There was a time when business intelligence was synonymous with intelligence being created long after an activity has taken place. With the business becoming more competitive, there is an inherent need to create intelligence on the fly during the transaction process itself. Business cannot wait for the data to be loaded in the data warehouse during the night batch process and then the analytics routines to run to create intelligence the next day. For this to happen, the BI interfaces need to integrated with the transactional application to provide a seamless feel to the end user.
This seamless integration between transactional and BI systems is brought about by using web services in service oriented architecture. The request for information is passed via a web service to the DW or any other data store and the result which may be analytical reports can be transferred via the same services. This integration of analytical function with transaction is called embedded BI.
Similarly on the data integration side, data can be integrated from multiple data sources in real time. Many companies are using traditional ETL tools in a web service environment to achieve this integration. Many data providers use BI delivery mechanisms wrapped in web services to deliver data to their customers.
For creating these embedded business intelligence applications, understanding both domains of service architecture and business intelligence is important, but the key requirement here is to understand the bigger process in which both transaction and decision making is woven together. The application of this concept is huge and can create really enriched applications.
Nagarro SAP Consulting has kicked off a challenging new engagement with Mexican mortgage and lending company Patrimonio Hipotecaria.
As part of a company-wide upgrade to the SAP platform, our SAP Consulting team is using the SAP Netweaver ™ platform, SAP IS-Banking and numerous other SAP technologies to help catapult Patrimonio Hipotecaria to the next level of success. Our team will create a 12-fold increase in overall system capacity for Patrimonio Hipotecaria –while improving the consumer experience as well as streamlining internal efficiencies.
You can read more about this new customer engagement in our recent press release and new customer case study.
Scalability and robustness
Since a very compelling business reason for using cloud computing is the ability to scale on demand and when needed, using the best practices and guidelines for designing large scale distributed systems is a good starting point. While academia has a preference for distributed transactions, ACID properties, and all kinds of consensus protocols, you are better off with loosely coupled systems where nodes will eventually reach a consistent state (as opposed to waiting for all nodes in a very large system to reach a consistent state before proceeding). Considering the state of existing systems, loosely coupled self healing self regulating systems should be preferred over system with exotic distributed transactional properties and consensus protocols. Continued »
SAP SOA is now a mainstream architectural strategy being followed by SAP customers for providing future proof integration to SAP and non-SAP systems. However, customers are not clear on the SAP SOA guidelines, and how to truly model, design and develop enterprise level services. Continued »
Enterprise Application Integration
You need to consider how your system integrates with other systems in your organization. Clouds are good but one-off systems that use cloud but do not integrate with existing systems will diminish the payoffs of using a cloud.
You need to consider how your system and its data get integrated with existing data. This may need to be done both ways. Without access to existing data or data created and maintained by your cloud based system, you will again limit the potential of your system under design. Continued »
Definitions and architecture
I am not a big fan of using definitions as a starting point. In technology many useful and successful concepts have escaped definition. People still argue about what exactly is an object in an object-oriented system. There is no scarcity of definitions for software architecture. The internet cannot be pinned down to a simple definition. A definition, however, it is still useful in certain contexts. Continued »
Background
Most SAP customers have enterprise applications developed in other mainstream development platforms such as Microsoft, Java and others. Many customers have existing legacy applications built on multiple technologies and platforms (too numerous to list here).
Going forward, SAP customers are tending to standardize on the SAP platform for running their core business operations. However, for development of custom applications, customers do not have a clear approach towards selecting SAP NetWeaver or the other mainstream platforms for development. Continued »
Last week we
announced that Nagarro has joined the Google Enterprise Partner™ program, which extends the power of Google across the enterprise and helps customers get more value out of their Google Enterprise™ deployments. Through this partnership, Nagarro has become one of the first software development firms offering custom application development on Google’s cloud computing platform, Google App Engine™.
For our customers, this means that Nagarro continues to be a trusted resource for the newest, most advanced tools and technologies available. We will keep you posted on our work with Google App Engine as it evolves. If you have any experiences with Google App Engine to share, we would love to hear your comments as well.
Know a high school math whiz? Registration is open for Moody’s Mega Math Challenge
Nagarro shares a love of mathematics with customer SIAM (the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics). This year, Nagarro’s custom applications will be automating the judging process for the Moody’s Mega Math Challenge, an Internet-based math contest co-hosted with SIAM. Participating teams of students are given 14 hours to solve an open-ended, realistic, applied math-modeling problem focused on real-world issues.
The content spotlights applied mathematics as a powerful problem-solving tool, a viable and exciting profession, and a vital contributor to advances in an increasingly technical society. Scholarship prizes total $100,000.
If you know a high school math whiz from Maine through Washington, DC who might be interested in participating, please feel free to share information on the contest. Registration closes on February 26, 2010.
Who knows, the winners could be your future employees (or our future customers)…
In most organizations, the SAP infrastructure is maintained through a team of SAP consultants sitting full time in the head office. The SAP team looks after all SAP functional areas, SAP technical development, SAP BASIS maintenance, and interacts with the business to resolve all their SAP issues. Continued »
In our experience working with customers who want to adopt Enterprise SOA in an SAP environment, many customers tend to believe that SAP PI is a prerequisite to enabling and consuming enterprise services. Since SAP’s service management tools of SAP ESR and SAP SR are provided by the SAP PI infrastructure, customers tend to believe that they need to use SAP PI in all service interactions.
In this blog, we would present guidelines and best practices for usage of SAP PI in an Enterprise SOA environment. Continued »
We have all heard the usability spiel: that technology is more or less a commodity, that ease of use – and in fact “delight of use” – should be paramount. We have also heard the horror stories of expensive enterprise and consumer applications that failed miserably because they were just too “kludgy” to use. Yet even today, for every wonderfully user-centric design (think iPhone) there are dozens of desktop or web applications that are boring at best, and simply unusable at worst.
Why is this so? Perhaps the problem is that when you are early in the SDLC, there are so many other challenges and moving parts that you have little time to worry about usability. You worry that bringing the “naïve” users in for design discussions will just derail the project or send it off on a tangent. On the other hand, if you wait till you are through with version 1, you have been compromised as well – it requires great courage to admit at this point that usability is poor and that major elements of the application have to be re-designed.
These are formidable challenges. Yet we at Nagarro recently had a very positive series of usability-related discussions with a major client, which may be useful to recount in this context.
Continued »
Independent Software Vendors (ISV) are companies that have niche product offerings for a certain industry area. ISVs typically have acquired their deep understanding of an industry through years of working in their particular focus areas. You would typically find the ISVs to have “champions” and well know industry experts in their area of expertise. Hence, these ISVs are extremely well known in the industry, and they may enjoy comfortable market share in the particular industry vertical in a certain geography. Continued »
We recently undertook an exercise to analyze the database performance, and subsequently optimize the overall performance for large, data-intensive business application. This post outlines the approach we adopted to analyze the problem, and how we went about arriving at solutions. Continued »
SAP NetWeaver projects are characterized by a high degree of core development activities, and less of business re-engineering or process re-engineering or SAP systems configuration. Hence, the extent for interaction with the customer’s Business team is much less as compared to a “traditional” SAP development project. Continued »
