Johannesburg, 18 Jul 2002
Business intelligence (BI) vendors will have to deliver lasting business value if they hope to succeed in a highly competitive BI marketplace.
That`s the word from Gary Lawrence, the country manager of BI solutions provider Business Objects, who believes that BI`s growing appeal to "a whole new world of end-users" is placing massive new demands on the industry, including ease of use and being fully extensible and scalable.
"In today`s business world, information is critical to the success of organisations," said Lawrence. "The value of BI is that it transforms raw data into real information and presents that information to end-users in a meaningful and usable manner, allowing them to take quick, educated decisions."
Business Objects came through a gruelling battery of tests at the IBM performance centre with flying colours a couple of months ago, but Lawrence is quick to put the results in context.
"The point of the tests is that you don`t have to have the biggest, fastest server to be able to get the most out of your BI solution," said Lawrence. "Scalability and extensibility is a far more important issue for organisations who are looking to extend their current deployment to more, geographies, divisions and users. We are seeing more and more of our customers that initially deployed BI within a department, extend their BI initiatives across the entire organisation and standardising on the Business Objects product set. A good BI deployment is a starting point for smooth functional evolution towards future solutions and provides a solid foundation for rapid growth."
The tests, performed at the IBM performance centre, simulated users reading and refreshing a variety of reports with thousands of rows and multiple calculations. These tests supported up to 6 000 active concurrent users hitting the server and included a think time of 10 seconds. This workload could correspond to a total population of 72 000 to hundreds of thousands of users, depending on usage patterns.
David Gelardi, IBM director of eServer benchmarking, said the tests pushed Business Objects` solutions to the limits of their scalability. "These results show that they`re able to create and support enterprise environments that scale to reach tens of thousands of users."
Lawrence said the tests were part of an existing global strategic partnership between Business Objects and IBM on a technology and reseller level.
"Our customers are constantly increasing their hardware, software and usage requirements. That`s why we work with IBM, one of our most strategic partners, to tune our products to ensure we are providing the most robust, scalable and extensible solution for our customers` current and future needs."
In the test, BusinessObjects 2000 ran on a fully loaded IBM pSeries p680 server with 24 CPUs. For additional information on the test results, please go to http://www.businessobjects.com/resources/ar/ibm_performance-test2002.pdf
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