BI Insight

Background

In this case study we describe how a leading specialty retailer achieved a greater insight into Key performance and Sales metrics through Systech’s MicroStrategy implementation. The MicroStrategy implementation supported business users to analyze sales and inventory to identify key trends and opportunities.

To accommodate their expanding business the client sought a platform to support complex data analysis that is user friendly. Formerly they depended on time consuming and less efficient POS System.

After evaluating several Business Intelligence vendors, they chose Systech Solutions Inc. to meet their needs for identifying the key trends and making informed decisions. Systech Solutions, Inc. was assigned to design an Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) for them in this regard.

Challenges

The client required a detailed access into a variety of business data to allow the business community to analyze their data in greater depth. To offer a simplified and integrated solution for a profitable growth Systech had to address certain challenges.

• To track trends and identify opportunities. Since the data was spread across disparate systems it was a laborious process.
• To manage overwhelming amounts of data from various sources—and turning it into reliable business intelligence that enabled better business outcomes.
• To effectively design EDW for consolidated reporting both from in-house applications, JDA and PeopleSoft.
• To configure and implement a scalable tool to query the EDW and to create reports.
• To build a system that would distribute reports with in a 24 hour window every month.
• To provide a platform that could keep up with constantly evolving user requirements.

Solution

Systech Solutions fashioned a business intelligence environment that comprised of a Netezza data warehousing infrastructure, a DataStage ETL environment and a MicroStrategy reporting environment.

The Systech team successfully achieved the extraction, transformation and loading of the source data into a data mart schema through an ETL process. The team made sure that the information was accurate, consistent, and optimally organized for complex analysis. The EDW was effectively designed for consolidated reporting from in-house applications, JDA and PeopleSoft. Since the source data was stored in individual schemas, the transformation strategy included consolidation of information which was common to all source systems. A user-friendly OLAP data model was successfully created to store pre-aggregated data for fast ad-hoc query performance.

MicroStrategy reporting tool was configured to query the EDW and to create reports. The Systech team developed dashboards that included scorecards to allow any type of key performance indicators (KPIs) to be rolled up into a score for a particular application area, overall IT performance, or anywhere in-between. More than 32 to 40 reports were run apart from the templates during the course of the project.

The sales data (KPI’s) was analyzed to:

• Anticipate the sales margin
• Analyze the SKU to aggregate (or roll-up) metrics into single overall “score” for IT and the inventory data
• Visualize store and warehouse inventory
• Calculate profitability evaluation ratio that analyzes the firm’s ability to turn inventory into cash above the cost of the inventory
• Study purchase orders and transfers

Result

The MicroStrategy implementation by Systech team provided the client a greater insight into Key performance and Sales metrics.
Systech developed an easy to use BI application to support their data from the users. The data warehouse was architected to support production reporting.
Multiple areas of their business used the data to manage inventory, identify sales opportunity, recognize key performers and review products.
Systech made it possible to provide customizable user experience and provide executive summary reports, analyze sales promotion and study products sales.
Systech created a robust architecture and a flexible platform. This architecture combined right level of access with required functionality and resulted in a positive user experience.

Systech Solutions launches Digital Media Analytics

Systech Solutions launches Industry specific Digital Media Analytics that leverages Systech’s experience and expertise in the Digital Media Industry. The analytical platform for this solution is built upon customer’s BI environment and provides ever-changing data about a website’s traffic patterns, revenue, conversion rate and other user trends and provides in-depth analytics such as:

• Customer Segmentation
• Customer Attitudinal Analysis
• Ad Revenue Analysis
• Marketing Campaign Scorecard
• Promotion Response Analysis
• Customer Loyalty & Attrition
• Customer Lifetime Value Analysis
• Click stream Analysis
• Conversion Funnels
• Risk Management

Arun Gollapudi, CEO, Systech Solutions, Inc. explains, “Since the start of 2007, people who spent time online have increased 9 times. Are all their actions utilized and optimized by the organizations? How do we leverage Digital Media Analytics to make better business decisions and drive value? Systech’s R&D groups and client engagements have given us excellent test bed to explore deep analytics for each of the business models employed by websites today. These results were distilled to formulate Systech’s Digital Media Solutions.”

