ADEs: The rise of buy and extend BI-tools

Analytic development environments ADEs- are the newest development technique on the block. ADEs are typically component-based extensions of business intelligence 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.

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. 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. 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. Source and full article: www.dmreview.coma>