The Business Intelligence Blog

Here’s a follow-up to the previously posted series, Breakthroughs in Analytics, from Tech News World.

In the latest update, Ned Madden talks about the various tools and vendors in the Analytics domain. Read more.

Today’s software packages are much more focused on the actual application of analytical approaches to specific types of decision problems and specific types of industries, according to Anthony Milano, GMI’s VP of professional services.

“In the old days, tools were typically very general purpose in nature,” Milano told TechNewsWorld. “Now, oftentimes, tools are much more focused on helping users solve specific types of problems in business verticals and industries.”

Vendors are even adapting their core analytical engines to specific needs by creating a packaged solution that includes a version of the engine, analytic models, processes, methodologies, add-ons and extensions that allow the product to solve a very specific need, Milano said.

“Importantly, this type of solution minimizes the amount of time required to solve the problem and makes it easier for the client to get the job done without requiring a deep topic expert,” he added. “In effect, these packaged solutions embed the expertise in the solution.”

Milano stressed the importance of analytics solutions that are provided under the rental model from an application service provider (ASP) as Software as a Service (SaaS).

“These software delivery models have proved to be very cost-effective and efficient for customers, particularly when all the costs of owning and installing your own software are understood,” he said.

Netezza co-founder Foster Hinshaw, who recently founded a new company Dataupia, talks about the new class of Data Warehouse Appliance.

Unlike existing appliances, Dataupia plugs right into or sights right underneath an organization’s existing RDBMS assets. As far as a DBA or data warehouse architect is concerned, Dataupia claims, it isn’t even there

From the Q & A Session with Foster -

Is that an advantage of the data warehouse appliance model, this ability to — I assume inexpensively, or comparatively inexpensively — host several years of data and make it available for rapid querying by users? Or is that more kind of an evolving status quo — sort of where data warehousing itself is heading?

I think it’s absolutely an advantage [of the data warehouse appliance]. Because of the affordability of our solution, it changes some of the things that you can do with your business and allows you to get more granular details, maybe more toward that one-to-one understanding of your customers. So you can tell historically over the last several holiday seasons what they’ve done for each holiday season, and that enables you to do really what you couldn’t do in the past.

As the users get on to the system, they’re doing types of queries [and] types of analytics they never thought about doing before. That’s what I love. When you see customers trying to do stuff and they say “Wow!”