Business Intelligence(BI) For Small And Middle-Sized Enterprises(SMEs)
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    • Business Intelligence(BI) for Small and Middle-Sized Enterprises(SMEs)

    Govinda Rajavarma

    Sr Software Professional
    During the last decade, data warehouses (DWs) have become an essential component of modern decision support systems in most companies of the world. In order to be competitive, even Small and Middle-Sized Enterprises (SMEs) now collect large volumes of information and are interested in business intelligence(BI) systems. SMEs are regarded as significantly important on a local, national or even global basis and they paly an important part in the any national economy. In spite of multiple advantages, existing Decision Support Systems (DSSs) frequently remain inaccessible for SMEs because of the following factors:

    • High Price;
    • High requirements for a hardware infrastructure;
    • Complexity for most users;
    • Irrelevant functionality;
    • Low flexibility to deal with a fast changing dynamic business environment;
    • Low attention to difference in data access necessity in SMEs and large-scaled enterprises.

    In addition, many projects fail due to the complexity of the development process. Thereby, SMEs require lightweight, cheap, flexible, simple and efficient solutions. To aim at these features, we can take advantage of light clients with web interfaces. For instance, web technologies are utilized for data warehousing by large corporations, but there is an even grater demand of such kind of systems among small and middle-sized enterprises.

    Thus, my objective is to propose an original and adapted BI Solutions for SMEs. To this aim few of the solutions I have discussed in this paper.

    WEB-POWERED BI

    The web has become the platform of choice for the delivery of business applications for large-scaled enterprises as well as for SMEs. Web warehousing is a recent approach that merges data warehousing and business intelligence systems with web technologies. Increasingly popular web-based solution is CLOUD COMPUTING.

    CLOUD COMPUTING: Cloud computing provides access to large amounts of data and computational resources through a variety of interfaces. It is provided as services via cloud(Internet). These services delivered through data canters are accessible anywhere. Besides, they allow the rise of cloud analytics.

    The main consumers of cloud computing are small enterprises and start-ups that do not have a legacy of IT investments to manage. Cloud computing based BI tools are rather cheap for small and middle-sized enterprises, because they provide no need of hardware and software maintenance an d their exists also for .NET, PHP, and C. Moreover, Palo is an in-memory Multidimensional OLAP database server. Mondrian schemas are represented in XML files. Mondrian Pentaho Server is used by different OLAP clients, eg., FreeAnalysis. All studied OLap clients are Java applications. They usually run on client, but tools also exist that run on web servers. So far, only PocOLAP is lightweight, open source OLAP solution.

     Analytics in the Cloud:

    • Cloud computing encompasses any subscription-based or pay-per-use service that, in real time over the Internet, extends It’s existing capabilities
    • Data Stored “in the cloud” resides somewhere. Where, you’re not sure-and you’re not sure you need to know- I agree with the first part of that statement and would argue with the second. The very nature of a cloud is blob-like. Data stored “in the cloud” in its truest sense. You just know that your data is stored and available to you for whatever reason you need, when you need it.
    • If companies are going to locate their data offsite, they should store it on servers they directly control.
    • In the cloud, the customer is not privy to what’s happening; they pay a lower price and get whatever the vendor chooses as the matter of delivery.
    • Before companies move down the road toward cloud computing, they owe it to themselves to fully analyse the cost and benefits

    Summary

    So, let’s make sure that I have clearly stated my belief: cloud computing is a good idea, in the sense that it will lower time to implementation, time to results at a quantifiable, positive ROI.
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