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BI Reporting SF Bay User
Group
08 July 2014
#BI Reporting for Bay Area Start-ups
Presented by: Scott Mitchell
DWApplications

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Presenter – Scott Mitchell Background
 Currently based in San Francisco Bay Area
 Consultant – Working for DWApplications
 Partnering with Infocepts for their off-shore blended staffing capacity
 BI and DW Experience
 Started working with BI/DW tools in 1997 (17yrs)
 Worked on all sides of the fence
 Reporting, DBA, ETL, Solution Architect
 Significant experience in Agile BI Application Integration
 Previous Implementations
 Start-ups - ePredix, Telephia/Nielsen Mobile, Quantros, mFoundry/FIS, TradePulse, iQ-ity
 Enterprise - Victoria Secrets, eBay, Ross, Safeway, Bank of America, VISA
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BI Reporting for Bay Area Start-ups

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BIG Data
#

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Big Data Agenda
#
• BIG Data
 Standard BIG Data Reference Architecture
 5/7 Vs of BIG Data
 Hadoop Ecosystem
 Connecting Hadoop
 Components of Hadoop Ecosystem
• BIG Data Questions
 What Hadoop can do Vs What Hadoop can’t do?
 When to use Hadoop
 When not to use Hadoop
 When BIG Data over RDBMS
 Can Big Data and traditional RDBMS co-exist?
 RDBMS or BIG Data or both?
 Real time Analytics using Big Data
• BIG Data Platform Comparison
• BI Tool Comparison

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Standard BIG Data Reference Architecture
#
http://thinkbiganalytics.com/leading_big_data_technologies/big-data-
reference-architecture/

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5 Vs of BIG Data
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 Volume: This is the aspect that comes to most people’s minds when they think of
Big Data. Volumes of data have increased exponentially in recent times. It is not
uncommon for businesses to deal with petabytes of data, and typically analysis is
performed over the entire data set, not just a sample
 Velocity: Big Data is not just about the volume though. Just as important is the rate
of change of the data. For a large volume of data which doesn’t change very often,
analysis that takes a number of hours or days to complete may be acceptable, but if
the dataset is growing by terabytes per day, or the data is changing at a high rate of
speed, the processing time of analysis becomes much more important
 Variety: Big Data is not always structured data and it is not always easy to put big
data into a relational database. Big Data includes data types such as videos, music
files, emails, unstructured word documents and social media feeds. Dealing with a
variety of structured and unstructured data greatly increases the complexity of
both storing and analyzing Big Data

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5 Vs of BIG Data
7
 Veracity: When we are dealing with a high volume, velocity and variety of data, it
is inevitable that not all of the data is going to be 100% correct – there will be
dirty data. The question is, how clean is good enough for the analysis to be
performed? Often the data does not need to be perfect, but does need to be close
enough to gain relevant insight. Dependent on the application, the veracity, or
verification of the data may be essential, or simply “nice to have”
 Value : This is the most important aspect of big data. It costs a lot of money to
implement IT infrastructure systems to store big data, and businesses are going to
require a return on investment. At the end of the day, if you can’t extract value
from your data, there is No point in building the capability to store and manage it.

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Additional Vs – Part of 7Vs of BIG Data
8
Additionally some experts also add:
 Validity: The interpreted data having a sound basis in logic or fact – is a result of
the logical inferences from matching data. One of the most common errors being
the confusion between correlation and causation. Context of the data becomes
very important.
 Visibility: The state of being able to see or be seen – is implied. Data from
disparate sources need to be stitched together where they are visible to the
technology stack making up Big Data. Critical data that is otherwise available, but
not visible to the processes of Big Data may be one of the Achilles Heels of the Big
Data paradigm. Conversely, unauthorized visibility is a risk.

