The insurgence of search vendors into the Business Intelligence (BI) space needs some close analysis to understand the coupling between these two distinct areas of intelligence. Studies show almost 80% of an organization’s information is unstructured and this data is unavailable to business intelligent systems simply because they are either stored in e-mails, instant messenger conversations or in narratives like documents and PDF. Search technologies help a user rummage through this unstructured data and view the listed results. But it does not help the user to utilize this data in any productive manner.
Business Intelligence tools, on the other hand, can only advice implementations based on structured data. It does not take advantage of mass amounts of unstructured data stored in a number of formats that it does not recognize. So an amalgamation of the two services allows both structured and unstructured data to be treated in a similar fashion and give the user a 360 degree view of all data available to an organization, on a particular topic.
Unified information access is about putting together a single view for a business user by taking "information from databases and structured data and business intelligence systems and combining that with text-based unstructured information or images," says Hadley Reynolds, research director for search and digital marketplace technologies at IDC.
Search-enabled BI requires an additional integration layer that can index and integrate structured data sources so a search engine can run through them. This typically involves indexing meta data layers, report titles and document descriptions, as well as the data content of reports. In addition, the hierarchies, dimensions, categories, and meta data for measures associated with scorecards, dashboards, OLAP cubes, and other analytics are also indexed. The result will be that users can search a broad range of sources -- including relational, multidimensional (OLAP), and unstructured data sources. Additionally, this integration capability allows data residing in structured data sources to be included in enterprise searches along with unstructured data sources.
Search-enabled BI is an important growth market. In the UK alone, in 2009, the market for web analytics technology and services grew by 9% to an estimated value of £85 million, per studies conducted by Econsultancy.
Note that search-enabled BI is not a brand new concept. In 2006, Information Builders released an enterprise search and BI tool giving business users a cleaner view of their internal data centres. WebFocus Intelligent Search combined Information Builder's iWay integration technology with the Google Search Appliance and an easy-to-use Google front end that required no user training.
A leading vendor in this space is IBM, which acquired Cognos in 2007 to boost its BI capability. And in 2008 Microsoft bought Fast Search & Transfer, a Norwegian company for USD $1.2 billion, which provides search software for use within large companies. The combination of ESP from Norwegian firm Fast Search and Transfer (FAST) and Cognos 8 BI with Cognos Go! Search Service is meant to enable workers to quickly find reports, analyses, scorecards, and other BI assets, along with corporate content, and other forms of structured and unstructured business information. The FAST product can also perform analysis of Cognos-generated data during the process of returning search results.
Other major products in the BI market currently include Information Builder's Magnify, Oracle's Hyperion Essbase with Secure Enterprise Search, and Polestar from Business Objects, an SAP company.
There are variations too. Natural language search company Semantra, for example, specializes in technology that makes it possible for a sales representative to type in to a search text box a question in the form of a statement like "list accounts scheduled to close before July 2010" to get a list of opportunities from a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system.
Search Vendors' Increasing Focus on BI
Recently, search vendors such as Google have been actively releasing search-enabled BI solutions. In 2009, Google released Fusion Tables, a cloud-based technology with BI capabilities. It can be used to filter and aggregate data and then look at the data through different ways such as on Google Maps or with other visualization engines from the Google Visualization API.
Additionally, Google’s OneBox for the enterprise provides unified and secure access to an unlimited array of real-time information sources from inside or outside a company. With OneBox for Enterprise, employees can use the familiar Google interface to access information such as contact and calendar info, HR benefits, sales leads, or purchase order status.
In another example, Boston-based Endeca Technologies' 2010 plans include delivering solutions that combine Internet-style search with business intelligence. The company had launched in 1999 with a new 'guided navigation' approach to narrow down search quickly by providing increasingly advanced search results.
An organization’s adoption of BI search is the first step towards information sharing and better decision-making. BI search is one of those technologies where the end collaborative product is greater and more efficient than the sum of its parts. Indeed, this is a progressive evolution of BI into a sophisticated, all-inclusive enterprise tool.