Wade Roush from Xconomy explains "what's cool about Kalido, a Burlington, MA, software company spun off five years ago by Royal Dutch Shell." Wade starts with a story about beer, and Labatt Breweries.

'In 2005, the company hired Kalido to build a new data warehouse that would bring together data from 93 transaction systems databases holding 16 year's worth of records on products, customers, suppliers, employees, and so on. A real-life test of the Kalido installation and its flexibility came almost as soon as it was completed, when Labatt acquired yet another brewery. Labatt's field sales staff wanted to integrate the new company's product information into the sales database right away, so they could see how Labatt's new sales totals would look. But the company's accountants didn't want to integrate the new information until the end of the fiscal year, fearing it would mess up the books. "In a traditional data warehouse you'd never be able to have it both ways," says Hewitt. "But because we have the ability to recreate a view at any point in time, the data warehouse managers could give the sales people the view they wanted and still wait until the end of the year to consolidate the financial information.'

Click the link below on the right for more details.

Tags: BI, business intelligence