A hot topic in today’s business environment is big data; managing and monetizing the massive expansion of data accessible to decision makers. Yet, for most companies, big data is a given. The big question now is: how does a company apply all the available data in order to increase revenue, increase efficiency, and improve decisionmaking? Traditionally, the answer to this question has been business intelligence (BI). BI has been evolving for decades, and what used to be a capability available only to senior management is now being applied at all levels of the company; providing the self-service capability to access, query and display data to support decisions at every level of the organization. However, traditional BI has not kept up with either the need to handle the massive amounts of data now available, or, more importantly, the needs of decision makers for quick, actionable information. Decision makers no longer have the time to wait for traditional BI, with its dependence on production analytics and spreadsheets. Information needs to be immediate, available to the user without IT intervention, and highly visual. It needs to enable smarter self-service, thereby empowering users at all levels of the organization with mechanisms for thinking and guiding. This calls for a new type of analytics solution....
