Agile Business Analytics How a New Generation Business Intelligence is Changing the Market Landscape
2 Table of Contents Introduction.... 3 Unprecedented Agility with Managed Data Mashups... 4 Superior End User Self-Service.... 6 Identifying Trends and Patterns with Discovery Edition.... 7 Speed-of-Thought Analytics with In-Memory Database... 8 Fast Time to Value with Data Warehouse Automation... 9 Flexible Deployment Options... 10 Delivers More Value... 11
3 Introduction According to the 2012 Gartner survey of IT executives, enterprises ranked increasing enterprise growth, retaining new customers and reducing costs as the top business priorities for the year. These are all areas in which a successful analytics strategy can have an enormous, positive impact. As a result, in a marketplace where competition is high and growth is increasingly hard to find, effective use of analytics has become an important competitive differentiator. Although over 80% of organizations have some type of Business Intelligence (BI) or reporting implementation, it is clear that legacy BI tools are not enabling organizations to rapidly and cost-efficiently adapt in today s ever -changing business environment. Traditional BI is big in cost and long in time to value. Typical implementations are inflexible and take from several months to more than a year to deliver results. In an attempt to avoid these problems, organizations often turn to simplistic data discovery and visualization tools. However, such tools are lacking the enterprise-class architecture and features required by organizations with multiple systems, large datasets and a need for scalability. A new approach to BI now offers an affordable, flexible, alternative solution that impacts every aspect of a BI implementation from data access, to report development and distribution, deployment flexibility and end user self-service. Analytics that are agile accelerate the development and deployment of BI solutions, maximizing the value organizations derive from BI infrastructure and data sources. This means that organizations can more quickly and cost-effectively provide users with the information they need to make better business decisions. Implementing an effective agile business analytics strategy has never been more important, yet it remains an unreachable goal for organizations that mistakenly turn to costly, traditional, big BI solutions or inadequate data discovery and visualization tools. This white paper will help you to avoid these pitfalls by identifying and exploring the key characteristics of a truly agile BI solution, flexible enough to satisfy ever-changing and growing business requirements.
4 Unprecedented Agility with Managed Data Mashups In most organizations, centralized IT and Business are at odds over questions of data access and control. IT is incentivized to ensure data quality, enforce data policies and manage risk surrounding the handling of data. Business s need for quick and flexible access to data in particular the ability to combine centrally managed sources with departmental data often takes a back seat to IT s data governance charter. With Birst s functionality, we re able to protect our valuable data assets by providing information to only authorized users, sharing results without revealing the data they re based upon, limiting access to competitive intelligence, and maintaining the confidentiality of our respondents. These capabilities are all show-stoppers; we couldn t have moved forward without them. Figure 1: Today, Business extracts data out of IT-controlled sources in order to satisfy analytics needs In support of BI applications, IT typically combines all data into a centralized data warehouse. This approach thwarts agility in that it is inherently inflexible, not scalable and causes IT to become a bottleneck in the organization, unable to meet business users requests to quickly add new data sources. Lines of business are forced to work around the bottleneck, using Excel or visualization tools to perform one-off analyses on combined data manually extracted from centralized and other data sources. In this far-from-optimal scenario IT is unable to maintain a single version of the truth across the organization, while Business is hamstrung by stale data and limited analytical capabilities. Birst Managed Data Mashups promotes agility by providing the only solution in the BI industry that meets the needs of Business for quick and flexible access to data, while also allowing IT to maintain necessary control. Birst Managed Data Mashups delivers self-service capabilities by enabling departments to combine their own data with high-quality data sources that are centrally managed by IT. This activity is safely confined to analytics sandboxes created by business users, as shown in Fig. 2. Michael Curri, President and CEO of Strategic Networks Group
5 Figure 2: Birst Managed Data Mashups To provide business users with personalized data sandboxes, Birst Managed Data Mashups introduces the concept of composite spaces and space inheritance. A composite space integrates data from one or more parent spaces with additional data loaded into the composite space. Data from a parent space and data loaded into a child space are both stored in the same underlying database, allowing joins to occur at the lowest possible level with optimal query performance. A child space only maintains logical references to a parent space. To maintain data integrity, no data from a parent space is copied and duplicated into a child space. Furthermore, none of the actions in a child space can alter the data and metadata in a parent space. Additionally, Birst Managed Data Mashups allows an administrator of a space to designate staging and warehouse tables, custom formulas and variables as a package for import by other spaces. Once a package is imported into a child space, the imported objects can be combined with other objects and serve as the basis for deriving new objects. Any dependencies, such as hierarchies associated with imported tables, are automatically maintained in the child space. In particular, data security filters that are applied to a source in the parent space are also enforced in the child space. IT also benefits from the agility of Birst Managed Data Mashups. Due to Birst Managed Data Mashups s modular design, a monolithic Birst space that combines numerous different data sources at various levels of hygiene can be split into separate, more easily managed spaces. And, to maximize flexibility, Birst Managed Data Mashups allows IT to incorporate data from existing data warehouses that were built, and are still maintained, outside of Birst.
