Turning data to your advantage

Gerhard Rumpff on how analytic warehousing is the pre-requisite for successful business intelligence (BI).

“Operational BI is all about gaining a significant competitive advantage. In other words, pushing the right information in real-time to the people who drive the business and who are the decision-makers”

CXO. Why is BI becoming more and more mission-critical for companies of all sizes and industries?
Gerhard Rumpff. BI has become a critical factor in the decision-making process of today's business world. During difficult economic times like at present, it is essential that executives and managers have all the information at their disposal to make the right decisions. On top of the challenges brought about by the current economic crisis, businesses are further challenged by constantly increasing data volumes and shorter planning and decision-making cycles. It is becoming very apparent that companies which are able to deploy BI to all levels of the company and to as many employees as possible reap the biggest benefits. However, a recent survey conducted by the Business Application Research Centre (BARC) shows that only eight percent of employees at organisations that have deployed BI solutions are actually able to use it.

What are the major hurdles facing companies when implementing business BI systems?
Given the business and economic challenges I just outlined, most companies are ill-equipped to get the best out of their BI solutions, so called front-ends. Although most front-ends can be deployed relatively quickly and easily the challenges actually start when it comes to 'connecting' the BI-solution to the existing database system, the so-called back-end. To extract information from large, fast-growing databases and deliver it to the BI front-ends has become a huge challenge for companies. This is the kind of situation we typically find: data needed for analysis is provided by a database or a data warehouse and one or several of a variety of analytical tools are used to query the data and visualise the required 'intelligence'. Users enter their query and what frequently happens is that they don't get the answer they need in the time they need it. The BARC survey also shows that over 20 percent of BI users are dissatisfied with the query performance. And the number of dissatisfied users is increasing all the time.

Why is analytic (data) warehousing fundamental  to successful operational enterprise BI?
Operational BI is all about gaining a significant competitive advantage. In other words, pushing the right information in real-time to the people who drive the business and who are the decision-makers. And this applies pretty much to all Industries. For example, the real test for best practice BI is making information available to the people when they are in front of the customer. Implementing operational BI requires a data warehousing solution that can deliver real-time data to the analytical or business intelligence front-ends.

How should companies approach selecting and implementing an analytic warehouse?
For all companies that have recognised the importance of operational BI and want to get the most out of their BI front-end, I recommend that they select and implement a true analytic data warehouse. Fortunately, analytic warehousing technology has progressed significantly in recent years und there are a number of vendors that can provide such necessary functionality, Exasol being one of them.

The major criteria when selecting the right analytic warehouse are:

• The product has been developed specifically for complex or real-time analytics
• It is easy to implement and integrate into your existing environment
• It can provide inherent high availability
• Requires no or very little administration
• Offers low total cost of ownership (TCO).
• And finally, 'test drive' it with your own data.

With EXASolution, the customer knows that he is getting a proven and tested analytic warehouse which fullfills all these criteria. It is an undisputed  fact that our customers have achieved significant performance increases (50 to 80 times faster) and cost reductions (up to 85 percent) after implementing our solution.

Gerhard Rumpff is CEO at EXASOL AG. He is a 25-year veteran of the software industry and prior to taking over as CEO at EXASOL in 2008, Rumpff was CEO of asknet AG. asknet is one of the leading providers of global e-commerce solutions for software distribution via the internet.