This new venture will provide strategic, in-depth custom analysis for a spectrum of businesses in Digital Media such as User Generated Media, Social media, Search Marketing, Online Advertising, Mobile Web, Widgets, E-mail, Online Video Websites, Web 2.0, E-Commerce and Online Banking.

IBM to Acquire SPSS Inc. to Provide Clients Predictive Analytics Capabilities

IBM and SPSS Inc. have entered into a definitive merger agreement for IBM to acquire SPSS, a publicly-held company headquartered in Chicago. This acquisition is expected to further expand IBM’s Information on Demand (IOD) software portfolio and business analytics capabilities, including the range of offerings available through IBM’s recently-announced Business Analytics and Optimization Consulting organization and network of Analytics Solution Centers. The acquisition is also expected to strengthen IBM’s Information Agenda initiative, which helps companies turn information into a strategic asset. As companies attempt to control costs and use resources more wisely, IDC estimates that the worldwide market for business analytics software will swell to $25 billion this year, growing 4% over 2008.

IBM is expanding its focus on business analytics technology and services to meet growing client needs to cut costs, reduce risk, and increase profitability through predictive analytics capabilities, which include advanced data capture, data mining and statistical analysis. These capabilities help organizations analyze trends and patterns found in historical and current data to drive new forms of competitive advantage by predicting potential future outcomes and optimizing all elements of their businesses, including product and service offerings for customers.

Oracle Buys GoldenGate Software

Adds Leading Real-Time Data Integration Solution to Create Comprehensive Heterogeneous Data Integration Platform

Oracle has agreed to acquire GoldenGate Software, Inc., a leading provider of real-time data integration solutions enabling superior IT performance and enterprise decision making. The addition of technology from GoldenGate extends Oracle’s capabilities with a heterogeneous real-time data integration solution and adds functionality to maintain uptime of business-critical applications during migrations and upgrades. The combination of GoldenGate and Oracle is expected to create a comprehensive heterogeneous data integration platform. Customers are expected to benefit from enhanced real-time data movement, replication and synchronization across heterogeneous systems enabling improved business intelligence, while providing high availability of business-critical applications. The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals and is expected to close later this year.

Until the deal closes, each company will continue to operate independently. Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed. “The need to improve operating performance in a global 24×7 environment has led to the need for data integration to support real-time and high availability capabilities,” said Hasan Rizvi, senior vice president Oracle Fusion Middleware Product Development. “With the addition of GoldenGate, Oracle expects to help our customers achieve better performance through improved business intelligence and business continuity with real-time information.”

“Oracle and GoldenGate share a common vision to bring a comprehensive data integration solution to customers,” said Ali Kutay, GoldenGate Software, Inc. President & CEO. “Our partnership spans more than 10 years and now our joint vision can help companies make better decisions based on more timely, accurate information across multiple systems.”

Business Intelligence comes to the Kindle

Business Intelligence provider MicroStrategy announced that it will provide its business reports and dashboards on Amazon’s Kindle DX reader. While many thought the Kindle was just about reading novels, think again.

For those of you who don’t know anything about the Kindle, it’s a simple platform for downloading and reading books provided by Amazon. However, with applications like this beginning to appear, it’s now becoming a viable platform as well.

This makes sense for the business intelligence world since the ease-of-use of the Kindle, its built-in 3G connectivity, as well as its easy-to-read screen, makes it perfect for the executive on-the-go who needs business intelligence data delivered anywhere. The company already has an iPhone app to allow mobile access to reports and the dashboard, in case you were wondering.

What’s significant about this application, and others like it that will soon appear, is the marriage of the mobile world with business intelligence which has been a long time in coming. Indeed, this could mean a resurgence of interest in business intelligence as a tool that has much more power in a phone or a Kindle, than it does on a laptop screen.

Core to the issues with business intelligence has been ease-of-use and accessibility. Thus use of mobile platforms addresses those issues. Watch out for many more business intelligence applications to appear on mobile devices in the very near future.

