Information Technology plays a key role in business operations. Large amounts of data are being generated by businesses each day. It thus becomes important to store, access and use this data for informed decision making.
Businesses are willing to spend large amounts of money on tools and technologies that help in managing this data.
Businesses thus need a reliable, consolidated and robust tool that can integrate reporting and analysis of its data at different levels within the organization. Data warehousing is ‘the’ tool that can help business in all these fronts and provide them the competitive edge over their rivals.
What Is Data Warehousing?
It can store current and historical data and helps managers with the decision making process. Business can use different tools to access this data for a wide range of purposes.
It can be analyzed thoroughly and helps determine trends over a period of time which helps in creating reports and also used for long term business planning.
Benefits of Data Warehousing Solutions
Enhanced Business Intelligence
Data Warehousing Solutions offer data from various sources offering a 360 degree view of the business. Thus the top management or executives won’t have to take decisions in the blind and have actionable information at their disposal.
A lot of business functions such as marketing, inventory management, financial management and sales are streamlined.
Standardization of Data
This allows users across the organization make use of data generated by other departments. They can easily restructure data and fix bad data in a manner that makes sense to the business users.
Time Saving Tool
With these solutions in place businesses can access critical data from a number of sources all of which is compiled in one place.
Managers won’t waste time retrieving data from multiple sources. They don’t have to rely on their IT team to source important data and report which is critical in industries where the level of competition is high.
Access Historical Data
When it comes to decision making historical data can often play an important role. Historical data helps in predicting future trends.
Since these solutions store large amounts of historical data, businesses can easily access and analyze them when needed. A transactional database won’t be able to store this data. Warehousing maintains data history even when the data has been deleted from the source.
Increase ROI
It has been statistically proven that businesses have generated more revenue upon adopting data warehousing. It has saved money in terms of data storage and its accessibility. It allows the end-user to make better use of data and this helps in catering to clients faster and increase business.
Top Data Warehousing Solutions
IBM
IBM offers businesses a wide variety of data warehousing and analytic solutions that aid decision making and adopt best approach for different business situations.
From traditional multidimensional and data mining to mashups and industry models, these tools simplify and accelerate business approach.
These highly customizable tools power capabilities for operational and strategic analytics. The bouquet of tools includes DB2, IBM InfoSphere Warehouse, Informix and IBM InfoSphere Mashup Hub.
Oracle
One of the market leaders in data warehousing, Oracle’s Exadata and Database 12c offer complete data warehousing solution. These tools are complete with in-database advanced analytics and offer a fast, reliable, and cost-effective platform for businesses of all scales.
They help businesses meet the complex reporting and analytics needs in a competitive business environment.
Exadata Database Machine is a complete package of hardware and software solution delivering extreme performance for data warehousing and brings down data storage cost by ten times.
SAP
The SAP data warehousing solution helps businesses speed up data search, exploration, and analysis. It allows decisions makers in an organization to get real-time insights into large volumes of data and make accurate decisions.
The high-performance data warehousing tools streamlines business operations and allows businesses to capture, store, analyze, and manage data in secure and scalable data warehouse.
This solution can easily be incorporated with pre-delivered extractors, business content and business-oriented modeling tools.
Microsoft
The data warehousing solution from Microsoft incorporates a wide variety of data sources. These include mobile, social, scanners, devices, RFID, web logs, analytics, click streams etc.
This solution enables business users to generate real-time queries on their data. Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 Parallel Data Warehouse and brings in Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) architecture to the table.
With these added functionalities businesses stand to gain from performance, flexibility and hardware choice allowing them to excel in their everyday operations.
Amazon
Amazon Redshift is a fast petabyte-scale data warehouse service that is fully cloud based and hence highly cost effective.
It costs about one-tenth of what popular solutions in the market would cost and has become very popular. It can efficiently analyze all business data and can be integrated along with existing business intelligence tools.
It has been built on the Massive Parallel Processing (MPP) model and is a part of Amazon’s every growing cloud computing platform Amazon Web Services.
Latest Trends in the Industry
Lots of enterprise data is generated using mobile devices, social media traffic, networked sensors. Thus contemporary warehousing solutions are adding new capabilities that can handle new types of data.
In the recent years we are also witnessing a shift towards cloud based data warehousing solutions. These mostly act under the SaaS model and have made deep inroads amongst small businesses and start-ups.
Data warehousing has become ever more critical for businesses than in the past.
Though these solutions have been around for years today businesses cannot operate, expand and remaining competitive without involving these in operations. They offer insights into two most crucial factors for any business - data on customers and business performance.
