A BI Cloud Also Rises

by Brian J. Dooley

Business intelligence (BI) solutions continue to rise in importance in the corporate decision-making processes at every level. At the same time, the size of the data sets that need to be analyzed and the complexity of integration processes have resulted in strains in traditional data warehousing infrastructure models and significant gaps in capability to provide a growing number of less sophisticated users with the insight that they require. This has led to proliferation of unattached data marts within the enterprise, direct development of Web-based analysis, and presentation tools as mashups, difficulties in keeping up with increasingly urgent real-time analysis demands, and problems in taking advantage of processor-intensive predictive analysis strategies.