First Look

Most current BI and BPM tools can only analyze 20% of current data pertaining to the enterprise. Analyzing unstructured data like chat and blog postings is becoming a popular way to provide better insights for better business decisions and processes.

"There are a lot of non-traditional data sources which customers and organizations want to use to get a complete picture of what their performance is," said Skytide Inc. Keith Feingold. These include chat, e-mail and XML log files - data which "doesn't fit very well into a defined format and mostly tends to be dynamically generated in real-time," Feingold noted.

"Traditional BI tools are not designed to handle it," he added. "They require the data to be moved and transformed into a relational format. And it's often summarized to speed analysis, so there's some level of information loss."

Feingold explained how the Skytide Application Platform can operate on that data without the traditional ETL and data movement process and automatically generate models for analysis. This can be presented in Excel and other dashboards.
"We call it 'BI without the baggage' he noted.

Feingold went on to describe how Skytide leverages XML for SOA applications:

"Companies deploying SOA have a hybrid, meaning they have some of their data captured and representing through services through SOA, and they have some traditional data sources as well," he said.

"What we've found is that they want to leverage both of these to gain visibility into all the data so they can optimize the business process and understand the root cause of any kind of concerns they have around that business process," he said.

"These multiple and complex data sources just aren't a strong suit of tradition of BI, but it is a sweet spot and does seem to be a reason why customers are deploying our technology," he added.

Feingold also went on to describe:
-- A case study where Skytide freed a credit-card company from having to create new ETL and custom data models each time data changed.
-- Why analyzing email and chat has become a growing field.