Business Intelligence for the Real-Time Enterprise

The ocean of data coursing through your business can be a blessing or a curse.

If you can use your data to spot opportunities as they appear, it can mean the difference between success and failure. Unfortunately for many companies, key performance indicators and other metrics reporting can involve long waits due to complex legacy systems burdened by large data volumes. The result can be standard reports that take hours or even days—and an inability to deliver custom reports.

How do these companies compensate for slow, inflexible reporting systems? Many end up relying on spreadsheets and manual labor to consolidate information from disparate systems. Is this timely or an efficient use of company manpower? Usually not.

In today’s 24/7, digital world, real-time analytics

are no longer a “nice to have” business tool. Companies need to leverage enterprise data in real time to keep pace with competition, meet customer demand, and adapt to changes in the market. With the right data platform and tools, everyone in the enterprise can make more informed decisions.

We at Red Hat, along with our partner SAP, are working hard to make sure our customers can move more quickly to leverage real-time analytics to their advantage. Case in point, we helped Peavey Electronics achieve faster performance from its business analytics solution by using SAP HANA running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

The Need to Increase the Tempo

Peavey Electronics wanted to take charge of its data. One of the world’s largest suppliers of musical instruments, amplifiers, and professional audio systems, the company provides more than 2,000 products to more than 130 countries . The distributed nature of their business puts heavy performance demands on Peavey’s business reporting systems. Reports often took too long to deliver, requests for more new reports were often denied due to concerns with system demand, and user access on a wide range of mobile devices was not available.

Hitting the Right Note with SAP HANA Running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux

After carefully considering its options, Peavey chose SAP BusinessObjects to deliver its new business intelligence offering. They also selected SAP HANA running Red Hat Enterprise Linux as their platform since it offered performance, flexibility, and availability advantages. The new analytics system has delivered a 300x increase in performance , providing the real-time reporting the company was looking for. In addition, Peavey now has improved mobile access for employees and the ability to more easily create custom reports and dashboards for their management.

“My guy can now look at open orders in just a few seconds,” said Robert Muirhead, Manager of ERP applications. “That probably involves numerous lines of data and this system is delivering that more quickly, before we’ve rewritten anything.”

With the combined high availability features of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SAP HANA, and the NEC appliance upon which the software solutions run, Peavey has not only benefited from less downtime but also reduced capital costs as they were able to move to a single node platform from a two node failover cluster. Hardware reductions alone are expected to save the company 54 percent of their original expense. The solution will also deliver future innovations for data mining and predictive analytics that Peavey hopes will improve their ability to manage the business.

Becoming a Real-Time Enterprise

SAP HANA running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux offers customers access to crucial business information. Companies in every industry are realizing the value of real-time reporting and the ability to drill-down to understand what is driving performance. Learn more about how this in-memory platform can benefit your business.