BI Insight

Welcome to the April 2009 edition of our newsletter – BI Insight!

In this month’s newsletter we have highlighted a research paper that talks about the green BI practices that helps to accomplish both green and financial objectives in “Green BI”. The paper also discusses some of the micro and macro changes that can be undertaken in the consumption and operational pattern for practicing the green BI initiative in the organization.

The newsletter also features “Falken Tire Corporation – Data Mart Development and Reporting” case study. This case study describes how Falken Tire benefitted from the centralized data in the data mart built by Systech and how it empowered them to report and analyze to make improved decisions.

And apart from these we also have included BI news articles from reputed sources. We hope you find the newsletter interesting and informative. Please invite your peers to visit us and subscribe to us.

Warm regards,

The Editor

Systechusa.com gets a facelift!

Systech is pleased to announce the launch of a new and improved website, http://www.systechusa.com/. We’ve spent months designing our corporate website so that we could become more of a resource to you, to our current and prospective clients and partners! Our intent is to keep this an active process of updating our portal constantly.

Our upgraded Web site is easy to navigate and easier than ever to find through search engines because of the way our information is presented and Systech’s search engine optimization capabilities.

The all new http://www.systechusa.com/ is filled with exciting new content that we believe and hope you will find it user-friendly and informative. So… what are you waiting for? Check it out!

Pi and Netezza Webinar: The Power of Item Profitability Analytics

April 2009 Pi Solutions and Netezza jointly sponsored a free web seminar focused on how true item-level profitability analytics could enable Retail and CPG companies to optimize revenues for the business by understanding and assessing their profits at the most granular level.

Ernie Levenson, VP of Operations at VTech, was the key speaker at this event. Ernie discussed how VTech used profitability analytics to improve their business. Ernie shared his insights on how to successfully implement and leverage these solutions. Pi Solutions provided a brief overview of their Pi Profit Analytics™ application, built to run on the Netezza platform. And, Netezza talked about its market-leading family of data warehouse appliances.

This webinar focused on how item-level profitability enables a company to:

• Make profitable decisions on product pricing, substitution and mix
• Manage customer relationships and make fact based decisions on pricing and discounting, order size, delivery arrangements and supply chain efficiencies
• Replace lowest price suppliers with lowest TCO suppliers
• Highlight new opportunities in the business and provide financial justifications for decisions
• Improve product development by providing product and merchandising managers information to optimize costs and maximize functionality

“The power of Item Profitability Analytics webinar” showcases how VTech was able to turn an unprofitable division to profitable one using profit analysis. It highlights how to leverage Pi Profit Analytics software and Netezza appliance to build the next generation profitability solution quickly and easily. The information in the webinar can be used by any company in increasing their own bottom line profitability through true profitability analysis. I would highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in improving their company’s profitability,” said Keshav Kuthiala, Vice President of Marketing Pi Solutions.

This event is recorded and is available on demand: The Power of Item Profitability Analytics

Oracle Buys Sun Microsystems

Apr 2009 Sun Microsystems and Oracle Corporation recently announced they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire Sun common stock for $9.50 per share in cash. The transaction is valued at approximately $7.4 billion, or $5.6 billion net of Sun’s cash and debt.

“We expect this acquisition to be accretive to Oracle’s earnings by at least 15 cents on a non-GAAP basis in the first full year after closing. We estimate that the acquired business will contribute over $1.5 billion to Oracle’s non-GAAP operating profit in the first year, increasing to over $2 billion in the second year. This would make the Sun acquisition more profitable in per share contribution in the first year than we had planned for the acquisitions of BEA, PeopleSoft and Siebel combined,” said Oracle President Safra Catz.

“The acquisition of Sun transforms the IT industry, combining best-in-class enterprise software and mission-critical computing systems,” said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. “Oracle will be the only company that can engineer an integrated system – applications to disk – where all the pieces fit and work together so customers do not have to do it themselves. Our customers benefit as their systems integration costs go down while system performance, reliability and security go up.”