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Hadoop Ecosystem
#
Components that
can directly use
YARN
Components using
MapReduce
framework
SQL based
database tools

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www.infocepts.com 10
BI Tools
ETL Tools
JDBC/ODBC
JDBC/ODBC/Native
Databases
Connecting Hadoop

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Modules of Hadoop Ecosystem
#
• Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS): A distributed file system that provides
high-throughput access to application data
• Hadoop YARN: A framework for job scheduling and cluster resource
management
• Hadoop Common: The common utilities that support the other Hadoop
modules
• Hadoop MapReduce: A YARN-based system for parallel processing of large data
sets

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• HBase: A scalable, distributed database that supports structured data storage
for large tables
• Hive: A data warehouse infrastructure that provides data summarization and ad
hoc querying
• Pig: A high-level data-flow language and execution framework for parallel
computation. Used for constructing data flows for (ETL) extract, transform, load
• ZooKeeper: A high-performance coordination service for distributed applications
• Ambari: A web-based tool for provisioning, managing, and monitoring Apache
Hadoop clusters which includes support for Hadoop HDFS, Hadoop MapReduce,
Hive, HCatalog, HBase, ZooKeeper, Oozie, Pig and Sqoop. Ambari also provides a
dashboard for viewing cluster health such as heatmaps and ability to view
MapReduce, Pig and Hive applications visually along with features to diagnose
their performance characteristics in a user-friendly manner
Other Components

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Gartner’s 12 Dimensions of Big Data – Extreme Information
#
There are three tiers of Information management in the model with four
dimensions in each tier

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Quantification
#
Physical data characteristics with reference to
 Complexity
 Velocity
 Growing by terabytes per day, or the data is changing at a high rate of speed, the processing
time of analysis becomes much more important
 Variety
 Various structures of data from different data sources like unstructured (from
websites, sensors, social media, etc.), semi-structured (from xml, web services, etc.)
and structured (from transactional systems)
 Velocity
 Speed of data collection, processing and access in real-time, near real-time,
historical and older.
 Volume
 High volume of data generated during different timeframes
 Complexity
 Individual data sets with different standards, business domain rules, storage formats
for each asset type.

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Access Enablement and Control
Information control based on nature of the data and information provided by
it (like, confidential HR, Finance and Sales data, Customer details, negative
tweets, etc.)
 Classification
 Classification of data in various classes depending on information hidden in it (like sensitive,
non-sensitive, private, public, etc.)
 Contracts
 Governance rules of enterprise data governance framework to allow access to specific data (like
agreements on who will share what information and how).
 Pervasiveness
 Spread and availability of data across various levels of organization depending on the
requirement by organization and details of information in the data (like how long does data
remain active, how long the Aggregation of data is valid for summary reports, when data
refreshes, etc…)
 Technology-enablement (specifications for tools and technology)
 Controlling empowerment of users to access various functionalities of Tools and technologies to
get information from Data (like security roles in MicroStrategy, etc.)
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Qualification and Assurance
 Fidelity
 Reliability of data source and authenticity of data.
 Linked data
 Association of data with its context (Affiliation)
 Validation of data
 Validity of data for its business use case and rules.
 Perishability
 Longevity, i.e. how long data is relevant to its context and analysis?
 Aging of data while retaining its state and originality
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BIG Data Questions
#

