Soaring data volumes and associated management costs are forcing organisations to adopt new strategies for business intelligence (BI) and data storage.
That's the word from Bill Hoggarth, MD of SAS SA, who told attendees of the opening session of this year's two-day SAS Forum taking place in Johannesburg, that while the explosion of enterprise data was good for BI suppliers, it was potentially bad from IT departments.
"The exponential increase in data, text and voice being captured by organisations provides more raw ingredient for BI to enable more accurate information, more insightful intelligence, and better predictions to enable strategic business decisions," Hoggarth said.
However, he warned that increased data volumes were likely to create problems from a technological point of view. "Architectures designed to cope with loading a couple dozen gigabytes overnight simply are not going to cope with new data volumes of dozens and even hundreds of terabytes of data that are becoming common in data warehousing environments," he said.
According to Hoggarth, the new realities of doing business have resulted in organisations embracing the concept of enterprise-wide intelligence, which sees intelligence being applied daily in all areas of decision making as a source of sustainable competitive advantage.
"No single department or line of business exists in isolation anymore and consequently there is an increasing demand from business leaders for a single, enterprise-wide version of reality," he said.
Consolidation of BI suppliers is another emerging trend Hoggarth identified in response to single suppliers developing offering with greater scope than ever before and the increasing importance of intelligence to enterprise business strategy.
"In addition to opting for faster and more powerful BI solutions, we are seeing many SA organisations consolidate their BI suppliers, with some cutting down from over 20 suppliers, to standardise on only one or two to make it easier to manage strategic relationships and reduce costs," he said.
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