Not sure if you saw this release, but last week Google announced Google Fusion Tables, an experimental system for data management that allows you to take your data visualization and comparison tasks to another level, with some human to human collaboration built in.
" Fusion Tables is not a traditional database system focusing on complicated SQL queries and transaction processing. Instead, the focus is on fusing data management and collaboration: merging multiple data sources, discussion of the data, querying, visualization, and Web publishing. We plan to iteratively add new features to the systems as we get feedback from users."
Using this cloud-based technology you can filter and aggregate the data, and you can visualize it on Google Maps or with other visualization engines from the Google Visualization API. In short, this technology provides you with the ability to look at your data in the context of other relevant public and private data to support BI, and mash that up in any number of impactful ways of looking at the data. For instance, why do my sales seems to trend down in specific geographies, and where does average household income come into play? Also, can I see this visually to show the CEO the core issue?
Beyond the BI capabilities which seem to be cool but pretty traditional, is the collaboration feature. In essence, Google Fusion Tables allows you to have a dynamic Web-based dialog around a row or rows of data, or even columns (See figure). So, not only can you generate some great decision support data, but drill down on the understanding of the data using human-to-human collaboration. Think Google Docs meets Business Objects.
Game changer? Not now, but as time moves forward I believe that this kind of cloud computing technology will just be too sexy, too cheap, and too easy to use to not have a huge effect on how we think about BI.
Nice. This kind of "collaboration" has been done before, but only to the extent that viewers of pre-built BI reports could add comments. Enabling participants to embellish on both the data inputs and the comments is a legitimate innovation!
I imagine Oracle, who has made a name of its "Fusion" busness applications and related integration products, will not be pleased.
It is good to see that Google is finally entering the Data Visualization and Infographics space with Google Fusion. Data visualization is currently not available in the Google Apps platform. There are some 3rd party Google Docs gadgets for creating TreeMaps, Timelines, Pivot Tables, Maps and such, but nothing that is officially supported by Google.
There are many players in the consumer data visualization space – IBM Many Eyes, Chartle, Timetric, dabbledb, Microsoft Research Excel add-ins and others, but IBM Many Eyes is the best thus far. You can create amazing visualization with Many Eyes.
In time, I am sure Google will be a strong contender in this technology space, but they have a long way to go.