There are substantial long-term strategic customer advantages to Oracle owning two key Sun software assets: Java and Solaris. Java is one of the computer industry’s best-known brands and most widely deployed technologies, and it is the most important software Oracle has ever acquired. Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle’s fastest growing business, is built on top of Sun’s Java language and software. Oracle can now ensure continued innovation and investment in Java technology for the benefit of customers and the Java community.

The Sun Solaris operating system is the leading platform for the Oracle database, Oracle’s largest business, and has been for a long time. With the acquisition of Sun, Oracle can optimize the Oracle database for some of the unique, high-end features of Solaris. Oracle is as committed as ever to Linux and other open platforms and will continue to support and enhance our strong industry partnerships.

Teradata and SAP Expand Partnership

Apr. 2009 Teradata Corporation, a company solely focused on data warehousing and enterprise analytics, and SAP AG, a provider of business software, recently announced at Teradata Universe a new agreement to provide SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse (SAP NetWeaver BW) on the Teradata database. Customers have asked for accelerated, unified access to detailed enterprise data for improved business visibility. To address this need, the partnership will deliver a seamlessly integrated and scalable solution that lowers total cost of ownership and consolidates data on one database platform.

Companies around the globe use both Teradata and SAP products. Today, these customers have various databases for their data warehouses, and use different business intelligence (BI) tools to analyze that data. Most have at least one SAP NetWeaver BW data warehouse. As a result of the new agreement, customers will benefit from an integrated end-to-end offering, including everything from data warehouse infrastructure and management to BI tools. The consolidation of all data on one database platform will support joint SAP-Teradata customers’ efforts to standardize and rationalize their IT investments while lowering their total cost of ownership.

“For companies like ours that leverage massive amounts of information with Teradata and SAP, the promise of tighter integration and closer collaboration is significant,” said Joe Zakutney, Vice President, Global Applications, The Hershey Company. “Most companies realize that centralized data warehousing is the best approach for BI and analytics, and SAP software running on Teradata is exactly the kind of combination we foresee as a technology advantage in the years ahead.”

Will Business Intelligence Software Move to Appliances?

SAP-Teradata alliance, IBM’s plans and Oracle-Sun deal all point to BI bundles on top of data warehouse appliances.

An alliance announced this week between SAP and Teradata goes beyond integration of SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse and the Teradata database. That first part is good news for joint customers who are getting by with customized integrations of the two data warehouse environments. But the alliance also points to what is likely to be a growing trend in data warehousing and business intelligence: the bundling of BI software onto data warehouse appliances.

Looking beyond support for the Teradata database, which will happen with the next release of SAP BW, the two vendors are “exploring many other opportunities to more closely integrate,” says Miles Stephenson, Teradata’s vice president of alliances. “We wouldn’t preclude some sort of a bundle… and we’ve actually looked at several of the packages that SAP BusinessObjects has put together as industry solutions.”

From SAP’s perspective, working with Teradata makes good sense. Nearly half of SAP’s top 100 customers run Teradata. What’s more, BusinessObjects was the number-one BI tool running on top of Teradata even before the BI vendor’s acquisition by SAP. As for the possibility of a joint appliance with bundled BI software, “Teradata obviously has a lot of strength in the appliance space, and it was one of the very first appliance vendors,” comments Tim Lang, vice president of product management at SAP BusinessObjects. “SAP isn’t new to appliances either, as we’ve had our Business Warehouse Accelerator technology for a number of years.”

In fact, SAP and Teradata may be responding in part to IBM. IBM has let it be known, and in an interview with Intelligent Enterprise in early March it acknowledged, that it will make its BI and information integration software available as modules. These modules will run –preconfigured and preinstalled — on top of the InfoSphere Balanced Warehouse appliances.

