Next Generation Business Performance Management Solution Why Existing Business Intelligence (BI) Products are Inadequate Changing Business Environment In the face of increased competition, complex customer relationships, regulatory compliance, globalization and mergers and acquisitions, your company s ability to leverage the data can mean the difference between being a leader and being a follower. As change in your business becomes pervasive, so does the need for a robust solution that can analyze the business performance in real time. Explosive data growth demands serious attention. Digital data volumes - both structured and unstructured - are growing by 30% a year and will be approaching 1 zettabyte by 2010. That s a one with 21 zeros! The kind of BI applications common today are not designed for reporting on and analyzing such large volumes of data. Limitations of Traditional BI Technology There s a lot of noise in the marketplace about BI, so we want to cut through some of that clutter by sharing our insights on actual problems with the existing products and lead the way for a new generation business intelligence. Take a close look at most of the current BI products in the market - BI is not what many of them are offering. They re offering a tactical, often cobbled-together approach to queryand-reporting tools that simply looks at historical data. Traditional BI infrastructure has inherent technological constraints that limit its ability to deliver robust and thorough data analysis. Leading the Way icast Solution Analyzing business performance matters more than ever for enterprises, and having a flexible, dynamic architecture and infrastructure matters the most. Timely, informed decision-making by employees, partners, and customers requires accurate, right-time business intelligence. That is what icast delivers: the right information, at the right time and at the right place & price. As a new generation business performance management product, Telesis provides a flexible, innovative platform that delivers complete landscape for analyzing performance, activity monitoring, and helps in proactive decision making. Completely built on Model Driven Architecture and SOA foundation enables the seamless integration of your information assets and flawless execution of your BI implementation with a vision for future scalability.
Typical Work-Around Solutions of Traditional BI Products Existing Business Intelligence Products are inadequate to address the sophisticated analytical and reporting requirements of businesses today. Not only are the new data sources (ranging from web to email, voice and images) more diverse and complex for existing technologies to handle, but the ability of the users to convert these into useful information to solve problems ranging from customer satisfaction to risk management are woefully inadequate with the current BI methodologies. Some of the limitations are enumerated below: BI technology is essential for making smart business decisions, discovering emerging business opportunities, streamlining business operations and spotting anomalous business events. That s why existing BI vendors should concentrate on addressing the core architectural problems rather than work-around solutions Business pressures are driving demand for BI across the enterprise. Profitability pressures require every department to make more insightful decisions ever more quickly. Productivity pressures require full empowerment of every employee. Accountability pressures require close tracking of every business process. Regulatory pressures require that businesses document what they are doing and why. These are all basic & core BI functions of icast Learn More >>>> a) Data must be transported from transactional systems into data warehouses for analysis and this requires transformation from relational models into models such as star schema that are needed for analysis. Additional transformation needs to happen in order to render the data from the warehouse suitable for aggregation, consolidation, etc. This process is very slow in traditional systems and cannot be of much use in operational BI. b) Data integration is a big technical challenge. Data from disparate and often incompatible sources must be analyzed together and correlated in order to gain meaningful insight and solve business problems. With current BI offerings, data from all these sources must be brought together into a common model which adds another layer of complexity and delays in analysis c) Lack of Integrated Incident Management Traditional BI systems lacks a rich, rule based alerting and incident tracking system that includes rootcause analysis, automotive alert aggregation, escalations and verification of efficacy of actions taken To overcome these limitations, many BI vendors are applying work-around such as: 1. Create a predefined analytical model with fixed data mapping. This approach used by most of the vendors offers very little flexibility and requires extensive reworking of the models and mapping whenever changes are made to analysis or data sources. This approach cannot scale beyond a single solution. 2. Reducing the amount of data being pulled into the BI system. Many vendors apply various ETL techniques to force a subset of non-relational data into relational format. This approach results in significant loss of information and removes the useful metadata that can be utilized for data analysis and reporting 3. Applying the non-relational data only at the reporting stage. Such an approach does not allow for the analysis of data sets such as XML, HTML, emails, etc.
