Overview
When discussing BI solutions, it's understood they serve as the backbone for any business. However, with growing volume of data, traditional BI solutions are facing multiple challenges, including low performance and inability to ingest more data. Modernizing your BI solution with big data technologies can enhance its capabilities significantly.
This article elaborates on six major reasons for modernization.
1. Today's data is unmanageable
Organizations are surrounded by a variety of data that is huge in volume and high in velocity: emails, pictures, videos, audio, and flowing streams of texts such as social media messages and blogs. Traditional BI solutions were tuned to handle only high quality structured data. Mining information from data available in various formats and sizes was not possible. Big data technologies make it possible to analyze this messy data and allow focus on what's important for business insights into customer behavior and preferences.
2. Quick data access
Research shows that managers spend 80% of their time searching for information before making business decisions. Having the right information when needed is critical for efficient business operations. Traditional BI solutions often face performance issues when running analysis over longer time ranges. Big data technologies with distributed computing power can handle huge computations in fractions of time.
3. Easier decision making
Often, only key business people are well versed at using BI tools. Empowering staff with modern big data solutions enables self-service analytics. For example, retailers can instantly locate which items are running low in inventory without waiting for manual reports.
4. BI is not only about historic data
Previously, BI was used primarily for historic perspective, understanding "how things were." Modern big data solutions enable real-time analytics and predictive capabilities. In the past, BI tools took a long time identifying area-wise product sales trends, but now this can be done in minutes.
5. Survive in the competition
Big data adoption is increasingly common among market leaders. Major e-commerce players like Amazon, Ebay, Flipkart, and Snapdeal use these technologies extensively. The e-commerce market is so mature in technology adoption that competitors must modernize to remain competitive.
6. Easy to get started
Big data enabled BI solutions can store and process data that is horizontally scalable, meaning you can expand as needed without major restructuring. Starting can be as simple as creating a low-cost data lake for your data. Traditional BI solutions rely on complex ETL processes pulling from data warehouses, whereas modern solutions offer more flexibility.
Conclusion
Modernizing BI solutions with big data technologies provides multiple competitive advantages and operational benefits for enterprises.