BI Scorecard: The Best BI Tool

Wrap-up of the BI Scorecard review series, focusing on suite architecture and strategic considerations.

Vendor demos often obscure architectural differences between BI suites. Yet, as our BI Scorecard series concludes, you dare not overlook them.

By Cindi Howson

In the last six installments of this series, I've looked in depth at a number of functional areas by which to evaluate BI suites. In this final column, I address architectural considerations and wrap up with a context to help you determine the best BI tool for your company.

Continuing the car-buying analogy I've used throughout this series, discussions about BI architecture are similar for many people to hearing car dealers tout overhead cam versus inline-6. Customers want to shout, "Skip the techno babble, just tell me the benefits!" Is it fast, does it scale, and most important, does it work within my current infrastructure?

There are many aspects of a BI architecture that will never come across in a vendor demo, such as:

• Whether it's client/server or Web-based
• The OLAP approach used (MOLAP, ROLAP, or DOLAP)
• How easily the BI tools can be customized or embedded within other applications
• How common is the framework (metadata, security, and infrastructure) that the suite uses across the different tools, such as query, reporting, OLAP, dashboards, or analytic applications?
• Whether services can be distributed across multiple servers and platforms.

Just as you may have to open the hood of a car or take it for a test drive to see some of the engine differences, so too will architectural differences in the BI suites become apparent only when you install, deploy, or customize the products.

Service-Oriented Architecture

As BI has moved to the Web and to enterprisewide deployments, many BI tools today have a serviceoriented architecture (SOA). An SOA allows different BI services to perform specialized tasks and, when necessary, to be distributed across multiple servers. As an example, let's look at three possible BI services: query, presentation, and scheduling. (See Figure 1.) Keep in mind that each BI tool may have more (or fewer) specialized services that may handle tasks such as logins, prompt generation, request routing, and so on. (For more on prompt generation, see Part 1: Query, in Resources.)