RoamBi Brings Business Intelligence to the iPhone

Mobile BI solution combines iPhone App, SaaS and on-premise offerings. System integrates with SAP BusinessObjects and Salesforce.com.

With its large screen and simple navigation, the iPhone is well suited to delivering charts, graphs and other types of data visualizations. It’s no surprise, then, that several leading business intelligence (BI) software vendors – including Oracle, SAP BusinessObjects and Information Builders – have added the iPhone to their mobile device support lists. The problem, Santiago Becerra contends, is that many of these solutions attempt to shrink reports designed for desktops onto tiny screens.

“The shrink-to-fit approach results in a lot of scrolling up and down, left and right, and shrinking and zooming to try to find the right information,” says Becerra, chairman and co-founder of MeLLmo, which provides the new RoamBi mobile BI system, announced May 19. Combining an iPhone app, a SaaS-based publishing site and an on-premise edition for enterprise deployments, RoamBi is said to offer superior visualization and navigation on the iPhone and an easy way to convert existing reports for mobile delivery.

“Instead of trying to read reports from left to right and top to bottom, as if you’re trying to read a spreadsheet through a straw, RoamBi converts a flat, static report into an interactive mini-analytic application for the iPhone,” Becerra says.

The RoamBi iPhone application, which is available as a free download from the iPhone app store, provides tables, pie charts and other views formatted specifically for the iPhone. By visiting the RoamBi Publisher at www.roambi.com, users can upload Excel spreadsheets, HTML tables, CSV files and Salesforce.com reports and select the styles of visualizations desired. The basic publishing options are free, but MeLLmo says premium SaaS-based services, such as third-party content/development partner offerings, will be launched later this year.

RoamBi Enterprise edition delivers the mobile solution as on-premise software that includes a Web/Flex-based RoamBi Designer and a RoamBi Server. The product currently supports secure, role-specific publishing of data from SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence and SAP BusinessObjects Crystal Reports as well as Microsoft Excel files. RoamBi Enterprise costs $10,000 per server plus $100 per user.

MeLLmo put a lot of emphasis on simplifying report development, so the Designer is said to read and interpret data and metadata and re-create existing reports automatically.

“If the system required users to re-create thousands of reports, it wouldn’t work. So a key goal was to protect investments in existing BI systems,” Becerra explains.

For now, there’s a limit to the specific investments that RoamBi can protect in that it only supports SAP BusinessObjects and Salesforce.com as data sources (beyond standard file formats). Becerra declined to detail what other BI systems the company might support and when those integrations might become available. The company also declined to spell out when RoamBi might support other smartphone platforms such as the RIM BlackBerry.

If Becerra’s track record is any indication, RoamBi is destined for growth. The executive was a co-founder of both Infommersion, which was sold along with its Xcelsius application to BusinessObjects, and Graphical Information, which was sold along with its Balanced Scorecard product to Oracle.

In-Memory BI Upgrades Point to Mainstream User Adoption

Both the TIBCO Spotfire 3.0 upgrade and SAP BusinessObjects Explorer release take first-generation in-memory products to a broader base of users.

New integrations, new scalability options and new data visualization options promise to bring TIBCO Spotfire 3.0 to a broader base of potential business intelligence consumers. Announced and released May 18, the 3.0 launch marks the latest in a series of major upgrades since Spotfire’s acquisition by TIBCO nearly two years ago. And like last week’s SAP BusinessObjects Explorer release, the upgrade represents the maturation of a once-nichey in-memory product into a mainstream BI offering.

In contrast to conventional BI tools, which query data on disk, in-memory products load data into random access memory (RAM) so users can quickly query and interact with information without extensive IT performance tuning and data preparation. Spotfire was introduced in the late 1990s as a visual data exploration tool used almost entirely by pharmaceutical and life sciences researchers. As has been the case for other in-memory products, Spotfire’s power and breadth of appeal have increased with the advent of multi-core, multi-threaded and 64-bit server technologies. Since its acquisition by TIBCO in May 2007, Spotfire has been enhanced with operational and predictive analytics, real-time data integrations and data mining capabilities.

