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.
