Five Steps to Prepare for the Global Intercloud
Most financial professionals spend a lot more time gathering data than actually analyzing it. Looking to reduce the amount of time it takes financial analysts to gather data, Adaptive Insights unfurled an update to its business analytics application that adds integration technologies to simplify pulling data into the cloud application that it provides as a service.
Adaptive Suite 2014.2 adds an integration platform for on-premise applications and other cloud services. Adaptive is also unveiling today a separate Adaptive OfficeConnect offering, which simplifies integration of Microsoft Office documents into Adaptive Suite. For example, Adaptive OfficeConnect allows organizations to leverage their existing Microsoft Excel report library and use it to create Adaptive Insights reports that preserve the look and feel of an Excel spreadsheet.
Paul Turner, vice president of product marketing for Adaptive Insights, says the major challenge many organizations have when shifting to the cloud is getting data into the applications that reside there. The latest release of Adaptive Suite, says Turner, solves that issue by making it easier to import spreadsheets or other sources of data into Adaptive Suite with a single click. Via its staging area, users can also store snapshots of history, manage incremental or full data sets, store summaries or data in detail and cleanse and prepare data for analytics, adds Turner.
Turner notes that when it comes to applications running on premise, there’s a lot of maintenance fatigue. Rather than running applications on premise that are several releases out of date, the cloud enables IT organizations to take advantage of all the latest features of an application in a way that eliminates the maintenance fees associated with running out-of-date software. Often, the only technical hurdle to making that shift has been getting all the data that already exists into a cloud application, says Turner.
Lots of organizational challenges are associated with making the shift to the cloud; one of the most significant issues being that so much data resides in existing applications. Starting over from scratch is simply not an option for most users. Organizations need to provide a path to the cloud where the transition for users and their data is made as smooth as possible. That’s a lot easier to do when the cloud application actually provides the integration tools necessary for such a transition.
