Published on System iNetwork (http://systeminetwork.com) By squinnCreated Feb 9 2011 - 13:39

By: Seamus Quinn [1]British i users are embracing the next generation of business intelligence, according to a Wiltshire midrange ERP specialist.

Differentia Consulting, based in Charlton-All-Saints, Salisbury, says that it is having considerable success with BI tool QlikView from QlikTech [2], originally a Swedish developer now headquartered in the States. Analyst Gartner now describes QlikTech as a leader in the BI sector and has dubbed applications such as QlikView as data discovery tools. Data discovery is also known to the IT industry spin machine as agile analytics or BI 2.0. It offers the beguiling promise of presenting end-users with on-the-fly analytics from huge amounts of data sucked from multiple sources as if they were live feeds.
Differentia [3] is pretty much a strictly i-based ERP consultancy. It works for large firms running the likes of Oracle's J.D. Edwards, Infor's BPCS/LX, Mapics/XA and SAP's Business All-in-One on the platform. Such users are used to weighing up the pros and cons of supposedly old guard BI solutions like IBM's Cognos, SAP's Business Objects or even Oracle's OBIEE. So why would they be keen on QlikTech's solution which although platform-agnostic about where it get its data, is Wintel-based? And, given BI 1.0's patchy record, can a new wave of analytical applications live up to their hype?
According to Differentia's Adrian Parker, cost and time are key factors but he also thinks that data discovery tools have the edge on the established BI players in terms of scope. A good analogy, he says, is the difference between going to the stationary cupboard in your office to get a new pen or going to a stationers shop to get one. In the first instance, which he says is like an old data warehousing solution, you are presented with the choice of pens in that cupboard. In the stationary shop, like a data discovery tool, you are presented with a huge variety of choice.
"And then there are all the other shops that sell pens as well," says Parker. "The point is that in a BI world the analytics that you look at are straightjacketed according to whatever was defined at the time when it was built. In the agile analytics world you are not constrained at all, you can navigate through data any way you like, you can look at things any way you like, the straightjacket comes off. And that is the power of the new BI 2.0 agile analytics data discovery tools."
Parker says that a major-league BI installation can cost an organisation £250,000 in terms of server software and licenses with big-ticket hardware on top plus a recurring 20% annual maintenance fee. He claims that the same project with QlikView would cost in the region of £100,000, with £20,000 yearly maintenance. Another claim is that while a traditional BI project can take 18 months, he says QlikView installations can offer "payback" in just 12 weeks using IBM DB2 Connect to optimise the transit of Power i-based data.
As an i user, the typical Differentia customer tends toward the steady and dependable. The sort that knows there is no such thing as a free lunch and that perhaps only 35% of BI projects have ever lived up to their promise, let alone presented one version of the truth, within any large entity. As such, Parker says they can be reluctant to believe such sales patter.
He says: "The first thing they say is, 'We’ve got lots of data and we don’t think you can look at 20 million rows of data'. And we come along with a laptop and we pull off 40, 60, 80 million rows of data and do the analytics in a day and present it all back to them and wow them."
On top of all that, Parker says that data discovery tools can also give organisations extra insight because of their ability to take on board disparate data sources. Take a grandmother who lives next to a football ground and doesn't go shopping on Saturdays, he says.
"We know why that would be; because she doesn’t like the crowds. But you can’t tell that looking at a normal BI tool because all it tells you is that store didn’t sell anything on that day. If you add an insight tool and you add which football clubs have got home games on certain days and you look at geographic demographics of populous age-related dispersion and locality to sporting events and home and away fixtures, you get the answer and that is insight."
It is, perhaps, easy to be slightly cynical about business intelligence. After all, BI promised many of the things BI 2.0 now apparently offers. Its shortcomings meant that few users within an organisation ended up actually using BI tools. More often, the IT department become the intermediary between their colleagues and the data warehouses, cubes and analytical tools that they were supposed to able to use themselves. Either that or the data that users do access (sometimes, paradoxically, with data discovery tools), is often unmanaged and incorrect.
QlikTech is one of a number firms claiming that they can usher in a new age of analytics to ameliorate such situations. Microsoft, for instance, is now big hitter in the BI league and makes many similar claims for its PowerPivot plug-in to SQL Server R2.
Parker says: "I would suggest the PowerPivot is part of this new breed of tools and I would just say to people that are looking at it, they’ve got to decide what level of functionality they want… QlikView is totally independent of other technologies other than the fact it just happens to have to run on Microsoft, but the data sources can be from anywhere and our favoured data source is, of course, the iSeries."
© 2011 Penton Media, Inc.
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Source URL: http://systeminetwork.com/article/power-i-specialist-makes-big-claims-bi-20Links:
[1] http://systeminetwork.com/author/seamus-quinn
[2] http://www.qlikview.com/uk
[3] http://differentia.co/qlikview