Building an analytics platform is about more than extracting data from your business application, it also needs to be transformed into information that is meaningful for the user. This is traditionally part of the process of engineering your data warehouse, deciding what data marts are required and engineering some code to transform the raw data from the business application into these more meaningful data objects. It’s an expensive and difficult process, requiring significant engineering skill and knowledge and is almost impossible to get right first time.

While this approach does have advantages, and there will always be a place for data warehouses in analytics, they can be cumbersome, expensive and a real barrier to agility. It also ignores the fact that more often than not you have already built the logic to transform data, often multiple times, in the application itself. Take one of our biggest partners Infor. The distribution industry survives on margins, so flexibility on the calculation of pricing is paramount. That’s one of the reasons Infor’s distribution system is so popular, it has a hugely flexible pricing module. This means however calculating prices is complex, and requires the application of a significant amount of business logic. That logic has already been written of course, in a stable and robust ABL module that is called from reports and screens across the application. Surely then, our analytics solution should make it simple for us to just call that logic, not force us to re-engineer and maintain it on another platform elsewhere?

We think to achieve a really successful embedded analytics solution integration of business logic at the back end is essential. Not only does it improve agility and save time and effort, but also ensures both the business application and analytics platform show the same figures, calculated as they are by the same code. That’s why we’ve engineered DataPA OpenAnalytics to natively call any ABL business logic at the back end, by calling ABL functions to add calculated values, or going further and running ABL code to receive the entire dataset. We believe in empowering our partners to unlock the hugely valuable asset they have in their robust ABL logic. Allowing them to deliver beautiful, live intelligence when and where their customer needs it.

If you would like to find out more about our partner program, please get in touch.