The Art of the Possible with Business Analytics

It has been established beyond doubt that data and its analysis can have a huge impact on an organization’s top line and bottom line. Business Analytics helps organizations deliver better business performance in two ways – by optimizing business processes and by helping to innovate. Optimization helps organizations be efficient and effective by taking inefficiencies out of the business processes and focusing on the high impact opportunities. Innovation on the other hand helps organizations by uncovering new customer segments, new product categories, new markets, new business models etc.

The styles of analyzing data are many fold from answering questions like “what is going on?” to “why are the things the way they are?” to “what will happen if I do X or Y?” to “what does the future look like?” Broadly speaking the styles of analytics can be classified into three categories:

·         Exploratory Analysis: The objective of exploratory or investigative analysis is exploration and analysis of complex and varied data – whether structured or unstructured for information discovery.  This style of analysis is particularly useful when the questions aren’t well formed or the value and shape of the data isn’t well understood.

·         Descriptive Analytics: The objective of this style of analysis is to answer historical or current questions like what is going on. why are the things the way they are?. This is the most common style of analysis and here the questions as well as the value and shape of data are well understood.

·         Predictive Analysis: Predictive analysis aims at painting a picture of the future with some reasonable certainty.

So, what’s art of possible with business analytics? It’s the application of the above three styles of analytics to a business scenario for better insights, decisions and results. Let’s try and explain this with an example. Consider this scenario:

You are a Financial Services firm e.g. a large bank and are trying to improve profitability. You read Larry Seldon’s book titled “Angel Customers and Demon Customers” and agree with the findings that 20% of your top customers bring in 80% of the profits and would like to manage you business as a portfolio of customers as opposed to portfolio of products. So, how do you do that? The answer is business analytics.

You can start by using descriptive analytics techniques like operational reports, ad-hoc query, dashboards etc. on data collected from different sources like sales, customer service etc. to determine the profitability of each customer. You can then use predictive analysis techniques like data mining, statistical analysis to further enrich your customer data into profitability segments like high, medium, low and loss making customers. Finally, you can choose different customer service channels like personal banker, phone or ATM to cost effectively serve you customers e.g. a high profitability customer can be served by a personal banker free of charge but if the loss making customer wants a personal banker there will be a charge. Once you have implemented such programs you can use exploratory analysis to gauge the sentiment across social media channels like Facebook and Twitter to see if the programs are working as desired. Better yet you may come up with new innovative business models like mobile banking or online only banking to improve profitability.

That’s the art of possible powered by business analytics. Stay tuned, I intend to publish more examples from different industries to show the art of possible with business analytics.

Five ways Oracle Exalytics is “different” from SAP HANA

The social media platforms are abuzz with comparisons between Oracle Exalytics & SAP HANA. Some of our esteemed colleagues from the other side have tried hard but failed miserably to differentiate between Exalytics & HANA. Frankly, you don’t need to be a PHD or a wine connoisseur to understand the differences; all you need is to invest some time. Here are the top 5 ways (David Letterman style) of how HANA imitates to be Exalytics but fails miserably:

#5: HANA is an “appliance”, Exalytics is an engineered solution: Ok, I am being generous here by classifying HANA as an appliance. My definition of appliance is hardware & software put together for a specific purpose. So, may be HP & Microsoft joined forces to offer a BI appliance but a piece of software running on a bunch of supported hardware platforms without any specific purpose, which HANA is, doesn’t qualify as an appliance. Exalytics on the other hand is an engineered solution. Engineered solution is one which is purpose built to solve a specific problem, think dental braces vs. metal wires. Exalytics is hardware and software which is purpose built to best handle analytical workloads. Unlike an appliance, Exalytics’ software has been designed from the ground up to best exploit the underlying hardware. Features like in-memory, parallelization, automated intelligent cache management, compression etc.  deliver the best analytics performance and exploit the abundance of memory and processing capability available on Exalytics.

#4: HANA does everything but analytics and Exalytics is purpose built for analytics: HANA takes on a new purpose depending on the day of the week. HANA is an analytics database today. In the future, it will be a transactional database. Well there’s nothing wrong in being opportunistic and finding a new purpose every day, experimentation is good. I would certainly like my 4 year old to experiment and figure out if he wants to be an astronaut, a scientist or an artist but how would you feel about experimenting with your mission critical business systems. My advice, please don’t innovate for the sake of innovation.

Exalytics, on the other hand, does only one thing – it delivers unmatched performance and user experience for speed of thought analytics. It super charges your existing BI deployments and enables a new category of smart analytical applications like yield management, revenue management, real time forecasting, virtual financial close, dynamic pricing etc. It integrates transparently into your existing IT environment and requires no manual data movement or costly changes to your application code or behavior – now this is true innovation without disruption.

#3: HANA solves the problem which Exadata solved 2 years ago: HANA is supposedly a database query accelerator. It makes the database queries run faster. Dah, a ground breaking innovation from SAP, well SAP welcome to the party, you are just 2+ years late. Oracle solved the database query acceleration problem 2+ years ago with introduction of Exadata. We can debate the technical nuances like in-memory etc. but with 2TB of RAM and innovations around storage and data access, Exadata remains the fastest database machine on the planet.

#2: HANA is closed; Exalytics is an open solution: HANA is designed to work with SAP data and tools only. Now this is Database 101, you don’t design a database that is closed. The basic concept of a DBMS is to act as a data consolidation platform where data can be collected, stored, managed and accessed openly. OK, you can’t really fault the SAP development here; after all they are designing a version 0.1 of the product which Oracle has been investing billions for the last 30 years to perfect. Exalytics is a completely open middle-tier analytics platform. It connects to any or all commercially available databases like Oracle, DB2, SQL Server, Teradata, Netezza and even SAP HANA and delivers high speed reporting and analysis. Besides, over 40+ pre-built enterprise performance management, ERP and CRM analytical applications are already certified on Exalytics.

#1: No BI software included with HANA; Exalytics is a single stop BI solution: In order to make sense of data or as the former CEO of Business Objects, Bernard Liautaud aptly put it to derive intelligence out of data; BI tools like dashboards, reports, scorecards and ad-hoc query and analysis tools are required. Looks like our able colleagues at SAP forgot this minor detail and didn’t include any BI tools with HANA. Exalytics on the other hand comes preloaded with Oracle BI Foundation. Oracle BI Foundation delivers the widest and most robust set of reporting, ad hoc query and analysis, OLAP, dashboard, and scorecard functionality with a rich end user experience that includes visualization, collaboration, alerts and notifications, search and mobile access. So, all you do with Exalytics is plug it in, connect to a data source and you are on your way to delivering pre-packaged or custom analytical applications.

Hopefully the above provides insightful context on Exalytics and its imposter SAP HANA. Exalytics is and remains the industry’s first in-memory analytics machine. You can learn more about Oracle Exalytics here.