Braintapper
What business intelligence products do you service?
For business intelligence products, we're most familiar with Cognos 8 and Pentaho. While there can be significant differences between various vendor and open source solutions, keep in mind that the raw skillset for any business intelligence professional is database querying. If required, most seasoned professionals can adapt to another platform with a little ramp-up time.
What data movement products do you service?
We've got experience with Cognos Data Manager (a.k.a., DecisionStream) and Pentaho Data Integration. While Data Manager is a good product, it's hard to beat the price of Pentaho Data Integration. Pentaho Data Integration can easily handle the data movement needs of most organizations.
Do you support planning products like TM1?
The short answer is No. While we've worked on TM1 projects, our core competency is on the business intelligence side. We are seriously looking at Jedox Palo as a solution. In any case, if we can't service your needs, we can point you to another consultancy that can.
What kinds of custom development do you do?
We have experience with:
- Visual Basic family (VBA, VBScript, VB6 and VB.NET)
- PHP/HTML/JavaScript
- Shell/batch scripting
- Lotus Domino/LotusScript
- Some Java/JSP
Open Source Software
Is it safe to run my business on free software?
If you stick with the major solutions such as MySQL, Infobright and Pentaho, the answer is a resounding "yes". The free software that we generally recommend are all backed by companies. These companies offer paid support subscriptions for additional peace of mind.
Can I build a data warehouse on MySQL?
Yes. MySQL can easily handle data warehouse duties for most small to medium sized businesses. If you have immense amounts of data, you can look at a MySQL variant called Infobright, which is a column-based database that can perform complex queries on large data sets very quickly.
General Business Intelligence
What is the difference between business intelligence, corporate performance management and decision support?
From a product sales perspective, most vendors use these terms interchangeably. In the end, they're still talking about warehouses, cubes, reports and dashboards. To keep things simple in the rest of this FAQ, we'll use the term "business intelligence".
Do I need to invest a lot of money in hardware?
Not necessarily. If you've got a VMWare environment, you can easily create a business intelligence environment with virtual machines. If you're into the bleeding edge, you can also consider using a "virtual server in the cloud" with a vendor like Amazon EC2 or Rackspace Cloud. A cloud server usually involves a monthly rate based on server size, uptime and bandwidth. A small server would cost about $100USD per month.
How do I know if I need a data warehouse?
If you've got multiple data sources, complex summary calculations or data that needs cleansing, then you can benefit from a data warehouse.
If I wanted a data warehouse, would that cost me a fortune?
There are three primary cost dimensions to data warehouses: infrastructure, software licensing, and development.
Moore's law has helped significantly in terms of lowering infrastructure costs. A single server today is several orders of magnitude faster than a decade ago.
Software licenses can still be a huge cost barrier, but the advent and evolution of open source software has the potential of eliminating licensing costs altogether.
While people costs haven't diminished, the improvements in the software tools has reduced the amount of time required to develop a data warehouse.
In the end, two of the three cost areas of developing data warehouses have seen drastic cost reductions. Ultimately, the scope and size of your warehouse will dictate the cost, but you can definitely create a modest data warehouse without breaking the bank.
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