by Ash Parikh on January 25, 2012 – 7:30 am
Today, agility and timely visibility are critical to the business. No wonder CIO.com, states that business intelligence (BI) will be the top technology priority for CIOs in 2012. However, is your data architecture agile enough to handle these exacting demands?
In his blog Top 10 Business Intelligence Predictions For 2012, Boris Evelson of Forrester Research, Inc., states that traditional BI approaches often fall short for the two following reasons (among many others):
- BI hasn’t fully empowered information workers, who still largely depend on IT
- BI platforms, tools and applications aren’t agile enough Read More »
by Informatica on January 24, 2012 – 12:10 am
Gartner hosted a webinar on January 10, 2012: Gartner Worldwide IT Spending Forecast. One of the topics covered was industry IT spend for 2012.
In covering that topic they made a point of saying that due to severe flooding in Thailand, they expect storage to become in short supply (as much as a 29% global shortfall) through the end of 2012. It is expected that the price of storage/GB will increase as a result and supplies will fall short of demand. They recommended finding alternatives to purchasing storage to keep costs down. Read More »
by Ash Parikh on January 23, 2012 – 10:18 am
If you haven’t already, I think you should read The Forrester Wave™: Data Virtualization, Q1 2012. For several reasons – one, to truly understand the space, and two, to understand the critical capabilities required to be a solution that solves real data integration problems.
At the very outset, let’s clearly define Data Virtualization. Simply put, Data Virtualization is foundational to Data Integration. It enables fast and direct access to the critical data and reports that the business needs and trusts. It is not to be confused with simple, traditional Data Federation. Instead, think of it as a superset which must complement existing data architectures to support BI agility, MDM and SOA. Read More »
by Claudia Chandra on January 19, 2012 – 8:00 am
Data warehouses are applications– so why not manage them like one? In fact, data grows at a much faster rate in data warehouses, since they integrate date from multiple applications and cater to many different groups of users who need different types of analysis. Data warehouses also keep historical data for a long time, so data grows exponentially in these systems. The infrastructure costs in data warehouses also escalate quickly since analytical processing on large amounts of data requires big beefy boxes. Not to mention the software license and maintenance costs of such a large amount of data. Imagine how many backup media is required to backup tens to hundreds of terabytes of data warehouses on a regular basis. But do you really need to keep all that historical data in production?
One of the challenges of managing data growth in data warehouses is that it’s hard to determine which data is actually used, which data is no longer being used, or even if the data was ever used at all. Unlike transactional systems where the application logic determines when records are no longer being transacted upon, the usage of analytical data in data warehouses has no definite business rules. Age or seasonality may determine data usage in data warehouses, but business users are usually loath to let go of the availability of all that data at their fingertips. The only clear cut way to prove that some data is no longer being used in data warehouses is to monitor its usage.
Read More »
by Peter Ku on January 10, 2012 – 12:19 pm
The recent Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) ruling requiring real-time reporting for over-the-counter (OTC) swap trading was decided over the holidays to increase transparency and provide a comprehensive view of the entire swaps market to help regulators monitor and govern market activities and hedge against increased systemic risk. This ruling is a major change for many companies who have had little to no regulatory reporting requirements prior to this rulings. The deadlines for real-time swap reporting are right around the corner as the first of three deadlines being July 16, 2012 to commence real-time swap reporting.
Meeting these new reporting requirements poses significant challenges for those impacted by the new ruling that cannot be ignored. Let’s take a look at what they are and how Informatica’s solutions can help overcome these obstacles. Read More »
