Bake in Business Intelligence
The architect of Crystal Reports speaks out on the impact of business intelligence on developers, security, and more
by Lee Thé
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Tony Wind
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The days have passed when you could get away with adding Business Intelligence (BI) provisions to apps after the fact. BI can be the integration point, but enabling users to drill down quickly into heterogeneous data sources requires careful planning. In an interview with VSM Executive Editor Lee Thé, Crystal Decisions Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Tony Wind describes how you can get ahead of the BI curve. Tony designed and developed Crystal Reports, arguably the original BI tool for VBers—and the one that comes in the Visual Studio box. Also, Tony has been a key player in driving Crystal Decisions' expansion into providing an integrated, comprehensive line of BI tools
Q. What do IT staffers need to understand about business intelligence?
Wind: It is as essential as e-mail. I know that like e-mail, it has a difficult return on investment (ROI) at times—especially with connecting people to corporate information. But as soon as it's there, if you try to take it away, people will refuse that. And because it's so essential, it requires an enterprise solution. That's what we've been focused on for five or six generations. Crystal Reports seeds that, but now in a mission-critical framework. If your BI system goes down, it really does impact the business. People will understand that more and more as they deploy these systems. That's also why it's important to go with a substantial BI vendor who understands how to provide high availability.
Q. What does it take to provide BI on the database side?
Wind: Ask yourself how many types of data do you connect to—Web logs, e-mail or other logs, different kinds of relational or OLAP/analytical databases, data from enterprise applications by SAP, Oracle, and the like? More importantly, can you bring these all together in reports? Your BI vendor should be able to provide drivers for everything.
I was the first programmer of database drivers for Crystal Reports. After a while, we started to partner, and I remember the vendors coming to me looking for database drivers. I gave them the DLL and let them build their own drivers to a standard interface. That way it didn't touch the core development team. Of course, if anyone has an obscure data source, you can map to ODBC or your BI vendor's own interfaces.
You should also be asking how strong are the engines the BI vendor provides. For example, we offload a lot of processing from the database server.
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