New Approaches to Business Intelligence - Page 3

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Data and more data.

Netezza (NYSE: NZ) offers an appliance that consists of a SQL database stored on the disk rather than on the server, and up to 800 snippet processing units, each consisting of a field programmable gate array (FPGA) and an IBM PowerPC chip running Linux.

All 800 snippet processing units can work concurrently on a problem.

Traditional databases keep data in storage and bring small amounts up into the database on the server when a query is run. This is too slow for business intelligence, where "typically you want to analyze vast amounts of data to find some sort of pattern," Tim Young, Netezza's vice president for corporate marketing, told InternetNews.com.

Netezza's customers analyze "tens, if not hundreds," of databases. Most are telecommunications companies, which use its solution to analyze the large amount of details in call detail records to detect "core patterns for network provisioning, marketing purposes like special offers and for other purposes," Young said.

Another new approach to BI is focused not on speed but on minimizing the waste of time and maximizing ease of use by building frameworks of reports users can modify as needed.

Managing resource consumption

"BI is getting bigger, growing from a departmental solution or application to an enterprise resource, so it needs an infrastructure that can support thousands or tens of thousands of users, not hundreds," Microstrategy vice president of products Mark LaRow told InternetNews.com.

The traditional method of building reports on request consumes a lot of resources, and an IT department would have to build more than a million designs to cover a modest data warehouse, according to LaRow.

Now, IT designs "a small number of reports -- maybe 1,000," and users can take one report, click on different rows and columns to drill down, LaRow said.

He said they can surf the data they want, adding the data they need dynamically and either saving their version of the report or using it online.

For example, one of Microstrategy's customers, the Loews (NASDAQ: LTR) hardware retail store chain, has 94,000 reports anyone can use. Only 3,000 were "explicitly designed by IT," and the rest are variations of those with additional data added by users, LaRow said, adding that some of the derivative reports are "much larger than the originals."

None of these approaches is fast enough for Terry Cunningham, the founder of Crystal Decisions, which sold the Crystal Reports BI tool. He is often considered the father of business intelligence.

BI is "evolving into what we call continuous BI; it never rests," Cunningham told InternetNews.com. "Things need to be understood, and decisions need to be made in real time," he explained. "There's no such thing as 'I'm going to run the report tomorrow and see how we did today.'"

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