“Customers will be able to say, ‘I want this E-Class Balanced Warehouse on a pSeries server, and I also want the IBM Cognos module, the InfoSphere Information Server module and maybe the Optim data retention module as well,” says Bill O’Connell, IBM’s data warehousing CTO. “The appliance would be shipped to the customer data-load ready, with everything installed and configured, further expediting time to value for our customers.”

So it’s apparent that data warehouse appliances are likely to give way to complete data warehouse and BI appliances. But with its pending deal to acquire Sun Microsystems, Oracle is talking about taking one-stop shopping for hardware and software to even greater extremes, adding in applications as well as information infrastructure.

The trend goes beyond data warehousing and BI. It’s about prefab data centers, ready to plug in and go with minimal systems integration and the promise of faster, lower cost deployment.

Background

Falken Tire is a brand of tires by Japanese Sumitomo Rubber Industries with branches across Asia, America and Europe. Their first tire was produced in 1983 and it wasn’t until two years later that they began exporting their tires outside Japan and entered the US market only in 1990.

As the organization grew, so did the need for accurate and immediate information. The company lacked an effective way to consolidate, manage and distribute business data. Data resided in many different sources and in different formats, limiting its ability to analyze and deliver it within a single platform. To evaluate performance in the market, Falken Tire compared their Sales data with the Market data. Falken Tire wanted to perform Market Share Analysis and also forecast demand. However, they were faced with complications involving multi-source data analysis.

These issues needed to be addressed by Systech Solutions, Inc.

Challenges

Diversity of sources:

The fundamental problem that Falken Tire faced was that their data was stored in different places. The Sales data was in the Operation System, Objective data was in a flat file and Market data was in an SQL database. It was not only time consuming to create a report but also not flexible to do further analysis.

Tracking and forecasting:

Traditionally, Falken Tire could not track or forecast actual sales. Therefore, it was essential to configure a reporting tool to access information in the data mart with ease. They needed to get a deeper insight into their key sales performance to better forecast the market.

Solution

After studying the data from different sources, Systech came up with a model of how the information fit together. To enable this, the development team needed to understand the existing information and find the correlated pieces. Systech’s development team then created a common format for the data mart in a SQL Server 2005 database. Later, Informatica was decided on as the most appropriate ETL platform for this BI implementation at Falken Tire. The ETL platform was configured to support reporting and complex data analysis with maximum efficiency. It was also structured to provide enough flexibility to accommodate future trade volume and business growth.
Subsequently, MicroStrategy was configured to access information in the data mart to deliver customer friendly reports, templates and dashboards.

Result

Centralized data in BI data mart:

• Users could easily access the data. Also allowed them to compare Falken Tire sales with their competitor and do market analysis.
• The robust architecture of the new ETL platform provided flexibility and scalability.
• The new ETL process fetched data to reports based on real time which was impossible earlier.

Empowered to report and analyze data to make improved decisions:

• The new and improved dashboard consisted of multiple parameters/metrics that helped track all Key Performance Indicators in Sales and Inventory.
• The dashboard enabled Falken Tire to view the performance of the company based on their objectives.
• It helped create a Daily Sales Report for the previous working day and also helped to view Sales by drilling down to the zip level of the state.
• The solution enabled business users to drill into the key trends to do an online analysis with just a click without coming back to the developer asking for a separate report.
• The reporting tool automated the comparative market share analysis of the Sales. This process which was a multi-step process earlier was now an automated process.
• They could report sales figures, forecast projection, estimate competitive sales and gauge the state of business.
• Based on the forecasting demand they could manage the inventory.

The Systech team thus helped the end users view critical performance information in a matter of seconds and quickly make decisions that seek to optimize market share.

Background

Adopting green practices will help reduce the environmental impact. Hence, there may be some micro and macro changes and innovations to be undertaken in the consumption and operational pattern for practicing the green BI initiative in an organization. Implementing some green practices comes at significantly high cost but it offers greater return on investment.

