Business Intelligence Software can Improve your
Bottom Line.
Business Intelligence (BI) is a widely used term that is being used a lot these
days around the world. Companies across the globe use BI on top of their
transactional systems to analyze and extract hidden insights into customer
behaviour, market patterns, costing scenarios, employee performance etc.
You may not know it, but your OLTP data contains a wealth of information that
can help you make informed decisions about your business. For example, you can
calculate your net profits for last quarter and compare them with the same
quarter of the previous year. It can also provide other types of valuable
information such as which employees are the most and least productive, and the
optimum levels of goods to keep in stock.
The process of analyzing your data for that type of information, and the data that
results, are collectively called business intelligence. Typically, business
intelligence tries to answer the following types of questions:

What were the total sales of all products last year?

How does our profitability for the first quarter of this year compare to the
same time period during the past five years?

How much money did customers over age 35 spend last year, and how
has that behavior changed over time?
However, you can spend a lot of time and money trying to extract business
intelligence information from your database. Some organizations use a small
army of data professionals and perhaps a dozen different software packages to
produce simple reports. Also, if the report doesn't have the proper information,
its creators have to start over.
Usually, companies create a datawarehouse or smaller departmental datamarts
that store aggregate data retrieved and summarized from their OLTP databases
on a nightly or regular basis. The costs however of designing such
datawarehouses or marts are quite high and require a lot of investment in
servers, expert professionals and time.
Analytics is another part of BI where complex formulas are created to generate
useful information like patterns in buying behaviour, consumption, raw material
and other costs, trend analysis both based on past data and extrapolation in the
future and modeling to figure out what variables will determine employee
performance, profitability and customer retention. In other words, statistical
analysis is becoming very important.
An article in New York Times last August puts a spotlight on the role of statistical
methods in today’s world. It states:
In field after field, computing and the Web are creating new realms of data to explore – sensor signals,
surveillance tapes, social network chatter, public records and more. And the digital data surge only
promises to accelerate, rising fivefold by 2012, according to a projection by IDC, an IT research firm …
Yet data is merely the raw material of knowledge. We’re rapidly entering a world where everything can
be monitored and measured, but the big problem is going to be the ability of humans to use, analyze
and make sense of the data … (Analysts) use powerful computers and sophisticated mathematical
models to hunt for meaningful patterns and insights in vast troves of data. The applications are as
diverse as improving Internet search and online advertising, culling gene sequencing information for
cancer research and analyzing sensor and location data to optimize the handling of food shipments.
The time and expense involved in retrieving answers from databases means that
a lot of business intelligence information often goes unused. The reason: most
operational systems are designed to store your data, not to help you analyze it.
The solution: an online analytical processing (OLAP) product, a specialized
software designed to help you extract business intelligence information from your
data.
Some of the major products in the market that provide the features of BI include
Business Objects from SAP, Cognos from IBM, Microstrategy, Oracle BIEE and
Microsoft’s own BI tool. All of these products come with some standard features
like Ad-hoc Reporting and Querying, Dashboarding, Drilldown Reporting and
Multidimensional Analysis. The drawback is that they are priced in such a way
that all the complex and advanced features like mathematical and statistical
analysis that are used by large multinational companies are also bundled in and
customers have to pay for them whether they use them or not.
In addition, the features are heavy and difficult to learn and use. The learning
curve is long and not many users end up using all the features. All of them
require expensive infrastructure like dedicated servers, operating systems and
databases that come with recurring costs. All in all the Total Cost of Ownership
(TCO) for these products is very high indeed and the returns do not always justify
the cost for small and medium businesses.
Cogient is a product that is similar in nature to these products in terms of basic
features. This is a product from Enflexis Solutions and although it has all the basic
features, it costs much less because you pay for what you use. The architecture is
simple and the product is agile. It is lightweight and does not require expensive
servers to install and can be installed on a normal PC that can then be used as a
server. It is completely browser based with no middle layer or application layer.
All the code is stored in the database which makes for better performance and
security.
Also, there are no additional licenses to be paid for any database or Operating
System. It works on Windows as well as non-Windows environments like Linux.
The TCO for a product like this is very low and the ROI is consequently much
higher because you obtain the same or slightly better returns with a lower cost as
much as 50-75% lower.
The advantages of a product like this are, in addition to lower investment and
recurring costs, the learning curve is shorter, minimal training is required and the
product can be scaled up or down depending on the requirements of the
customer. Installation can be done easily within just one day.
Call today for a free demo or trial version from the company.