What is Advanced Business Intelligence or Advanced Analytics?
Why would anyone need an Advanced Analytics platform?
1. Business benefits
All companies handle data. More and more every day. The magnitude only depends on the size of the company. Data from sales transactions, internal master data, product categories, etc.
This data has huge business value. The proper value can be discovered by data professionals, who can tell the current figures from past/present sales data, and can also predict the future, count efficiency rates, net margin, and many aspects you are curious about. But we can agree that without a clear understanding of this data a company can’t be successful in 2022.
2. Technological modernization
Data professionals agree that data is still best stored in a database. Data professionals also agree that there might be more opportunities in raw data stored in databases, but it is usually two different worlds, relational databases and machine learning are not really close to each other.
The bridge between them is an advanced analytics platform, that can understand and serve both worlds very well, bringing out the best synergies from each.
3. Sustainability: lower and more dynamic costs
Locally: The platform’s costs are dynamic (use less, pay less), but also accurately predictable (hourly rates). Also, you don’t need to hassle with technical physical parts, and there is no need to keep a team of technician handymen standing by until they must urgently fix a serious outage. There is no such outage in Azure.
Globally: Way less energy consumption, and it is only consumed when it is really used. There are no idle blank spots (day vs night energy consumption) and the energy bill is paid by Microsoft, NOT you.
+1 The future of BI is in the cloud (or multi-cloud, or hybrid)
Not so long ago, all big companies stored their business data in their own, huge on-premise data centers. But maintaining and operating this type of infrastructure costs a lot of money and with the size of data growing exponentially this concept seems like a dead end. This led to the birth of the concept of cloud computing, offering a new era for data-oriented systems. Cloud computing is a lot more than a catchy buzzword; it is the next generation infrastructure that modern companies already use.
If your company is not on board yet, you’re already losing out to your competition. In a 2021 O’Reilly survey, 48% of participants said they plan to move most of their apps to a cloud during the next year.
There are options even for those companies who have their security and data confidentiality concerns with the cloud. Services like Microsoft Azure allow you to keep some data on public servers while giving you the option to keep sensitive data on private servers so that you can actively control and monitor it.
An Advanced Analytics Platform is naturally built using cloud technology, and as cloud computing is the future of data systems, an advanced analytics platform is the future of analytics, reporting, and self-service BI.
How to get started?
Author of the post
Balázs Katona, BI Consultant / Data Engineer at Abylon Consulting Linkedin Profile
