In my recent blog posts, I shared insights on real time decisions (How critical are Real Time decisions in business today?) and its significance in our lives in general and in business today. Threats and damages caused by major catastrophe such as earthquakes, Tsunami, Air, rails or ships accidents can be minimized if not averted with the help of predictable and agile analytics at speed of thoughts. What to talk about businesses? Not only product failures, major losses and economic disaster can be avoided but it can be turnaround with major innovation in the area of in-memory analytics.
Analytics is all about gaining insights from the data for better decision making. The business press is abuzz with examples of leading organizations across the world using data-driven insights for strategic, financial and operational excellence.
A recent study on “data-driven decision making” conducted by researchers at MIT and Wharton provides empirical evidence that “firms that adopt data-driven decision making have output and productivity that is 5-6% higher than the competition”.
There are few solutions offered in this space such as SAP and IBM, as well as specialized plays such as QlikTech and Tableau and Oracle has recently announced Exalytics-an engineered system to enable fast and easy ad hoc analysis across large end-user communities using an in-memory processing engine.
Speed of thought and instant response are the hallmarks of its functionality, making it highly applicable to a range of ad hoc, what-if analysis and forecasting and real-time planning applications. The in-memory capabilities are key to enabling a highly interactive and visual analytic experience for end users.
Although Oracle Exalytics is a new product, the architecture is built on several existing Oracle products: parallelized versions of its Times Ten in-memory database and Oracle Essbase OLAP Server (a specialized in-memory version), together with an optimized version of the Oracle BI Foundation Suite (OBI EE 11g for standard enterprise-grade BI query, analysis, reporting, dash boarding, and other visualizations).
Most, if not all, of these software products have been modified to run in-parallel and in-memory data-processing architectures. All of these combine to deliver query optimization, complex multidimensional analysis and planning calculations, and enterprise-wide BI scale, respectively, through a revamped user interface that is designed for “speed-of-thought” analytics.
These predictive analytics capabilities can easily be leveraged on demand anywhere with the access of mobile devices at speed of thought if not only to avert disaster but to minimize risks and to turn it around for growth and prosperity.
