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Cape Times - 28 March 2008
In-memory processing is the intelligence behind business intelligence
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To succeed, modern organisations need to be able to access recent data at all times. Consequently, the business intelligence arena has developed rapidly in recent years. How, when and how big a return an organisation gets on this investment depends on the planning and strategic goal setting that proceeds and accompanies implementation and rollout.
Business intelligence (BI) today entails more than reports, it includes, associative query logic (AQL), score carding, executive information systems (EIS), data mining (DM), decision support systems (DSS) performance management and dashboards, helping not only individuals make faster more informed decisions but also increasing visibility and accountability to assist organisations to better manage business performance.
According to Davide Hanan of Qlikview SA, to get answers to your questions as accurately and quickly as possible you need to opt for a BI tool that operates in memory.
QlikView has become South Africa's preferred business intelligence software, according to the results of iTWeb's annual BI survey released earlier this year. Launched in South Africa a mere four years ago, Qlikview is based on in-memory processing unlike other BI tools in the market that are predominantly based on technology created in the 1980's with the hardware and memory constraints of the time.
The survey showed that more companies bought QlikView last year than bought any other BI software; 22.3 percent of respondents bought QlikView, compared to 15.8 percent who bought the next most popular product.
The news came shortly after Gartner confirmed that QlikView is the fastest growing BI vendor in the world and perceived as the coolest product in the market, attracting customers looking for ease of use and highly scalable functionality.
Gartner, Hanan pointed out, predicts 70 percent of the top 1000 companies in the world will be doing BI in memory by 2012.
"54 percent of the iTWeb survey respondents who chose QlikView said its ease of use was a motivating factor, whilst others cited its fast performance and product features. This confirms the factors identified by Gartner," said Hanan.
Of the companies who evaluated QlikView, 89 percent subsequently bought the product. QlikView was also the highest-scoring BI application when it came to several key benefits: 92 percent of respondents who had bought QlikView said it had improved management reporting and 79 percent said it had improved the decision-making process.
"The survey highlighted QlikView's high user satisfaction," added Hanan. "Our tool has decidedly simplified people's life - BI is no longer passed on to specialist analysts, the real decision-makers are doing it themselves on their laptops."
Hanan believes people today need more information - not less - to make the best decisions be it in business or in other fields.
"Though this commonly accepted, the perception is that you need reports to provide the necessary information," he explained. "This leads to, amongst others, information overload as one report leads to another report and so the process continues, one having to refine the search step by step. Our aim is to provide the necessary information, not to produce reports; Qlikview has done to structured data what Google has done for unstructured data."
Without in-memory processing, it could take you weeks to discover that you'd lost a major client. With in-memory processing, you can review each day's sales figures the next day and pick up problems immediately. With the client's entire history in front of you, it becomes much easier to investigate the problems, and to fix them.
But business intelligence software is not only good for increasing profits. According to Hanan, any professional who regularly needs to analyse large quantities of data can benefit from using business intelligence software.
Qlikview received 15 awards in the past year, one of which was for its contribution to saving lives.
At Sweden's Sahlgrenska University Hospital, the largest in northern Europe, associate professor Daniel Ståammar has used QlikView business intelligence software to predict and manage complications arising from cranial surgery, reducing complications to zero and saving the hospital about a million US dollars a year. QlikTech, the makers of QlikView, received a 21st Century Achievement Award from the Computerworld Honors Program in recognition of the extraordinary use of information technology which enabled Prof Ståammar to achieve these results.
"Brain inflammation or meningitis after cranial surgery is a major complication, difficult to detect, and difficult to decide how aggressively to treat it," Hanan explained. "Previously doctors had to juggle paper files of test results and patient histories and make all their own calculations. QlikView has eliminated all of that, making it easy to spot associations and anomalies."
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