The Cloud - What Is It Good For?

If you're in IT, and haven't been living under a rock for the past few years, then you're probably already caught up in the Cloud debate.

For non-technical managers, the debate is a minefield with no clear path marked, and no amount of debate will replace the due diligence required to make a decision to go with Software as a Service (SaaS) and online storage to enhance or replace existing enterprise application infrastructure and data services.

The question is this: Is the Cloud ready for business intelligence prime time?
At the risk of seeming indecisive, yes and no.

Deploying enterprise BI successfully is not easy, but the rewards are great. In a recent report, Forrester Research described BI as the "last frontier of competitive differentiation," meaning that most enterprises are equal in their deployments of ERP, CRM and most other enterprise solutions, but there is still room to compete in the BI sphere. All other things being equal, well managed BI can be the advantage that enables your enterprise to compete and win.

So deploying BI in the Cloud is not, and should not be, a trivial issue.

You need to be as diligent in your vendor/hosting service research as you would be in assembling your own IT infrastructure and resources, especially when the applications and data are mission critical. What about business intelligence? First, is BI mission critical within your enterprise? (Hint: it should be.) And second, what is your motivation for moving BI to the Cloud? (HInt: it shouldn't be just to save money.)

Your due diligence needs to answer some high-level questions:

• What can we safely move to the Cloud?
• Is it secure enough?
• Private or public?
• How will the Cloud affect the way we deliver information services?
• How does disaster recovery work in the Cloud?
• What effect will the Cloud have on our budget?

eWeek recently published an article on data center trends, concluding that monolithic data centers are on the endangered list:

If all your servers are dedicated, you're not using some form of virtualization or not using a cloud service somewhere in your IT establishment, then you've officially been passed by. Consider yourself warned.

As a related webroot article by Gary Frank declares, "IT is undergoing a virtualization revolution." In an article on BI and DR (disaster recovery) in the Cloud, they ask: "Is the cloud a good fit for the data-mining and analytical-processing technologies that BI relies on?" They answer with a tentative "yes," but their first justification is that the Cloud "can offer considerable cost savings."

As I hinted earlier, you should be wary of the cost-savings justification. It's great to save money, but it shouldn't be your sole justification for adopting any IT path. There's an old IT expression: No one was ever fired for buying a Cisco router, meaning that you shouldn't be penny-wise and pound-foolish. Let your requirements drive the process.

The webroot article goes on to say that there are new BI vendors in the Cloud marketspace and that "Big players like IBM, SAP, BusinessObjects, and Tibco are now making BI for the cloud." Encouraging, but it sounds more like a developing trend than a mature option. Do these cloud offerings provide the same data analysis capabilities as their enterprise network editions?

SmartData Collective looks more closely at the disaster recovery statistics for Cloud-based IT, and discovers that the Cloud is most comfortable for mid-sized companies (48%), followed by small companies (38%), followed by large companies (26%). These statistics seem to reflect both the level of effectiveness the Cloud has for different sizes of enterprises, as well as the level of trust.

Is the Cloud ready for BI? Yes, if you're a small- to mid-sized company just starting to roll out BI to the enterprise. Maybe no, if you're a large, established enterprise in which BI is already mission critical and requirements are complex.

Of course, at the speed of IT, this can all change very quickly.

If your enterprise, whatever its size, is considering adding geospatial capabilities to your BI system -- creating location intelligence -- then the Cloud is a completely viable option for hosting the GIS (geographic information systems) portion of the solution.

APOS COO Allan Pym on Well Managed BI

Allan Pym, COO of APOS Systems, delivers a presentation on well managed BI at the SAP BusinessObjects New York Metropolitan Area User Group (BONYMAUG) one-day conference, today in New York City.

Well managed BI, aside from being the title of this blog, is the very reason for the existence of APOS. We help BI practitioners move from the curative (or reactive) practice of BI, to the preventive (or active), and eventually to the progressive (or proactive) practice of BI.

Check our solutions page to see how APOS can help your company achieve preventive and progressive BI platform management.

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APOS COO Allan Pym Interviewed by SmartBrief

SmartBrief's Jesse Stanchak interviewing APOS Chief Operating Officer Allan Pym at the 2011 Esri Business Summit on the relationship between business intelligence and location intelligence:

Posted by Tom Woodhead at 8:00 am.
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Well Managed BI - Part II

My first post on this blog tried to explain the concept of well managed BI, and perhaps it's time I delved more deeply into that topic. The tagline under the blog's title kind of says it all: if you implemented a BI solution to help you operate your enterprise more efficiently, you need to ensure that your BI solution is working up to its potential, or you may not get the information you need to manage your enterprise in a timely manner. Worse still, the information you're getting may be faulty.

But what if it's more than operational efficiency that you're looking for? Is there more to well managed BI than getting your reports on time?

We know that BI systems are becoming more pervasive among enterprises, and also more pervasive within enterprises, and that BI systems are capable of playing a larger role within the enterprise solution stack. What if you're looking to do more with your BI system?

