ADEs: The Rise of Buy and Extend BI Tools
Information Management Magazine, June 2005
This is an excerpt from Wayne Eckerson's "Development Techniques for Creating Analytic Applications" (TDWI Report Series), The Data Warehousing Institute, March 2005.
Analytic development environments (ADEs) are the newest development technique on the block. ADEs are typically component-based extensions of business intelligence (BI) tools that let developers and power users create sophisticated analytic applications by dragging analytical objects onto a graphical workbench, where they can be connected and configured to create an analytic application without writing much code, if any at all.
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ADEs are the analytical complement of integrated development environments or IDEs, which are used to build transaction applications. Examples of IDEs are Microsoft Visual Studio.NET, Borland's JBuilder, Eclipse, IBM's WebSphere Studio and BEA's WebLogic Workshop. ADEs are the spiritual heir to IDEs, both in functionality and name.
A Promising Future. ADEs promise to accelerate the development of custom-built analytic applications, as well as make it easier and faster to customize packaged analytic applications. An ADE enables developers to drag and drop analytic components onto a screen to rapidly create analytic applications. More than a report designer, ADEs give developers precise control over the look and feel, functionality and workflow of an application.
Today, organizations spend way too much time customizing and extending BI tools and packages to create analytic applications that meet user requirements. On average, organizations customize approximately 33 percent of every analytic application using mostly SQL and other hand-written code and spend 7.5 months to deliver a final product -- way too much time to meet fast-changing user needs.
As a result, users will soon be using ADEs to "buy and extend" BI tools or packaged analytic applications. In fact, the drag-and-drop nature of ADEs will further shift development responsibilities from IT developers to power users in the field. With an ADE, a power user can easily modify a packaged analytic application, flesh out a report definition or create a new application or report from scratch (once IT has established data connections and BI query objects). Thus, ADEs will once and for all get the IT staff out of the business of creating reports so they can focus on what they are best at: building robust data architectures and abstraction layers for end users.
Rapid Prototyping. ADE tools will also accelerate the trend toward rapid prototyping. Developers and power users can use an ADE tool in a joint application design session to get immediate feedback from users on data, application screens, metrics and report designs. This iterative process results in better designed applications that are delivered more rapidly. Many vendors are shipping ADEs for specific applications to facilitate rapid prototyping. For example, many dashboard and scorecard solutions are ADEs.
Service-Oriented Architecture. The real power behind ADEs comes from the fact that vendors have componentized the functionality of their BI tools. In the past, vendors hard-wired presentation, logic and data functionality together. However, the advent of object-oriented programming and service-oriented architectures has enabled vendors to open up their products, componentizing functionality within a services-oriented framework. The upshot is that ADEs enable developers to create multiple instances of components, store them centrally and reuse them in other applications.
Vendor Offerings
Tool Extensions. In most cases, ADEs are extensions of existing BI tools. Many BI vendors, under pressure from users, now offer an ADE version of their BI tool. (See http://www.tdwi.org/adeapp for a list of criteria to evaluate vendor ADEs.)
"We found that many users wanted more flexibility to create custom applications using the components in our toolset without dropping down into an SDK [software development toolkit]," says Clay Young, senior vice president of strategic marketing at ProClarity Corp. "So now we give users the option of getting our traditional BI tool out of the box or a developer's version [ProClarity Analytics Application Development Platform] in which we surface hundreds of our components in a graphical development environment."
ProClarity recently went one step further in the ADE camp when it released an Excel-based design and modeling environment that provides real-time access to multiple, distributed data sources, including ODBC/JDBC, CSV and Web pages. IT professionals set up persistent data connections and then step aside, allowing power users to create reports and screens inside Excel (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: Real-Time ADE. ProClarity's new Live Server product empowers business users to rapidly create read/write analytic applications in Excel after IT establishes persistent connections to multiple data sources. Here an anlyst at a distributor compares product pricing with direct competittors (whose prices were extracted in real time from their Web sites) and then inserts new prices to model the impact of a price change on margins and revenues (Courtesy of ProClarity Corp.)
ProClarity introduced Live Server because it found that traditional analytic application development cycles were too long for many users. According to Young: "For every business user who has been served by a traditional analytic application, there are 50 who haven't. Even tools like ProClarity [Analytic Applications Development Platform], which speeds development by an order of magnitude, are not fast enough to serve many users. With ProClarity Live Server, we put the tools in business users' hands so they can develop custom applications quickly."
However, Young points out that ProClarity Live Server is not a replacement for most types of analytic applications. For example, companies will still want to use ProClarity's development platform if they wish to deploy Web-based applications (versus Excel-based desktop applications) that provide guided analysis, rich OLAP navigation, and sophisticated visualization and calculation objects.
Internal Requirements. Other ADEs have evolved from practical necessity. When Business Objects decided to enter the market for packaged analytic applications, it leveraged numerous analytic engines, visualization components, and query/reporting tools it had built and acquired over the years. It wrapped these components together into a graphical development environment to build its suite of packaged applications. After completing the applications, Business Objects decided to commercialize the development environment as well. Much to its surprise, the toolset, then called Application Foundation, became as popular as the packaged applications it helped build.
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