InetSoft CEO Interviewed about Data Mashup by Business Intelligence Network

Nott: So you've talked about a number of benefits to a mashup. You can take data from a wide variety of sources, and a wide variety of types, structured and unstructured. You can connect things that maybe have never been connected before. Are there other benefits that you have observed?

Liang: Yes. You can think of this from many different angles. As technologists in this industry, many times we focus on the benefit at the technical level. However, there are a great deal of business benefits from data mashup which we have built into our product. We do this to deliver a higher return on investment and a lower total cost of ownership. It's a goal for almost every business software application. But how you accomplish that is very different. And for us, how to achieve those two goals for our customers is somewhat unique.

For the return on investment side, we've enabled the business users to dynamically bring in the formal and informal data together so they can answer questions much, much more quickly. There are actually many of those questions that before have been very hard to answer. When we bring our technology, when people really begin to assemble the data one piece at a time, they begin to build up very complex and useful things out of it. That is why we call our technology Data Block. This is a process in a grand scale not much different from how people would assemble those very complex structures. You can build huge things out of these simple blocks, and it is the same thing for us here.

In this building process, it is not only a technology process of being to connect all these different things. When you have an idea, as a business person, many times this idea or question is not 100% clear. You need to experiment. You need to explore. You would assemble those blocks differently in one way which might not work exactly as you expected. You would take away a couple of pieces. You put together another couple of pieces

Nott: So applying mashups to business intelligence specifically, this helps the business user find information on his own without relying on IT resources. Is that a safe assessment?

Liang: Yes, I think to a very large degree, IT still plays a very role important role here. That brings us to the lower total cost of ownership, because after all, IT is still responsible for controlling the data, making sure that it is secure - that people are accessing it in a way that they are supposed to be.

IT's role, here, becomes more focused on their expertise. They would build what we call atomic Data Blocks. Those are the Data Blocks they would be secured. They would be fine-tuned. So they can be exposed to the business user without the concern of data quality or security concerns. This way IT also retains control of the company infrastructure, but it reduces a lot of those iterations between IT and business users. How to apply those exposed data to the actual business problem, that becomes much more of a self-service process for the business users.