Business Intelligence: Build it or Buy it?

An eBook for business users

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Executive Overview
Managing by the metrics is a business strategy geared to maintaining competitive advantage.
But with data streams growing and proliferating faster than ever, how do you harness your mission critical data into valuable, actionable insightsquickly, ef ciently and exibly? Do you build your own stack or buy a cloud solution? This eBook explores the challenges and opportunities inherent in each option so you can make an informed decision.

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Business Intelligence: Buy it or Build it?

The Challenges

The Challenges of Building Your Own BI Infrastructure

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Business Intelligence: Buy it or Build it?

The Challenges

Requirements De nition

Time is not on your side.

Recruiting Team Members

Two out of three BI projects fail to meet business objectives within the projected time or budget. (Source: The Standish Group)
High Level System Design

In-house projects are complex, time-consuming

and require coordination between several teams. By most accounts, the average total implementation time is 17 months, with ve months to deploy the rst usable analytics application. Documentation
(Source: DM Review & IDC Business Intelligence Survey, October 2004 & 2006)

Coding

System Revisions

Even with extensive time tracking, determining total development resources required to implement a new BI application is a crap shoot.

Beta Testing

Mock-ups and User Reviews Business Process Analysis User Interface Design

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Business Intelligence: Buy it or Build it?

The Challenges

You need mountains of money.

Average total cost of ownership for building your own BI platform? Almost $2,000,000 in year 1, including software licenses, implementation fees and administrative costs.
(Source: Gartner, 29 Mar 2011)

Creating a BI solution requires an ongoing commitment to maintain and upgrade the solution (can be as much as 75% of the total cost). Meaning updates can run $1,000,000 or more. Why are these platforms so expensive? In-house builds incur costs for headcount in several areas:

Development Team Maintenance Support

Training QA Management

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Business Intelligence: Buy it or Build it?

The Challenges

Building in scalability is nearly impossible.

Most in-house BI projects cannot scale to meet long-term organizational needs. Often, its because new applications are introduced into the organization that were not accounted for in the original scope. So they have to wait, or you have to pay more (and still wait). Though your team surely has a great understanding of how your platform is used and the kinds of reports your customers want, all that is subject to change, tomorrow.

Data source neutrality: As your product evolves over time and other social channels are introduced into the platform, you will need to nd a way to incorporate these data streams into your platform. Mo money, mo time.

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Business Intelligence: Buy it or Build it?

The Challenges

Reporting will not be actionable.

Why not? Because ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) insights can be slow and can cause delays in accessing data.

Its very dif cult to build visualization and analysis that truly support drill-down capability for rich analysis and easy data digestion.

Empowering end users to perform ad-hoc reports on their ownspeci c to their individual business requirements, and not just to consume contentis great but dif cult to scope into a new build.

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Business Intelligence: Buy it or Build it?

The Challenges

Complexity is inescapable.

Procuring, installing and maintaining hardware and software required for end-to-end BI is not trivial and requires a team of highly skilled IT resources. To increase user adoption, you will want to create a collaborative element to your solution, so that users can share and discuss key metrics. Easy, right? Simple, static data reports are easy to incorporate into your system, but users expect to perform robust analysis. You will need to make reports interactive and ensure that users can easily drill-down and navigate the data.

Back-end needs will include:

Infrastructure Data integration (ETL) Provisioning DW (indexing)

Front-end needs will include:

Report and dashboard creation Content delivery (email, embed, browser)

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Business Intelligence: Buy it or Build it?

The Challenges

Recap: Challenges of Building Your Own BI Infrastructure

Time to value is very long. It costs a fortune upfront and then forever and ever, amen. Its hard to make it scalable. Reporting is historically not usable enough to be used. Inescapable (and really quite unnecessary) complexity.

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Business Intelligence: Buy it or Build it?

The Challenges

The Advantages of Buying a BI Solution

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Business Intelligence: Buy it or Build it?

The Advantages

Deliver in a matter of weeks.

GoodData deploys in weeks...not years.

Typically, deployments allow you to start viewing dashboards in 4-6 weeks.

Typical Deployment

GoodData Deployment

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Business Intelligence: Buy it or Build it?

The Advantages

Spend your money advancing your core product.

GoodData does the development work, keeping your implementation costs low. Maintenance and upgrades are included (we release every two weeks). So, no down time or astronomical upgrades!

The total cost of ownership is the lowest in the industry.

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Business Intelligence: Buy it or Build it?

The Advantages

Accommodate changing requirements & gain a 360 view of your business.

GoodData can process enormous amounts of data. Data is continuously loaded to ensure that analyses can quickly return insights.

We can easily link multiple data sources to provide for multi-dimensional analyses.

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Business Intelligence: Buy it or Build it?

The Advantages

Easy for users to adopt, which in turn provides value from data.

GoodData gives you access to multiple layers of data quickly.

Report setup is intuitive and allows the creation of reports in minutes versus days!

Our uid data model allows your business users to de ne different perspectives in the data based on individual requirements, which results in great amount of exibility. Without any insight into business data, the data is useless. On the other hand, accurate analyses drive to great business decisions.

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Business Intelligence: Buy it or Build it?

The Advantages

A system doesnt have to be complex to get the job done.

GoodData takes care of the back-end development. GoodDatas platform does all this for you:

GoodData provides built-in data discovery tools, so your users can do more drilling down without IT support.

Integration Data Cleansing Enterprise Data Warehouse

OLAP/Cubes Reporting/Query Engine Dashboarding Environment

Visualization Tool Advanced Analysis

(e.g., Predictive Analytics)

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Business Intelligence: Buy it or Build it?

The Advantages

Bonus: Employ best practices from industry analysts and experts.

Trying to understand what to measure is critical to solving business problems, but is often incorrectly executed. GoodData has the expertise to leverage best practices across many business verticals.

Our intelligent BI setup leads to intelligent decisions that drive business success.

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Business Intelligence: Buy it or Build it?

The Advantages

Advantages of Buying BI from a Platform-as-a-Service Provider

Deliver in weeks, not months. Save your money for your core product. Provide exibility to keep up with changing business tools. Delight your users with easy-to-use tools and reporting-on-the- y. Enjoy power without unnecessary complexity. BONUS: Have highly desirable PaaS implementation on your rsum.

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Business Intelligence: Buy it or Build it?

The Advantages

BI without the B.S.

Want to talk? Were here.
Corporate Headquarters
111 Sutter Street, 4th Floor San Francisco, CA 94104 view map

Call 415-200-0186 to learn more about GoodData.

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Business Intelligence: Buy it or Build it?