2007 in review: scaling business analytics applications.

The growing reliance on business analytics to improve strategic operational decision making and increase an organization's competitive advantage is driving an explosive market. IDC estimates that the overall market for business analytics development tools and packaged applications will top $20 billion for the year 2007. Furthermore, companies are aiming to expand the reach of their business analytics or business intelligence applications within their organizations:

According to Louella Fernandes, Principal Analyst, Quocirca, in August 2007, 'Various research projects have shown that business intelligence (BI) continues to be one of the top investment priorities for CIOs. But what is changing is its shift in focus from complex tools for a few users to more flexible, affordable and accessible tools for a larger audience. As such, BI is moving away from being an exclusive tool for power users, or 'information producers', to empowering the 'information consumers' in accessing, analyzing and sharing data.'

In the quest to make business analytics and intelligence applications more accessible to more users, companies often spend unnecessarily on underlying infrastructure to support these goals.

Too many users simultaneously analyzing a single data set can cause contention and slow application performance, particularly when the underlying infrastructure relies on a disk-based storage system. The impact of simultaneous use simply brings the system to a crawl and this can cost organizations substantially in terms of lost revenue opportunities. For example, if bank tellers are bogged down by 'screen freeze' or glacial system response time when trying to up sell a customer new financial services they are not familiar with, the sales opportunity window could close at the point of contact. Making these ...