More Affordable and Efficient Alternatives for Analysis
by Rachel Shortt
Editor, LogiBIzComm
November 9, 2007
The current trend in Business Intelligence (BI) is to make reporting and analysis features available to the masses of users across the organization. BI is also becoming more critical to small to mid-sized businesses. Today’s organizations need solutions that are scalable, affordable, easy to rollout and to maintain. Traditional approaches to analysis via Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) just do not fit this bill. The cost, complexity and lengthy implementation times of OLAP architectures prohibit wide and immediate availability.
Some organizations need to report on real time data straight from their operational or relational databases; others need the benefits of a data warehouse to facilitate reporting and analysis of historical information; others yet may have the resources necessary to take advantage of the specialized analytical capabilities of OLAP. And most business users just want to quickly answer pressing questions without waiting for IT to build a special report for them.
In all these cases, organizations need to meet users’ reporting and analysis needs regardless of time constraints or the nature of the data source. As BI becomes more important to organizations and more widely available to a variety of users, affordable solutions for complex data analysis that are easy to set up and maintain become increasingly necessary.
The lines between traditional reporting and OLAP analysis are blurring for a variety of reasons:
- Web-based and Pervasive BI now make reporting and analysis available to more users than ever before, not just to a special set of users in the organization
- Business users now expect their standard corporate reports to be more interactive, so that they may further explore details and have more analytic capabilities
- Other technologies are available that offer powerful analytical features and that are easier to set up and maintain than traditional OLAP cubes.
In LogiXML's latest white paper, we discuss the historical and current BI trends as well as the effect of the convergence of modern-day reporting and analysis. It also outlines various solutions that BI providers can offer their customers as viable alternatives to OLAP, and that fulfill various reporting and analysis requirements.
Download here.
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