6 Superior End User Self-Service The organizations that respond most efficiently to shifting market conditions are those that acknowledge and address the changing needs of their business users. These users which include, but are not limited to, executives, power users, customers and partners possess varying and evolving analytic skill sets and requirements that are commonly dictated by area of responsibility, job function and placement in the management hierarchy. An agile BI solution offers the depth and breadth of functionality required to satisfy the changing needs of every user in the organization, providing access to accurate and actionable insights in the format that each user prefers. It allows users to combine and massage data from different source systems to get answers to their most pressing business questions. And, when answers spur new questions, the agile environment adapts quickly to satisfy the new requests. Unlike big BI and data discovery and visualization tools, Birst satisfies the changing needs of business users with banded reporting, ad hoc query and data visualization capabilities that enable users to drill-down to view supporting data. An intuitive, WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) editor with one-click toolbars and drag and drop functionality reduces ongoing training costs, while the ability to save and share IT-provisioned and user-created reports across the organization and easily transform them into interactive dashboards with only a few clicks facilitates effective and efficient collaboration. Birst s capabilities extend further to meet the higher-level demands of power users. With Birst, power users can perform advanced point and click analysis of data. Every data element in an analytical data store, including modeling results, plus all logical measures, can be made accessible for OLAP-style analysis and report generation. Birst features a powerful logical query language for Excel-style calculations, including lookups and statistical functions, and supports real-time alerting and conditional formatting for exception reporting. Every report and dashboard can be exported to various formats, including PDF, Excel, PowerPoint and CSV, and then scheduled and delivered via email throughout the enterprise. When using solutions provided by other vendors, IT must cobble together a set of disparate products to create this kind of end-to-end analytics functionality. Birst, however, was designed and built from the ground up as a single product, empowering users to filter, sort and group data and do much more in a self-service environment. Business users can build and share reports without having to rely on IT, creating a self-sufficient community equipped to make faster, more-informed decisions that improve overall business results.
7 Identifying Trends and Patterns with Discovery Edition Demand for data discovery and visualization is growing rapidly. At the same time, data volumes and the variety of sources are quickly increasing, along with the realization that all this data holds valuable insights about customers, suppliers, markets and much more. Birst s data visualization capabilities help users to more easily and rapidly understand and absorb these insights. While Birst Managed Data Mashups empowers business users with selfservice access to information by eliminating their dependency on IT, the Birst Discovery Edition makes it possible for business users to easily load data into Birst and flexibly visualize data. As part of the Birst BI platform, the Discovery Edition provides a real semantic layer, removing the need to write SQL queries or rely on IT for data extracts. Users simply define join relationships between different sources. No advanced modeling and scripting is required. Figure 3: Birst data visualization, including trellis chart Data visualization enables users to flexibly explore data rather than work towards building a specific end result. The primary objective is to gain an understanding of the data and hopefully find patterns, trends or outliers that provide business value. To that end, Birst supports advanced visualization techniques like trellis charts, which allow users to simultaneously visualize metrics along multiple dimensions. Users simply drag additional attributes on top of an existing visualization to generate a row or grid of identically configured charts.
8 Speed-of-Thought Analytics with In-Memory Database The highly interactive process of data discovery and visualization typically generates a large number of ad hoc queries. To best support a user s train of thought, a visualization tool needs to respond quickly with results. Birst provides an in-memory database option built for speed and agility. Unlike in-memory solutions provided by data discovery vendors, the Birst in-memory solution is a true database that is SQL compliant and capable of handling sophisticated (multi-pass) aggregations of data in memory. One of the drivers for the popularity of data discovery tools is the ability to store and compute data in memory. Yet the data is stored in a structure that is proprietary and designed only for fast but simple aggregation. Because of this structure, data discovery solutions offer only limited analytical power. More complex analytical questions, which often generate valuable results, cannot be answered. In the associative, in-memory data model used by some vendors, all join paths are fixed at the time of loading data into memory. While this enables joins to be pre-indexed for extra speed, it also eliminates much of the ad hoc flexibility. Simply storing all data in memory does not, by itself, solve all performance issues and will not ensure scalability. Keeping data in memory removes the bottleneck of reading data for large queries from disk. But the structure of the data in memory is equally important. To perform and scale well, the structure of the data needs to be designed for analytics. The Birst in-memory database uses columnar data storage in which every column is fully indexed for rapid lookup and aggregation. A highly parallel architecture means that performance scales with the addition of more processing cores.
