Lightweight BI Solution
Customer
Our customer was a large Czech company from the telco segment and a consulting company which participated on the project.
Technologies
The core of the system - Bee - is written in Perl and thus supports almost any operating systems. For the prototype installation, we used Linux and MySQL database for testing. The future BI solution is expected to run on Solaris and Sybase database.
Project Overview
The customer already had a complex BI application but he wanted a secondary, lightweight and significantly cheaper solution with a suitable license for a large group of employees.
With respect to the price issue and with respect to expected future enhancements, we decided to create a solution using opensource software.
During the design phase, it was necessary to consider a lot of items, since BI solutions are very variable in terms of the covered functionality and depth of each part.
The core of a BI solution deals with the information handling. It means preparation of the data (Extract, Transform, Load; ETL), various processing (statistical, neuron networks) or traditional operations like drill up/down/across a slice&dice... and finally presentation of the results in forms of tables, charts, interactive data models, etc. All these components must be tightly integrated to provide consistent output and user experience.
The client prefered traditional analytical tasks (drill up/down/across a slice&dice) with high performance, so we concentrated on this part of BI. After the analysis we proposed two possible solutions, from which we selected a system called Bee made by a small company Insight Strategy. The system had limited functionality, however the vendor from Brno was very flexible to fulfill all requirements.
In the project, we used a commercial branch of Bee that extends the opensource core by adding performance optimizations and support of more database vendors.
IBA CZ, with cooperation with the consulting company, prepared a prototype installation of the BI system allowing the client its own testing and hands-on experience. The evaluation phase was accompanied by a workshop for selected employees of our customer.
Project Summary
In a short time, IBA CZ analyzed the market situation, designed a solution with respect to specific customer needs and prepared a prototype of the system. The customer accepted the solution.
