Ulaş Kula, BilişimBI Product ManagerProf. Aydın Köksal, the founder and president of Bilişim Inc. is a pioneer who contributed in the development of the informatics sector in Turkey. Prof. Köksal has played a pivotal role in the generation of terminologies in Turkish language related to informatics and establishment of the first computer engineering department of Turkey at the Hacettepe University.
Ulaş Kula product manager of BilişimBI, shares his valuable insights on the product that enable organizations to achieve their targeted business goals by leveraging business intelligence.
What do you think are the imminent challenges perturbing the Business Intelligence Solutions?
Business is changing rapidly and so are the Business Intelligence tools. Companies are making significant investments in their digital transformation initiatives and therefore BI solutions have to adapt. Consequently, corporate data is dynamically evolving owing to this change. Data is becoming unstructured as well as massive. On top of that, collecting information from a wide range of sources has become a severe predicament. In order to surpass these challenges, it’s high time that BI tools adapt to this change and become smarter by bringing new features.
Analytics require meaningful combination of data regardless of technology in use. For that reason, support for more and diverse data sources is required to combine and analyze inside and outside data to provide better insight. Some of the other technical aspects such as time to value for data analysis, integrations with autonomous data mining, machine learning and AI, and the need for embedded and real time intelligence and data safety present serious concerns. BI tools are very expensive and for this reason justifying the ROI can be a real challenge for decision makers. Problems surrounding data democratization also aggravate the issue.
How is your company addressing these challenges effectively?
Our BI solution, BilişimBI supports a wide variety of data sources and we invest in adding more of them from different technologies such as RDBMS, NoSQL, Web Services, Json, and XML to name some. We have a standard data model interface that can be used to prepare data models regardless of the format and technology and instantly turn them into insightful reports. BilişimBI also supports in place and Ad-hoc data analysis combining data from different sources and leveraging different technologies.
We see BilişimBI as an end to end data platform rather than just a BI system. We invest on democratization of data so that every stakeholder can reach the data they need regardless of the underlying technology within their access rights
Models that are prepared using data modelling tool can be executed directly on source systems with various performance improvements like query push downs or cost based optimizations. This leads to real time and in place data dashboards. These models can also be easily loaded into BilişimBI’s scalable, high performance, built-in data store with a single click to provide better performance and in memory computing over large data sets.
As a BI software vendor, we are investing heavily on machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques and technologies for providing actionable insights from raw data and uncovering hidden relationships between data sets. We are also researching for newer, better and more efficient ways of metadata management and data quality management using ML and AI technologies. Unlike many other BI systems that allow data access rights to be defined at the reporting level, BilişimBI lets administrators define access rights at source level. BilişimBI takes advantage of a mature cost based query optimizer and columnar in memory data analytics structures that improve query times significantly. Whether it is analytics in place or with transferred data, these components help to keep query times at its best. We leverage advanced data caching mechanisms and in memory columnar structures combined with query optimizations to provide satisfactory response times for even most complex data analytics scenarios.
Please elaborate on next generation BilişimBI system that you offer and how is it going to benefit the clients who come on board to avail your service?
We see BilişimBI as a data platform rather than just a BI system. Most of the BI software today focuses on data visualization, but we see data as a whole and try to incorporate data preparation, data virtualization and data consolidation so that the advanced users like dashboard designers and data publishers can use our system as easy and fun as our end users do.
We invest on democratization of data so that every stakeholder can reach the data they need within their access rights. We use dashboards from which real-time data from various sources can be pulled for analysis. We offer the best integration with big data sources like Hadoop, Hive, Hbase etc. and try to eliminate technological differences between data systems for providing a common layer for data analysis regardless of the technologies used for data storage and management.
Our single click web service support makes the data behind the dashboards, reports, queries or widgets instantly available through a web service. This enables easy data flow between users and systems and provides a secure data exchange between them with extensive data access logs. BilişimBI is built on highly horizontal scalable architecture that can be extended easily to overcome data volume or user’s performance issues.
Can you cite a customer success story where BilişimBI helped in overcoming real life business challenges?
Acıbadem Healthcare Group, having 22 hospitals, 15 outpatient clinics, and nearly 22500 employees chose BilişimBI for their strategic medical reporting and analysis requirements. Acıbadem Healthcare Group uses BilişimBI for detecting anomalies about the treatment, and takes data driven decisions accordingly. The healthcare group uses the cellular level data security feature of BilşimBI effectively, and produces a single report. And for that reason, the healthcare group eliminates the need of preparing different report for each hospital. The feature also enables the Medical Directorate view the report on the same dashboard.
Looking ahead, where do you see BilişimBI? What does the future hold in BilişimBI’s roadmap?
We have a mission to maintain and improve our position as the leading BI solution provider in Turkey leveraging technology and innovation. We see Augmented Analytics and data platforms that leverages machine learning, artificial intelligence, and natural language processing techniques as the future of data analytics and make significant investments in this area. We are planning to become a global player in the analytics software market in the near future by collaborating with resellers, solution partners and distributors. We are open to all kinds of global business partnerships right now that will bring our products and services accessible to a wider spectrum of clientele who faces data analytics challenges.
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