Why An Open BI Platform is Essential to the All Data Enterprise

As companies continue the evolution from big data to all data, their business intelligence challenges and requirements are evolving in tandem. Companies are moving toward cloud‐based analytics and storage systems, away from on‐premise relational databases because the antiquated architecture struggles to support the complex data needs that businesses face today.

A BI platform with comprehensive APIs allows organizations to build and integrate their own functional extensions. This open architecture has three overarching benefits:

1. Prepares organizations to leverage “all data”Cloud based data sources are growing exponentially, creating significant complexity and confusion for reporting and analytics. Hence why most organizations only use about 12% of their data, according to Forrester. The idea of connecting the dots between data from various sources or functional teams seems daunting. The good news is that’s what all of these BI vendors (like GoodData) are here for.

When organizations leverage more data employees are empowered to discover their own insights that often drive strategic initiatives and make their companies more agile.

2. Delivers increased flexibility and support for custom extensionsAll organizations have unique needs and processes. An open platform that allows developers to write their own code delivers significantly more flexibility for custom extensions.

Data visualization and analytics are rapidly evolving, and sometimes businesses have their own specific set of formulas and analytic functions that third party vendors may not have established. With traditional BI systems, you’d be out of luck – but with an open platform developers and analysts can write their own functions directly on top of the powerful existing capabilities, saving valuable time and effort.

3. Platforms with rich APIs can be automated and are designed for scaleIn the interest of driving “consumerization”, organizations are beginning to embed analytics directly into products and internal workflows. To connect those applications and provide a seamless user experience, the BI platform of choice must be open.

That type level of integration significantly increases the adoption of the analytics, which segues into the scalability and performance of the platform over time. In most BI platforms, updating and scaling data marts to support the growth of users and addition use cases results in downtime while they merge the data over to new stacks. On the contrary, BI platforms with rich APIs can make all of those changes programmatically without impacting availability and performance.

Today, when data comes from so many places – three or four different systems or applications running inside the company as well as outside data from social channels, or public sources – the old, in‐flexible architecture simply doesn’t work.

In the end, only open BI platforms can provide the breadth and scale of analytics that organizations require to be competitive in the age of the All Data Enterprise.