"Hide not your talents. They for use were made. What's a sundial in the shade?"

Wonderful words from Ben Franklin.  They are too often forgotten when it comes to business intelligence and data warehousing.  Many times the design and implementation of an analytical environment takes away an analysts ability to look at the “raw data” and replaces it with a view into a single aspect of that data.

To be fair, that encapsulation of the “raw data” in analytical environments was often a result of a lack of functionality/power to present millions of records at one time.  However, currently the power of analytical environments can allow for more of the “raw data” to be presented to analysts in a format in which they are familiar.

At the recent TDWI conference in San Diego, 1010data presented their Transparent Database concept which matches a “spreadsheet” interface with a powerful software as a service (SaaS) DBMS in the cloud engine to support the following:

• Data Warehouse as a Service
• Business Intelligence as a Service
• Data Integration as a Service

Telecom Applications

For telecommunications organizations, the transparent database from 1010data offers opportunities for both business stakeholders and IT departments.

Business stakeholders will find the “spreadsheet” interface dovetails nicely with the most widely available analysis tool (MS Excel) in telecom.  This lowers the learning curve and enables Franklin’s call for not hiding the talents of analysts to use the skills they have developed over years.  1010data, however, provides the ability to see not just 1m rows/records as with Excel 2007/2010.  The range is closer to 10b+ per “table” or record set.  This allows the analysis of a much wider range of events rather than simply what can fit into a spreadsheet.

For IT departments, 1010data offers the ability to speed data availability for business analysts by leveraging the SaaS model to allow for ad-hoc datasets to be quickly placed in that transparent database environment either for short-term/ad hoc environments or long-term standardized analysis.

Move that Sundial

While I probably would have preferred to see a greater level of analysis tools being available with 1010data’s offerings, I like the focus on the quick easy presentation of data associated with the heavy loads in telecom usage anlaysis – be it for marketing, billing or network.  This presentation style provides analysts of all types the ability to get their fingers in the data instead of “hiding their talents” behind encapsulating interfaces whether they be SQL to get the data or an analysis wizard to manipulate the data.