The TIBCO Spotfire 3.0 upgrades announced today include prebuilt data integrations to SAP BW, SAP R/3, Salesforce.com, Siebel eBusiness Applications and Oracle E-Business Suite, in addition to a new Web services integration option. These connectors not only make it easier to integrate popular data sources, they also open up new data access and analysis options.

“Until recently we’ve been limited to accessing data from relational data sources and file-based locations,” admits TIBCO Spotfire product marketing manager Tim Wormus. “With 3.0 we’re expanding to full enterprise connectivity, and you can also model the data so you can connect multiple sources to build a federated data warehouse or analytics layer.” With Spotfire’s caching support, Wormus says you can pull data from production systems and let users query against the caching layer rather than mission-critical production systems.

Designed to support larger, enterprisewide deployments, the scalability features in the 3.0 release include load balancing and failover support as well as new deployment management and administrative controls. The Web-based configuration controls ease remote administration while the deployment management features simplify migration from development, test and production servers.

New analytics and visualizations introduced in TIBCO Spotfire 3.0 include treemaps, new scatterplots and error bars within bar and line charts that let you see the data behind the visualization. An added visualization toolkit is said to make it easier to build custom visualizations. “This extends our lead in our core competency of visually interactive, real-time analytics,” Wormus says.

The TIBCO Spotfire 3.0 release comes less than a week after SAP announced SAP BusinessObjects Explorer, a new product that blends the Internet-search-like Polestar query interface with the in-memory analysis capabilities of SAP’s Business Warehouse Accelerator (BWA) appliance. Introduced in 2006 as the Business Intelligence Accelerator, the BWA appliance is another in-memory product headed for mainstream use. The accelerated version of Explorer introduced last week is limited to accessing data in SAP BW, but a “second-wave” upgrade set to be introduced late this year or early next year is expected to access myriad data sources.

QlikTech QlikView and IBM Cognos TM1 (formerly Applix TM1) are two other venerable in-memory products. Several leading BI vendors have either recently added (MicroStrategy) or plan to add (Microsoft) in-memory analysis capabilities. Leading in-memory products and benefits were recently covered in “Insight at the Speed of Thought: Taking Advantage of In-Memory Analytics,” an in-depth report available as a free download (registration required) at the Intelligent Enterprise “Next-Era BI Tech Center.”

IBM ‘System S’ Promises New Era of Stream Processing

‘Perpetual analytics’ touted as the dynamic, real-time future of forward-looking analysis.

High-end analytics offer the power to predict, but those predictions may be based on warehouse-resident data that is hours, days or even weeks old. Although complex event processing technologies eliminate the data latency problem, they’re most often deployed in very limited, industry-specific applications. Addressing these shortcomings and hoping to usher in a new era of real-time stream computing, IBM today unveiled today System S, a new platform designed to handle instantaneous analysis of hundreds or even thousands of high-volume data streams.

“We started from scratch and looked at the mathematics of the analytics, the programming language and the way in which applications are structured,” says Nagui Halim, the chief scientist behind System S. “The difference with System S is that the analytics are much more advanced and the applications are much more sophisticated in terms of what you can look at and how you express the programs.”

To be marketed under the product name InfoSphere Streams, System S is designed to support forward-looking “perpetual analytics” based on analysis of up to 6 gigabytes per second or 21,600 gigabytes per hour – the equivalent of all the Web pages on the Internet. What’s more, these analyses are continuously refined and dynamically react as data sources and underlying trends change.

“As the applications are processing, they can change how they operate,” Halim explains. “For example, as streams of data appear or disappear, we can introduce compensating actions and do [data] source selection on the fly. You can also send feedback to earlier parts of an application so it can dynamically tune how it processes the data.”

In development at IBM Research since 2003, System S is said to be both scalable ” from laptops to exotic supercomputers – and broadly applicable to industries such as manufacturing, retail, transportation, finance, and security and surveillance. The sweet spot for deployments will be on commodity clustered servers in the 10- to 50-blade range. The immediate focus will be on many of the same applications targeted by CEP vendors, including trade surveillance, fraud detection, market making and program trading applications at financial institutions.

