Briefs

Boris Evelson, Information Management Blogs, August 14, 2009

I typically don't like to comment on rumors, but this one is too juicy (from the BI point of view) to pass by. Even though TIBCO’s business is primarily in application and process integration, enterprise service bus, middleware, messaging, etc., Business Intelligence implications of the rumored SAP/TIBCO merger are huge! By acquiring TIBCO SAP will get:

A leading position in the in-memory analytics. In-memory analytics, provided by TIBCO’s acquisition of Spotfire a couple of years ago, is a very different animal then traditional BI. First it enables ultimate flexibility and nearly instantaneous response. Also, while power analysts using their own copies of MOLAP cubes free to modify data models as they see fit, a data modeling step is still required before reporting and analysis can be performed. In-memory data models do not require that step, since all of the calculations and aggregations can be done at RAM speeds and therefore require little, if any, design and preparatory work. For example, there are times when analysts need to treat a continuously variable numerical value (like sales price) not as fact, but as a dimension. While conventional OLAP tools make this very difficult, in-memory models do not require a distinction between facts and dimensions - any element can be instantaneously used in either capacity.

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