What are enterprises demanding out of business analytics when the going gets tough? Vishnu Anand of CyberMedia finds out from Chase Hacker, director, Business Intelligence - Asia Pacific for Sybase

What are the new-age challenges that enterprises face with Business Intelligence?

Sybase has attempted to understand how the concept of business intelligence has changed over the years. We now realize that there are three main components of business intelligence that make sense today - volume of data, access to data, and the complexity of questions being asked about the data.

Enterprises worldwide, whichever industry verticals they might belong to, have increasing volumes of data floating around at any given point of time. With businesses and corporations understanding the fact that data should be made available to multiple individuals within the company, and not just a handful of 'policy makers', timely access and dissemination of date becomes vital.

The same data, in most cases, is required by multiple individuals for different purposes. Depending on the individual's need and the company's compliance policies on 'who gets what information', the BI backbone should be able to distribute the data accordingly. Sybase has understood this complex needs, and calls the process 'Extreme Analytics'.

How does business intelligence make sense in a scenario where business output is directly linked to data processes?

Fundamentally, data can provide a lot of insight for an enterprise. Of course, raw data makes sense only to the individual employee dealing with the data, but if the data is organized, processed and disseminated efficiently, it can go a long way in understanding business goals, profitability and, most importantly, leakages in the company.

Imagine a scenario where an enterprise deals day in and day out with multiple customers or clients. If the information (or data) exchanged between the company and each of its clients is processed effectively, it can go a long way in fine-tuning the unique requirements of each client, or to eliminate loss-making initiatives.

During today's testing times, there is nothing more suicidal than misinterpretation of data. Also, if a company already has deployed a BI framework, the data output will aid the company in reducing losses and focusing on the core business.

What are some of the demands from enterprises under current conditions?

Most enterprises have realized overnight that the data they deal with should be accessible to many more users. The collective result of this aggregation results in better business decisions and effective road-maps. Sybase has a suite of offerings for these new challenges.

Our technology, that saves data as columns unlike rows in offerings from other companies, ensures faster responses to queries. When a query is generated, only the relevant array needs to be searched, and not the other neighboring arrays. As a natural off shoot, there is reduction in processing power and ensures faster data results, and better archives for future use.