Online Spreadsheet

Arguably, the most widely used analytic tool is not a Business Intelligence application.  It is the desktop spreadsheet.   It is both easy-to-use and flexible.

Critical business management applications are migrating to the Internet for easier deployment and application administration.  These online applications are being tailored to improve business processes and facilitate collaborative workflows.  They are supporting a larger more dispersed group of users. The first business applications deployed via the Internet were informational, now organizations are deploying online applications that are operational. 

Operational applications often require volume forecasting, financial modeling, and scenario comparisons (“What if?” assessment and goal seeking), which have been the provenance of the desktop spreadsheet.   Now online spreadsheet-like capabilities are needed.  These will be embedded in the business process and collaborative workflows of operational analytics.  eiVia's core technology is an online spreadsheet, linked into the data warehouse architecture.

The desktop spreadsheet maintains referential data integrity within the spreadsheet application.  eiVia provides a server-centric analytic processing capability, tied to the data warehouse.  Users' applications are generating data that is added to the data warehouse.  These operational applications now must maintain database referential integrity, when the virtual spreadsheet application is accessing hundreds of millions of rows of data, organized by multiple dimensions, with many hierarchical levels within each dimension.

Desktop spreadsheets pose challenges for managing enterprise-wide data assets.  Increasingly, Business Intelligence applications are being merged into operational business processes and decision-making workflows.

Providing users with an easy-to-use and flexible online spreadsheet is the next step in delivering Actionable Business Intelligence.