Overview of New Horizons in Business Intelligence

Sources, Software and Services

Harry Collier, Infonortics Ltd

2

What is new?

• Networking

• Desktop power

• Software

• Data explosion

3

Networking

• Internet

• Intranets

• Extranets

4

Networking (II)

• TCP / IP brings standardisation

• HTML brings simplicity and

standardisation

• Mass market brings lower prices, simplicity

and technological innovation

5

Desktop power

• Desktop power enables

– New tasks– New horizons– Transfer from central to local– Flexibility

6

Software

• An explosion of affordable software to run on powerful desktops:

• Search (text, patterns, images, sounds)

• Knowledge-based systems (inference)

• Intelligent agents

• Data mining / text mining

• Visualisation

7

Network Search Software

• New technology – network search engines

began to proliferate around 1995

• Spiders, crawlers, engines, directories,

metadata searching

• Northern Light, Inktomi, AltaVista, Excite,

InfoSeek, Yahoo, HotBot, Ask Jeeves ...

8

Software Explosion

• Sageware, Retrieval Technologies, Bowne

Internet, InfoGIST, Net Perceptions,

Magnify, Inxight, Knowledge-X,

WavePhore, SemioCorp, i2, Memex,

Aquabrowser … Plus JAVA.

9

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Data Explosion

• Networks, desktop power and software are keys to mastering data explosion

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Business Intelligence

• Company reports (net)

• Company news (net)

• Comments, reports, rumours concerning companies (net)

• Political trend data

• Company image

12

Building on the past

• Traditional electronic sources still exist

– Dialog– Lexis-Nexis– IAC– SilverPlatter– EPO

13

Where are we going?

• Seamless integration of data sources

– Internal data (intranet)– External data (internet)– Evaluated / data collections (extranet)

14

Where are we at present?

15

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Conclusion

• For business intelligence, this is a time of

– Rapid and accelerating change– Unparalleled opportunity– Experimentation– Networks, software and desktop power