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Executive Summary 2
Endeca Latitude 8
Summary 12
About ENDECA 12
Executive summary
Over the past 20 years, the speed of business and the nature of the information
businesses collect, share, and analyze have changed dramatically. During
that same period of time, the approach to business intelligence (BI) has
essentially been fixed and has largely focused on efficiently generating
reports for a few select individuals within the company. While this reporting
is highly valuable and must continue, it is no longer sufficient.
The traditional approach to BI, with its heavy reliance on data modeling
and its appeal to a few, highly sophisticated users, just is not capable of
responding to new business requirements such as the need to make mid-
term course corrections, to push information to a wider audience, and to
consider a wider variety of data types, including both structured data and
unstructured content. Efforts to employ agile development processes and
to replace existing architecture components with faster versions of the
same components simply do not go far enough. To date these solutions
have had little effect on addressing the backlog of BI requests that builds
as demand for modifications and new analyses increase. In addition, just
making the existing infrastructure faster does not address the need to
incorporate new data types or provide the ease of access that the broader
user-base demands.
To adapt to the new business requirements, organizations should augment
their traditional BI reporting infrastructures with technology designed
to handle the new data integration and presentation requirements. By
adding a specialized database optimized for exploration, integration tools
for unstructured content, advanced search, and visualization capabilities,
IT organizations can both provide their business decision makers with
new insight into critical business problems and dramatically reduce the
BI backlog that has plagued them.
To make informed decisions, people often must consider a broader set of data from a variety of systems. But
because this data is so diverse, it defies conventional modeling
Traditional BI systems are not designed to meet these new demands. In particular,
traditional BI has difficulty supporting three key trends that represent the future of BI and
enterprise information:
> Increased Importance of Unstructured Content Traditional BI processes have almost
entirely ignored unstructured content, such as word processing documents, email
messages, and even text-based fields on structured forms. The reason – the structured
data of relational databases was the low hanging fruit. It was easy to model and the
content from unstructured documents was not. We convinced ourselves that we could
live without knowing what information was captured in the text. But the exponential
growth of the Internet has both increased the importance and the volume of unstructured
text. Especially in consumer-oriented businesses, consumer sentiment as shown in
blogs and Web content, including RSS-based news feeds and social media sites such
as Twitter and Facebook, can no longer be ignored. Yet, traditional BI platforms, with
their focus on structured data and heavy emphasis on modeling have had a difficult time
extracting value from that data and combining it with structured data.
If architected and designed
> The Need to Address Emerging Challenges with Midcourse Corrections The
properly, traditional BI applica-
competitive battle is increasingly being waged on how organizations address new
tions provide deep insights into
questions in the moment. Agile operations mean that businesses can make rapid
past and present events, as well
adjustments to new information and new conditions. Adjustments may be slight or
as help identify patterns in past
major and new questions can arise at any time, whether it is mid quarter, mid-month,
sales, marketing, supply chain,
or even intra-day. Typically these involve new data sources that are being introduced
and financial performance.
every day, and existing sources that are undergoing constant change. The heavy
But in this new age of future-
modeling burden of traditional BI complicates the task of unifying data, often removes
facing business analytics, any
its distinctions, and prevents decision makers from having a clear view of the most
BI user without strong advanced
up-to-date information.
analytics capabilities is seriously
deficient and at a competitive > Decision Making and Enterprise Information Extended to More and Less Technical
disadvantage. Traditional BI Users An agile organization is one that can sense trends and changing conditions and
tools effectively answer past- react quickly. That requires all organizations within the enterprise and all levels of
facing questions such as, “What employees, regardless of their technical skill, to be an information receptor and to either
happened?” and “Why did it be able to feed that information back to the central part of the organization or, ideally,
happen?” But they do not offer respond appropriately on their own. Analytic tools associated with traditional BI have
much assistance with proactive generally been designed for sophisticated power users, which has limited the use of
concerns such as, “What will those tools to only a small fraction of the decision-making population in a company.
happen?,” “What may happen
next?,” and “What could possibly
happen if I take action X versus
Making Existing Infrastructure Go Faster
action Y? Is Just Not Enough
Some organizations have responded to the need for greater agility by improving the scale
Business Intelligence (BI) and speed of their data warehouses, databases, and other elements of their BI infrastructure.
Polishes Its Crystal Ball
Forrester Research
Still others have responded by implementing agile software development processes, such as
September 2009 a Scrum process, to help their IT groups respond more quickly to business requests. While
these changes have resulted in BI systems that can process more data than ever before and
software development teams that can release new reports more quickly, they simply do not
go far enough.
Neither improvement, for example, directly improves decision making agility. Analytic tools
remain too difficult to use for a broad audience of less-technical users and unstructured
content is still ignored. So while the speed of the traditional infrastructure has improved,
it has not improved the decision making capability of the organization because we have
not enriched the data that can be considered for decisions and we have not expanded the
number of people that can access and use the data. Increasingly, this makes the IT group
appear as if they are out of touch with the needs of the business.
Similarly, neither of these improvements provides a good solution for reducing the data
modeling burden, which is the primary bottleneck restricting the throughput of the IT
organization. In fact, according to some experts, even an agile software development
approach does not address this issue because it calls either for ignoring modeling altogether,
which seems unrealistic, or it calls for very rapid modeling, which, if left as a people-driven
process, is easier said than done.
