Some of you might have attended our webinar February 4. When we put the webinar together, we felt that most of the attendees were interested in using the Agile Data Warehouse (ADW) as a Business Intelligence (BI) sandbox, or as a development and test environment. But we've found since then that many of the attendees had much bigger plans for the ADW than we had originally anticipated. So I'd like to discuss some of the market feedback we received and actual use cases that are now being developed around the ADW.

Primarily, the webinar attendees were impressed with the industrial strength nature of the platform, and so have focused on the following areas for development:

- Open Source BI platform for Large Enterprises
- Enhanced client reporting for Software-as-a-Service vendors and commercial websites
- Affordable, Industrial-strength Data Warehouse platform for production workloads

A common thread we heard was that people still don't have access to information when they need it, in the form they need it in to make decisions. It's either too expensive to produce, too hard to assemble, or too complex to manage. They felt the ADW stack would be great for prototyping, but also that it fills a void in the marketplace for BI infrastructure that's easy to set up and flexible to operate.

In talking to the attendees we also realized that we weren't clear enough about our ability to unbundle the stack as may be required to accommodate existing standards, or by the option for on-premise licensing of the ADW. Each of the component applications works fine on its own, as does the entire ADW stack in a corporate datacenter. 

Open Source BI for Large Enterprises

Many of the world's largest companies - and particularly those who have struggled to survive in the past 18 months - have begun to embrace Open Source as a way to lower their costs of computing. They have concluded that paying hundreds, or even thousands of dollars per seat for traditional BI solutions for their many users just does not make economic sense - especially when viable lower-cost alternatives exist. This is especially true when the vast majority of their employees are casual users of BI, where a self-serve, modifiable dashboard with key departmental metrics provides most of what they need in terms of reporting. And where a simple, easy-to-use ad hoc query capability can replace formal requests to IT for changes to fixed reports, which often take months to turn around.

The Agile Data Warehouse fills this need with its largely open source base  - but in commercial versions that make it viable for an enterprise purchase. With robust functionality and licensing costs that are about 20% of the traditional vendors, the base ADW is a very attractive alternative to traditional vendors.

Enhanced Client Reporting for Software/SaaS vendors, Commercial Websites

The Agile Data Warehouse is becoming a popular choice for web-based commercial applications, whether they are provided as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) or commercial websites. Many software providers code their first generation of reports in fixed formats like Crystal Reports, which require substantial application knowledge to modify. And they custom-code the ad hoc query, which often provides just a handful of parameters to modify one of the aforementioned fixed reports.  These solution providers eventually realize that they are not in the BI market, and decide to embrace a more comprehensive solution. But the costs for traditional BI applications can be prohibitive, especially across a user base that may involve thousands of clients.

The Agile Data Warehouse offers affordable licensing across large numbers of corporate clients, as well as a robust multi-tenancy option to effectively segregate proprietary reporting environments. The ADW  reduces the cost of BI in two key ways: first, by providing better performance so that less powerful servers are required, and then by operating on economical cloud-based servers, which cost a fraction of the IT charge-back rates at most corporations. And since the ADW is also massively parallel, it can handle even the largest corporate client's database.

The result of this new approach is that many of the vendors are beginning to look at Reporting as a potential profit center, versus an after-thought to the core functionality of their solution.

Affordable, Industrial-strength Data Warehouse Platform in the Cloud

Many companies today are struggling with homegrown reporting environments, or have reached the limitations of the Microsoft offerings, which tend to focus on Excel as the end-user platform, and often present roadblocks to integration with the non-Microsoft world. (Ever try to get non-Microsoft browsers like Google Chrome or Apple Safari to work with Microsoft BI? Even Firefox is limited in ways you would not encounter from a truly "open" vendor.)

Some companies have turned to "BI-as-a-Service" vendors on the web, which tend to present their own limitations in terms of the schema they can support and the depth and quality of their BI tools. Many are startups that have tried to re-invent Business Intelligence and Analytic Databases on limited budgets or meager funding, and so offer only one leg of the cheaper-faster-more functional formula for invasive new technology (i.e. at least they're cheap.)

In contrast, the Agile Data Warehouse is an affordable, industrial-strength data warehouse platform. It features the most widely-used Business Intelligence solution in the world (Jaspersoft), the leader in columnar-storage analytic databases (Vertica) and the recognized leader in open source Data Integration (Talend) - all integrated into an efficient but flexible software stack. It can be used to develop a comprehensive query, reporting, and analysis environment for even the most complex corporate structure, with revolutionary performance that lays bare the 1990s-era code and techniques that traditional relational databases still utilize.

To learn more about the Agile Data Warehouse, click here.