What is On-demand-driven BI Solutions?

Until recently BI industry has been dominated by BI tool vendors. BI has been largely focused on BI tools such as OLAP, ETL, charting and dashboard tools, and so on. The disappearance of BI vendors as independent companies opens a new perspective on BI industry in general.

What's wrong with BI?

Major consumers of BI information are business managers and executives. They are not trained as data analysts. BI tools often are based on simple things. But systems are enormously complex. For them to learn and use such systems is beyond their interests. So BI missed the real user's needs. What they need is not BI tools. It's the solutions that consist of business summary and analytic reports that managers and executives best understand and interested!

New BI Trend: Solution-based

Therefore the future of BI will be solution based. New BI vendors will be providing solutions, not bloated complex tools. BI solutions are developed based on the following practices;

(1) Delivered as web server applications.
Web is the simplest platform. It is not only easy to develop and deploy analytic reports but also easy to use. Web will be preferred form of solution deployment. (Note that applications will be runing on customer's servers along with other applications, since no customers will be interested in exposing confidential business information! This is different from On-demand computing which hosts services from solution provider's servers.)

(2) Comprehensive pre-packaged reporting & analytics.
BI solutions will have comprehensive summary and analytic reports, organized in menus. They can be organized in hierarchical fashion providing drill-down information. Most of the core needs should be met with pre-packaged reports.

(3) Re-configurable for customer environment and demand.
Pre-packaged components must be amenable to changes and reconfiguration for customer environments. In addition, customers may demand certain things to be changed. Solutions must be easy for changes.

(4) Extend features what customers need and want.
Ask customers what they need and want to implement (at extra costs). Extend systems with new requirement with new rapid development.

(5) Develop cool advanced features as separately installable modules.
Cool and advanced features may be developed and deployed as separate components. For example, sales trend monitoring, market monitoring, and so on.

(6) Rapid deployment and development for extra features.
Solutions must use rapid development platforms which allow rapid proto-typing of pre-packaged components, subsequent modification, and extensions.

(7) Lower cost solutions and lower cost custom solutions.
Rapid development and deployment means lower cost solutions for customers, and more profit for solution vendors.

New Platform for On-demand BI Solutions

To launch successful on-demand BI solutions, there are two critical requirements;

1. Rapid development and deployment.
2. End-to-end functional requirement support.

Rosella BI Platform is designed for new generation on-demand BI solutions. The platform supports;

• HTML/PDF/RTF.
• SQL: embedded queries.
• Embedded Rosella DBMS: fast sorting and aggregation with native statistics.
• Predictive analytics: Rule-based modeling, regression, neural network.
• Database connections: all major database systems.
• Script languages; HTML, JSP.
• SOAP/SOA.

Core features include;

• Report writing: groupby tables, cross tables ...
• Charts: Bars, lines, pies, gauges, ...
• GIS: Map charts.
• RME: Rule-based modeling and model evaluation.
• Time-series regression and modeling.
• Predictive modeling: neural network, regression, decision tree.

For more, please read Rosella BI Server Platform.