Oracle, MS spread BI
Business intelligence (BI) software will be among the top growth IT performers as Microsoft and Oracle roll-out lower cost, high performance and easy to use systems that take BI business-wide and operational, reports CIO Today.
The report says both companies are aiming to make BI as embedded and universal as their already dominant databases, onto which new BI functionality has been grafted.
The report also says the coming release of 2007 Microsoft Office is expected to broaden Microsoft`s reach in BI, while Oracle`s plans to bundle its BI technology with Oracle Standard Edition (SE) and SE1 will make BI capabilities available for heterogeneous database users.
Coming to terms with BI
The biggest problem in turning data into something useful to the enterprise is the lack of understanding of that data at a basic and contextual level, according to a B-Eye Network article.
The article cites the examples of the costly mistakes made in the US Mars orbiter programme in which data was assumed to represent miles, but was actually stored as metres, resulting in the loss of millions of dollars` worth of equipment.
The article argues that in the BI world, the simple difference in the assumed and actual definition of a customer could have similarly costly consequences. The article concludes that misunderstood data may unwittingly cause many errors in judgment because the business terms used are not clarified and their definitions are not made readily available.
Actutate takes BI open source
UK-based Actuate has announced that organisations can apply the technology and principles of open source to BI in the latest version of the company`s enterprise reporting platform.
According to the company, the collaborative reporting architecture of the Actuate 9 release will enable companies to shift from a closed BI model, where information access and analysis is siloed, to an open BI model that speeds up report development by supporting collaboration.
Actuate says by applying open source principles such as participation, iterative development and modularity, IT developers will be able to create a report quickly and offer it immediately to business analysts and end-users.
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