Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence Product Comparison Stacey Willis, Katie Tiesworth, & Taneli Ahtiainen Ferris State University

Business Intelligence

Executive Summary Through out this report, you will be introduced to the various aspects of two different business intelligence applications, Informatica Corporation and Boomi. With this, both the positives and the negatives of each application will be reviewed. After this review, a comparison of the two applications will be completed along with recommendations. In conclusion, the reader will also be introduced to what other considerations need to be taken when implementing a business intelligence application.

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Informatica The first organization we looked into is Informatica Corporation. Informatica Corporation is the worlds number one independent provider of data integration software. Thousands of enterprises worldwide depend on Informatica data integration, data quality, and big data solutions to access, integrate, and trust their information assets residing on premise and in the cloud. Informatica was founded in 1993 and has over 2,570 employees. Informatica provides the most high-performance, scalable, adaptive solutions in the information technology industry. With key capabilities such as adaptive load balancing, parallel processing, interference handling, memory management, 64-bit processing support, and a variety of methods available to optimize performance for company infrastructures, Informatica delivers the superior performance our organization can count on to support the most demanding data integration needs. The Informatica Corporation offers a wide variety of products and solutions. Some include application lifecycle management, B2B data exchange, cloud integration, complex data processing, data masking, data quality, data replication, data virtualization, master data management, and enterprise data integration. This company even offers business and industry solutions for government, acquisitions and mergers, energy and utilities, healthcare, manufacturing, and much more. These components form a toolset for establishing and maintaining enterprise-wide data warehouses, including the key ETL processing. Informatica currently has a customer base of over 4,500 companies. Some of Informatica customers include organizations such as EBay, Duke Energy, Best Buy, Deloitte, Pfizer, and many other global wide companies. This company also has many global partners. Some include IBM, Accenture, EDS, Oracle, and Deloitte just to name a few.

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According to the Informatica organization website, Informatica integration services have a go-live success rate of near 100%. They also have a 95% renewal rate which is significantly higher than the industry average of 86%. Below are few examples of the success stories companies have seen from implementing Informatica products and services. ACH Food Companies reported that from using Informatica they saved $3 million by shaving three months off the data migration for their ERP project. Ellie Mae achieved 40% lower TCO and 7x faster project delivery migrating from legacy CRM to salesforce.com. Duke Energy saved $3 million in operations and maintenance cost over 2 years. They reduced M&A consolidation time and cost by 35%, and achieved economies of scale with 17 projects rolled out in the first 15 months of their Integration Competency Center. Rabobank lowered the cost of system maintenance by 40%, leading to over $1 million in annual savings. KPN Telecommunications now has access to accurate real-time data in their call center. As a result, the customer service representatives now spend 10% less time on each call, had a 5% increase in productivity, a 5% increase in average revenue per user, and have cut customer churn by 10% annually. Informatica organization has many products and services that would be beneficial for a company. However, according to etl-tools.com, the company does have weaknesses to take into consideration. First of all, Lack of functionality in mapping and workflow development as compared to other integration service vendors. For example, there is lack of refresh options in designer and workflow manager. If for instance a source definition changes, a developer needs to disconnect and connect again. Another weakness is the lack of a possibility to do loops within

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Informatica workflows. Also, when a workflow is running it's not possible to run another session (the error message says: Could not start execution of this workflow because the current run on this Informatica Server has not completed yet). Some other notable weaknesses are that several customers have reported issues with importing XML export files, sorting values, and moving objects from one folder to another. Below is a diagram that list more strengths and weaknesses of Informatica integration services.

