InetSoft BI Webcast: Data Mashups vs. OLAP Cubes

The DM Radio Webcast, “The Last Mile: Data Visualization in a Mashed-Up” from Information Management continues. The transcript of that Webcast, which was hosted by Eric Kavanagh and included InetSoft's Product Manager Byron Igoe and BI consultants William Laurent and Malcolm Chisholm resumes below:

Eric Kavanagh (EK): That’s very interesting. And Malcolm, I’ll bring you in, too, because again sometimes we get kind of lost in definitions and we’re splitting hairs essentially but it seems to me the whole concept of a mashup is that you really want to enable a very swift and agile world of analysis for your end users, and some of the dashboard products out there are getting a lot easier to use.

There are data visualization technologies that are a lot easier to use than they were three-four years ago. So it all seems to be moving in that direction of empowering the end user to mix and match data sets. But it seems to me that ideally the beauty of a mashup environment, if it is done properly, is that you can essentially, I don’t want to say circumvent IT, but you can avoid a lot of the painstaking work required for building specific OLAP cubes. Is that a fair assessment?

Malcolm Chisholm (MC): I think so. I think that it’s certainly enables the end users to act in an agile way. But for me, I also think that situational awareness is also important which is, if I come in the morning, and I have a really good dashboard I can look at my production data landscape and just see very quickly that everything is OK. Or I can look at the previous example of the UN country mashups and just see what’s going on.

I don’t necessarily have to act. But if I was to try and gain that knowledge by reading reports, it would take me forever. I really wouldn’t have the time to do it. I wouldn’t be able to get there. So getting situational awareness in a sort of rapid manner that is easy to assimilate, I think is as critical as the ability to act in agile fashion.

EK: That’s a good point. William, one last comment from you before the first break. Is there some reason in your mind why, for example, the stuff like Salesforce and this other, almost like, SMB type stuff seems to be picking up on this faster than the enterprise?

I know of, for example, some really high profile mashup environments at places like USAA which is obviously a huge financial services company. But by and large, you don’t hear it as much from the larger institutions. Is there any reason why you think that might be the case?

William Laurent (WL): Yeah, because the primary factor in my opinion is this, that well over 50% of mashups in existence are based on geographical information. So you have your first responders that in an emergency deportment, fire department.

Getting back to what Malcolm was talking about, the situational awareness, you have a command system that is in place to respond to various events on the ground, and those types of things, tracking sales, these type of applications are what’s out there right now, and the geographic paradigm really is fundamental to mashups. That’s really what has driven this first generation of data mashups.