Analysis solutions provider Epistemic is rethinking the way Online
Analytical Processing (OLAP) is used with its latest software
release.
With Version 2.0 of the Java-based Epistemic Analytics Toolkit, due
out in July, the company is supporting Web services to help
companies reach the next phase of enterprise applications, such as
ERP (enterprise resource planning), CRM (customer relationship
management), and SCM (supply-chain management), according to Vidur
Dhanda, founder of the company.
"Analytics is the second phase of enterprise software. The first
phase is getting the data in the applications. Now that we've got
the data, the question becomes what to do with it," Dhanda said.
"There is a value to bringing together the ERP and CRM with the
financials."
Web services protocols Soap (Simple Object Access Protocol) and
WSDL (Web Services Description Language) enable Epistemic to impart
analytics on data sources, Dhanda said.
"The Web services interface essentially provides an analytics
utility as a true service. Given that our toolkit is datasource
agnostic, we can inject analytics into a workflow or business
process," Dhanda said.
That allows manual processes to be more automated than they
currently are, Dhanda added. For instance, users can put rules into
an OLAP engine, and then look at a multi-dimensional view.
The toolkit also includes what Dhanda called Dynamic OLAP, or the
ability for users to define metrics and rules on the fly. So if a
user wants to know who is buying yellow socks, where, and at which
store types, that analysis can be run. And when the user then wants
to alter the analysis to find out which buyers of yellow socks also
buy blue socks that can be done as well.
"You don't have to bring the data to the process, you can bring the
process to the data," Dhanda said.
He added that the advantages include faster analytics, and more
accurate results because data can be pulled from a variety of
sources, be it enterprise applications or databases.
"The goal is to project the model onto the data, thereby reducing
latency, that being the time it takes to run the analytics," said
Bob Moran, vice-president and managing director of data knowledge
and analytics, at Aberdeen Group, a consultancy in Boston.
Moran continued, however, that Epistemic's approach to solving the
latency problem is only one of several, and that companies can also
use caching or delta management, which is the practice of sending
off only changes to data.
Epistemic is not the only analytics company to support Web
services. Business Objects earlier this year announced a Web
services software development kit designed to extend the reach of
business intelligence applications and extranets as Web services,
which will be available later this month.
In addition to the Web services support in Epistemic Analytics
Toolkit, Version 2.0 includes performance gains and tweaks on the
information delivery end that make it easier to develop Web-based
applications without bothering with HTML coding, Dhanda said.