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The key to making informed decisions is having the right data in the right place at the right time. Executives and line managers rely on business intelligence (BI) and reporting tools to deliver timely, accurate, and relevant data for both strategic as well as operational decisions.
A key issue is that all parties in the corporate information supply chain have different requirements regarding BI and reporting tools.
- Users of enterprise reports and BI need information in the proper format, regardless of the origin of the data or how many sources contain the necessary components.
- Application developers and system architects need a way to reduce the time they spend making custom reports.
- IT managers need a way to control access to backend systems, safeguard data, and reduce the amount of data replication used to feed BI tools.
While Business intelligence (BI) and enterprise reporting tools, such as Business Objects, Hyperion, Cognos, Crystal Reports, Microsoft Reporting Services, and Excel, play a critical role in supporting corporate decision makers, they have several limitations. Ipedo XIP addresses these limitations by providing an information integration layer that extends the value and utility of BI and reporting tools.
Limitation of BI
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Ipedo XIP Solution |
Limited access to real-time information
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Recently, BI software has been moving towards providing real-time or near-real-time data. Real-time BI relies on pulling current data from enterprise applications or frequently updated data warehouses.
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Ipedo XIP uses a query-based approach to provide information on demand to BI software. This guarantees current data. For less time-sensitive applications, Ipedo caches frequently used queries to reduce load on back-end systems. |
Inability to access data from multiple relational sources
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Many BI packages are limited to a single data source so their decision support utility is limited to the breadth of the data.
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Ipedo XIP makes all data universally accessible by consolidating different data topologies, formats, and locations. Ipedo appears to BI tools as a single source - containing fresh information. |
Difficulty integrating documents, messages, and other unstructured data
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An increasing amount of corporate information resides in unstructured sources such as Word documents, Excel files, message queues, or service oriented architectures (SOAs). Without an EII layer such as Ipedo, this potentially useful information remains beyond the grasp of reporting tools.
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Ipedo XIP hides the complexity of multiple databases, content repositories, and message streams, each with its own different access protocols. Ipedo provides a flexible and scalable infrastructure that makes BI tools more powerful, useful, and valuable. |
The proliferation of data replication to feed BI and reporting tools
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Many companies replicate enterprise data in departmental data marts just to stage information for BI tools. This replicated data can quickly become outdated or "stale," not to mention very costly.
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Ipedo XIP eliminates the need to replicate local data marts just to create reports. In addition, Ipedo's EII capabilities reduce the load on production systems by retrieving only the required information and making it reusable to multiple tools rather than having each one perform its own queries.
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Ipedo Benefits
- Produces better reports with up-to-date information that spans diverse data sources, both structured and unstructured
- Reduces data replication by leaving information in place and querying on demand
- Cuts the cost of integrating data from disparate systems and external analysis tools by replacing expensive custom programming with simple queries
- Supports multiple business intelligence and enterprise reporting applications from one platform
- Eliminates manual error checking by using real-time business rules processing
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