The InetSoft Data Intelligence Platform

This is the continuation of thetranscript of a Webinar hosted by InetSoft on the topic of "Analytics and Agile BI." The speaker is Abhishek Gupta, Product Manager at InetSoft.

So with that in mind let me turn to the product presentation part of this webinar. The three pillars of agile BI really resonates very, very well with the InetSoft data intelligence platform, especially in terms of software development which the first thing that we’re about. We support some of the big things that’s BI is all about, which is really everything that you would see in a complete BI application such as dashboards, scorecards, reports, and analytic applications.

The support part really relates well with the whole developmental environment. Getting the business users and business analysts involved in communicating with the IT people so that when the business users are building dashboards and using our web based report studio that if they run into something that might not be available in the data itself, that they can just go to the IT person, they can figure out where to get, make it available and do it right there.

Or even if they have some kind of tricky layout or visualization that they are not able to do because it might be a little more complicated then what they can do, they can easily pass that design to the IT person who can use the same development environment, make modifications, and then he can publish it back for use by the business users.

Data Intelligence Sandboxes

And then having your own sandbox, just to be able to have a separate environment to allow this type of collaboration is key, and that’s something that the InetSoft application supports very well. So I think time wise we are probably at the point for the Q&A. I would like to ask our audience if you have any questions please press the Q&A tab which is on the left of your screen or on the Q&A icon and then many of are at the bottom of the widow in the box having your question next to them. Again any questions that are not addressed within our timeframe will be answered via email.

Here is a question from Lauri. We have a huge investment in traditional enterprise BI infrastructure which may not be very agile. How do you leverage it but don’t move towards agile BI? Yeah that’s a common question obviously these days. Obviously very few of you out there are starting from scratch. I am sure all of you do have investments in traditional BI technology so there are a couple of things to consider right. It’s almost like splitting your BI infrastructure down the middle.

Once again, think in terms of data preparation versus data usage. One of the simplest things to do is to keep your investment in ETL and data warehousing which is probably the most expensive part of your investment and start putting more self-service BI tools on top of that infrastructure. Don’t be shy using multiple technologies.

Read the top 10 reasons for selecting InetSoft as your BI partner.

Business Intelligence Nirvana

Obviously it’s Nirvana out there if you have a single data warehouse, a single BI platform, but Nirvana is pretty much unachievable in a large enterprise, but if you find a good compromise, you should be happy. Centralize your data warehousing and then use multiple BI tools on top of it. Even though it’s multiple BI tools you are still looking at the same data.

You are leveraging the metadata, the same metrics, and the same rules. So if your BI tools are outdated, that’s one of the ways to go. Switch your BI platform to something more agile but keep your investments and infrastructure in data warehousing and data integration.