InetSoft's Business Intelligence Tools for Accessing an OLAP Server

InetSoft offers a software platform for dashboards, visual analysis, and reporting to be used in conjunction with an OLAP server or any combination of open standards data sources. InetSoft's mission is to deliver such business intelligence solutions with a focus on making them easy, agile and robust.

■ Easy to deploy, easy to learn, easy to use, and easy to administer

■ Agile by enabling maximum self-service - which increases business user satisfaction and adoption and reduces IT and DBA support requirements

■ Robust by being able to scale up for enterprise deployments by running on a secure, high performance infrastructure

View a five-minute Flash demo to get an overview of what InetSoft's BI tools for OLAP cubes can do and how easy they are to use.

Breaking the Convention of BI Implementations - OLAP Cubes + Operational Databases

Traditionally, business intelligence solutions have focused on corporate departments that serve strategic functions. Because of the targeted user population, traditional BI focused on historical data analytics such as OLAP analysis and other slice-and-dice functions where users typically evaluate large volumes of historic data. As a consequence, traditional business intelligence solutions have been associated with OLAP cubes, data warehouses, data marts and other centralized, large scale, aggregated data stores.

Traditionally a BI or OLAP tool has been modeled, designed and engineered to address strategic business decisions. Fittingly, a typical BI implementation scenario has been as follows:

• A dedicated expert team builds the front-end BI tools and back end data warehouse, often using an OLAP server.
• Data needs to be Extracted, Transformed and Loaded (ETL) from different sources into a central data warehouse and OLAP cubes. Data quality issues are addressed in this ETL process.
• Data models are structured for clearly defined static requirements. Changes typically require high-level expertise and lengthy customization.
• Analysis and presentations are concentrated on high-level views from aggregated data using an OLAP tool.
• End users are highly trained analysts and managers who value power far more than flexibility or ease of use.
• The OLAP tool is too complex for business users to learn.

This cumbersome process clearly has its disadvantages of cost and effort.

Now, business intelligence applications such as that offered by InetSoft are powerful and agile enough to access both OLAP cubes and operational databases in their native format. In fact, even more value is derived out of a business intelligence solution when multiple data sources are accessed and data mashups are produced.

What is a data mashup and what is unique about InetSoft's OLAP tools for end-user defined data mashups?

InetSoft offers a unique capability in its BI platform for enabling end-users to combine disparate data sources (OLAP servers and operational databases, e.g.) that are not already mapped within a data warehouse schema. While traditional information management philosophy requires IT to be the gatekeeper of a "single truth" of enterprise data definitions, it is misguided to believe that this can ever be fully accomplished. Moreover, by limiting end-user abilities IT creates obstacles to delivering the fullest benefits of BI and burdens itself with unnecessary change requests, work backlogs, and administration overhead.

InetSoft has written a business intelligence white paper that explains further what data mashup means in the BI space and makes the business case from both the business-side and the IT-side for enabling this level of self-service:

• What is data mashup?
• The fallacy of the single-truth
• Why end-users need data mashup
• Why IT needs data mashup
• Business case results of enabling data mashup

More Resources:

		Information about OLAP Reporting
		InetSoft's Web Based OLAP Server Solution
		Creating Materialized OLAP Overlays
		Setting up InetSoft's Software for an OLAP Server