The Business Intelligence (BI) Challenge

BI's evolution from simple operational reporting tool to multi-dimensional analytical capabilities has fueled its widespread adoption as a mission-critical application. However, BI is now facing significant financial and technical barriers to its future efficacy:

• Limited Data Scope

  Even when fed by very large data warehouses, BI systems process only a fraction of relevant corporate information assets, and rarely if ever encompass the exploding volume of unstructured data (email messages, presentations, Office documents, Web pages, instant messages, call transcripts, etc.) containing critical decision-making information.

• Unacceptable Data Latency

  Since input to data warehouses and data marts largely depends on ETL tools operating in batch mode, decision platforms frequently fail to deliver the data freshness and system responsiveness required for effective decision making.

• High Complexity

  Traditional BI systems are difficult to evolve, scale, manage and use. They are often composed of dozens of distinct components, and efforts to integrate new data sources, new work-flow utilities and collaborative features are typically complex and costly. They also often employ multiple interfaces for accessing various functions and data sources, and, though much improved, their user interfaces are still overly complex, limiting adoption and use.

The Exalead Solution Exalead CloudView™ technology extends the functional scope of classic BI, harnessing data from an unprecedented range of unstructured and structured sources, and enabling your BI platform to present a far more complete and timely picture of your business. In addition to enhancing existing BI systems, CloudView can also be used as an alternative means for accessing BI data. It can serve as a platform for agile search-based applications (SBAs) that enable you to greatly expand access to crucial company information while providing a user experience that is as fast and intuitive as surfing the Web.

Essential information for today's extended enterprise lies inside and outside the firewall, in both structured and unstructured formats. Download the Extended Business Intelligence whitepaper to learn more.

Solution Benefits

Better Exploit Existing Structured Data

Latency and Costs Slashed

Using a CloudView SBA for operational intelligence enabled Gefco to cut its data latency from 24 hours to 15 minutes, and to cut the cost per user 50%.
"Every day, I see thousands of events consolidated in real-time and I log on to the system just to be sure it's real!"

– Guillaume Rabier, Manager of IT Research and Projects, GEFCO
Gefco Case Study
Gefco Wins CIO Innovation Prize
GEFCO Video

Exalead CloudView offers a new approach to accessing structured data from decision intelligence systems (DISs). It uses sophisticated data indexing and search infrastructures to index the structured content of DISs, and enables users to employ natural language queries and Web-style browsing to access the key information these systems contain.

Provide More Timely Information

CloudView also enables much more timely data access. Whether used as a middleware tool for feeding a DI datawarehouse, or as an alternative data access platform, CloudView essentially decouples data from underlying data production systems, and creates a 'virtual' view of your data. This independent data layer can be non-intrusively updated, accessed, and searched without affecting these underlying systems. With dramatically reduced loads on their databases, many companies find they can afford more frequent data updates, sometimes dropping off-hour batch updates altogether in favor of the real-time incremental updates search engines were intrinsically designed to support. (For further information, see our Database Offloading section.)

Harness New Data Channels

• New Structured Sources

  Because Web search engines can efficiently process staggering volumes of data, they can enable you to greatly expand the scope of your decision platform without affecting performance. What's more, a next generation engine like CloudView offers a service-oriented architecture and standard Web technologies (SOAP, REST, XML, RSS, RDF, OWL, etc.) that bring a new simplicity and agility to data integration.

• New Unstructured Data

  The advanced text and multimedia analytics developed in the search engine industry are ideally suited for capturing new and emerging unstructured information resources. CloudView can be leveraged to enhance BI data with information from sources like digital audio transcripts, satisfaction surveys, blogs and forums, and is positioned to help you exploit emerging technologies like image content recognition.

Provide Unique Insights to Decision Makers

CloudView provides a unified analysis of unstructured data and the information contained in BI reports, analyses, and dashboards. The result is the creation of dynamic associations between structured and non-structured data, yielding important insights unavailable with traditional BI.

When used as an alternative DI access tool, you can leverage CloudView's built-in data clustering and statistical computation capabilities to provide real-time operational reporting in the form of charts, maps, reports and graphical dashboards.

Improve Performance, Reliability, Stability, and Scalability

Given the volume of information to consider, the implementation of Web technologies within BI is indispensable. Because Web search engines were designed to handle and index hundreds of millions of gigabytes, only web search engines like CloudView can meet these technological challenges.

In addition, CloudView can be used as an alternative access platform for BI data, reducing the stress on the existing BI platform and expanding the potential user base. This increased efficiency functions in much the same way as database offloading.

Improve the Cost/Relevance Ratio of your BI Platform

Faced with the accumulation of documents and varied decisional tools, users sometimes find it difficult to find the information or reports containing the sought indicator. The Extended Business Intelligence (EBI) approach fostered by Exalead is intended to meet this challenge by offering users transparent access to the metadata reference frame of the platform and a rich user interface. Homogenization of the content of the metadata reference frame and consideration of the user's profile provided by Exalead CloudView enable improvement of the EBI portal's relevance.

In addition, using CloudView as an alternative access point for BI data can reduce the licensing and infrastructure costs required to support your BI platform.

Related Information

Document downloads:

• Extended Business Intelligence (Whitepaper)
• Achieving Business Agility with Search-Based Technologies (Whitepaper)
• Get More Out of Your Databases with SBAs (Solutions Brief)
• Gefco Case Study, or the article "Gefco Wins CIO Online Trophy for Innovation"
• CloudView Platform Highlights
• Search-Based Applications (Solutions Brief)

Videos:

• Exalead Tracks and Traces GEFCO Vehicles
• vdR Group delivers Product Data Intelligence
• ST Groupe Taps a New World of Search-Based Applications

Site sections:

• Search-Based Applications
• Information Management
• Database Offloading

SBA Partners

Exalead works closely with leading information technology consultants like Capgemini, Logica, ST Groupe and Synaxio to provide you with next-generation search-based applications (SBAs) tailored to your unique needs. Visit our Channel Partners page to learn more about these solution providers and other Exalead partners. Also see our video interview with ST Groupe, and the brochure introducing Synaxio's new CloudView-powered SBA, Operational Business Intelligence for Postal Operators. Interested in partnering with Exalead? Visit Become a Partner.