Of late I have noticed the mainstream computing press getting stuck into survive the credit crunch mode, with a variety of themes from saving money by running fewer servers through virtualisation, to cloud computing, SaaS and SOA. What I haven’t noticed, perhaps because of a perceived level of ‘assumed knowledge’, is many articles saying stop, take a deep breath and look closely at what you are already doing and see if you can wring any more out of it without spending too much more money on it; much as I hate jargon, a favourite phrase of a former mentor springs to mind; ‘work smarter, not harder’.

Recently a team from Altius have been working with a global company who, by virtue of having grown through acquisitions, have found themselves with very few, if any, group wide systems and no centralised reporting system. Central to their future strategy is getting the whole group onto Hyperion Planning to use a standard chart of accounts, and reporting from it along with drawing data from existing sales systems. This data is fed to OBIEE via two Essbase cubes optimised for reporting, making the development of OBIEE simpler and faster. However, the really interesting thing about this particular client and project has been the way OBIEE has captured the imagination of other development teams who are over hauling systems in other parts of the business. Out of curiosity other teams have asked for demos, and by design we have demonstrated the product in such a way as to capture their imagination to the extent that they are all now considering OBIEE as their reporting tool. Included in this is a project to replace existing sales systems with Salesforce.com, probably the best known of the current SaaS offerings and typical of the type of application recommended to companies looking to save money by avoiding costly implementations of installed software. In this case though, the reporting capabilities of Salesforce didn’t quite meet the client’s requirements, and integration of the data into mainstream reporting via a data mart is someway down the line, so step in Oracle Business Intelligence, with its multiple data source capabilities and fast prototyping we were able to offer a solution. From nightly data extracts from Salesforce, OBIEE now reports sales metrics not previously captured and most importantly, gives the marketing teams a powerful query builder in Oracle Answers, with the ability to drill back into records in Salesforce after applying a simple formatting string to the results. Marketing campaign targets are downloaded from OBIEE query results to Excel, and imported back into Salesforce.

All this has been possible because people talked to each other, were prepared to be flexible and pragmatic about recognising a good product and how to get their moneys worth from one tool when they could easily have ended up with several. So, although the cloud might save you money, a really good umbrella is what you need to need to bring it all together.