Service-Oriented Architecture for your Standardized Business Intelligence Solution
An SOA Provides the Technology for Standardized BI
A Business Intelligence Competency Center (BICC) is your key to implementing and promoting a standardized business intelligence (BI) solution. However, the BICC is nothing without the right technology. The most successful standardized BI has a service-oriented architecture (SOA), which uses a single, modern Web-based design that requires no user knowledge of the underlying platform. This SOA minimizes the resources required for development, deployment, and maintenance to produce a lower total cost of ownership, and it simplifies your BI environment, optimizing it for standardization while serving all of your users’ needs.
Features of BI software with an SOA
Cognos, the leader in business intelligence (BI), uses an SOA to deliver all the BI capabilities users require on one product and on one architecture. This single, consistent architecture is server based and Web centric, offering open data access to all users. The architecture lays the foundation for one standardized business intelligence solution that the BICC can implement, manage, and promote to all users across the organization.
Cognos BI software meets seven key SOA requirements. The Cognos BI services are therefore:
- Loosely coupled – The BI logic is separate from its underlying infrastructure, allowing integration with many data sources independent of the BI capability or access mode.
- Interface based – Users can communicate through SOAP and XML without prior knowledge of how each works.
- Coarse grained – Services are defined at the business level rather than at the application level, reducing network traffic and easing integration.
- Location transparent – All services plug into the Internet and can be located anywhere by users and other services.
- Platform neutral – The software runs on existing hardware, databases, and application servers, allowing organizations to use their existing infrastructure.
- Peer-to-peer – Complete fault tolerance is provided, and any request can be routed to and handled by any server in the system.
- Open and standards based – The overall business need is addressed by integration and extension with a single API.
