Virtualizing Access to All Data Sources

Below is the continuation of the transcript of a Webinar hosted by InetSoft on the topic of Agile Data Access and Agile Business Intelligence. The presenter is Mark Flaherty, CMO at InetSoft.

Mark Flaherty (MF): This is the anti-silo approach. Clearly, this needs to be a unified and extensible set of applications that build on common reusable components. So often you’re driving towards real time or near real time data access which is essentially a cross platform silo agnostic infrastructure for multi-latency integration, batch, near real time, and real time that can all be accommodated as different delivery models within an end-to-end fabric.

Then of course the semantic abstraction layer and registry are key of course to rolling up unified access, unified administration to all these disparate data repositories and so forth throughout your infrastructure. So if you build a semantic abstraction layer and registry, think of it in a broader sense which means it needs to be unified infrastructure where you maintain all the important artifacts which is metadata, which is schema definitions, which is business rules, predictive models, statistical models, a full range of report definitions, a full range of artifacts that are absolutely essential for maximum reuse across disparate BI efforts.

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And so when it comes down to front end BI then in an agile data access world, the front end to the end users in anyway won't work radically different from what they are used to. You will still be building out reports and dashboards, scorecards and time series analysis and forecasts and presenting them with of course hopefully an ever more sophisticated visualization and interaction capability. But fundamentally those are the dominant type of applications that you will continue to build out and deliver into all manner of business rules and processes.

But fundamentally in the back end it's all going to be changing, moving towards this agile distributed federated cloud oriented increasingly approach to unifying and virtualizing access to all data sources. This is agile data access. It all sounds ambitious, but really when you are trying to justify going this approach where do you start, on what sort of projects, what sort of requirements?

Well really any analytics, any BI effort, any reporting initiative where you need rapid, on-demand access to information anywhere at anytime for any purpose, fundamentally, agile data access is the enabler for that vision so that you can rapidly discover any information internal and external to your company quickly, access it, share, invoke it, reuse it and publish. Really so you can then aggregate and visualize and cleanse and build predictive models in a way that’s very fast where you need to do as little new coding as absolutely essential because it's all been built for you already or much of it of the underlying functionality.