Among the early beta customers of System S is TD Securities, which is said to be using the technology to ingest more than 5 million bits of trading data per microsecond to make faster financial trading decisions. Uppsala University and the Swedish Institute of Space Physics, meanwhile, are using System S to predict “space weather” such as solar winds that can have an impact on communications, energy transmission over power lines, airline and space travel, and satellites.

System S frees mathematicians to employ sophisticated analytic techniques such as micro clustering or support-vector machine analysis without proprietary restrictions, Halim says. And to allay fears that an entirely new platform might discourage would-be developers, IBM is making System S trial code available at no cost, and it will also offer developer tools, adapters and software for testing applications. The new development language, called Spade, is easy to pick up quickly, Halim says.

“We’ve worked with clients to help them learn the language, and we’ve found that within two to four weeks they can become productive,” Halim says. We haven’t found it to be a big barrier to entry because it employs familiar ways to express how the information is handled.”

IBM also announced today that it will open an IBM European Stream Computing Center in Dublin, Ireland, to provide customer support, testing and research capabilities for prospective European customers.

Oracle Extends Business Intelligence Applications Portfolio

Project Analytics and Loyalty Analytics apps round out the ERP- and CRM-integrated portfolio. Oracle stresses fast deployment and ongoing support.

Since acquiring Siebel in early 2006, Oracle has steadily built on that vendor’s collection of Siebel Analytics applications. With today’s 7.9.6 release of what are now called Oracle Business Intelligence Applications, the portfolio gains two more analytics apps as well as additional integrations and upgrades. With each app providing predefined ETL adapters, data warehouse schemas, and dashboards and reports, the appeal for many customers is fast-track deployment and ongoing support.

“These applications give you the technologies you need to pull information from Oracle and non-Oracle sources, do federated queries and present information in the right context,” says John O’Rourke, a vice president of marketing at Oracle. “At least 80 percent of what the customer needs is predefined, and they can then customize the dashboards and add links and metrics. The benefit is not only faster deployment but also lower ongoing cost of ownership, because we’re supporting the applications and keeping them in sync with transaction systems.”

The two new BI Applications are Project Analytics and Loyalty Analytics. The first is designed to help companies control project costs and performance by tracking budgets, forecasts, cost, revenue, billing, profitability, agreements, funding and project performance. The application is integrated with the project-management capabilities in Oracle E-Business Suite and PeopleSoft Enterprise. Government agencies, engineering and construction companies, and professional-services organizations are among the target customers.

The Loyalty Analytics application helps companies measure the effectiveness of customer and partner programs administered within the Siebel Loyalty Management application. “The analytic app lets you extract information out of transactional apps, summarize in a high-level dashboard and then drill down to understand underlying causes behind the trends,” O’Rourke says. “It’s a timely release, in that many companies are trying to maintain existing customers and win new customers in light of the economy.”

Release 7.9.6 also brings enhancements to Oracle’s existing Human Resources Analytics and Oracle Procurement and Spend Analytics applications. The HR app gains dashboards for talent management, learning management, recruiting, leave and absenteeism; the Procurement app now offers a Spend Analyzer and new employee expense and enhanced procurement dashboards.

Oracle says more than 2,000 customers use its BI Applications. Rivals including SAP BusinessObjects, IBM Cognos and SAS also offer analytic apps, though each with different levels of depth, breadth and support.

IBM Cognos Blueprints, for instance, provide frameworks that help you apply BI to a certain content area, “but they are not supported,” says AMR Research Analyst John Hagerty. “They are not standard products, and you’re on your own in terms of extending them and keeping them in sync with applications.”

SAP BusinessObjects is starting to build out analytic applications as part of its Enterprise Performance Management Framework, and that list includes Spend Analytics and Supply Chain Performance apps. “SAP doesn’t have the same breadth of applications that Oracle offers at this point,” Hagerty says.

