BI Appliance

As data volumes have grown, and the complexities of queries and analysis needs have increased, the traditional approaches to accessing, processing and delivering resulting views into data have started to fall short.  Simply put, the performance of legacy data warehouses and relational databases has not kept pace with the growth of data volumes and complexity.  BI applications have been a driving force behind this.  As companies have grown in their maturity with BI capabilities, their questions have become more complex, and the scope of data available to answer questions has become larger.

At Crescent we understand the cost and impact of a BI/DW initiative.  Our approach and philosophy is to reduce cost and risk associated with such high profile initiatives, prove value with a limited solution, and then expand BI/DW for the enterprise.  To accomplish this objective we have defined “packs” for specific needs.

The DW appliance approach is a combination of specialized software and hardware designed to take-on a specific application or need, in this case BI.  There is also an open source approach to BI Appliances with an offering that consists of a software/software “appliance” that is designed as a virtual machine.  It can be loaded onto several generic hardware platforms.  This is a reasonable approach for an open source play as it does not assume specific hardware requirements, and leaves the selection of hardware platform (or the pre-existence of a machine) up to you.

It is all about ROI.  All in one software and hardware has traditionally been thought of as the high-end performer for the largest data warehouse organizations.  But this solution is not affordable for many organizations.  The BI appliance is a solution which breaks down the barrier to entry for effective BI.  With low cost, low risk, and high ROI, BI Appliance provides a high-performance BI solution that can be deployed quickly and cost effectively.  Together with database appliance BI appliance boasts big-time performance with little deployment effort and low maintenance.  Clients provide ringing endorsements of the architecture and allow organizations to focus on application development instead of performance tuning.