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When to use Hadoop?
 Your Data Sets Are Really Big – If data is in GBs, use Excel, a SQL BI tool on Postgres,
or some similar combination, but if data is in TBs or Petabytes, Hadoop’s superior
scalability will save you a considerable amount of time and money
 You Celebrate Data Diversity – It doesn’t matter whether your raw data is structured
(like out of an ERP system), semi-structured (like XML and log files), unstructured
(like video files) or all three–Hadoop and its forgiving schema will gobble it up
 You Have Strong Programming Skills – Hadoop is written in Java, and therefore
requires Java programming skills to master. That is changing with new tools in
Hadoop ecosystem but right now it largely remains a venue for excellent Java skills
 You Are Building an ‘Enterprise Data Hub’ for the Future – If you work for large
enterprise, you might sign up for Hadoop even if your data isn’t particularly massive
or diverse or fast at this point in time. It might make sense to start experimenting
with Hadoop to be ready to take advantage when the elephant really starts sizzling
and goes mainstream in a few years.
 You Find Yourself Throwing Away Perfectly Good Data –Hadoop can store petabytes
of data. If you find that you are throwing away potentially valuable data because its
costs too much to archive, you may find that setting up a Hadoop cluster allows you
to retain this data, and gives you the time to figure out how to best make use of that
data
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When not to use Hadoop?
 You Want to Store Sensitive Data – One of the things that Hadoop is not particularly
good at today is storing sensitive data. Hadoop today has basic data and use access
security. And while these features are improving by the month, the risks of
accidentally losing personally identifiable information due to Hadoop’s less-than-
stellar security capabilities is probably not worth the risk
 You Want to Replace Your Data Warehouse – Still a majority of data pros tell that
Hadoop is complementary to a traditional data warehouse, not a replacement for it.
The superior economics of Hadoop-based storage make it an excellent place to land
raw data and pre-process it before siphoning it over to a traditional data warehouse
to run analytic workloads
 You want to Delete or Update data frequently – Hive does not support DELETE and
UPDATE commands, so if there exists a business need where frequent deletion or
updating data is paramount, Hadoop is not the way to go
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When to use BIG Data technologies over RDBMS? When you
No longer can achieve the desired results with your RDBMS
#
• When data is highly unstructured. Ex: Scanner data, social media data, streaming
data, videos, documents tweets, photos, etc.
• When data is huge in volume and complexity (Greater than 1TB and complex
data)
• Customers adopt BIG Data for specific roles – especially exploratory data-science
sandboxes and unstructured data staging
And for some very technical issue oriented reasoning:
• Count Distinct Queries: A count distinct query by definition has to process every
record, including sorting and counting. And this becomes a difficult problem when
the volume of data is huge. Mixing one or more such distinct aggregates with non-
distinct aggregates in the same select list, or mixing two or more distinct aggregates
causes more performance issues as it leads to spooling and re-reading of
intermediate results.
• Cursors: A cursor is where you are stepping through a table row by row in a
database. If you are doing some analysis using some kind of a case statement using a
cursor on each row of the database and if the table is of any significant size, this is a
very bad situation. Cursors are good for iterating through small metadata tables.
RDBM Systems are not optimized for stepping through large datasets one entry at a
time

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• Alter Table: You have a big data warehouse of a customer and you have a table X.
This table X is so big and is so important with so many columns that if you want to
alter it by adding a column, changing a column data type or running any DML
operation, it would require a long time to complete. Such operations need to be
planned and done very carefully as they lock out the table during this whole
operation until the statement completes. In addition if the column that you are
adding has a NOT NULL clause it would be very painful as the DBMS has to insert
default values into all of the existing rows which may overburden your transaction
logs.
• Data Merge and Mashup (Structured meeting Unstructured): Most retailers today
have both online and in-store presence. Consider a scenario where you have
customers' online product search data (search logs) in the retailer’s website for the
last 15 days, their past in-store purchase history (RDBMS), their in-store charge card
transaction data and their daily commute pattern data that you have from their
cellphone provider. If you want to build an analytical model that aims to combine
these myriad sources of data to send custom discount offers that are valid in a
specific store located along the customer’s daily commute path, then you would need
to combine all of these sources of data to achieve this. It’s difficult to deal with
unstructured data using an RDBMS, let alone combining unstructured data with
structured.

