The data warehousing market has moved into the next phase of its evolution with organisations around the world looking to use Web-enablement to drive more value out of their investments in the technology.
That's according to Andre Zitzke, Executive Consultant at SAS Institute SA, who says that "e-warehousing" allows companies to deliver the benefits of the data warehouse to more users across the organisations at a vastly reduced cost.
"The advent of new-age applications such as electronic customer relationship management, business intelligence portals, and knowledge management are turning data warehousing into a whole new ball-game.
"In time, the data warehouse will become as much of a fundamental part of the business as its operational systems. Use of data warehousing tools such as web-OLAP is also bound to become more widespread throughout the organisation as any time, any place access to information becomes an important competitive advantage," adds Zitzke.
Zitzke notes that the pressure on companies to fully Web-enable their data warehouses has created a need for architectures that are scalable and built for optimum response times over a network. These architectures also need to be built on open standards such COM, DCOM, Corba, XML, ODBC, JDBC, LDAP and OLE DB for OLAP to facilitate sharing of information with various third party information delivery products as well as transaction systems eg. ERP and legacy across the enterprise. All of which SAS supports with the latest release of it's software.
Business intelligence portals are a logical step down the road towards e-warehousing. These portals provide end-users with secure and personalised access to warehouse information through a browser, providing them with the tools they need to acquire, manage and view packaged information, including graphs and reports.
SAS has created a new publishing framework that automates the process of information distribution. This framework allows end-users to select which information they would like to have access to by subscribing to channels.
Importantly, IT users are now also able to view metadata through the business intelligence portal, giving those responsible for administration a powerful set of tools for management and maintenance of the warehouse data and processes.
Says Zitzke: "IT managers spend as much time managing their data warehouses as they do building them, for this reason, metadata has a very important role to play: it helps end-users find the right information and provides a rich explanation of the history of the data in the warehouse."
In the knowledge management arena, companies need to be able to freely mix the structured information and reports generated by the data warehouse with unstructured information from a host of other sources. Use of standards such as HTTP:DAV allows the SAS business intelligence tools to seamless integrate with applications such as Notes or Exchange that are designed for the sharing of unstructured, textual information.
Zitzke says that the rise of e-business means that companies are generating more data than ever before and need to find ways of turning this into useful information. It is here where the concept of "eCRM" comes to the fore.
"Although we talk about customers, it makes more sense to talk about stakeholder relationship management instead. The idea of eCRM is to take data collected through a company's Web site and integrate it with the back-end systems to gain a complete view of customers, suppliers, or employees," says Zitzke.
"In turn, this empowers the company in negotiations with suppliers; supports a move towards personalised service and marketing to customers and allows more efficient management of the organisation's intellectual capital."
"E-warehousing plays a vital role in support of strategic enterprise management tools such as the Balanced Scorecard, presenting companies with the tools they need to monitor performance, translate strategy into action, and align and support key business processes," says Zitzke.
Ultimately, says Zitzke, the data warehousing environment will place more emphasis on creating access to information on a real-time basis, supporting the needs companies have in the Internet age to make immediate decisions and maintain a high-level of flexibility.