Without a reliable, streamlined data modeling procedure, IT will continue to have difficulty
keeping pace with the requests from business users. Every report and dashboard that is
created spurs additional questions. “Is this normal?” “Why did it change?” Questions
Even the most powerful, that seem simple turn into significant IT projects if the questions have not already been
advanced, and well-architected anticipated and modeled. Because new questions are created faster than they can be
BI applications have one serious modeled, a backlog of BI requests builds. The BI backlog has a number of undesirable side
weakness: They are only as good effects. For decision makers, it can limit their ability to make rapid, mid-course corrections.
as the underlying data model. For IT managers, it can make them look unresponsive to the needs of the business. It also
Whether relational, multidimen- causes unwanted headaches for IT because it drives the business users to develop their own
sional, or hierarchical, data reporting capability outside of IT’s data governance and security models.
models that form the basis for
all BI applications have to be
designed based on all potential A New Architecture for BI Agility
questions that might be asked Since traditional systems and processes cannot be easily modified to address the need
of the BI application in the future. for agility and the new BI requirements, a new agile architecture is needed to extend the
traditional BI infrastructure. This architecture should be designed for ease of use, so that it
Business Intelligence (BI) can help a broad audience, and flexibility, so that it can support a broad set of analytic tools
Polishes Its Crystal Ball
Forrester Research and easily incorporate new, varied, and changing data sources.
September 2009
This new infrastructure should not replace the legacy BI infrastructure. In fact, it is best
to leverage the traditional BI infrastructure for its strength – historical reporting – and
compliment it with the agile architecture. Over time, the agile infrastructure may prove
that it can also handle the historical reporting task as well, but given the enterprise’s
reliance on historical reporting and the value that is still being derived from the traditional
BI infrastructure, a prudent strategy and one that reduces the risks for the IT staff is to
postpone that decision to later.
With this architecture, IT is able to quickly set up applications where business users can
fully explore varied data and can answer questions they may not anticipate at the outset
of their exploration. This brings agility to decision making and also reduces the BI backlog
because it reduces the number of BI requests sent to IT.
Endeca Latitude
Endeca solves the new BI requirements around agility with Endeca Latitude – a new
product that combines the simplicity of search with the power of BI.
Endeca Latitude is used to create BI applications that present users with wide-ranging
data sources and data types and provide users with discovery capability – an ability to
ask new questions that lead to better outcomes. Because of their breadth and flexibility, a
single application designed with Endeca Latitude can take the place of literally hundreds
of traditional BI reports. Just as importantly, applications developed with Endeca Latitude
embody the best search technology so business users can productively use them with
essentially zero training.
IT organizations also benefit from Endeca Latitude. Endeca Latitude reduces the time,
In the case of Endeca, based effort, and cost of creating BI applications by enabling IT to quickly and easily combine
on XML architecture, data, data and content of any type, format or source without complex modeling, integration or
metadata, and applications app development, even as the data changes. In addition, Endeca Latitude can enhance a
(reports and dashboards) are traditional data warehouse and reporting infrastructure by offering a cost-effective way to
actually one and the same. deliver applications that answer unanticipated, in-the-moment questions.
The organization realized there was a need for a new information system that enabled
brokers to quickly see important changes in the market and match those changes up
with the client who, based on their investment profile, would be most interested in that
information. Endeca Latitude was the only technology capable of combining structured
information such as stock tickers with unstructured information such as news reports, and
providing one navigable view of that data.
With Endeca Latitude this organization was able to provide 13,000 users with a zero-
training interface that utilizes the ease of search through Guided Navigation and helpful
visualizations, such as heat maps, for easily analyzing regional sales volumes and promotion
performance. They now have clear visibility into sales performance by brand, product,
distributor, campaign and even dynamic product groupings to analyze sales performance.
This has enhanced understanding of why certain promotional programs are more effective
so that those efforts can be repeated.
By implementing Endeca Latitude, this customer has a single search interface across
multiple operating systems that includes structured and unstructured content from sources
such as the local newspapers. The application enables proactive discovery of emerging
trends and threats through correlating diverse data to showcase patterns in people, objects,
locations and events. Police officers using this application on a daily basis are able to
discover the important correlations in data that help identify and apprehend perpetrators,
prevent crime, and protect citizens.
Summary
Today most organizations seek to have more agility in their operations and their decision
making. These goals are driving new requirements of the BI infrastructure, such as the
need to expand the number and nature of BI users and the need to easily integrate a greater
volume and variety of enterprise data. Traditional BI has struggled to support the level
of agility required. Simply improving the speed of the IT organization or the existing BI
infrastructure is not enough to address the new requirements. To improve the agility of the
BI infrastructure, organizations must add new technology to their existing BI infrastructure,
such as a specialized database that can lessen the data modeling effort and search tools that
can be used without any training. The agile BI infrastructure promises to reduce the BI
backlog and simultaneously provide users with greater analysis and exploration capability
to improve countless decisions made daily across an enterprise.
About Endeca
Endeca is a search and business intelligence software company that improves daily
decisions for employees and purchase decisions for customers. Endeca’s unique innovation,
the hybrid search-analytical database, enables IT organizations to deliver solutions with
consumer ease-of-use on diverse and changing information. Endeca solutions drive
hundreds of millions of dollars in reduced costs and increased revenues in the world’s most
demanding decision-making environments in organizations like Boeing, Cox Newspapers,
the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, Ford Motor Company, Hyatt, IBM, the Library of
Congress, Texas Instruments, and Walmart.com.
ENDECA 101 Main Street, Cambridge, MA 02142 USA | T 617.674.6000 | F 617.674.6001 | info@endeca.com | endeca.com
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