9 Fast Time to Value with Data Warehouse Automation An enterprise-class BI solution must be able to incorporate data from a variety of sources, including relational databases, enterprise applications, Cloud sources, Excel documents and legacy systems. Designing, instantiating and maintaining a data warehouse using conventional BI tools is a resourceintensive and time-consuming process. Resulting implementations are often rigid, limited in scope and suffer from low adoption. One of our internal analysts has been spending three weeks a month running reports, importing information from our core insurance system into Excel and then performing additional analysis. With Birst, we can automate this process, which will allow us to reallocate 120 hours a month toward other aspects of our business,and significantly accelerate key decisions and their impact. Vaughan Coots, System & Application Manager, Swann Insurance necessitates the incremental addition of new data sources, easily and without disrupting the existing metadata layer. Birst automatically compiles a logical dimensional model into a modern star schema design, and generates corresponding load routines, as well as fact and dimension tables. Logical measures are automatically analyzed for calculation grain, while logical dimensions are analyzed for levels requiring persistence. Birst generates and manages all key relationships, including surrogate keys where necessary. This patent-pending technology enables rapid iterative development of an analytical data store and facilitates the addition of new tables, calculated tables and schema changes to an existing data structure. With only a few clicks, a Birst administrator can generate and maintain the data model, join relationships and the required processes for loading data into an analytical data store. Birst automates data change management and capture of snapshots, shielding administrators from all database management tasks including index management, performance tuning and optimization of disk I/O. Figure 4: Birst s award-winning data layer automates the generation and maintenance of fact and dimension tables, join relationships, and ETL processes required for creating and maintaining an analytical data store Birst provides data connectivity and extract options for a wide variety of databases, flat and structured files and popular Cloud and on-premise applications. Using Birst Live Access, on-premise data can be queried in realtime, without the need to extract into Birst.
10 Flexible Deployment Options Depending on an organization s BI maturity, deployment requirements will vary substantially. Traditional BI locks companies into rigid, on-premise installations with high maintenance costs. These solutions do not provide flexibility to meet the varying needs and requirements of organizations at different levels of BI maturity. As the provider of the industry s only solution that can be delivered on premise or in the Cloud, Birst allows organizations to grow the scope and scale of their BI usage. Using Birst, businesses can move from one deployment model to another with minimal impact to the existing infrastructure, gaining the ability to more quickly address key strategic and operational problems. Birst makes it possible for organizations to easily scale the solution when additional data sources are needed and more users require access. In the Cloud, Birst seamlessly expands server capacity to accommodate anywhere from dozens, to hundreds, or even thousands of users. Figure 5: Birst Cloud and Birst Appliance are the same powerful Birst solution, deployed in two seamless ways Birst Cloud is a multi-tenant, fully integrated software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution. Users get everything required for advanced business analytics in a subscription service delivered over the Internet. With a Cloud-based model, organizations can remain agile while reaping the benefits of SaaS: fast deployment, lower costs and rapid time-to-value. The Birst Appliance encapsulates the entire Birst BI suite as a virtual machine for deployment on premise. It features the same shared-nothing architecture as Birst Cloud, enabling painless horizontal scalability and upgrades in place. The Birst Appliance is easy to setup and requires minimal configuration, with support for upgrades in place. Whether you choose to go with Birst Cloud or the Birst Appliance, you are not locked in. To maximize agility, Birst supports transitions from a Birst Cloud solution to an Appliance deployment and vice versa. Both options for deploying Birst provide the same powerful, agile business analytics without compromising functionality and features.
11 Our investment in Birst has paid off exactly as we anticipated. Birst ensures that we re all looking at the data through the same lens so that we can more easily reach consensus and make better, faster decisions. We re all on the same page, with more time and an improved understanding of how to do what s best for our business. Nelson Santini, Vice President of Sales Operations at Internap Delivers More Value In summary, is changing the market landscape as organizations realize that the cost, resources and implementation time of traditional BI does not lend itself to dynamically changing environments, and the capabilities of data discovery and visualization tools cannot meet the functional needs of an organization. As illustrated in Fig. 6, with Agile Business Analytics, an initial phase can be deployed in weeks, and subsequent features can be released iteratively. And, as we have seen, Agile BI solutions guarantee data accuracy and automation, easy integration and aggregation, support for multiple consumption styles, flexible deployment options and enterprise-wide scalability. Combined, these capabilities lead to faster, easier, more affordable access to information in whatever format is needed. And this, in turn, confers a valuable competitive advantage in a fast-changing business environment where advantages can be hard to find. Figure 6: With agile BI, an initial deployment goes live in weeks and subsequent features can be added iteratively And so, organizations seeking to increase growth, improve customer loyalty and cut costs, must acknowledge that, when it comes to analytics, the status quo is no longer enough. For those businesses seeking a truly agile BI solution and failing to find it amongst the traditional, big BI and data discovery and visualization tools Birst is offering the industry s first comprehensive business analytics suite available in the Cloud or on premise as a virtual software appliance. Due to its agility, Birst is faster to deploy, more affordable, and offers greater time-to-value than traditional vendors, while providing the same rich functionality for which they are known. With its solution, Birst is ushering in a new era of an approach that will inevitably and irrevocably change the world of BI for the better. Birst Inc. 153 Kearny Street San Francisco, CA 94108 Call toll free: (866) 940-1496 Email us: info@birst.com www.birst.com About Birst Birst is the leader in agile business analytics. It offers a single place to manage all of a business analytics and agility to answer questions that span departments, data sources, and deployments across both public or private Clouds. Birst gives users the fastest way to answer their most pressing business questions and then all the ones they didn t know to ask. At one-third the cost, time, and staff of traditional big BI, Birst brings the benefits of analytics and factbased decision-making to a much broader audience. For more information, visit www.birst.com.