“The past of BI (Business Intelligence) was decision support system and its future is Intelligent Business,” said Donald Farmer, Principal, TreeHive Strategy at TimeXtender Data Discovery Hub launch event. He explained what is intelligence in this context. It translates to insight, foresight, adaptability and wisdom. He mentioned that every company is a data company. If they do not think like that then they are losing competitive advantage.
Romi Mahajan, CCO, TimeXtender said, “Data is the new commodity. Every organization will strive very soon to build secure, agile and automated data infrastructure.” He further stated that any organization in any industry will determine how successful they will be in next decade by how they frame the question of data. The five assumptions they will working around will be:
1. Data is a fundamental source of value.
2. In the current state data is far from perfect.
3. Organizations can make far more progress if they could contextualize the data.
4. Organizations do not have to invent or buy. The asset is what they have collected over years in existing data.
5. Today despite IT business singularity IT and business teams are often at loggerheads.
Shedding light on current predicaments, he said that data sources are increasing and changing. There is lot of challenge around siloed data. wherein one has to open 1,000 gates for thousand reports. Classic data warehouses is slow to respond to current business needs.
Speaking about TimeXtender Data Discovery Hub, Mahajan explained that it is an architecture that allows organization to address the needs of self-service, governance, security. It automates the following elements: generation of ETL code, building and deployment of the data warehouse, generation of project documentation, version control, building of OLAP cubes, if required.
With TimeXtender Data Discovery Hub, there is no need for standalone data preparation and data blending, catalogue or data quality tools.The hub bridges the business and IT gap. Its automation technology enables the hub to deliver data at the speeds of the business.
The key components of TimeXtender Data Discovery Hub are:
Operational Data Store: The ODS does not involve any data manipulation and is as close to real time as possible. The strength to this approach is ability to connect to the ever growing and changing types of data. All users have to connect only to the ODS, instead of connecting to raw data, allowing IT data governance.
Modern Data Warehouse: In the MDW the data is cleansed, validated and stored. If quality issue arise or bad data is found, the error is corrected once for all users. Data is available to the business users in a format that they can understand.
Semantic Layer: Whichever Discovery Tool an organization prefers, Timextender can help them prepare data for applications.
He stated that poor data quality has bad consequences on business. Customers have no idea about aggregation or data arrangement. Presently, even two year old companies are looking at data warehouse kind of strategy as they are inundated with data. BFSI, Insurance, healthcare, manufacturing need these kind of solutions. Data Discovery Hub can support any size of data warehouse. As of now, it works on SQL server only.