Strengths
Highly specialized in ETL and Data Integration and focuseed on those topics not BI as a whole

Weaknesses

Can be costly

Most substancial size and resources on the market of data integration tool vendors

Limited in overall IT field experience

Consistent track record, solid technology, straightforward learning curve, ability to address realtime data integration schemes

Several partnerships dimenishing the value of technologies

Focus on B2B data exchange

Looks at solutions from other IT companies on technology enhancements other than data integration and quality

Even though Informatica does have weaknesses, it may be a very good idea for our company to consider implementing Informatica for our integration service needs. As shown above, many

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major organizations have seen extremely beneficial results. With accurate planning, it is evident that we too can see those same improvements if not better. Boomi Boomi is a provider of on-demand integration technology and the creator of AtomSphere. AtomSphere is sold as both a service and on-premise software. It is the industrys first integration platform-as-a-service (like Salesforce.com and NetSuite, among others.). AtomSphere connects any combination of SaaS, cloud, and on premise applications without the burden of installing and maintaining integration software or appliances. Boomis mission is to revolutionize integration and make it accessible and affordable to businesses of all sizes.

Boomi has made it easier to exchange data between public cloud services and on-premise applications in anticipation of greater use of public clouds by large organizations. AtomSphere offers the ability, through a caching layer to transmit only data that has been changed since the last time it was transferred. AtomSphere provides a way to connect to cloud services without going through the messy business of writing code to connect to each cloud provider's application programming interface (API). It has a graphical user interface for administrators and analysts to connect different systems by way of linking icons on a palette.

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Boomi/Atomspheres API Interface has three dimensions, (a) Build, (b) Depoly, and (c) Manage.

Build is used to design and configure your integration. The creation of integration processes for application integration, data integration, and B2B integration are simple. By identifying the common steps needed to automate complex integration scenarios, a series of common integration components have been created and are available to all users. The next dimension is Deploy. Once your integration processes are built, they are deployed into lightweight runtime engines known as Atoms. The Boomi Atom contains one or more complete end-to-end integration processes, and executes those integration processes with absolutely no dependency on Boomi's platform. The last dimension is Manage. The Manage functionality of the Boomi platform enables users to monitor the health and activity of all Atom's, review detailed logs of what processes ran and when, how long they took to run, the result, how many objects were processed, etc. Another aspect of Boomi is its ability to Embed, or productize integration to extend your application. AtomSphere makes it possible to pre-package an Integration Widget. Integration Widgets consist of a simple web-based user interface with a wizard-style approach that allows your customers to step through the configuration and deployment of an integration that you built for them. This product also allows you to develop and maintain your own connectors through Connector SDK. A network of interconnected SaaS, PaaS, cloud, and on-premise applications. Connectors allow access to this ecosystem of applications and are one of the key components behind Boomi's Visual Integration technology.

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As pertaining to security, with cloud integration, data is moving between ownership boundaries. The need to enforce security policies and audit data moves was really not that important when integration was behind the firewall. Because the Atom can reside on your network or be hosted in our data center, it is important that there are extensive security measures in place in order to prevent any compromise in your data or the Atom. During deployment, the Atom and all of its contents are verified and authenticated by the Boomi data center before activation. Data is never sent to the AtomSphere data center unless explicitly configured by user to do so. The diagram illustrates the password security method that is applied when a user registers for Boomi AtomSphere and how passwords are encrypted.All communication from Atom to data center uses SSL 128 bit encryption. Boomi is a straight forward tool. The interface looks simple to use and it holds wide debugging. It covers every phase of your ETL process. The engine does most of the work. Building a process is object oriented and you need to know little about it if the data you are trying to obtain is supported by Boomi or its easily transformed to a flat file. Boomis customer support offers to help on integrations that are not so simple, however, this support requires a monthly fee. Doing an implementation is like attaching files from different locations on a computer and attaching files that are in the cloud, googledocs, salesforce.com etc. Every build needs minor adjustment but nothing that I couldnt do myself. Reading help files and watching their how to

