Look up pretty much any survey on IT priorities over the last few years, and analytics is consistently number one. Not only that, the number of decision makers reporting that it is their highest priority is growing year on year. Why? Well we think the major reason is modern analytics offers real disruptive change for organisations, rather than just the iterative efficiencies afforded by traditional BI. This change has been driven by the development from passive reporting to technology that allows users to actively discover, share and collaborate with insight about their organisation. In our presentation at PUG Challenge EMEA…

A reoccurring point of discussion as I visit our customers is the role of traditional printed reports in business intelligence. Like most BI vendors, we have always delivered a traditional report designer as one option for visualizing the intelligence DataPA OpenAnalytics generates. However, for a good number of years we’ve concentrated our development efforts on dashboards, and ways of delivering them to an increasing array of devices. Our reasons are simple. We believe that pretty much any business function can be better supported with a live, interactive visual display of information rather than a static printed document. So I’m always…

There has been a lot of discussion lately that data lakes will transform analytics, giving us access to a huge volume of data with a variety and velocity rarely seen in the past. For those of you who don’t spend your days trawling analytics or big data blogs, the concept of a data lake is simple. With a traditional data warehouse, the repository is heavily structured, so all the work to convert the data from its raw structure needs to be implemented before the data enters the repository. This makes it expensive to add new data sources and limits the…