The high cost of entry to Business Intelligence solutions needs to be addressed if South African companies, other than the larger corporates, are to benefit from what is seen as one of the foremost information technologies capable of delivering real business benefits.
That, according to Werner van der Merwe, Enterprise Management Solutions manager at nVisionIT, the Johannesburg based software development house, is why his company decided to investigate how existing technology could be leveraged to deliver a BI solution affordable to a wider range of companies.
Announcing the launch of nVisionIT BI Portal this week, Van der Merwe says: "Even though BI has been around for some time, the acquisition cost of BI tools and the inevitable extended implementation projects, continue to be a major barrier to entry to all but a relatively few large companies able to support considerable capital IT investments," he says.
"We decided to use our expertise in the Microsoft environment to see if we could provide a sophisticated BI solution that, while not pitched at the high level datawarehouse market, is able to meet the BI needs of most companies, but without the high price tag. The result is BI Portal."
Van der Merwe argues that apart from the cost of current BI solutions there was also a need for fast implementation to enable a rapid return on investment (ROI). Because of the time it takes to implement most traditional BI solutions, it is often too late to realise a significant ROI because initial business needs have changed.
"There are only a few organisations that have generated returns on their BI investment because of the high cost of front end tools and the large IT projects necessary to take BI solutions live," he says.
nVisionIT has focused its local BI development on leveraging technology already inherent in many companies` SQL databases and MS Office suites. In doing so it has been able to obviate the expense of front end tools and the cost of multi-seat licenses as well as address the need for rapid solution delivery. Implementation can be finalised in weeks in most cases, not the year or more it takes for traditional BI implementation.
"We looked at what was available and decided that we could provide a very functional and very specific BI solution for local organisations that has lower up-front costs without compromising effective functionality," says Van der Merwe.
BI Portal leverages SQL`s Analysis Services that has been built-into the database since the launch of SQL Server 7 (it was called Olap Services in version 7) and uses the Office Web Components that is a feature of Microsoft Office 2000, XP and 2003. Office Web Components enables users to access back-end servers through a Web interface.
By leveraging these technologies, nVisionIT has been able to provide users with BI functionality such as slicing and dicing, graphing, drill through, report generation and Web publishing.
"One of the advantages of this approach is that usage is not restricted by high license fees. Companies typically limit BI use to senior management and analysts because of high per seat costs, but with BI Portal, users will already have been licensed for Office," he adds.
As technology already exists, the BI Portal, which is essentially an extension of the Office Web Components and can be used with other BI front end products such as Proclarity. It includes additional functionality and enables solutions to be better tailored to individual needs, thereby obviating one of the main problems with high end BI solutions - too much information.
According to a recent Butler Group report, "the implementation of large data warehouse and data mining applications tend to deliver all kinds of spurious, random analyses. This often leads to `wild goose chases`. Sometimes these facts can be relevant, but usually they are not."
In addition to using existing MS SQL and MS Office technology, BI Portal will also be able to be incorproated into the upcoming release of MS SharePoint Portal Server Version II, enabling a company to move to a knowledge management environment with BI Portal leveraging SharePoint`s document management capabilities.
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