SAS, in contrast, offers a range of “very deep and rich analytic applications in specific, industry-driven content areas,” Hagerty explains. Examples include drug discovery, warranty management and environmental impact management, and the apps offer ongoing support.

Meanwhile, observes Hagerty, “What Oracle is doing is more of a broad-brush approach, addressing the main content areas that ERP and CRM systems address.”

Integration with Oracle transactional applications is, indeed, a core appeal of the BI Apps. The 7.9.6 release includes a new integration between the Oracle Financial Analytics app and JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Financial Management. The release also updates existing integrations with Oracle E-Business Suite (11i10 and R12), PeopleSoft Enterprise 8.9 and 9.0, and Siebel CRM 8.0 and 8.1.1.

Adoption of the BI Apps has been highest among Oracle’s Siebel and Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition customers, so there’s room for growth across the rest of the application portfolio. “These applications can pull information from legacy apps and even SAP,” Hagerty says. “But practically speaking, the real value is very much geared to extending the Oracle suite of assets.”

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.

Statistics

Background

Guitar Center is the largest chain of musical instrument retailers in the world with 214 locations throughout the United States.

To accommodate their expanding business they were seeking a platform to support complex data analysis that is user friendly. Formerly they depended on time consuming and less efficient POS System.

After evaluating several Business Intelligence vendors, they chose Systech Solutions Inc. to meet their needs for identifying the key trends and make informed decisions. Systech Solutions, Inc. was assigned to design an Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) for them in this regard.

Challenges

Guitar Center required a detailed access into a variety of business data to allow the business community to analyze their data in greater depth. To offer a simplified and integrated solution for a profitable growth Systech had to address certain challenges.

• To track trends and identify opportunities. Since the data was spread across disparate systems it was a laborious process.
• To manage overwhelming amounts of data from various sources—and turning it into reliable business intelligence that enabled better business outcomes.
• To effectively design EDW for consolidated reporting both from DRUM, JDA and PeopleSoft.
• To configure and implement a commodious tool to query the EDW and to create reports.
• To compile a system that would distribute reports with in a 24 hour window every month.
• To provide a platform that could keep up with constantly evolving user requirements.

Solution

Systech Solutions fashioned a business intelligence environment that comprised of a Netezza 4.0.2 data warehousing infrastructure, a DataStage 7.5.1 ETL environment and a MicroStrategy 8.1.1 reporting environment.

The Systech team successfully achieved the extraction, transformation and loading of the source data into a data mart schema through an ETL process. The team made sure that the information was accurate, consistent, and optimally organized for complex analysis. The EDW was effectively designed for consolidated reporting both from DRUM, JDA and PeopleSoft. Since the source data was stored in individual schemas, the transform strategy included consolidation of information which was common to all source systems. A user-friendly OLAP data model was successfully created to store pre-aggregated data for fast ad-hoc query performance.

MicroStrategy reporting tool was configured to query the EDW and to create reports. The Systech team developed dashboards that included scorecards to allow any type of key performance indicators (KPI’s) to be rolled up into a score for a particular application area, overall IT performance, or anywhere in-between. More than 32 to 40 reports were run apart from the templates during the course of the project.

The sales data (KPI’s) was analyzed to:

• Anticipate the sales margin
• Analyze the SKU to aggregate (or roll-up) metrics into single overall “score” for IT and the inventory data
• Visualize store and warehouse inventory
• Calculate profitability evaluation ratio that analyzes the firm’s ability to turn inventory into cash above the cost of the inventory
• Study purchase orders and transfers

Result

The Microstrategy implementation at Guitar Center by Systech team provided them a greater insight into Key performance and Sales metrics. Systech developed an easy to use BI application to support their data from the users. The data warehouse was architected to support production reporting, making the database more intuitive to query than the operational database.

Multiple areas of their business used the data to manage inventory, identify sales opportunity, recognize key performers and review products. Systech made it possible to provide customizable user experience to provide executive summary reports, analyze sales promotion and study products sales. The robust architecture and a flexible platform enabled the team to combine right level of access with right functionality to create a positive user experience.