A reoccurring point of discussion as I visit our customers is the role of traditional printed reports in business intelligence. Like most BI vendors, we have always delivered a traditional report designer as one option for visualizing the intelligence DataPA OpenAnalytics generates. However, for a good number of years we’ve concentrated our development efforts on dashboards, and ways of delivering them to an increasing array of devices. Our reasons are simple. We believe that pretty much any business function can be better supported with a live, interactive visual display of information rather than a static printed document. So I’m always…

There has been a lot of discussion lately that data lakes will transform analytics, giving us access to a huge volume of data with a variety and velocity rarely seen in the past. For those of you who don’t spend your days trawling analytics or big data blogs, the concept of a data lake is simple. With a traditional data warehouse, the repository is heavily structured, so all the work to convert the data from its raw structure needs to be implemented before the data enters the repository. This makes it expensive to add new data sources and limits the…

Gone are the days when analytics solutions were simply a window on our business applications. With the proliferation of mobile technologies and the introduction of alerting, analytics solutions can now offer huge opportunities for change within an organisation, driving business agility and changing the working landscape forever. However, to take part in this revolution, your chosen analytics solution must have two very important attributes. First and foremost, it must be real time. It’s no good alerting a sales representative to an up selling opportunity ten minutes after the customer has left. Which is why your analytics solution has to be…

Our Enterprise server offers the perfect platform to pull data from an OpenEdge app and distribute it as actionable intelligence to any device across the web. Many of our customers already use it by hosting a server themselves. However, for smaller organisations, the cost required to host and maintain their own server makes it a much less compelling offering. Which is a shame, because often these customers would benefit the most from our technology. So, for some time now, we’ve been pondering on the best way to offer DataPA OpenAnalytics as a hosted service. The hard part was how to…