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do it videos helps. I didnt try to implement integrations that were not supported. Due to this, the review was a bit short. However, implementing that data which was supported was fairly smooth. Boomi has a good, wide, and flexible customer service and customer training approach. It is included in a package. Its has monthly fee and coverage of a package which decides the monthly fee. I only used training videos and FAQs. Security issues are well stated and cared for. Comparison Overall, both products offer varying benefits. While Informatica has the ability to support demanding integration needs, Boomi provides a more simplistic way for users to set up their business intelligence application without the need to write additional code which could be confusing. While Informatica has the claim of being the number one provider of data integration software with a long list of large companies for clients, as well as a straight forward learning curve, Boomi has created their product with the mission to revolutionize integration and make it accessible and affordable to businesses of all sizes. While some products will charge over 150,000 dollars for the first year of licensing, Boomi is reported to cost under 20,000 dollars. It has been noted that the use of Informatica can be costly. Although there are costs associated with the use of Boomi, such as the cost if support is needed, again their goal is to remain affordable to companies of all sizes. When deciding which product would be more appropriate, consideration to take into account may include: (a) the size of the company, (b) the type of support structure and knowledge available within the company, (c) the size and complexity of the data warehouse being created, and (d) the amount of funding available. From the above comparison, it would be recommended that those companies which have larger more complex data needs should consider Informatica as their choice of product.

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However, those companies which are smaller with less complex data needs and a smaller support structure should consider Boomi as their product of choice. Additional Needs Along with choosing the appropriate software, there also needs to be an effective management system in place when implementing any kind of business intelligence program. This management system needs to begin with support from an organizations leadership and an agreement to move from current and differing reporting structures to a more uniform and agreed upon structure. To assist in this process, organizations need to improve their data collection practices. Many companies have multiple and disparate data collection practices with inconsistent data types and definitions. Prior to implementing a business intelligence system, these differences need to be vetted out. The organization will also have to decide on what personnel will be charged with maintaining the data. The role of Data Steward should be filled with the purpose of creating and enforcing the policy and procedures which will govern the data. Those who own varying aspects of the data, or data owners, should be identified. For example, the Human Resources department may be charge with all employee data. Those who will use the data, or Business Users, need to be identified. Along with this, those who are identified as the Business Users need to be educated on how to appropriately abstract the data. This education should not only occur upon implementation, but as time goes on. Last, the information technology staff who will manage the varying parts of the technology must be identified. Recommendations Although the implementation of a new business intelligence program may be resource consuming and costly, the benefits that a well established business intelligence program will

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bring out weigh the downfalls. Not only will business intelligence allow a company to minimize guess work and promote informed decisions, but it will allow the company to find answers to questions quickly, when and where you need them. A well placed business intelligence program will allow a company to increase their visibility into what their customers are, or are not, buying, as well as help identify trends which could lead to profits. Also, because of the increased visibility of the data, a company can visualize where resources can be streamlined as well as improve efficiencies. Last, a good business intelligence program will not only allow you to investigate how your company is currently doing, but will allow you see to how your company has done over varying time periods.

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References Adeptia (2012). Inetgration vendor comparison. Retrieved from http://www.adeptia.com/products/integration_vendor_comparison.html Dell (2012). Connect once, integrate everywhere. Retrieved from http://www.boomi.com/solutions ETL-Tools.Info. (2012) Business intelligence data warehousing- ETL. Retrieved Wednesday, July 18, 2012 from http://etl-tools.infor/informatica/informatica-weaknesses.html Enterprise Apps Today. (2010). Ten Benefits of Business Intelligence Software. Retrieved Thursday, July 19, 2012 from http://www.enterpriseappstoday.com/businessintelligence/ten-benefits-of-business-intelligence-software-2.html Glasser, J. & Stone, J. (2008). Effective use of business intelligence. Healthcare Financial Management. Informatica Corporation. (2012). Why Informatica, why not. Retrieved Monday, July 16, 2012 from www.informatica.com PC Business Center (2011). Dell boomi connects the cloud to the enterprise. Retrieved from
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/226246/dell_boomi_connects_the_cloud_to_t he_enterprise.html