Data Warehouse in the Sky?
Nov 4, 2006Over the years I’ve spent a lot of time talking with members of IT departments about the challenges of integrating data from multiple sources and the opportunity that business intelligence (BI) solutions represent for providing “one version of the truth” across the organization. The BI market has grown rapidly and the leading enterprise vendors now typically offer a full suite of technologies and services ranging from ETL and data quality, to reporting and OLAP servers, to performance management dashboards and financial budgeting and planning applications. But who is using these tools in your organization and how widespread is their usage? As we see BI vendors partner with Salesforce and begin to offer on-demand versions of their tools and applications, I’m very interested in this topic. And as these BI partners also talk about the benefits of standardizing on a single platform and the associated benefits of such an initiative, I’m interested in understanding how, and, or, if this fits into your on-demand strategy. Would you like to see all of your corporate data made available in a secure, on-demand way just as your CRM data is today within Salesforce.com? Have you discussed this topic with members of your IT department already? What about your BI vendor? In many organizations getting access to information locked away in the data warehouse is still considered to be "in demand" not on demand. More often than not Excel "spreadmarts" are the alternative to waiting to get the right report from the IT or finance department. Could an on-demand data warehouse that integrates and aggregates real-time and historical CRM and non-CRM data be the answer? Will the market shift towards software-as-a-service solutions and away from proprietary on-premise software finally make BI available for the masses? It’s an interesting discussion. Is the data warehouse in the sky an idea whose time has come? I’d like to know your thoughts.
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I posted an Idea on this topic here: http://ideas.salesforce.com/article/show/38518/On_Demand_Data_Warehouse
Posted by: DarrenC | November 19, 2006 at 01:41 PM
Hi Darren,
An on-demand data warehouse or data mart would be very appealing. We have an Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) initiative underway, and it is intended to be the central repository for all our of reporting data. While this is certainly the correct approach conceptually, the time it seems to take to actually deploy a phase of the EDW, and then to make that data available to users via an appropriate BI tool, is quite protracted. Such a glacial pace is the antithesis of an on-demand world.
I've attended enough BI courses to know that due diligence is required in order to correctly model the data per the business requirements, and that you certainly don't want to short-cut this step, but we have users screaming for better and more reliable BI and today our only answer seems to be "patience, my child, the EDW will address your needs but it won't be ready for another 6-12 months. In the meantime, enjoy your spreadsheets." If there were a way to leverage the flexibility and speed of an on-demand platform to construct a data mart that catered to specific reporting requirements, and thereby deploy BI to our users more rapidly, we could finally unshackle ourselves from the painfully slow deployment that seems to be the norm for enterprise BI projects. We'd like to stop answering yesterday's business questions with today's BI solution -- an on-demand model would hopefully allow us to answer today's business questions instead.
I am very interested to see how this line of thought develops.
-Mike
Posted by: Michael Mixon | November 28, 2006 at 10:48 PM
Or will it be "BI in the sky"? I think the future of the enteprise market looks like the consumer Web 2.0 market does now. Existing software "products" will migrate to become on-demand sites (with federation/downloadable versions for on-premise, if necessary), and gathering the data across those sites will require a mix of data integration, federation, and BI, as it is today within organizations (but hopefully more seamlessly, without the users having to care what technology is being used)...
Posted by: Timo Elliott | April 17, 2007 at 10:28 AM
I couldn't agree more Timo. BTW, if you'd like to provide feedback on how you use (or don't use) business intelligence tools in your organization today, this survey is the place to go: http://www.intelligententerprise.com/blog/archives/2007/04/take_the_survey.html
I suspect that the results will point to a huge opportunity for an on-demand approach.
Posted by: Darren Cunningham | April 19, 2007 at 05:05 PM
Hi Darren, I like the idea. I think that an on-demand data warehouse is now possible with Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) and data integration between Salesforce.com and S3. I work for an open source data integration software vendor Apatar (AppExchange listing http://www.salesforce.com/appexchange/detail_overview.jsp?NavCode__c=a0130000006P6IoAAK-31&id=a03300000032Vm0AAE ) and we are working on an Amazon S3 connector. The idea is to let users store data in S3 not only from CRM, but from anywhere on the web, or from behind their firewall. Should you be interested in such a solution, I would love to hear from a potential pilot customer to implement a data warehouse in the sky. You can contact me through my by blog http://www.apatar.com/blogs/renat.
Posted by: Renat Khasanshyn | May 05, 2007 at 01:49 AM
Sorry, folks, the link to my blog in the previous comment is not correct. This one should work fine: http://www.apatar.com/blogs/renat
Posted by: Renat Khasanshyn | May 05, 2007 at 01:57 AM