Search for Business Intelligence coming to your browser
Business Intelligence is one of the fastest growing enterprise software sectors and also on top of the CXO radar. Companies have built large data warehouses (Enterprise DW, DataMarts, Federated ...) and have deployed BI tools to help knowledge workers analyze the data and dish out actionable insights. Unfortunately the problem is that the business users still can not find the right reports, data, and insights. Google with its search technology has democratized access to unstructured data anywhere on the web. Could businesses combine DW, BI, and Search to have instant access to the knowledge nuggets? Recent months, several BI vendors have announced products and partnerships in this direction and this could well be the next frontier of BI.
In April Google OneBox extended the reach of the Google Search Appliance to BI. Cognos, IBM, Microsoft and other BI vendors announced new products and features for customers who want to marry search functionality with BI to get real-time business analytics into the hands of more employees. Through joint development efforts with Google, Cognos is extending the capabilities of its Cognos Go! Search Service by allowing reports, analyses, dashboards, key metrics, and alerts to be directly accessed through the new Google OneBox for Enterprise.
In May, Fast Search and Transfer (FAST) joined its Enterprise Search Platform with Cognos 8 Business Intelligence solution to deliver corporate content directly to workers who are not necessarily sophisticated BI consumers. The combination of FAST ESP and Cognos 8 BI with Cognos Go! Search Service delivers a solution which enables users to leverage sophisticated enterprise search functionality to quickly and easily find reports, analysis, scorecards, dashboards, and other business intelligence information, along with corporate content such as documents, e-mail and other forms of structured and unstructured business information distributed across the enterprise. Leveraging the power of Contextual Insight™, FAST ESP is able to analyze and interpret the underlying meaning behind reports, not just the reports themselves, providing users with a single search across all of their information, including their business intelligence information.
CRM Daily has a detailed analysis of the emerging BI frontier "In Search of Better Business Intelligence"
What do you think of this trend? Thoughts...Comments...Critique?