The consulting company IDC holds several events, throughout the world, where analysts and technology vendors provide hints and perspective on their products and their markets.

The Business Intelligence Conference 2008, which took place in Paris belongs to that category.

• IDC confirmed the several facts that every software vendor in the BI arena already knows:
  Business Intelligence and security are the two software domains with the largest growth over the last five years. BI represents as much as 6.5% of the total software investment, which represents approximately 560m€ in 2008.
• BI has a very low level of adoption. Among companies larger than 1K employees, the average total of BI solution users is approximately 50. IDC envisions a rapid increase, by a factor 5 to 6.
• Several companies have more than  different BI solutions, with little or no integration, mostly due to isolated initiatives from finance or sales organizations. IT has a major role to play in order to integrate, rationalize and support enterprise wide solutions
• The three major challenges IT organizations will have to address are: 1/ manage data explosion and increase of the number of users 2/ guaranty data coherence and quality, #1 condition to real-time BI 3/ harness data reuse and manage duplication of information 

This visions was confirmed by reps from major BI solution vendors like Cognos, Business Objects and SAS (strangely Oracle, Microsoft, Terradata were missing). They all agree that the recent consolidation trend (BO acquired by SAP, Cognos by IBM) will lead to a very simple market segmentation:

• Mass reporting BI with Office automation and integration: this is where the all position Microsoft or the recent open source new entrants 
• Industry oriented solutions, with predefined schemas, and dashboards, highly customizable by the customers

“Turning data into information” has always been Business Intelligence’s main mission. This is where Ekoz plays a major role.

French freelance ICT consultant and former Microsoft Chief Marketing Officier for France Olivier Ezratty posted a long and interesting article about Ekoz Technology’s applications in the database industry (in french).

We met with Olivier a few days ago, and had very intresting talks about technology, innovation, and the database market. Dominated by well-known editors like Microsoft, Oracle, Sybase or IBM, database technology has seen very few new entrants except MySQL in the last ten years. More interesting, there has been no drastic evolution in the technology of data representation for database systems. For the last twenty years, most efforts in those companies R&D teams have been dedicated to the application portfolio, from reporting to dashboarding, from ERPing to CRMing.

At Ekoz, we have dedicated our time to the data representation problem, and brought very innovative solutions that completely revolutionize the performance of such systems. When traditional relational database technology requires OLAP and hypercubes approaches, our technology offers the first path towards Real Time Business Intelligence.

Aeronautics

One of the challenges the aeronautics industry is currently facing, is to address the integration of engineering data coming from multiple source: CAD systems, electronics, software, electrical models, etc. Traditional engineering data in the aeronautics industry is extremely heterogeneous, making relational queries on the metadata even more difficult to process.

Automotive

The automotive industry needs to address a similar challenge with the integration of engineering data coming from multiple source: CAD systems, electronics, software, electrical models, etc. Traditional engineering data in the automotive industry is becoming more and more heterogeneous, making relational queries on the metadata even more difficult to process.

Electronics

With hundreds of millions of components in a single inch of silicium, integration has never been so high in the electronics industry. This race for minimal sizes is coupled with a critical industry challenge for quality, including optimizations in the routing and placement engine. This challenge can only be addressed with global supervision systems, that need to address very large databases, and huge flow of metadata.

Finance

Finance is fond of databases. Every single transaction, every single quotation is stored, analyzed, compared with tons of other data in order to evaluate the ultimate strategy to optimizerevenues on the financial markets.

However, database managements has developed as an actual burden, while queries have become critical issues in this permanent quest for the optimal deal. Over the last decades, a few seconds delay could turn the position of a trader into a loss. Nowadays, algorithmic trading makes it a matter of milliseconds.

EKOZ can help traders and financial analysts save a precious time in this process, by reducing dramatically the time spent in querying databases and this, in all posible ways, without ever needing to reshape the database to suit certain queries. Saving labor and speeding up strategies, EKOZ is your partner in Finance.