InetSoft

InetSoft’s Data Mashup technology bridges the gap between traditional ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) and the general data mashup paradigm to create an innovative methodology of rapid BI.  While the benefits of ETL are gleaned overwhelmingly at run time, the value of data mashups are obtained at design time - where users have the ability to do ad-hoc data transformations and data integration work. Looking at this scenario more bluntly, it is not a stretch to say that the greatest advantage of ETL is also its biggest limitation: It is resistant to change and easy to become brittle, siloed and opaque.  In addition, a large up-front investment of effort, time and money is required to initially set up the ETL architecture; and when business requirements change, the agility of ETL will inevitably come in to question.

ETL will usually be tightly-coupled to a large data warehouse or data repository, resulting in a complicated web of dependencies in both data and process.  However, when employing a data mashup strategy, business agility reaches a new apex.  Very little work is needed to integrate a new data source or change the way the data is processed.  This is because the data remains in its source systems and is transformed and integrated on demand.  This contrasts mightily with the traditional (and costly) approaches to inserting data into a data warehouse and sourcing the data back out.

Let’s face it, no business analyst or data analyst will ever be able to anticipate the entire portfolio of user data needs.  (End users have a hard enough time documenting needs that they currently know about, let alone set up the relationships of data and capture its ontological information.)  And now matter how change-resistant IT managers think their data warehouse architecture is, it will always lag present business conditions and realities.  Therefore, at its essence, BI must be ad-hoc in spirit, adaptive in nature and agile at all times if it is to achieve the highest quality of data with the fastest possible time to market.  Data mashup will result in a higher success rate of deployment due to higher end-user satisfaction and adoption quotients.  Cost savings can be huge: Licensing fees can be cut to the bone and far fewer resources will be needed to support the BI architecture.

Mark Flaherty, VP of Marketing for InetSoft, evangelizes on the data mashup concept: “Something we have really embraced is self-service business intelligence and we’ve taken the concept to uniquely extensive reaches.  Our software lets business users do their own data mashups.  For example, they can import a spreadsheet and combine their own data with what is in the enterprise’s data warehouse and then make new dashboards and reports that can be shared in the BI environment without having to ask for IT help.”

With the InetSoft toolset, end users get visually compelling, highly interactive access to data, and solution providers get a highly customizable, quick to learn and quick to deploy business intelligence toolset and information delivery platform.

Actuate

Actuate Corporation continues to improve their industry-leading business intelligence and reporting tools, specifically their BIRT (Business Intelligence Reporting Tools) product line which is based on an open-source integrated design environment - the world famous Eclipse IDE.  I had the chance to delve deeply into BIRT during the second half of 2009 and subsequently authored an e-book on BIRT in which I praised its many features and benefits, such as its tremendous data visualization functionality and its rapid deployability.  BIRT’s advantages are legion in number, they include:

• The use of animation (Flash technology, Java widgets, etc.) which provides an unsurpassed graphical BI experience.
• An Open Data Access (ODA) framework which allows BIRT to connect to and retrieve data from relational databases (via JDBC), XML files and web services.  Almost any data repository can feed a BIRT-enabled application, dashboard or KPI report.  The sourcing of data from so many different technology platforms and file types is something promised by most competing tools, but often their claims fall short.  Usually some very complex pre-massaging of data via an external programming language will be needed, whereas BIRT tools can conduct such data scrubbing implicitly.
• Not only can it source data from many disparate data sources, but BIRT provides its users with many choices of output formats.  All Microsoft Office formats, XML, PDF, HTML and more, can be used.
• Because of its open-source nature, BIRT users have access to a global brain trust of Eclipse developers, engineers and systems architects, whose collective expertise can be leveraged when building and deploying BIRT applications.  The net effect will be a drastic reduction of maintenance and support costs that usually come attached to more proprietary software.