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Buy versus Build — Data Warehouse

With widespread coverage of pre-built business intelligence content for Oracle Applications and a robust architecture that is extensible and upgradeable, Noetix Analytics speeds time to benefit while reducing risk and providing the lowest cost of ownership.

Custom data warehouse based BI applications are complex and demand a variety of skills to build and maintain. The upfront work: gathering reporting requirements, defining data models, and creating the metadata that catalogues the contents of the data warehouse is a huge undertaking. It’s not uncommon for users to have difficulty articulating their reporting needs, so just getting a project off the ground can be a hurdle.

One of the most technically challenging and labor intensive parts of a custom data warehouse project is writing the data extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) code — mapping tens of thousands of columns from various source systems into the data warehouse. The ETL architecture should be able to not only load historical data, but also efficiently identify changes and deletions in order to quickly update the data warehouse on a timely basis.

While many reports may only need data that is current as of last night, an operational data store may be necessary to address near real-time reporting requirements to avoid bogging down the transaction system.

Integrating a custom data warehouse with an organization’s BI platform involves the tedious process of defining the semantic layer metadata to enable users to build reports and dashboards.

There really is no end date to a custom data warehouse project. Keeping up with changes to the database structures in the source systems introduced by application upgrades is often overlooked in the resource planning phase of a project, but can require significant ongoing development effort.

A packaged solution, like Noetix Analytics, can speed your time to value while dramatically lowering your costs and risks associated with custom development projects. Noetix is able to do this by providing pre-built data models, ETL maps, automated semantic layer metadata generation, reports, and dashboards in a system that is integrated with several leading BI platforms and can leverage and maximize your existing BI investments. Noetix Analytics is unique among the packaged solutions for Oracle Applications customers providing coverage for more than three dozen Oracle Applications modules, while our nearest competitor provides limited support for less than half that.

Optimized for Oracle Applications, Noetix Analytics automatically integrates two dozen key flexfields and more than 300 descriptive flexfields. Furthermore, Noetix Analytics is based on a metadata-driven architecture, which allows customers to be more agile when extending the system to integrate data from third-party or custom applications.

KEY QUESTIONS

• Does the vendor offer pre-built solutions for the Oracle applications we are using? (Noetix Analytics Coverage)
• Does the vendor’s solution require manual customizations to integrate flexfields, HR EITs and SITs, and other application configuration options?
• What is the vendor’s strategy for performing incremental updates?
• Does the vendor support our existing or future BI platform(s)?
• What is the total cost of acquiring, implementing, and maintaining the packaged solution, including prerequisite software and hardware components?