New Challenges Calls for New Architectures: Today s business environment requires BI technology that can Integrate structured and unstructured content Combine data with rules for true process driven intelligence Analyze data to uncover root causes and trends in business performance Leverage all existing data assets across the enterprise regardless of the data type, platform or application Provide real time event driven notifications Provide rule driven automated analysis and alerting capabilities Handle both relational and non-relational data at the same time Combine real time and historical data for true forecasting Reuse of existing information assets and eliminate data duplication The Final Truth The problem for existing BI vendors is that they still have monolithic and bloated architectures, and recent product acquisitions by many of these vendors makes this situation even worse. Exploiting light-weight Web 2.0, XML development approaches and technologies often forces vendors to develop new products from the ground up, and this is why existing vendors could be threatened by new BI products entering the market with modern SOA architectures and no legacy features to worry about Today BI solutions are primarily used by the analyst community and experienced data-centric business users who are using business intelligence for strategic and tactical business decision making. BI vendors however should realize, that the future growth lies in operational BI (OBI) and deploying BI to a wider of set of less experienced users that drives the strategic objectives of businesses
icast Next Generation BI Platform BI for Everyone, Anywhere, Anytime icast Business Performance Suite is a comprehensive product with a simple, easy to use and complete portfolio of advanced business intelligence capabilities on a state-of-theart SOA foundation. This helps organizations to consolidate information and allows users to consume reliable information to manage the operations and improve performance. The Product delivers more than just traditional BI like query and reporting to provide a comprehensive solution ranging from data integration to hybrid warehousing to advanced analytics and data visualization so that customers can turn raw data into measurable results that impact their business at attractive TCO The product is the result of innovation and understanding of customers' current and future needs in mind. Since the problem with existing business intelligence tools is that they are not intuitive enough for the "average" business user; managers have to routinely rely on external IT consultants to produce effective decisions. One of the key aspects of icast BI is simplicity of use, without compromising the sophistication. icast achieves this through an elegant architectural design, deploying state of the art technologies to deliver a rich platform for complete reporting, dashboards and analytical functionality under a single window.
Turing Data into Decisions To make the kind of decisions that keep your business competitive, you must be able to sort through an increasing volume of information quickly while maintaining high performance levels. The icast BI Platform can help. It features a Hybrid Warehousing Accelerator and Real Time ETL that enhances business analysis functionality. Scalable and easy to use, the platform developed in collaboration with IBM dramatically improves performance speed and load time, ensuring maximum return on investment. icast uniqueness compared to Traditional BI solutions Hybrid warehousing environment that combines physical integration with virtual integration techniques enabling dynamic views of data sources that focus on a particular subject area Codeless development for deploying new dashboards, analytics and configuring new data sources thus eliminating complexity the need for highly technical resources Lower total cost of ownership as a result of off-the-shelf, ready to use templates, easy installation, and reduced administration Embedded Rule Management for automating data flows, analysis, alerting and event notifications on operational deviations Complete range of business user functionality integrated scorecards, interactive reporting, analytical models, dashboards and pro active guided analysis. Single Vendor & Integrated Product, The product is completely built on IBM platforms eliminating the need for integrating multiple BI layers, technologies and applications from multiple vendors SOA Architecture that can virtually connect to any data source enabling complete reusability of existing information assets and removing the complex integration hassles icast Event Driven Architecture (EDA) helps business to respond on the predefine when-then rules that proactively takes automated decisions based on the human defined steps. Operational Business Intelligence (OBI) provides the ability to precisely predict & guide the operational users about the changes / fluctuations that can occur in regular intervals. Enterprises can monitor and improve their daily operations in real-time across departments. The Benefits Are Clear With icast, data and information will become readily available on each employee s desktop. With minimal training, people could become self-sufficient by leveraging information in their daily decisions. The product gives a competitive advantage by providing them with an open standards BI platform and modern architecture with easy-to-use interfaces. End users at all levels of an organization can obtain information quickly and easily to make decisions at the lowest overall cost to the organization.
About Telesis Telesis, a new generation technology company offers high end business performance management solutions that helps enterprises improve information access and analyze Information on Demand. Telesis has brought together the best practices and emerging technologies in BI Space to develop a product, ground up completely using MDA on the SOA foundation. The product is the first of its kind to get certified at the highest level of SOA maturity among IBM business partners. Telesis offers solutions that handle end-to-end data management and analytic capabilities that can tell an organization not only where it has been, but where it should go next. For More Information about icast product suites, call Telesis at East Coast (908) 342-2520, West Coast (510) 386 2939. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to: www.telesisglobal.com 2008 Telesis. All rights reserved. This brochure is only for informational purposes only. TELESIS MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS BROCHURE. IBM Data Warehouse Enterprise Edition, WebSphere, Information Server are either registered trademarks or trademarks of IBM Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.