The Technical System: Information, Information Technology, And Information Systems

Introduction

For this module I will be preparing a report for my boss who has expressed interest in purchasing a business intelligence system for my business. I will be addressing the following questions that she has addressed and they are as follows: how will business intelligence software help our business? What sort of information and analysis capabilities does it provide? What hardware and system software are required to run the application? And last I will be listing some of the major vendors and my evaluation of their products.

Topics of Discussion

I have looked into the systems that you express interest in and they are IBM, Microsoft, SAP and Oracle. First I found the IBM DB2 Warehouse features a set of extreme workload management capabilities that can enable real-time delivery of business insight while continuing to support all the traditional needs. However with traditional date server solutions, it’s difficult to deliver information in real time to a broad set of users and applications because more users running queries simultaneously puts a technological strain on the underlying infrastructure (November, 2007).

On the other hand SAP is the leading provider of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications in the world and with the new software system, it’s designed to ease installation and heighten usability. In order to improve integration of the product, the company built the offering around its NetWeaver infrastructure software, which is meant to help SAP’s customers blend the company’s business applications with other technologies. In fact as SAP has developed this whole integrated suite of business applications, customers have seen the advantage of adopting this fully integrated business process approach to CRM (Hines, 2005).

Furthermore SAP has added improved user interface, embedded analytical applications, and new tools for accessing sales force automation software from mobile devices. Also available are new offerings fro the telecommunications, public-sector and financial services industries.

On the contrary, Microsoft has enormous resources and has proved in the past to be a ferocious foe to those it’s challenged in the database, desktop software and Web browser markets, among other areas. Microsoft insists it’s competing largely with a collection of several thousand software makers round the world that cater to small businesses. Unlike the high end of the market, the segment Microsoft is chasing is populated by many tiny competitors such as SAP (Gilbert, 2003).

Furthermore one major advantage Microsoft has in the small-business segment is its network of 4,500 software distributors. Compared to SAP typically sells directly to customers, and the lack of such a network has proved to be a stumbling block in previous attempts to reach smaller business. Microsoft is also very user friendly.

By comparison the Oracle database is a relational database management system software product released by Oracle Corporation and has become a major feature of database computing. The operation of Oracle depends on ready access to the data dictionary: performance bottlenecks in the data dictionary affect all Oracle users. Because of this, database administrators should make sure that the data dictionary cache has sufficient capacity to cache this data. Without enough memory to the shared pool where the data dictionary cache resides precludes these particular performance problems (October, 2007).

Next some of the features of the Oracle Database may include many semi-autonomous software sub-systems, which include Automatic Workload Repository (AWR) which provides monitoring services to Oracle database installations from Oracle version 10. Prior to the release of Oracle version 10, the Statspack facility provided similar functionality, Data Guard for high availability, Data Aggregation and Consolidation, Flashback for selective data recovery and reconstructing, Recovery Manager (rman)