Real Time BI in the Real World
- by tobin.gilman(at)oracle.com
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One of my favorite BI offerings from Oracle
is a solution called Oracle Real Time Decisions. Whenever I mention this
product in customer meetings, eyes light up. There are some fascinating
examples of customers using it to up-sell, cross-sell, increase customer
retention, and reduce risk in real time, with off the charts return on
investment. I plan to share some of those stories in a future blog.
In this post however, I want to share some far more common real time analytics
use case scenarios that are being addressed with widely deployed Oracle BI and data
integration technologies
Not all real time BI applications require continuous learning, predictive
modeling, and data mining. Many simply require the ability to integrate,
aggregate, and access information that is current (typically within in few
minutes or a few seconds). The use cases are infinite. A few I've
seen:
· Purchasing
agents need to match demand against available inventory
· Manufacturing
planners need to monitor current parts and material against scheduled build
plans
· Airline
agents need to match ticket demand against flight schedules,
· Human
resources managers need to track the status of global hiring requisitions against
current headcount authorizations...you get the idea.
One way of doing this is to
run reports or federated queries directly against transactional systems.
That approach can be viable if you only need to access simple data sets on rare
occasions. High volume and complex queries can quickly bog down
performance of mission critical transactional systems. There is an
architecturally simple way of solving the problem, and it's being applied by
real companies around the world to solve real needs in real time.
Cbeyond is an Atlanta, GA
based provider of voice, data and mobile business applications
delivers. They deliver real time information to its call center agents
as they are interacting with their customers. The data they need resides
in production CRM and other transactional systems, but instead or
reporting directly off the those systems, data is first moved to an operational
data store (ODS). Rather than running data intensive, time consuming, and
performance degrading batch ETL routines to populate the ODS, Cbeyond uses
Oracle Golden Gate software to incrementally capture and move only the changed
records from log files of the transactional systems every few minutes.
There is no impact on transactional system performance, and the information
needed by call center representatives is up to date. Oracle Business
Intelligence software presents the information to services reps in a rich,
visual, and highly interactive format.
Avea is similar to
Cbeyond. They are a telecommunications company who integrates billing and
customer information in an ODS that is accessed by their call center agents in
real time using Oracle Golden Gate and Oracle Business Intelligence.
They've taken it a step further by using the ODS to feed a data warehouse.
The operational data store provides the current information needed by call
center agents during "in flight" customer interactions. The
data warehouse is used for more sophisticated analysis of historical
data. For maximum performance, both the ODS and data warehouse run on the
Oracle Exadata Database Machine.
These are practical
illustrations of companies addressing real time reporting and analysis needs
using established business intelligence/data warehousing methodologies and
tools common to many IT departments. If real time BI could benefit your
organization, you may be already be closer than you thought to having the
pieces in place to solving the problem.
Give us a shout if you are
interested in learning more or if you have an interesting use or approach to
real-time BI.
