Austin Energy
A municipal utility owned and operated by the City of Austin, Austin Energy has provided the city with electric service for over 100 years. Austin Energy is the ninth largest public power utility in the nation. Austin Energy provides power generation, distribution, transmission and substation transmission.
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Austin Energy needed a low-cost, end-to-end solution that would enable it to give users at various levels throughout the organization timely access to relevant performance metrics, as well as the ability to perform ad hoc data analysis. This goal was met using Infobright and Jaspersoft technologies instead of the traditional, expensive, resource-intensive products used by many companies today. Two project managers, working part-time over six weeks, were able to meet all of the requirements of the project and subsequently began a staged institutionalization of the performance management solution throughout Austin Energy.
Challenge
Traditional business intelligence and data warehousing models often cost millions of dollars and take years to migrate through design, development, and production-level deployment. Burdened salaries for highly-skilled IT professionals tasked with building and maintaining these systems is often at the peak of professional-services costs, and retention of these employees can prove difficult. Although a request for an executive dashboard had been officially recognized as a project within Austin Energy for years, it had yet to be delivered, primarily due to following the traditional business intelligence and data warehouse model.
No software or hardware solution will replace the need for superlative requirements analysis and project management. However, the greater the complexity of systems, applications and requirements, the greater the potential for delay, scope reduction, or outright failure of an attempted solution.
- From the case study "Austin Energy Case Study: Implementing BI and a Data Mart in Weeks"
Solution
After years of approaching the executive dashboard project in the traditional manner, Austin Energy’s project managers realized that to meet all of these seemingly polar objectives would require a non-traditional approach. In June of 2009 an evaluation of open source technologies that could meet the rigorous demands of the solution proved extremely successful. All of the objectives could be met through the acquisition and deployment of just two technologies, a Business Intelligence suite of tools provided by Jaspersoft, and a revolutionary column-based database engine available from Infobright. Through the use of these solutions, two project managers, working part-time over six weeks, were able to meet all of the requirements of the project and subsequently begin a staged institutionalization of the performance management solution.
Although the application of this solution demonstrated significant savings in time, cost, effort, and maintenance requirements, it is not industry-specific. The products, principle and performance of this project have wide-ranging benefits for any organization or institution.
- From the case study "Austin Energy Case Study: Implementing BI and a Data Mart in Weeks"
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A New Approach
The Analytic Data Warehouse
Traditional data warehouse products put a tremendous burden on IT in order to create and maintain an environment that will allow users to query against large volumes of data.
