Informatica Perspectives

In my last post Business Intelligence, Light and Fast (Part 1), I talked about how Web 2.0 technologies hold a lot promise for the spread of BI. But how are organizations putting this approach into everyday practice?

In a recent ComputerWorld article, Julia King cites the example of a local police force that is employing mapping technology to, within a matter of seconds, perform geographic profiling of crimes and analysis of police data. She notes how BI 2.0 is opening “a world in which one of BI's original big promises is finally being met, and a broader class of everyday business users — as opposed to statisticians or data analysts — are tapping into innovative technologies and Web-based BI capabilities. Police officers, physicians, accountants and salespeople are mashing up and analyzing structured and unstructured data from far-flung sources in the ways that make the most contextual sense to them.”

In other examples cited, an insurance company is employing mashup technology to link claims and wellness program data, to help employers can to analyze the cost effectiveness of different programs and benefits. As enterprise architect Mike Axelrod is quoted as saying, "Mashups solve the old-school problem of data isolation."

A number of trends are converging to make this a possibility. Through Software as a Service and cloud computing, users have access to an array of Web services that can add value to their BI environments. Web services covering a range of functions – transaction processing services, analytical services, collaborative services, content services, storage and data integration services on-demand – are publicly available from sites such as Amazon Web Services and Google.

Applications vendors such as Salesforce.com and data integration vendors such as Informatica also offer a wide range of functionality from the cloud. Informatica has a set of offerings as part of Informatica version 8.6 that address cloud computing requirements, including data quality, data replication, and integration. Informatica also announced a cloud-based integration service, Informatica On Demand Data Loader, which enables integration of data into Salesforce.com between applications and data.

“All these services offer up data that can be combined or ‘mashed up’ in order to offer even greater business value,” says Mike Ferguson in a post at B-Eye Network. He adds that “service-oriented development offers up a new way to build applications. This new way is based on incremental application development where applications can be built up gradually offering more and more functionality.” Other trends include new rapid development tools based on open-source programming frameworks.

As Gartner analyst Kurt Schlegel observed in the ComputerWorld article, one of the limiting factors of traditional BI tools has been their complexity in deploying and generating reports, which has typically been handed off to busy IT departments. Mashups and Web 2.0 approaches make it possible for end users to quickly build their own BI interfaces. "All of these new technologies are about making it easier to build and consume analytical applications," he says.