Then you had better make sure that your BI system is running at peak efficiency. You need to make sure that you can administer your BI system proactively, monitor its critical services from outside, publish content efficiently and effortlessly, and that you have the storage, backup and restore capabilities that meet your enterprise disaster recovery specifications.

After you've done everything you can to manage your BI system effectively, you can start thinking about extending it. Location intelligence -- true bi-directional integration with GIS -- is a good place to start. And how about publishing content to your customers? Or integrating BI with your enterprise content management system?

At APOS, we believe that if you're not using our software to administer and monitor your SAP BusinessObjects system, and to publish and store your BI content, you're simply not getting the most out of your BI system. We complement, enhance and extend that system so that you have the confidence to do more with it, and the peace of mind to sleep at night.

That's well managed BI.

BI Publishing and the CFO

Linda Tucci of SearchCIO-Midmarket tells the story of a CFO taking the lead on business intelligence strategy. What drove the CFO to get involved? Was it quality of information? Was it the price of the solution? Total cost of ownership?

No. It was the fact that the company was going through reams of paper on a daily basis. Their staff were manually sorting, collating, troubleshooting and distributing reports. CFO Gary Petrangelo:

"The larger the size of the department, the bigger the report. Our mailing department could have 200 pages to page through if a discrepancy showed up in the bottom line," Petrangelo said... "To me it just seemed senseless, with all the technology we have. We should be able to generate that in electronic format," Petrangelo said.

What drove the CFO to get involved was the company's outdated and unwieldy process of generating, distributing and accessing business intelligence -- in a word: Publishing. The publishing capabilities of their legacy BI system were not scalable and extensible enough to meet their growing needs.

This anecdotal evidence agrees with our experience selling the APOS Publisher solution: the growing demands on the BI system, the complexities of those demands, and the migration of line-of-business functions to the BI platform call for an end-to-end, integrated, scalable and extensible BI publishing solution.

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Webinar Reminder: Publishing for SAP BusinessObjects

Thousands of organizations rely on the SAP BusinessObjects platform to connect their information consumers with the business intelligence content they need for effective decision-making. The business intelligence publishing process is of critical importance to these organizations. They require flawless generation and timely delivery of reports, and secure access for information consumers.

Is your publishing process growing more and more complex and consuming more and more of your administrative resources? Find out how report generation, distribution, and access can be planned, automated, executed and monitored from within a single integrated solution.

The APOS Publisher Solution provides the agility, flexibility and security to meet complex BI publishing requirements. APOS Publisher complements the inherent strengths of SAP BusinessObjects, and brings end-to-end monitoring and control to your output management process.

Please join us for this 45-minute webinar to learn more about:

• Complementing SAP Publishing with APOS Publisher
• Understanding the content lifecycle
• Automating bursting and scheduling
• Proactively managinge the full publishing process
• Getting more from your BI system - total output management

Have you missed an important webinar? Download recent webinars and white papers here.
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Beyond Bursting: the Future of BI Publishing

Publishing has some very specific connotations in the business intelligence world. To some, BI publishing is just report printing, but this description does not do justice to the many subtleties and complexities of BI publishing. As BI becomes more pervasive within organizations, the needs of information consumers increase and grow more complex, and so do the information delivery requirements.

BI publishing is more than just bursting now. It has become a much larger topic within today's enterprise. An end-to-end BI publishing solution should not only meet today's information requirements, but also lay the groundwork for the future of enterprise information generation, delivery, and secure access.

Let's look at BI publishing at the conceptual level. The objective of an end-to-end BI publishing solution is to get the right content to the right information consumer, at the right time, in the right format, and with the right level of security. The solution has to generate the content, distribute it, and provide (secure) access to it. And to ensure that all of these things happen according to plan, the solution must have an administrative layer that assures delivery and provides remedial capabilities.

A BI publishing solution that does all of these things well should be of interest to a variety of people within an enterprise:

• BI administrators need to know that tasks have executed as scheduled, and they need to be able to validate reception of documents by information consumers. But knowing is not enough: they also need clear remedial courses of action to administer publishing processes proactively.
• BI Platform managers need a BI publishing solution that is both scalable and extensible. Scalable, because they know that publishing needs will continue to grow as the demand for BI becomes more pervasive throughout the organization. Extensible, because line-of-business managers will continue to ask them for more enterprise publishing functionality. Knowing they have a robust BI publishing system gives platform managers the confidence they need to offer new enterprise publishing solutions.
• Line-of-business managers need to optimize the flow of information within their business units and look for new ways to create competitive advantage. An end-to-end BI publishing solution goes beyond the generation and delivery of internal documents. As the use of BI publishing becomes more customer-facing, it becomes a key line-of-business tool, and the more line-of-business managers get from a BI publishing solution, the more they will demand.
• CIOs and other C-level executives are looking for cost-effective ways to modernize legacy information systems. Many internal and customer-facing document generation and delivery applications reside on aging IT infrastructure. C-level executives are looking to leverage their BI investment to assume many of these legacy functions.

Have you missed an important webinar? Download recent webinars here.