Thursday, July 14, 2011

Running your BI and EPM applications in the Cloud

Hosted and Cloud-based application offerings are rapidly expanding their footprint in the enterprise application landscape. In the Hyperion EPM space, those offerings are available from Oracle On-Demand (http://www.oracle.com/us/products/ondemand/index.html), Key Performance Ideas (http://keyperformanceideas.com/) and Full 360 (http://full360.com/) to name just a few.

There are many benefits to moving applications to the Cloud. Cloud computing shifts the responsibility of the installation, configuration and management of the application from an in-house (on-premise) responsibility to an out-sourced and off-premise arrangement. It insulates the user from the complexity of the application and provides a consistent and fixed billing arrangement. As this new marketplace matures and the kinks are worked out, it is becoming a compelling option for rapid application deployment.

Despite the many advantages of Cloud computing, the traditional complexities of application automation not only remain, but get compounded.

Hybrid computing environments require advanced orchestration of the critical steps between on-premise and Cloud environments. For example, a simple process might require running a task on-premise and then sequence a dependant task on a hosted application that resides in the Cloud. A seamless and unified handshake is required which is typically a thorny problem to solve with custom scripting and introduces significant security challenges and maintenance headaches. Star Command Center can easily overcome these challenges that exist across a hybrid computing environment. This solution creates a unified computing environment between new applications in the Cloud and legacy applications that exist on-premise.

Recently, Star Analytics announced that Key Performance Ideas will be using Star Command Center Azure Edition to enhance their client deliveries by using a packaged software product to orchestrate automation across environments instead of using customized scripting. Hence they eliminate variability in their delivery and introduce simplicity and control to their automation process. Find out more at http://mwne.ws/neiaev.