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Integrating BI, Portals and CMS Software Into a Single Platform

In enterprises today, it is not uncommon to see IT building enterprise applications that integrate best-of-breed technologies. Significant effort goes into selecting the components that need to work together as well as share common infrastructure components, such as a unified security model, administration, and look and feel. The integration of these components is an intensive task, and IT ends up owning the integration and ongoing support. This is one part of the enterprise application challenge.

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Enterprise software is going through a paradigm shift that is primarily attributed to the open source movement. Open source fosters a community development model and offers very compelling software economics. An entirely new application software market is emerging that has its roots in open source products and community. Leveraging open source within enterprise IT is becoming more accepted by CIOs.

Gartner says that, “By 2012, 80 percent of all commercial software will include elements of open-source technology. Many open-source technologies are mature, stable and well supported. They provide significant opportunities for vendors and users to lower their total cost of ownership and increase returns on investment. Ignoring this will put companies at a serious competitive disadvantage. Embedded open source strategies will become the minimal level of investment that most large software vendors will find necessary to maintain competitive advantages during the next five years.”

There are multiple challenges associated with this paradigm shift. First, how can these new technologies integrate with existing investments? Do companies have the bandwidth to evaluate the hundreds of available open source products and select the right solutions for their company? Do they have the time and resources to support the integration themselves, instead of solving their business problem?

Now, let’s briefly look at the anatomy of every enterprise application, both internal- and external-facing. These applications invariably contain three distinct, but closely related, layers:

• Portals that serve as distribution channels by presenting content, transactional data, and business processes, as well as providing a reusable and dynamic look-and-feel framework.
• Content management that provides collaboration and content that feeds into several consumers (including portals).
• Business Intelligence that serves as the hub for disseminating business-critical information to the right audience and can also feed into a portal.

It is interesting to note that, while the end application has brought the layers together, the infrastructure components themselves largely act as silos.

The observations above lead to an interesting dimension of developing enterprise applications. If the economics of open source software can be harnessed to build an integrated suite of BI, portal, and content management, both IT and Business stand to gain. In such an integrated product, a report can be designed with the BI solution, persisted in the CMS (for versioning, workflow, archival search, etc.) and surfaced through a portal. There are many other benefits of a tightly integrated suite. As examples, businesses can save on procurement and development costs, while IT saves significant time on integration and support issues.

Suresh Kuppusamy is the Co-Founder and CEO of Bluenog.

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