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When using Big Data Technologies like Hadoop and Hive, Do
we still need standard RDBMS to perform Analytics? No
#
Hive is essentially a data warehouse infrastructure that provides data
summarization and ad hoc querying. It performs the role of a Data Warehouse
platform for using the organization’s structured data in the Hadoop Ecosystem. The
Hadoop long term vision is that an organization can completely rely on Hadoop
ecosystem for Analytics even in absence of RDBMS.
However Right Now:
- Hadoop is IT heavy and business users need IT hand holding
- Lacks highly accessible self-service tools for business users
- Hadoop does not have extensive pre-existing adapters for ERP systems
- Would require significant investment to re-write advanced ETL feeding DW
Do I need a RDBMS or a BIG Data database or Both? Varies
from one organization to other
As organizations become aware of their data and their needs, they will be in a
better position to decide which technology fits their requirement. As covered
earlier – structured vs unstructured and the volume and complexity of data are
major attributes that can help in deciding.

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How close can we get to Real time Analytics using BIG Data
technologies(than having to move data through ETL
Processes) ? Really Real Time or Streaming Real Time
Analytics is possible with BIG Data
#
Hadoop ecosystem has already got many customer examples where the Real time
Analytics is really real time / streaming real time.
Learn from this recently concluded Hadoop Summit keynote how a large truck
agency tracks various events like starting, stopping, traffic violations like speeding,
excessive braking and unsafe tail distance while trucks are on the roads and
delivery goods.
The system also gives interactive inputs on historical data as well – to see how
other routes have performed in violations.
http://hadoopsummit.org/san-jose/keynote-day2/

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Can we can replace RDBMS with BIG Data databases some
day? Yes and No
Why Yes?
• BIG Data Eco systems like Hadoop already have components that can handle
unstructured as well as the traditional structured data.
• RDBMS Is expensive. Even with a Terabyte or two of data. The license fees and
hardware needed to run even a 2-3 TB DWH and BI solution will be massive for a
RDBMS based system. BIG Data technologies are quickly filling up here – giving
away stable ecosystems without hampering performance or budget.
Why No?
• RDBMS, its been around for ages, is mature and has a lot of helpful tools. And
then “Transactional Applications” is still one thing that RDBMS handles best, and
we don’t see anything yet from the BIG Data technologies that tackles it as well.
• Hadoop’s inventor Doug Cutting feels so. He recently opined Hadoop is
"augmenting and not replacing“. He mentions things like doing payroll – the real
nuts and bolts things for which people have been using RDBMS will not be a
good fit for Hadoop or other BIG Data platforms

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www.infocepts.com #
Augment your EDW with Hadoop adding new capabilities/insight
- Continue to store summary structured data from your OLTP and back
office systems into the EDW.
- Store unstructured data into Hadoop that does not fit nicely into “Tables.”
This means all the communication with your customers from phone logs,
customer feedbacks, GPS locations, photos, tweets, emails, text messages,
etc. can be stored in Hadoop. You can store this a lot more cost effectively in
Hadoop.
- Co-relate data in your EDW with the data in your Hadoop cluster to get
better insight about your customers, products, equipment, etc. You can now
use this data for analytics that are computation-intensive, such as clustering
and targeting. Run ad-hoc analytics and models against your data in
Hadoop, while you are still transforming and loading your EDW.
- Do not build Hadoop capabilities within your enterprise in a silo. Hadoop
and other big data technologies should work in tandem with and extend
the value of your existing data warehouse and analytics technologies.
- Data warehouse vendors are adding capabilities of Hadoop and
MapReduce into their offerings while Hadoop is trying to take on more
traditional DW activities

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Big Data Tool Comparison

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Big Data Technologies Comparison
#
Features Cassandra HBase Hive MongoDB
Description
Wide-column store
based on ideas of
BigTable and
DynamoDB
Wide-column store
based on Apache
Hadoop and on
concepts of BigTable
data warehouse
software for querying
and managing large
distributed datasets,
built on Hadoop
One of the most
popular document
stores
Developer
Apache Software
Foundation
Apache Software
Foundation
Apache Software
Foundation MongoDB, Inc
Initial release 2008 2008 2012 2009
License Open Source Open Source Open Source Open Source
Implementation
language Java Java Java C++
Server operating
systems BSD Linux, Unix, Windows
All OS with a Java
VM,
Linux, OSX, Solaris,
Windows
Database model Wide column store Wide column store Relational DBMS Document store
Data scheme schema-free schema-free Yes schema-free
Transaction concepts No No No No

