Business Intelligence and the Cloud: Strategic Implementation Guide

CHAPTER 7

Business Intelligence

The Interaction of Business Intelligence and Cloud Computing

Several months ago, the author was discussing BI at a conference when another attendee asked, “Can you use those two terms together—business and intelligence?” Not being one to be outdone, the author quickly answered, “You cannot have one without the other, at least if you want to be successful.” As you might imagine, that led to a long discussion of what BI is (or should be). The author continued to interject the notion that cloud computing must be at the core of BI today and that having BI that is not enabled by cloud resources is sort of like eating apple pie without vanilla ice cream: You are not getting the most out of the experience (at least, not from the author's point of view!). BI needs the cloud to be most successful. This chapter explains why.

Enterprise applications, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM), have been rapidly advancing to include analytics that create BI. Our understanding of descriptive and predictive analysis has been expanded to include cloud-based solutions. What for decades was known as decision support has grown to become business analytics and business intelligence and has become the cornerstone of business strategy. We once primarily discussed the analysis of databases and data warehouses, but today we discuss Big Data. There has been a surge in tools and techniques that have created the new discipline of ...