Business intelligence (BI) is about improving organisations by providing business insights to all employees leading to better, faster and more relevant decisions. This is according to the director of BI and knowledge management at IS Partners, David Ives.
He believes this could be better accomplished with the use of in-memory BI. “Effective BI means the right information, at the right time, in the right format,” Ives said at ITWeb's annual BI Summit and Awards in Bryanston.
He believes that since memory is becoming increasingly affordable, the majority of the fortune 5 000 companies will have systems running eight to 12 core processors and 1TB RAM that will make total in-memory data processing possible by 2012.
Ives also mentioned that cloud-computing will allow users to access information from portable devices when they need to, although in SA he foresees bandwidth continuing to be an issue long past that date.
While the previous speaker, Davide Hanan of QlikView, was adamant that data warehouses are no longer needed, Ives believes it's not a case of choosing between in-memory and warehousing. Rather, businesses can take the positive aspects of both.
While data warehouses guarantee integrity and provide a stable server environment for managing data, in-memory can make information accessible at the time it is needed and available to anyone who requires it.
Used correctly, in memory can assist in efficiently managing enterprise-wide workloads and help a company to leverage existing investments, break even quickly, and receive a positive return on investment because it allows for on-demand analysis by decision-makers themselves.
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