Green BI practices helps to accomplish both green and financial objectives. An organization implementing a number of environment friendly best practices cuts on the energy consumption and carbon emissions. With the rising procurement costs, organizations need to diligently plan the utilization of resources albeit social imperatives, that implicitly contributes to the green practices. Corporate social responsibility and need for creating a sustainable environment require better manageability of data warehouse systems and resources aligning to the business requirements. Understanding the business process enables the organization to focus on business optimization.

BI organizations being entirely dependant on data, green initiatives largely depend on consolidating and virtualizing data centers. Optimization of energy is of paramount importance which predominantly contributes to the carbon footprint which could be practiced through e-commuting, using virtual resources, prohibiting unnecessary printing, proper disposal of e-waste and switching to greener products.

IT organizations carbon emission is 2% of the world’s environmental impact says Gartner’s report. Tough BI offers great benefits to the companies to better control and optimize their business, yet the evolving BI market contributes a larger part to the carbon emissions. Under utilization of disparate assets and energy hogs need to be immediately addressed especially with Governments bringing in regulations and placing restrictions on energy consumption by organizations and the carbon emissions. While it is essential for BI organizations to better handle servers and storage space, it is also required to efficiently design the BI applications as well. Adopting the various energy conservation practices offers greater benefits than just going green.

Hardware Optimization

As we start discussing about green initiatives, the energy monsters of the BI organizations could be hardly missed and it starts from right here.

The rapid growth of BI industry and its implementation across various sectors results in huge amount of data to be managed. Catering to the processing and storage requirements, the burgeoning data centers increases the need for facility space. Data centers consume almost 40% of the energy consumed by the organization. And almost 60% of that power is used to cool the DCs that turn our attention towards it. The operating cost of data center increases, as the power consumption increases with the energy costs rising as well.

Initiatives to make DCs zero carbon facilities include switching to high density blade servers built with specialized processors that consume less electricity and requires less cooling than traditional server; consolidation and efficient cooling mechanisms with better air flow designs.

Though green practices for data centers largely focus on converting them energy efficient with an aim to increase maximum utilization of hardware infrastructure, BI concentrates on consolidation emphasizing the de-duplication of data.

Ubiquitous proliferation of data is huge especially while maintaining disparate servers for development, test and production environments in BI. Server consolidation optimizes the usage of under utilized servers by amalgamating the different environments and running it on a consolidated server, avoiding de-duplication of data.

Are the organizations using the DCs to its maximum storage efficiency just having single instance of data without being replicated? Installing separate data marts for each and every department of an organization leads to data duplication. Building enterprise DWs assists database consolidation approach to attain de-duplication of data that invariably reduces the storage space.

Virtualization and cloud computing plays a vital role in better utilization of the consolidated hardware.

Virtualization provides an instance of a PC on an existing hardware platform. This allows running several virtual machines with multiple OS’s on a single physical system. Virtualization improves the utilization capacity of the server running multiple applications simultaneously.

While BI requires running loads and processing data from centralized servers, thin client could be effectively put in place replacing desktops and PCs avoiding unnecessary hardware. With thin clients the processing is entirely performed on the server side that will be beneficial for organizations offering better manageability of resources. Thin client reduces the power consumption requiring only 30-50 watt when compared to the typical desktop which requires 150-180 watt saving substantially on power consumption.

Cloud computing provides access to the IT services across the internet from a centralized server. SaaS, the concepts of cloud computing, with web enabled services, allows clients to view the dashboards or reports online via the network. The end user could use the web interface, without having to be bothered about the underlying technology and the requirement to maintain the infrastructure. BI SaaS also known as ‘on-demand BI’ is an emerging market that makes BI accessible to organizations at large and offers the advantages of shorter implementation cycles.

