market differentiation
The fact that the US-based developer, Datawatch Corporation, has had more than 18 years’ experience
with its Monarch report mining system might suggest that its Monarch BI Server is a logical development
from that core product set and is therefore making different claims on the Business Intelligence territory.
Whether the solution can draw upon all of the Monarch desktop solutions support. Monarch
ICT resources in an organisation is another emerged from a marketplace dominated by
factor. Few organisations source their deci- data mining which specifically extracted the
sion-bait from a single application. Would ad information needed by management from spe-
a BI solution, for example, have the ‘breadth cially created data warehouses or data marts.
of vision’ to source specific data fields from a
diversity of Enterprise Resource Planning
(ERP), Customer Relationship Management
Strategic change in approach to data
(CRM) company-wide accounting systems The process of defining, cleansing, extracting
and industry-specific systems which may be and integrating the data from a variety of
in place? databases into a data warehouse that could
All are generating information which im- feed a data mining tool was a specialist IT
pacts upon the business, though addressing department task that would often subsume all
different aspects of that operation. of an IT department’s resources.
Delays were frequent and any changes in
Justifying investment in BI
the information needed from the data miner
would often require modifications to the data
Were the ‘intelligence’ benefits sufficiently warehouse itself necessitating a whole new
strong on all those counts to warrant an invest- expensive and time consuming round of what
ment in BI, questions would have to be raised is commonly called ETL (Extract, Transform
about the implementation of such a system. and Load) to produce the appropriate data.
Would it involve a substantial investment in
programming resources to ensure that the ‘cor-
rect’ questions could be asked, for example?
Introduced report mining
There is a broad tier of businesses for which The developers of Monarch came into the
the total investment needed to support a tradi- marketplace with a product that focussed on
tional business intelligence system would be report mining; this was more than data mining
too great: SMEs (which range up to substan- by another name.
tial operations with 250 staff) need the benefits Report mining, as its name suggests, takes
of BI without those overheads. existing reports as the source for its extraction
Without understanding something of the his- and processing. It can aggregate the output
tory of the Datawatch Corporation, it would be from multiple reports, from different systems
easy to dismiss the vendor’s recently launched and in different formats, and extract from that
Monarch BI Server as little more than a late material the precise information content
entrant to an increasingly crowded market for needed by management.
business intelligence solutions. Using reports as a source for information
eliminated all of the issues associated with ac-
Logical development from Monarch
cessing information directly from databases.
Most systems come with standard reports and
The fact that the US-based developer has had most organisations have spent a lot of time and
more than 18 years’ experience with its Mon- money customising or writing new reports.
arch report mining system might suggest, how- By using reports instead of trying to pull in-
ever, that Monarch BI Server is a logical formation from databases, the data integra-
development from that core product set and is tion, cleansing, and quality issues associated
therefore making different claims on the BI with data warehouses disappeared. What is
territory. more, organisations were able to leverage ex-
It would follow that Monarch BI Server isting system output, instead of having to rec-
incorporates all of the features which the reate it in another format.
The Informed Executive
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