Next-Gen BI Is Here

Doug Henschen
October 21, 2009 | COMMENTS

Business intelligence (BI) initiatives continue to top CIO priorities, as executives from the boardroom on down demand better visibility. The problem is that BI often has fallen short of ideal, delivering insight into the past but not into up-to-the-moment performance or future prospects.

That's about to change. Next-generation BI has arrived, and three major factors are driving it: the spread of predictive analytics, more real-time performance monitoring, and much faster analysis. (A fourth factor, software as a service, promises to further alter the BI market by helping companies get these next-generation systems running more quickly.)

Predictive Analytics

This white-hot growth segment recently got hotter with IBM's $1.2-billion deal to buy SPSS, a company that uses algorithms and combinations of calculations to spot trends, risks, and opportunities in ways not possible with historical reporting. This next generation of BI technology is still evolving and comes with plenty of risk. Prediction typically requires statistical expertise that's scarce and pricey. Real-time monitoring of stream processing technology can be a lifesaver, but only if you can respond as quickly as you detect opportunity or risk. Fast in-memory-analysis tools are selling briskly, but they may require companies to pony up for higher-performance 64-bit hardware.

Real-Time

You hear “real time” a lot from BI vendors, but they seldom mean sub-second or even sub-minute response. You can use techniques such as trickle feeding or change data capture to get a conventional data warehouse down to sub-minute latency, but it might be more troublesome and expensive than stream processing alternatives, which are moving outside their finance niche.

Low-latency BI, faster business activity monitoring, and ultra-low-latency complex event processing are all examples of stream processing technologies. They typically include instant alerts so people can react when a particular threshold, event, or pattern is seen.

Faster Analysis

The third element poised to change BI is the much faster analysis that's possible using in-memory calculations. In-memory tools can quickly slice and dice large data sets without resorting to summarized data, pre-built cubes, or IT-intensive database tuning. The power and appeal of in-memory products have grown in recent years as multicore, multithreaded, and 64-bit server technologies have become more commonplace and affordable. These hardware advances enable in-memory products to analyze the equivalent of multiple data marts or even small data warehouses in RAM. The technology also eliminates, or at least minimizes, the need for extensive data prep and performance tuning by IT.

This is a short summary of Doug Henschen's full-length white paper entitled “Next-Gen BI Is Here” published by InformationWeek. Henschen is editor-in-chief of Intelligent Enterprise. Read the complete paper online here. Reprinted with permission.