How to modernize your business analytics platform with Cloud Solutions

In today's data digitized world, no business or organization can survive, let alone thrive without a solid data management and data analysis infrastructure. For several decades now, organizations have relied on platforms and analytics software to analyze their digital data in order to understand the health of their business, layout business and management strategies, identify growth opportunities and overall run their businesses effectively.

Over the years, it has been proven time and time again, the top performing companies who are constantly beating analysts’ expectations have also instituted leading analytic capabilities.  These companies have a solid data management infrastructure and a team that is constantly adapting to changes in the digital data management and data analysis landscape.  They are proactive in providing their business users with tools and capabilities which empowers users to analyze the data at a ferocious volume, integrate multiple sources easily and also in some cases giving them the freedom to perform self-service types of analysis.

Today, with Cloud Analytics solutions, it has become very easy for organizations and Lines of Business to get that level of analytical capabilities at a very low subscription based cost. So,  If  you are considering an upgrade of your existing Business Intelligence platform or still trying to consolidate and migrate your legacy reporting tool to an enterprise class data warehouse platform, you should consider cloud analytics solution like Oracle BI Cloud Service (BICS) to modernize your analytics platform.

BI’s Movement to the Cloud is happening at a staggering pace providing competitive advantage  

Gartner predicts worldwide software as a service (SaaS) application revenue will reach $22.1 billion by 2015.By the end of 2016, more than 50 percent of Global 1000 companies will have stored customer-sensitive data in the public cloud. The industry analyst firm also predicts that 30% of organizations have considered a cloud BI Deployment in the last five years and 50% of organizations will have considered a cloud BI deployment by 2015. This prediction simply states that if you’re not adopting cloud BI, your competition certainly is, and they are modernizing their analytics platform to better empower their Business Users while reducing data consolidation and data management cost.

What are the Business and IT challenges with the traditional, on premise based analytics deployment?

In my opinion, there are three major challenges with today’s on-premise based Business Analytics Deployments:

1.       Deployment approach – Every single BI Project starts with an expectation that business users know what they want during the start of the BI Project. Of course, some metrics that are key to understanding the health of the organizations are known and they don’t change as frequently. However, there are times business users need the ability to integrate new data feeds with their enterprise data. Users may want to integrate a new product data (data element) that was not considered during the requirements process but is key to understanding how their customers are reacting to the newly launched product/campaign. Being able to analyze the customer behavior on time (when it really matters) can mean a difference between retaining your customers and losing them to your competition.

2.       Turnaround time for enhancements –  In a typical BI environment, any new enhancement requests, even if it means the ability to analyze spreadsheet data with a fully working Enterprise Data Warehouse could mean a week(best case) to a couple weeks in most cases.  Again, this time frame is if you have a BI Competency center and an efficient change management process that your IT team follows.

3.       Infrastructure Planning - The infrastructure (hardware and software) capacity is usually planned to fulfill the BI need at the start of the project. Every time a new applications needs to be integrated, the hardware and software architecture changes. Again, this is not even including data types and applications that are not known today but will be of vital importance in the near future as newer applications are created and used by consumers to create new type of data files. 

How can cloud analytics platforms like Oracle BI Cloud Service (BICS) address the above Challenges?

1.       Easy Self-Service Capabilities- BI cloud services provides a complete self-service Business Intelligence for the business users.  Self-service really helps the business users in getting what they want quickly.  It gives them the capability to combine the single “source of truth” data that’s in their enterprise systems with any other external data that they want to combine. This means that users’ ability to make quick, timely decisions drastically improves.

2.       Outsource Infrastructure planning and ongoing maintenance to Oracle – Organizations can now offload ongoing infrastructure maintenance, backup, high availability as well as new functionalities that allows them to integrate new applications and data types into a Business Analytics platform by going with a vendor like Oracle and adopting Oracle BI Cloud Services (BICS).

Also keep in mind the cloud analytics offerings today has significantly matured as a product and is ready for prime time. All the previous hesitations to move to the cloud such as – security, reliability, data movement - have now been addressed by vendors like Oracle, particularly with their introduction of Oracle BI Cloud Service (BICS)

I sincerely believe that organizations which are considering building a modern analytics platform that can fulfill the changing digital landscape and empower business users to answer questions at a tremendous speed not just today but also in the future should definitely be looking at Oracle BI Cloud Service.

