Another point is that the smaller software developers are mostly relying on one single technology / architecture approach – here it is OLAP, the solutions with customers always will be OLAP solutions which will be OK in most of the cases in the beginning of the projects when everything is pretty clear and structured. But growing and changing demands during the times will need to over think the BI – architecture.A vendor relying on payback of the investments in devoloping his only database and having his complete consulting team educated in his own and only software will always do very hard to recommend a switch. On the other side a BIG Vendor having all technologies in his portfolio will generate income with any suggested architecture approach ( I am not saying that those suggestion are always the best).

Closing this already to long statement I will take a metaphor from a different branch

It is not about inventing faster cars anymore it is about transporting peaple and goods in a save, ecologic, economic way.

There is little doubt that GPU acceleration has many people in IT excited and every IT department should be alerted to this robust development, as it significantly improves any business case by providing significantly higher performance for less than traditional cost.

In larger organisations, the technology choice is left to the IT department, while managers are interested in ease of use, data control, process flows, and reasonable application speed. Getting your ETL and processes right are critical for success, but speed can become a major issue whether you are faced with waiting for an hour, or sometimes overnight, for Budget or Treasury models to recalculate.

Operational staff need tools that will work quickly, if they are to meet that working day 3 reporting deadline. Try telling a manager he will have to wait 33 hours for his reports, instead of 16 minutes, just because each one of those 1000 workstations takes 2 minutes per process instead of 1 second.

The world is full of large scale, process compliant installations, that have been abandoned because the process worked, but the technology didn’t.

The key is to ensure you address the technology issues as well as the process issues.

A CFO might be ok to wait a few minutes for his report, the greater number of business users having to spend hours instead of minutes for entering data and doing detailed analysis will certainly not agree with their CFO’s speaking.

It is not a game controller, it is a processing card with hundreds of number crunching CPUs working in parallel.

dear Kristian, sorry I have to say this, as a consultant I would say that I am sometimes a little bit too technical for my clients, and I have to admit that I could not read your artice because I did not understand it – BI is definetly not a technical issue.
It is not “the more the better” it is about processes, data reduction and information reliability. All this is not technical.
And this is where so called “small” BI-vendors are extremly weak, because they usually cannot handle big company projects with their workforce.
They stick with small and medium clients ( a fact which is not considered in the nice but useless charts above) where it seems that processes are not crucial.
The “Big” Vendor Software is much more process oriented and is in most of the cases the only really solution for tasks in the “big” companies.
While you are writing about Game-Controllers, they are implementing a 1000 Client planning application somewhere, not promissing it will be the fastest, not promissing that it will be done within 3 month but after implementation the planning process will be streamlined and the data will come out of a single source ( hopefully right). I spoke lately with a couple of CFOs of bigger Companies the where all together stating ” I do not care that much about waiting a couple of minutes for my report, what I do care about much more that the numbers in this report are 100% reliable “.
The correctness of “right” numbers is 99% depending on processes and 1% on IT -Tools.

Regards

If true, it’s huge. A moderately powered PC, good GPU and one (or more) Tesla boxes could literally scale way above a higher end PC or multi core CPU!! In real terms an ordinary PC (US$800), good GPU (US$500) and a Tesla box (US$1,200) would rival any $10,000+ workstation.

On the general GPU front, I agree completely with you. Here’s a small CapEx case: I have three systems – my beloved Sun 40 workstation (omitted here) and two new PC’s. I demanded and received a PC with a high end Intel Core i7 cpu and run of the mill GPU. The thing cost well over US$3,500. Still unimpressed, a kid in IT built a much less expensive (say US$1,000) system at home for me using AMD’s gaming technology with 2 high end GPU’s. For heavily cpu-bound and in-memory applications with a lot of data visualization, the low cost system is always faster and more responsive!!

I encourage my CFO and Analyst friends not to take whatever IT issues “just because.” It will save countless hours and make computing much more enjoyable. Best regards, The Old Quant, CFA