Web services drive BI evolution

Faced with growing enterprise demand for seamless, real-time access to transactional data, BI (business intelligence) vendors are increasingly turning to Web services technologies.

Accenture and Information Builders are two players making the first leaps to aid enterprises in reaching the real-time goal by using Web services to integrate BI into applications and systems. For enterprises, this means more flexibility and more available options when it comes to spreading BI throughout an enterprise.

“What used to be a batch-oriented process … now we’re listening for a particular event,” said Henry Morris, an analyst at IDC. “Part of the real-time thing is being able to monitor real-time data … databases listening for events we have flagged. Web services makes it more possible to do this.”

Conventional BI boundaries -- applying analytical tools to data warehouses and data marts -- are being cast aside in favor of real-time intelligence that would allow a manufacturer to forecast demand for materials and use Web services to expose that demand to a supplier or expose performance metrics to its institutional investors via a Web service for risk management.

Embracing these boundary changes, Accenture has developed a new active BI prototype designed to allow users to aggregate, view, and manipulate real-time data from multiple sources, including enterprise systems and trusted third parties. The Live Information Models prototype, based on Microsoft .Net technology and Juice Software’s enterprise software platform, provides a continuous connection between Excel spreadsheets and multiple data sources.

The models can go to any SOAP-enabled back-end system, and pull and expose data, said Alan Warren, CTO and co-founder of New York City-based Juice. Users can build simple and flexible analytical models to be shared with other users via live data streams embedded in desktop applications.

“We aren’t trying to replace the traditional BI stack,”Warrensaid. “There’s a lot of value in this traditional view where you go through [extraction, transformation, and loading] to a warehouse, and spin off cubes and data marts, and apply BI tools against that. What we’re letting you do is expose access to your end-users anywhere up and down that stack.

“We had been looking at building solutions that leverage the desktop applications like Word and Excel, and let them connect into information assets in the enterprise or mainframe and legacy sources,”Warrensaid. “Live Information Models are geared toward information access and delivery at the desktop so end users can interact from a variety of systems and can maintain a link to it.”