168-compliant portal should be compatible with all Java-based portal solutions, it should alleviate the development burden on BI vendors. As a result, vendors can then focus on more advanced BI functionality rather than on porting their solutions to the individual, commercially available enterprise portal products. Thus, because of a strong Web similarity associated with BI application suites, some vendors describe their offerings as BI portals, whereby these portal offerings typically provide a subset of the counterpart client/server functionality via a Web browser. However, the vendors have been steadily increasing this functionality to come closer to that provided by rich, Microsoft Windows-like client desktop tools.
There are those who always want more due to the many pressures that demand the need and investment in data management and integration. The trend of massive growth in data volumes continues with no end in sight, while enterprises have to manage and share large amounts of data across diverse regions and lines of businesses (LOB). The introduction of new data generating technologies, such as radio-frequency identification (RFID), will only accelerate this growth and the subsequent need for real time BI. Traditional BI systems use a large volume of static data that has been extracted, cleansed, and loaded into a data warehouse (DW) to produce reports and analyses. However, the need is not just reporting, since users need business monitoring, analysis, and an understanding of why things are happening.
The demand for instant, on-demand access to dispersed information has grown as the need to close the gap between the operational data and strategic objectives has become more pressing. As a result, a category of products called real-time BI applications have emerged. These can provide users, who need to know (virtually in real-time) about changes in data or the availability of relevant reports, alerts, and notifications regarding events and emerging trends in Web, e-mail, or instant messaging (IM) applications. In addition, business applications can be programmed to act on what these real-time BI systems discover. For example, a supply chain management (SCM) or enterprise resource planning (ERP) application might automatically place an order for more "widgets", for example, when real time inventory falls below a certain threshold, or when a customer relationship management (CRM) application automatically triggers a customer service representative and credit control clerk to check a customer who has placed an on-line order larger than $10,000.
The first approach to real time BI uses the DW model of traditional BI systems. In this case, products from innovative BI platform providers like Ascential or Informatica provide a service-oriented, near real time solution that populates and the DW much faster than the typical nightly extract/transfer/load (ETL) batch update does. The second, commonly called business activity monitoring (BAM) is adopted by pure play BAM and or hybrid BAM-middleware providers such as Savvion, Iteration Software, Vitria, webMethods, Quantive, Tibco (particularly after the acquisitions of Staffware and Praja) or Vineyard Software. It bypasses the DW entirely and uses Web services or other monitoring means to discover key business events. These software monitors or agents can be placed on a separate server in the network or on the transactional application databases themselves, and they can use event- and process-based approaches to proactively and intelligently measure and monitor operational processes.
For more on these diagnostic BI tools, see Business Activity Monitoring—Watching the Store for You. The most advanced of these applications not only optimize users' time and the information they receive, but also provide the context for them to take appropriate action.
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