Business Intelligence: Build it or Buy it?

Transcription

1 Business Intelligence: Build it or Buy it? An ebook for business users brought to you by

2 Executive Overview Managing by the metrics is a business strategy geared to maintaining competitive advantage. But with data streams growing and proliferating faster than ever, how do you harness your mission critical data into valuable, actionable insightsquickly, efficiently and flexibly? 02 The Challenges Do you build your own stack or buy a cloud solution? This ebook explores the challenges and opportunities inherent in each option so you can make an informed decision.

3 1 03 The Challenges of Building Your Own BI Infrastructure The Challenges

4 Requirements Definition Time is not on your side. Two out of three BI projects fail to meet business objectives within the projected time or budget. (Source: The Standish Group) In-house projects are complex, time-consuming and require coordination between several teams. By most accounts, the average total implementation time is 17 months, with five months to deploy the first usable analytics application. Documentation (Source: DM Review & IDC Business Intelligence Survey, October 2004 & 2006) Recruiting Team Members High Level System Design Coding System Revisions Even with extensive time tracking, determining total development resources required to implement a new BI application is a crap shoot. Beta Testing Mock-ups and User Reviews Business Process Analysis User Interface Design 04 The Challenges

5 You need mountains of money. Average total cost of ownership for building your own BI platform? Almost $2,000,000 in year 1, including software licenses, implementation fees and administrative costs. (Source: Gartner, 29 Mar 2011) 05 Creating a BI solution requires an ongoing commitment to maintain and upgrade the solution (can be as much as 75% of the total cost). Meaning updates can run $1,000,000 or more. Why are these platforms so expensive? In-house builds incur costs for headcount in several areas: Development Team Training Maintenance QA Support Management The Challenges

6 Building in scalability is nearly impossible. Most in-house BI projects cannot scale to meet long-term organizational needs. Often, it s because new applications are introduced into the organization that were not accounted for in the original scope. So they have to wait, or you have to pay more (and still wait). Though your team surely has a great understanding of how your platform is used and the kinds of reports your customers want, all that is subject to change, tomorrow. Data source neutrality: As your product evolves over time and other social channels are introduced into the platform, you will need to find a way to incorporate these data streams into your platform. Mo money, mo time. 06 The Challenges

7 Reporting will not be actionable. It s very difficult to build visualization and analysis that truly support drill-down capability for rich analysis and easy data digestion. 07 Why not? Because ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) insights can be slow and can cause delays in accessing data. Empowering end users to perform ad-hoc reports on their own specific to their individual business requirements, and not just to consume content is great but difficult to scope into a new build. The Challenges

8 Complexity is inescapable. 08 Procuring, installing and maintaining hardware and software required for end-to-end BI is not trivial and requires a team of highly skilled IT resources. To increase user adoption, you will want to create a collaborative element to your solution, so that users can share and discuss key metrics. Easy, right? Simple, static data reports are easy to incorporate into your system, but users expect to perform robust analysis. You will need to make reports interactive and ensure that users can easily drill-down and navigate the data. The Challenges Back-end needs will include: Infrastructure Data integration (ETL) Provisioning DW (indexing) Front-end needs will include: Report and dashboard creation Content delivery ( , embed, browser)

9 Recap: Challenges of Building Your Own BI Infrastructure Time to value is very long. It costs a fortune upfront and then forever and ever, amen. It s hard to make it scalable. Reporting is historically not usable enough to be used. Inescapable (and really quite unnecessary) complexity. 09 The Challenges

10 2 10 The Advantages of Buying a BI Solution The Advantages

11 Deliver in a matter of weeks. GoodData deploys in weeks...not years. Typically, deployments allow you to start viewing dashboards in 4-6 weeks. Typical Deployment GoodData Deployment 11 The Advantages

12 Spend your money advancing your core product. GoodData does the development work, keeping your implementation costs low. Maintenance and upgrades are included (we release every two weeks). So, no down time or astronomical upgrades! The total cost of ownership is the lowest in the industry. 12 The Advantages

13 Accommodate changing requirements & gain a 360º view of your business. GoodData can process enormous amounts of data. Data is continuously loaded to ensure that analyses can quickly return insights. We can easily link multiple data sources to provide for multi-dimensional analyses. 13 The Advantages

14 Easy for users to adopt, which in turn provides value from data. GoodData gives you access to multiple layers of data quickly. Report setup is intuitive and allows the creation of reports in minutes versus days! 14 Our fluid data model allows your business users to define different perspectives in the data based on individual requirements, which results in great amount of flexibility. Without any insight into business data, the data is useless. On the other hand, accurate analyses drive to great business decisions. The Advantages

15 A system doesn t have to be complex to get the job done. GoodData takes care of the back-end development. GoodData s platform does all this for you: GoodData provides built-in data discovery tools, so your users can do more drilling down without IT support. Integration OLAP/Cubes Visualization Tool Data Cleansing Reporting/Query Engine Advanced Analysis (e.g., Predictive Analytics) Enterprise Data Warehouse 15 Dashboarding Environment The Advantages

16 Bonus: Employ best practices from industry analysts and experts. 16 Trying to understand what to measure is critical to solving business problems, but is often incorrectly executed. GoodData has the expertise to leverage best practices across many business verticals. Our intelligent BI setup leads to intelligent decisions that drive business success. The Advantages

17 Advantages of Buying BI from a Platform-as-a-Service Provider Deliver in weeks, not months. Save your money for your core product. Provide flexibility to keep up with changing business tools. Delight your users with easy-to-use tools and reporting-on-the-fly. Enjoy power without unnecessary complexity. BONUS: Have highly desirable PaaS implementation on your résumé. 17 The Advantages

18 BI without the B.S. Want to talk? We re here. Corporate Headquarters 111 Sutter Street, 4th Floor San Francisco, CA view map Call to learn more about GoodData. 18