Business Intelligence Lowdown

BI Booming in Asia-Pacific

The business of business intelligence (BI) is booming in the Asia-Pacific region. With intense competition and the need to comply with regulations driving the market, Malaysia is set to register BI applications sales of $10 million by the end of this year, according to IDC. The research firm also predicts that this figure will double in another four years.

Japan already has a whopping BI market worth $340 billion, and other countries in the region, though just off the starting block, are picking up speed. The BI industry will grow at a compounded annual rate of 13.5 percent over the five-year period between 2005 and 2010, says Sharon Tan, senior analyst with IDC’s Asia-Pacific unit.

The largest users of BI in Malaysia are the government, telecommunications companies and manufacturing units, which leverage analytical tools and applications to make sense of the daily volumes of transactional data. Tan says Malaysia has a long way to go before it can put business performance management (BPM) to optimal use. Training and education, easy-to-use software, industry-specific solutions and management attitude are factors that will play a key role in the adoption of BI among other sectors and industries.

According to IDC, ten years from now, the BI as we know it today will morph into intelligence process automation (IPA). The research company defines IPA as the ability to automate simple, operational decisions. BI will go past the analysts and data-mining users to the mass market, says IDC.

Oracle Ships Data Warehousing Solutions

Data warehousing solution providers can now take advantage of Oracle’s two Oracle Warehouse Builder 10g database tools that were released earlier this week, to manage data and metadata lifecycles. Release 2 is a database design and Extraction, Transformation and Load (ETL) tool. Customers can also buy extra ETL and Data Quality options at $10,000 per CPU or $200 per user and $15,000 per CPU or $300 per user respectively. Connectors for PeopleSoft Enterprise, Oracle E-Business Suite and SAP come at $20,000 per connector per target application. The ETL options can be used in heterogeneous environments while the data quality options can be used for data profiling, cleansing, auto-correction, and auditing. Biz Intelligence Pipeline reports:

Oracle's new tool also reflects a trend in which the worlds of data warehouses, traditionally used for historical data, and operational databases, typically used for everyday tasks, are becoming more closely linked.