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Layers of Integration

Components of a complete analytics solution

Analytics is helping companies across industries solve tough business problems and perform better. These companies have found a way to turn relevant information into insights, informed decisions and optimized business results. Analytics at its best leverages a complete integrated solution to solve a set of business problems.

An increasing number of leading industry solutions provide some level of analytics. Often these solutions leverage one or more underlying business analytics tools or technologies to aid in analysis. These analytics tools and solutions depend on access to a complete view of meaningful content. Workload-optimized systems deliver the hardware infrastructure that provides the execution platform to make this all run. When these layers are properly integrated, the complete analytics solution can deliver the best results.

Figure 1 illustrates the four key components of a complete analytics solution. In this article, you’ll learn about the capabilities of each component and how they work together to provide a complete solution, as well as the different categories of business analytics and how they fit together. IBM’s extensive portfolio provides capabilities for the bottom three components, and I’ll introduce a few as examples. Let’s examine each component in detail, starting at the top.

Ideally, analytics solutions will be tailored to your specific business problems, which may be specific to your industry or may be a general financial or operational issue. Many ISVs are building analytics capabilities into their existing solutions or developing new analytics solutions. These industry and cross-industry solutions typically require and integrate with core business-analytics tools and products shown in Figure 1 as the business-analytics component.

Management, security and control of content and data are critical to ensure a consistent, repeatable, quality process.

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