Most companies do not regard the various types of information and knowledge that they have invested in over the years as business assets that can be integrated and used as the foundation of a corporate-wide business intelligence strategy, says Alison North, Cartagena Product Manager at IOCORE, Oracle`s only Advantage Partner in SA and one of only 25 in EMEA (Europe Middle East and Africa).
She explains that there are three key but often disparate components in the business information world: traditional business information, spatial information provided by GIS systems, as well as unstructured business information that often resides in, for example, presentations, reports, video and sound.
Corporates are increasingly demanding the integration of these components, and - as reported by International Data Corporation (IDC) -- this is leading to the emergence of business support systems along the lines of IOCORE`s newly-launched Cartagena application, says Roger Harris, spatial product specialist at Oracle Corporation South Africa.
He believes the Cartagena application will allow corporates to finally start making "real use of the true potential of the database", a far cry from the past where databases were often nothing more than storehouses.
"Even with the most sophisticated database, the traditional problem is that all the knowledge that companies have invested in over time have not been assembled as an integrated asset," says North. "Ideally, information should become the property of the organisation, but instead tends to remain the `property` of individual users, evaporating over time."
North explains that Cartagena was developed to provide the capability to bring together traditional business information, spatial information and unstructured information with tools to expose this integrated asset to the organisation for maximum business benefit. Harris adds that the relationship between Oracle SA and IOCORE and the launch of Cartagena will enable the database vendor to substantially increase its influence across an even wider spread of SA industries, including municipalities, banking, insurance, telecommunications, municipal, as well as companies that are looking at increasing brand awareness in specific geographical areas, or that require demand forecasting.
"The standard Oracle database provides the ability to store images, video and text," he says. "Cartagena spatially enables the corporate`s business intelligence, and integrates it all in one repository, with the facility to provide graphic visualisation."
North explains that Cartagena is targeted at management and other key business executives, providing them with a common perspective by integrating all knowledge sources in a single environment.
She also points out that the key design focus of the Cartagena application has been to "bring spatial into business and not bring business into spatial". "Traditionally, spatial data was seen as a very separate component existing outside conventional business environments," she explains. "It had to do this because of technology limitations, creating in the process an environment where spatial data lived separately.
"Cartagena`s focus is on promoting the integration of these data sets: not integrating business into spatial, but taking spatial data and putting it into business systems, and then working with that in an integrated fashion."
North maintains that the development of Cartagena is well in line with the IDC findings, which not only state that the GIS sector is nearly saturated, but that business support systems have only penetrated less than 10% of the market.
"The point has been reached where there is sufficient spatial data available to make it viable to start bringing GIS information into the business environment and make it an integral part of the business," she adds. "This means the business support system sector of the market is starting to take off, and this is where Cartagena is positioned."
IDC also points out that most organisations with mature GIS systems are looking for ways to extend spatial information into their major business processes. "This demand creates significant new opportunities for companies that address enterprise integration. Database and business intelligence (BI) vendors are well-positioned to capture revenue for enterprise data management and analysis," says the research group.
IDC says the spatial information management (SIM) market will be more about spatially enabling business applications rather than building dedicated spatial applications.
"The market dynamics here are simple and well-understood. Location is a fundamental component of most business information architectures. However, most businesses do not need or want separate applications to handle location information; they just want to handle location like any other data," it says. "This is the fundamental principle on which Cartagena is based.
"Therefore, businesses will demand that applications and tools vendors add spatial capabilities to existing business applications rapidly. SIM vendors that can help applications and tools vendors meet this demand will succeed, and those that choose not to help will find themselves competing for an increasingly small revenue pool in the traditional GIS space."
IDC also believes spatial technology has become much easier to integrate into business systems, pointing out that vendors such as Oracle not only offer robust database-management and -development tools for spatially enabling business applications, but also offer spatially enabled application servers.
Share
Editorial contacts