In my next post, I’ll talk about a migration strategy and path for customers considering Oracle BI Cloud Service as their Business Analytics platform of choice.

Fulfilling Real-Time analytics on Oracle BI Applications platform

Analytics users have always had the desire to get “real-time” data.  There are certain business scenarios where the ability to do real-time analysis can positively impact different areas of our Business – from increased revenue to a greater customer satisfaction.

Most of the Oracle BI Application deployments my team and I have been a part of, have always had some Real-Time components.There are a number of design approaches to extend the Oracle BI applications foundation in order to fulfill these requirements. In this article, I would like to share one of the design approaches I will be presenting with my colleague during Oracle OpenWorld 2014. If you are visiting the Oracle Open World this year, please join us to discuss this topic and any other questions on Oracle Business Intelligence:

Session ID: CON6485

Session Title: Leverage Oracle BI Applications Architecture to Meet Real-Time Reporting Requirements

Venue / Room: Moscone West - 3011

Date and Time: 10/1/14, 16:30 - 17:15

What is “Real-Time Analytics”?

Real-time business intelligence (RTBI) is the process of delivering information about business operations as they occur. Real time means near to zero latency and access to information whenever it is required.

- Wikipedia

Some of the common business scenarios for real-time analytics we always run into are:

§  Access to Point Of Sale transactions to efficiently manage Inventory and Store Cash

§  Operational reports for Business that depend on timely deliveries

§  Users simply need critical operational data in real-time

Let’s take a look at the design approach to fulfill real-time analytics on Oracle BI applications Platform

For those of you who are not familiar with Oracle BI Applications, It is a pre-packaged and prebuilt BI tool that enables organizations to realize the value of a packaged BI Application, such as rapid deployment, lower TCO, and built-in best practices, while also being able to very easily extend those solutions to meet their specific needs, or build completely custom BI applications, all on one common BI architecture.

Business Requirement: Show me the list of Order Quantity by Customer and Product in real Time.

In order to fulfill this requirement, we will extend the OBIEE metadata to seamlessly integrate data from two data sources:

1.       Oracle Business Analytics Warehouse (OBAW) for historical data (This would be the data loaded as of the night before)

2.       Transactional Data (OLTP).

Figure- 1

The Physical layer is an exact depiction of the target physical database(s). Figure 2 shows an Out of the Box (OOTB) Sales Invoice Line Fact and its relationship with OOTB Dimensions.

Figure- 2

Similarly, in order to access the real-time data, we created views in our transactional system that would store transactions occurred since the nightly load. Now, based on the real-time reporting requirement, we may need to create multiple views depending on the number of dimensions we want our users to be able to seamlessly analyze and slice real-time data. As you can see in figure 3, we created seven dimensional views in order to provide the ability to slice real-time data by those dimensions.

Figure- 3

The Business Model is a layer of abstraction that sits on top of the physical data. The Business Model allows us to collapse multiple dimension tables or multiple fact tables coming from disparate physical sources into a single logical table.  As you can see in Figure-4, there is one Logical Fact and One Logical Dimension for two disparate sources (OBAW and OLTP).

The Business Model also contains some of the rules for how the databases should be interrogated.  If the application contains Aggregate or Partitioned database tables used to improve query response times, these rules would be defined within the Logical Table Sources within the Business Model.   We will leverage this functionality to federate data from two Physical data sources.

Figure- 4

We need to map the Physical column for each Logical Table sources. As you can see in Figure-5, Ordered Amount is mapped to NET_AMT for W_SALES_INVOICE_LINE_F (OBAW Fact Table) and ORDERED_AMOUNT for View_Sales_Order_lines_Fact (OLTP Table).

Figure- 5

Similarly, we need to map the Physical column for each Dimensions, Logical Table sources.

Figure- 6

The Presentation layer is a second layer of abstraction that sit-on-top of Business Model. The Presentation layer is presented to end-users in a complete WYSIWYG framework. 

Figure- 7

 Per the design steps completed above, when we try to create a report. OBI generates queries for each data source. Data returns from each data source. Data is then integrated on the OBI Server before displaying it to the users.

Figure- 8

Below is a 3-Tier architecture diagram to fulfill real-time and analytical reporting need without adversely impacting the ERP (Business) Applications.

Figure- 9