Data Virtualization: Enabling Next-Generation Business Intelligence

Vijay Raj Singh is the Center of Excellence (CoE) lead for the Business Intelligence and Performance Management (BIPM) practice within the Technology Excellence Group (TEG) at Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). Over an experience of more than 11 years, he has successfully anchored several customer engagements; helping organizations across industries design and develop solutions involving business intelligence tools and technologies. In his current role, Raj provides architectural guidance and conducts technical reviews for TCS' HiTech projects, assists the presales teams in proposal management, and supports the learning and development teams in organizational competency building. He holds a Bachelor's degree in electronics and instrumentation engineering from the Visvesvaraya Technological University, Karnataka. Shobhna Bansal is the Center of Excellence (CoE) lead for the Analytics, Big Data, and Information Management (ABIM) practice within the Technology Excellence Group (TEG) at Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). She has over 15 years of experience, through which she has been involved in numerous consulting and solution development engagements for some of TCS' leading customers, across industries. Shobhna also supports the various presales teams during the proposal management process. She holds a Bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the National Institute of Technology, Karnataka (NITK). Data is a vital asset for enterprises and is touted to become even more important in the times to come. Organizations rely on data warehousing (DW) to manage and mine gathered data and business intelligence (BI) techniques to draw insights for business support, but the capabilities of existing systems need to be augmented to accommodate the changing nature of data. Owing to globalization, digitization, and a rapidly changing economic climate, its volume and complexity are growing at a staggering rate. There is a pressing need for organizations to effectively and efficiently manage data and transform it into valuable information in a timely manner. To profitably sustain in the dynamic business environment that exists today, HiTech companies are heavily investing in tools and techniques based on advanced analytics to derive actionable insights that enable timely and effective decision making. These new age systems should have the ability to tap into the existing and new data sources – structured and unstructured, and should be user-friendly with easy self-service options, while ensuring real-time access to the required information. To cater to these demands, the BI and DW systems need to evolve quickly and adopt modern data integration practices. In this paper, we have discussed how data virtualization can …