Business Situation
As the data warehousing and business intelligence needs of the organization evolve, faulty data integration architecture becomes more and more difficult to maintain and the total cost of ownership rising, challenges of data integration, data quality, data transformation, and etc...
The ability to transform corporate data into meaningful and actionable information is the single most important source of competitive advantage in today’s business world. Harnessing the data explosion to better understand the past and get direction for the future has turned out to be one of the most challenging ventures for enterprise Information Technology departments in global organizations. There are three broad categories of issues associated with data integration:
- Technology challenges
- Organizational issues
- Economic challenges
Solutions
We use Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Integration Services (SSIS) which is an effective toolset for both the traditional demands of ETL operations, as well as for the evolving needs of general purpose data integration to extract, transform, and load data from different system data sources to designated environments. We will also discuss how SSIS is fundamentally different from the tools and solutions provided by major ETL vendors so it is ideally suited to address the changing demands of global business from the largest enterprise to the smallest business.
The extensible nature of SSIS makes it possible for organizations to leverage their existing investments in custom code for data integration by wrapping it as re-usable extensions to SSIS and by doing so to take full advantage of features such as logging, debugging, BI integration, etc. This greatly helps to overcome some of the organizational challenges in getting, cleansing data, and data integration.
Business Benefits
The inclusion of SSIS in the SQL Server product makes the cost acquisition extremely reasonable as compared to other high-end data integration tools. Not only is the initial cost acquisition lowered, but via tight integration with Visual Studio and the rest of SQL Server BI tools, the cost of application development and maintenance is also significantly lowered in comparison to other similar tools. The extremely reasonable total cost of ownership (TCO) of SSIS (and the rest of SQL Server) makes enterprise-class data integration approachable to all segments of the market, taking it out of the exclusive domain of the largest (and richest) companies.
At the same time, the architecture of SSIS is tuned to take advantage of modern hardware and to deliver performance and scale at the highest end of customer requirements. SSIS enables rich, scalable data integration to all customers, from the highest end enterprise to the small and medium business.
In conjunction with the rest of the features in SQL Server, the Microsoft customer support infrastructure (ranging from broad, long beta testing, to rich online communities to premiere support contracts) and the consistency and integration with the rest of Microsoft product offerings, SSIS is truly a unique toolset that opens up new frontiers in data integration.
VTL Consulting identified that the organization needed a business intelligence (BI) solution that would consolidate the individual sellers on disparate systems and provide commitment reporting and goal collection in an integrated web application using Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services, Analysis Services, and Microsoft Business Scorecard Manager 2005.