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Big Data Technologies Comparison
#
Name Cassandra HBase Hive MongoDB
Typing Yes No Yes Yes
Secondary indexes restricted No Yes Yes
SQL No No No No
APIs and other
access methods Proprietary protocol
Java API, RESTful
HTTP API, Thrift JDBC, ODBC, Thrift
proprietary protocol
using JSON
Partitioning methods Sharding Sharding Sharding Sharding
Durability Yes Yes Yes Yes
Server-side scripts No Yes Yes JavaScript
Triggers Yes Yes No No
Replication methods
selectable replication
factor
selectable replication
factor
selectable replication
factor
Master-slave
replication
MapReduce Yes Yes Yes Yes

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www.infocepts.com #
Features Cassandra HBase Hive MongoDB
Supported
programming
languages
C#, C++, Clojure,
Erlang, Go, Haskell,
Java, JavaScript , Perl,
PHP, Python, Ruby,
Scala
C, C#, C++, Groovy,
Java, PHP, Python,
Scala
C++, Java, PHP,
Python
Actionscript , C, C#,
C++, Clojure ,
ColdFusion , D , Dart ,
Delphi , , Erlang, Go ,
Groovy , Haskell,
Java, JavaScript, Lisp ,
Lua , MatLab , Perl,
PHP, PowerShell ,
Prolog , Python, R ,
Ruby, Scala, Smalltalk
Consistency concepts
Eventual Consistency,
Immediate
Consistency
Immediate
Consistency Eventual Consistency
Eventual Consistency,
Immediate
Consistency
Foreign keys No No No No
Concurrency Yes Yes Yes Yes
User concepts
Access rights for
users can be defined
per object
Access Control Lists
(ACL)
Access rights for
users, groups and
roles
Users can be defined
with full access or
read-only access
Big Data Technologies Comparison

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BI Tool Comparison

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BI Landscape
#
Vendor Category Vendor Products
Megavendors IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP
Large Independent
Vendors
Information Builders,
MicroStrategy, SAS
Data Discovery
Vendors
Qlik, Tableau, Tibco Spotfire
Open Source Actuate, Jaspersoft, Pentaho
SaaS Birst,
Small Independent
Vendors
Bitam, Salient, Panorama,
Logi Analytics, Targit,
GoodData, arcplan, Infor,
Alteryx, Pyramid Analytics,
Board International,
Prognoz, Yellowfin

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Gartner’s 17 Categories
#
Information Delivery
1. Reporting – Ability to create print-ready and interactive reports
2. Dashboards – Multi-object, linked reports in an intuitive and interactive display.
3. Ad hock report/query – Ability for end-users to create their own reports
4. Microsoft Office Integration – How the tool integrates with Office suite
5. Mobile BI – Ability to deliver to mobile devices using the native features of
mobile
Analysis
6. Interactive Visualization – Exploring the data that goes beyond pie/bar charts.
Includes heat maps, geographic maps, scatter plots, etc.
7. Search-based Data Discovery – Easily search structured and unstructured data
sources.
8. Geospatial and Location Intelligence – Ability to show relationships on
interactive maps using geographic, spatial and time information.
9. Embedded Advanced Analytics – Leverages statistical function libraries,
Predictive Model Markup Language (PMML )and R-based models.
10. OLAP – Fast, multidimensional access and manipulation of the data.

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Gartner’s 17 Categories
#
Integration
11. BI Infrastructure and Administration – Shared security, metadata,
administration, object model, query engine and scheduling/distribution.
12. Metadata Management (MDM) – Centralized and robust way to
administer/manage dimensions, facts, performance, report layouts, etc.
13. Business User Data Mashup and Modeling – Code-free, drag-and-drop and user
driving ability to mix and match different data.
14. Development Tools – Programmatic and visual tools for developing reports,
dashboards and analysis.
15. Embeddable Analytics – Includes software development kit (SDK) for truly
customizing, porting and embedding analysis both within and outside the
platform.
16. Collaboration – Ability to share and discuss.
17. Support for Big Data – Ability to query hybrid, columnar and array-based data
sources – MapReduce and NoSQL databases.