Energy Conservation

In BI organizations scheduling loads during off business hours and then processing the data, keeps the servers and pc’s running 24×7. But, truly these servers and other devices lay idle for almost 50% which could be turned off when not in use. Else by using high efficient processors, idle cores could be shunt into sleep mode, instantly turning them on as they’re needed. Though greener products come with such options, existing infrastructure could be powered down using software agents for certain period of time depending on their usage.

Another practice where energy could be conserved is using TFT monitors instead of CRT because LCD monitors with LED requires less power. Turning off the monitor while not in uses zero energy and turning PCs to hibernation or sleep mode setting can drop energy consumption over 90 and 100 percent respectively.

Managing Application

BI applications should be designed specific to the user requirements. Careful designing of reports with flexible options to retrieve only the required information would reduce the processing of unwanted data that the user will not always require.

Design reports compatible with mobile device to send notifications or alerts, when some events occur, instead of the user constantly monitoring the reports and be dependant on the IT infrastructure.

Reports with web enabled services provide the flexibility of accessing it across the network which avoids the necessity of printing. Environment conscientiousness should be propagated to use e-documents and not to print reports unless and otherwise required. Inkjet printers with vegetable inks are eco-friendly compared to laser printers. Recycled papers could be used for printing to support the green initiatives.

E-Commuting

E-commuting offers benefits to both organizations and employees. Adopting such practices could significantly reduce fuel consumption, the emissions and traffic. Flexible work patterns reduce the air travel that stands huge in contributing to the carbon footprint. Enabling the remote users to securely access the network regardless of the location avoids the unnecessary employee commute. Newer technology practices like video conference, go to meetings, audio conference over VoIP have changed the pattern of communication which proves effective for BI organizations with project teams and clients across the globe.

Consumables

Increasing awareness of the environmental impact and depleting natural reserves have made product vendors to manufacture mercury, lead, cadmium and chromium free greener and recyclable products. Faster computing needs have to be satisfied by DW servers without hindering the performance while hitting million of records to process the data. Right from chips to servers and databases to printers, energy efficiency and performance optimization are taking precedence that offers compact and higher capacity products. High speed processing units greatly enhances the speed of query processing and loading. Green manufacturing would also greatly help in reducing e-waste.

Sustainability

Electronic products as it becomes obsolete, the e-waste has to be prudently discarded by the organizations. Dumping away items in landfill contaminates the environment. From the total e-waste generated only about 40% are channeled for recycling. Hence e-waste has to be channelized through exchange or take-back facility programs offered by vendors or recycled through registered recyclers.

Manage-Measure-Enhance

To measure the results is vital in order to manage the change. Monitor and measure the carbon footprint, material scrap, water and energy usage, etc., to find out and reduce the consumption. Power tracking products are available that enable accurate measurement over time. Online calculators can be utilized to find out the carbon footprint.

We know that BI offers comprehensive and better understanding of the business performance collecting data from all the sources and offering a consolidated and interpreted view. BI can not only provide insight to better manage the business but also helps in tracking the details about the environmental impact that the organizations are causing. BI solutions also supports to monitor and measure the carbon footprint, material scrap, water usage, etc., to analyze the organization’s carbon footprint helping to formulate greener policies and implement it successfully.

Organizational benefits of going green

Green BI from the business perspective offers monetary savings by adapting the green practices. Efficiently designing BI solutions, better utilization of available physical resources and usage of greener products, reduce the energy usage and the floor space that drops the expenditure and realize cost savings.

Summary

Putting green initiatives into practice have progressed from just board discussions to actual implementation. Though some initiatives may require substantial investment, on longer term, the returns will be beneficial. To make your infrastructure and applications greener,

• Reduce the energy usage by eliminating the unwanted hardware and make processes more efficient;
• Reuse the available resources; and
• Recycle the e-waste responsibly.

Monitoring the effectiveness of the implementation leads to efficient management of all the resources. And, BI organizations adopting various energy conservation practices are hugely beneficial more than just going green; a profitable solution.