Cloud Computing and Business Intelligence
In the past, cloud business intelligence was an area of interest only for startup vendors, who offered Software as a Service (SaaS) BI tools. But today, cloud BI is a buzzword as more and more corporate users are embracing cloud computing and SaaS models as part of their business intelligence strategies.
About 25% of organizations surveyed by consulting firm Enterprise Management Associates Inc. in 2011 said they were using BI applications in the cloud, and only 2% said they weren’t considering or interested in cloud BI technology. Top BI vendors are responding to the increasing interest among users by focusing more attention, and development resources, on SaaS BI and cloud analytics.
Cloud BI’s potential benefits are as follows:
- Reduced data center and IT management costs
- Faster deployment times
- Increased flexibility, as business needs change
Few disadvantages that hold back companies from adopting cloud-based approaches are:
- Complexities arising due to integration of data from disparate sources
- Security concerns about sending confidential data on storage servers located outside the organization’s firewall.
Examples of Cloud Computing BI technologies:
AMAZON REDSHIFT
Amazon Redshift is a data warehouse product part of the Amazon Web Services, which happens to be a cloud-computing platform. This product has been built on top of the Massive Parallel Processing (MPP) data warehouse platform ParAccel by Actian. It is a fast, fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse solution that makes it simple and cost-effective to efficiently analyze all your data using your existing business intelligence tools. Its implementation costs very less (almost one-tenth) as compared to most other cloud data warehousing solutions.
Customer Stories
Nokia
Telecommunications giant, Nokia Corporation, uses its Xpress Internet Services platform to provide mobile Internet services for emerging markets in India, Asia Pacific, Africa, and South America. The platform deals with large volumes of data. It runs on about 2200 servers and on an average, collects approximately 800 GB of data. It is impossible for the traditional relational databases to manage such large volumes of data and thus, Nokia’s performance was being hampered. This is when Nokia decided to shift to AWS and make use of Amazon Redshift as a fast, fully managed data warehouse. With this implementation, Nokia is able to run queries twice as fast as its previous solution and can use business intelligence tools to mine and analyze big data. This has resulted in cost savings of approximately 50% for the organization.
Euclid
Euclid uses Amazon’s Redshift and EMR implementation to run complex queries on large and growing data sets. This has improved the organization’s performance a great deal. As per a senior executive of Euclid, “We’ve collected 1 to 30 GB of data per day over the last three years. By running on AWS and taking advantage of Amazon Redshift, we can scale to provide the computational power to complete a task on our entire data set, tens of terabytes, in a couple of hours—a task that used to take two weeks. Overall, compared to what we would have to spend to build an infrastructure capable of meeting our peak compute load requirements, we’re saving 80 to 90 percent using AWS.”
TERADATA
Teradata has gone a step further to provide its customers with a portfolio of platforms and services available via the cloud. This ensures customers flexibility to store, process and leverage their data in the cloud or in a hybrid environment. The three major services that Teradata is offering are:
- Data Warehouse as a Service
- Discovery as a Service
- Data Management as a Service
The Data Warehouse as a Service provides access to Teradata Database, ETL and BI ecosystems, managed by Teradata, in a secure and reliable production class environment in the cloud. Teradata says it assumes responsibility for the hardware/software and daily end-to-end operations via Teradata Managed Services.
Customer Stories
Verizon
The largest wireless carrier in the United States with the lowest churn rate has employed Unified Data Architecture to 'listen' to its 100 million customers. This innovative Teradata Warehouse strategy together with Aster Discovery Platform and Hadoop Verizon Wireless has helped the organization gain valuable insights for better customer service.
24/7 Media
A massive organization within the media industry, 24/7 Media needed a technology solution that could scale, perform complex analytics improving CPM's and maximizing revenue. It therefore, migrated from Oracle to Teradata, getting business insights in seconds rather than minutes. This has helped the organization progress by helping it build strategic steps so that it is able to take decisions to the benefit of the organization as a whole.
References:
http://www.teradata.com
