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Data Discovery and Enterprise Analytics – Apples and Oranges

admin Jun 15, 2012

Data Discovery, dashboards and visualization are among common ways of delivering business analytics to end users which is noticeable by the popularity of desktop discovery tools such as Tableau & Qlikview. For the most part, visualization does a great job of summarizing information in an interactive and graphical format. Is it, however, robust and rich enough to act as a substitute for enterprise business intelligence? Rumor has it that a leading industry analyst firm is beginning to recognize that data discovery is not enterprise BI and is in the process of creating a separate process for ranking data discovery and visualization tools. I tend to agree. Enterprise BI requires support for complex joins and relationships, custom business logic and scalability which requires robust infrastructure, automation and a semantic data model. Data discovery tools lack these features, which limit their growth into enterprise business analytics.

So, how would a business user take their analysis from the desktop and scale it to the enterprise? The answer to this lies in the way a platform is architected. A BI solution that can turn ‘off’ enterprise features such as operational reporting and data warehousing and allow the platform to behave like a discovery tool and turn ‘on’ these features when a project is ready for further growth -- is the solution to take data discovery and scale it into enterprise BI, as and when an organization becomes ready. A typical use case involves a project with business users asking for ad hoc capabilities and realizing that they need more – banded reports, integration from SAP or other systems and advanced data modeling. A BI solution that can deliver these initial discovery capabilities and support enterprise analytics as requirements change prevents the loss of time, resources and revenue from re-architecting or replacing a data discovery tool, once it hits its ceiling.

Yesterday, Birst announced the release of a Visualization Edition - a simple-to-use, quick-to-deploy version of Birst that empowers business users to intuitively explore data and build reports in minutes from local or centralized data without the need for data modeling. The solution makes it easier than ever for business users, on their own, to solve complex problems and make data-driven decisions that result in real business value. The real benefit over desktop visualization tools however, is two-fold:

• First, Birst Visualization Edition enables easy distribution of discoveries without locking users into a desktop data discovery with limited publishing capabilities
• Secondly, it delivers a visualization solution with a semantic layer, removing the need to write SQL queries or rely on IT for data extracts

What this additionally means to your organization is that when a BI project grows, Birst provides a seamless upgrade path and ability add on features such a mobile BI, Bing maps, operational reporting and data warehouse automation.

With the Visualization Edition, Birst is expanding its product footprint to help organizations match Birst to their BI needs and the market reception has been very positive. While analysts continue to discuss the separation of data discovery and enterprise analytics, we expect the new packaging to do the same-- - help Birst customers worldwide understand that apples and oranges are very different in flavor.