A Service-oriented Architecture for Business Intelligence

Business intelligence is a business management term used to describe applications and technologies which are used to gather, provide access to and analyze data and information about the organization, to help make better business decisions. In other words, the purpose of business intelligence is to provide actionable insight Business intelligence technologies include traditional data warehousing technologies such as reporting, ad-hoc querying, online analytical processing (OLAP). More advanced business intelligence tools - such as HP Openview DecisionCenter - also include data-mining, predictive analysis using rule-based simulations, Web services and advanced visualization capabilities. In this paper we describe a service-oriented architecture for business intelligence that makes possible a seamless integration of technologies into a coherent business intelligence environment, thus enabling simplified data delivery and low-latency analytics. We compare our service-oriented approach with traditional BI architectures, illustrate the advantages of the service oriented paradigm and share our experience and the lessons learned in architecting and implementing the framework.