In 2013, Gartner issued the CIO Agenda Report. In this report, CIOs ranked Analytics and Business Intelligence as their number 1 technology priority. Separately, just a few months ago, Forbes magazine confirmed that 89% of business leaders believe big data will revolutionize business operations in the same way the internet did.
So how are IT departments balancing the adoption of big data, with the CIO’s priority for business intelligence? And more importantly, how do you extract the relevant data (the needle) across all of your multiple data stores (the haystack) and ensure that the combined data is properly presented on the Business Intelligence dashboard?
Enterprises today are using business intelligence tools such as Tableau to share information across the organization. Business Intelligence makes it easy for everyone (from decision makers to functional teams) to access and analyze data that is readily available and understandable. The challenge arises when users demand reports with better business insights, gathered from more information sources, delivered in real-time, with the ability to do it themselves as self-service. These requirements make it hard for Business Intellige professionals to meet such expectations, especially when data required for these reports span multiple data stores such as data warehouses, data marts, enterprise applications and other operational systems.
Data virtualization is an agile data integration platform that makes it easy to abstract and view data, no matter where the data resides. With data virtualization, organizations can query all types of data, across all data sources as if they were in a single place. The data remains in its source which means replication is not required. Changes are similarly quick, making iterative report and dashboard creation (with almost immediate involvement and feedback from the business stakeholders) a reality. The insight gained gives enterprises the ability to quickly make decisions in real time and provides a comprehensive and complete view of their data with the ability to drill into information stored across multiple sources, accelerating access to a unified view of their disparate enterprise business intelligence.
Data virtualization can greatly enhance a business intelligence and data warehouse architecture. The use of a data virtualization layer provides greater agility, flexibility to accommodate changes in data sources or end-user requirements, and shorter time-to-market for delivering reports to the business. Plus it provides support for multiple sources and multiple consumers with integration of virtually any data source – internal or external.
In 2015 Denodo and Tableau joined forces in a technology partnership with a new solution to improve performance and user experience for data exploration and self-service BI. Denodo provides agile access to disparate data sources through data virtualization, while Tableau offers powerful data exploration and data visualization capabilities. The enhanced integration between the two technologies allows IT departments to easily provision reusable and integrated data services with high performance while enabling enterprise data consumers to analyze, visualize and share information.
To learn more about the partnership between Tableau and Denodo, and how to discover the needle in your haystack, visit www.denodo.com/en/partner/tableau.
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What is important to remember is that data visualization is just one aspect of reporting for BI. With data visualization, organizations are able to see the “big picture,” with data sets serving as guides as companies have to dig down through grid reports to make your business decisions. Not all decisions can simply be made off of visualized charts and graphs, but these visual representations make the decision process much easier.