This year, SAP, Oracle, and IBM collectively spent $15 billion to purchase Business Objects, Hyperion, and Cognos. Given this radical consolidation in the business intelligence industry, it is only natural that customers are starting to carefully re-assess their BI investment strategies. The results of this inevitable technology and strategy re-evaluation could end up surprising many in the industry. In fact, it is likely to precipitate a wave of change in the BI space.

For twenty years, the business intelligence industry has rested on a single, established architectural assumption: in order to analyze large amounts of data from multiple data sources, it is first necessary to move the data out of those source systems, put it in a new location that has been specifically designed to handle queries (also known as a data warehouse), and organize that information in advance to optimize query performance. Twenty years ago (when the BI technology from today’s market leaders was developed), this architecture made sense, because:

• Operational “source” systems are designed to support business activities, not analytics. Pulling data from the source slows those systems down, so the data updates needed to be performed in batch when those systems were experiencing minimal operational load; and
• Joining data from multiple sources using traditional SQL techniques was resource-intensive and time consuming. So data from multiple sources needed to be co-located in a single environment and pre-optimized for certain recurring queries.

Naturally, data warehouses are expensive to build and expensive to maintain, but they are viewed as a necessary evil. Organizations budget millions of dollars every year just to build and maintain data warehouses. Over the last few years, an entire industry, led by rapidly growing companies like Netezza, has emerged just to sell hardware and storage solutions that reduce the expense and complexity of data warehousing.

Business intelligence has been handicapped by traditional data warehouse architecture for twenty years. But times have changed. As organizations re-evaluate their BI strategy in light of industry consolidation, they are starting to ask themselves a fundamental question: What if data warehouses aren’t necessary any more?

Altosoft, an innovative, US-based software provider, has developed a revolutionary new approach that eliminates the need for a data warehouse while delivering extremely high analytical performance across multiple large databases. By using an architectural approach that doesn’t require a data warehouse, Altosoft’s approach fundamentally changes the rules for BI.

By selectively targeting essential source data and combining it with real-time event processing, Altosoft eliminates the need to wait 24+ hours for the data warehouse to be updated in batch in order to get the latest business data and analytics. Altosoft also uses advanced techniques to significantly accelerate complex cross-database calculations like outer joins that in many cases are requisite for delivering useful business analysis. Data dimensions are determined automatically, eliminating the need to define and build data cubes up front for optimized query performance, and dramatically reducing the costs of change if analytical requirements need to be adjusted. As a result, Altosoft is able to deliver powerful, real time data for monitoring and analysis. Installation and configuration is minimal.

Altosoft’s architecture also reduces load on operational systems versus traditional data warehouse or BI techniques by intelligently reducing query load on those systems. Operational database performance is optimized and requirements for expensive hardware investment are minimized.

Altosoft’s warehouse-less analytics are delivered through an easy-to-use web dashboard. Dashboard development is remarkably efficient using an AJAX- and Flash-based drag-and-drop environment. Unlike other BI tools, zero custom code is required. Building personalized dashboard views is as simple as dragging graphical components around a web browser. Work that requires a developer in most BI tools can now be accomplished in a fraction of the time by any business user who knows how to point and click.

Altosoft’s patent-pending approach to BI is saving their customers significant money while dramatically accelerating their “time to data”. A typical Altosoft deployment takes less than two weeks, versus nine to eighteen months for a traditional BI solution based on a data warehouse.

Given this kind of innovation, the time has never been better for businesses to re-think their BI and data warehouse strategies.