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BI Platforms Comparison - Gartner
Tool Strengths Weakness
Actuate • Release of Birt iHub 3 – consistent, streamlined interface with
better integration across product line
• Expanded big data connectivity and mashup capabilities
• Functionality and ease of use rated high
• Deterioration of market understanding, user
experience and contract experience
• Overall product capability score below average
• Not highly used for dash boarding, ad hoc analysis
and interactive visualization/discovery
Jaspersoft • End-to-end BI
• First pay-as-you-go BI server on AWS
• Low cost of ownership
• Capabilities scored below average
• Used narrowly in organizations
• Below average data volumes
• Embeddable analytics and advanced analytics
Pentaho • Low cost of ownership
• Ranked high for development tools
• Investing and launching emerging analytic application
capabilities – Big Data Layer, Instaview, Storm ad Splunk
• Customer experience, product quality and support
below average.
• Difficult to use and implement
Qlik • Launch of redesigned visualization experience – Natural
Analytics (Q3/Q4 2014).
• Ease of use for analysis and development
• Associative search eliminates some complex SQL
• Strong on dashboards, visualizations, mashups, collaboration,
mobile and big data support
• Not enterprise-ready – lacks MDM, infrastructure
and embeddability
• Limited compared to other stand-alone data
vendors in visual-based interactive exploration and
analysis
• Major rearchitecting poses risks to current
customers – could loose market traction
Tableau • Highly intuitive, visual-based data discovery, dash boarding,
and data mashup capabilities
• High customer satisfaction and experience
• Reusability, scalability and embeddability
• Wide range of support for data access
• Used as a complement, not the standard
• Inflexible in negotiations / high maintenance fees
• Ability to address governance and broader BI
functionality a work in progress
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BI Platforms Comparison - Gartner
Tool Strengths Weakness
MicroStrategy • Go-to platform to handle the most complex deployments
• Organic integration and superior product quality
• Choice where mobile is strategic requirement
• Big Data integration
• Visual data discovery and multi-TB, in-memory engine (in dev)
• Steep initial learning curve (Moblie/VI combating
that)
• Cost of software
• Longest to develop reports (along w/SAP)
• Blurred marketing message
SAP Business
Object
• Large deployments and enterprise BI standards – integration
key
• Heavy investing in visual data discovery/embeddable analytics
• Expansion of BI Customer Success initiative
• Hard to use and do complex analysis
• Software quality/difficult to migrate
• High cost and hard sale
• Integration concerns/questions on BI commitment
IBM Cognos • Handles some of the largest deployments
• Watson Analytics (2014) – smart data discovery
• Simplified licensing modeling
• Unrecognizable differentiation in market
• Cost, poor performance, lack of ease-of-use and
support quality all customer concerns
• Scores low/not reaching business benefits
Oracle BI
EE
• Leader in information management
• Integration, pre-built solutions and large scale deployments
• Large network of partners
• Unavailability of complex types/advanced analytics
• Requires sophisticated BI-related competencies
• Scores low in quality and late with mobile
Tibco • Aims to stay ahead of the curve with aggressive
development/acquisition
• Quality, functional and ease of use rated high
• Used for complex analyses
• Large, complex reports take a long time to develop
• Dashboards rated average
• Administration, development and MDM rated
below average
• Support staff coverage not always adequate
Microsoft • Ubiquitous BI across products - it is already there and being
used
• Attractive packaging and pricing
• Investing heavily in cloud
• Excel widely used and accelerated investments in feature
releases
• Mobile BI, interactive visualization and MDM are
product weaknesses
• Multiproduct complexity = on-premises or hybrid
deployments.
• Do-it-yourself approach – onus is on customer
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