The Challenges of Gaining Useful Insight into Data
Rather than going to the trouble of standing up their own analytics platform, Data Intensity via the general availability this week of Analytics1 is making the case for moving business intelligence applications into the cloud altogether.
John Bostick, president of the analytics division of Data Intensity, a provider of managed IT services for ERP applications running in the cloud, says that after engaging with multiple customers regarding the deployment of applications in the cloud, it became increasingly apparent that most of them were looking for a more turnkey experience when it came specifically to analytics.
In fact, Bostick notes that most IT organizations already have ERP applications running on-premises. The rate at which they are willing to move those applications into the cloud varies. But almost all customers view analytics as more a green field application that they are willing to deploy in the cloud. The challenge they face is that almost none of them have any experience first building and then actually running an analytics application in the cloud.
As a service managed by Data Intensity, all the management headaches associated with running Analytics1 are assumed by Data Intensity. At the core of Analytics1 is a mix of Oracle, Microsoft and open source database technologies as well as the middleware, storage and server infrastructure required to run them. Layered around this is a set of data migration and ETL software based on technologies from Informatica, Microsoft and Oracle as well as visualization tools from Tableau Software, Oracle and Microsoft.
Finally, Data Intensity also makes available an analytics service through which organizations can engage its analytics experts for a defined period of time.
By definition, Analytics1 is a hybrid cloud involving a mix of software running on premise and in data center facilities managed by Data Intensity. The ability of most IT organizations to replicate that service, given the complexity of the technologies involved, is fairly limited. As such, Data Intensity is betting that over an extended period of time more IT organizations will vote with their feet to outsource analytics applications than choose to try to deploy and manage those applications themselves.
