Corporate Business Intelligence and Reporting
Provide up-to-the-minute business insight from your
data silos
Supercharge BI with Virtual Data Integration
Information Drives Business
In 2007, businesses will spend over $26 billion on technology
solutions in the areas of analytics, BI, budgeting/planning,
dashboards/scorecards, performance management, reporting and
portals. These solutions all promise to deliver more timely,
detailed and accurate information for better decision making.
Common to these solutions is the need to access and combine
vast amounts of existing data both inside and outside the enterprise.
Recently, the demand for real-time data has become increasingly
critical, as have the needs to reduce development times and costs.
Data Warehouses/Marts Fill Some Gaps
Originally, BI and reporting were performed directly against
original data sources. As volume exceeded capacity, complexity
increased and data sources proliferated, IT created data marts,
warehouses, and more recently, operational data stores, for
storing and managing critical business data.
The drawback is that data marts rely on physical data replication,
which is slower to implement and more costly than a virtualized
approach. Particular issues include:
- Batch refreshes slow down real-time information delivery.
- Building and testing extracts and marts add development time
to every project, delaying timely business decision making.
- Controlling replicated data and maintaining additional physical
data stores are resource intensive and add to the data-proliferation
problem as well as business costs.
- Only a subset of use cases
requires multidimensionality.
- Typical data mart architectures
don’t easily fit with
new approaches like SOA.
The Composite Advantage
Composite’s “virtual data mart” is the better
choice for BI and reporting projects that require one or more
of the following:
- Real-time information across operational and historical data;
- Rapid development techniques including configuration, not
coding;
- Data access at the source, without replication.
While inappropriate for large-scale, multidimensional analysis
initiatives and warehouses where data volumes prohibit virtualized
approaches, Composite’s “virtual data mart” fits
best when you want to access and federate multiple, disparate
sources, including your warehouses, operational data stores and
marts. In addition, Composite is especially adept at delivering
real-time data by leveraging its patent-pending query optimization
and caching capabilities.
How Composite Enables BI and Reporting
Composite is the recognized leader in the virtualized approach
to data integration that groups like DAMA and TDWI often call
Enterprise Information Integration (EII), data federation,
or virtual data marts. Only Composite lets you:
- Get the data you need. Access and
combine your breadth of operational and historical data. Certified
views of common objects in SAP, Oracle EBS, PeopleSoft, Siebel,
and Salesforce.com remove complexity. Security enabled.
- Get it now. Today’s data now,
not yesterday’s data tomorrow. Fulfill new requirements
in just minutes. Pre-built reports for leading applications
provide a jumpstart.
- Use the BI and Reporting solutions you like. Integrate
data into any BI and reporting solution including Excel, Cognos
and more. Standards-compliant. Future proof.
Three Tier Data Services Landscape
Composite BI and Reporting In Action
Composite is proven at large customers like Wall Street investment
banks, large pharmaceuticals, and the US Federal government. The
following represent a few of the hundreds of use cases:
- Interest Rate Sensitivity Analysis. An
analytic application accesses up-to-the-minute interest rate
and financial position data to calculate interest rate exposure
for risk management.
- Financial Planning Virtual Month-end Close. A
reporting application combines the latest accounting data from
a number of global on-line accounting systems, providing financial
metrics at any time during a given period, and ensuring better
financial control.
- Supply Chain Planner Workbench. A
portal application increases customer satisfaction and sales
by deriving global inventory balances and calculating available-to-promise
dates at any time by federation of on-hand inventories from
across manufacturing sites, carriers, distributors and retailers.
Further, BI vendors such as Cognos embed Composite to provide
critical data integration functions for their customers. And
other data integration vendors, including Informatica, resell
Composite to complete their data integration offerings.
Go to the following links to better understand how where
Composite data integration can support your upcoming BI and
Reporting projects.
The Bottom Line
Your enterprise is continually seeking ways to reduce operating
costs, increase efficiency, and compete more effectively. Extending
your current BI and reporting solutions to integrate more up-to-the-minute
business insight from diverse operational and historical sources
is critical. But this requires a different approach to data
integration than traditional physically-based extracts and data
marts. Only Composite lets you get the data you need, when
you need it, while using the BI and reporting solutions you prefer. Proven
at innovative customers and leading BI vendors, Composite fulfills
your real-time BI and reporting information requirements sooner,
for less.
