BI Workspaces - Forrester

A recent forrester report titled BI Workspaces: BI Without Borders has introducing a new concept of "BI Workspace"

Definition - "a data exploration environment where a power user can analyze production, clean data with near complete freedom to modify data models, enrich data sets, and run the analysis whenever necessary, without much dependency on IT and production environment restrictions."

Some Excerpts from the same:

the next wave of productivity lies in providing flexible "BI Workspaces" to the oranization's few analysts and power users. Overcoming the classic tech struggle between autonomy and centralized control, BI Workspaces are said to offer a best-of-both-worlds environment in which experts can analyze and model vetted data without facing IT constraints. The primary examples of these environments are multidimensional OLAP (MOLAP) slice-and-dice analytics, BI and data warehousing delivered Software as a Service (SaaS) style, and in-memory analytics platforms.

MOLAP. The primary examples of these environments are multidimensional OLAP (MOLAP) slice-and-dice analytics, BI and data warehousing delivered Software as a Service (SaaS) style, and in-memory analytics platforms.

BI SaaS and DW SaaS. The downside of MOLAP is that it can't always scale, so many companies are turning to SaaS-based BI and data warehousing to quickly gain access to flexible browser-based reporting and analytical tools. SaaS-based DW, in contrast, is geared to multigigabyte and terabyte data sets.

In-Memory Analytics. MOLAP and SaaS-based BI offer flexibility, but they still require data modeling steps. In contrast, in-memory technologies let you perform calculations and aggregations at RAM speeds with little data preparation.

Interesting concept!

Tags: bi+workspace - BI - DWH - saas - olap - forrester

Prashanth Rai