TARGIT, the company behind TARGIT Decision Suite, has pushed out a new initiative that enables companies to adopt a complete bimodal strategy into their standard BI operations. With the release of the company’s updated Data Discovery tool, TARGIT further puts complex data and exploration into the hands of everyday business users with simple drag-and-drop technology. This makes TARGIT one of the few vendors that can satisfy the structured, centralized IT data warehouse roll-out while giving freedom of deep data discovery and exploration for business users.
This move combines agile, user-friendly data mash-up and analytics with reliability and data security. TARGIT’s Data Discovery tool facilitates both traditional business operation—the classic data warehouse and continuous decision loops—and also line of business-driven data discovery and experimentation.
“With the new release of TARGIT’s Data Discovery module we are now allowing the business analysts to enrich their traditional data warehouse solution with external and big data sources that can give them a competitive advantage,” says Ulrik Pedersen, TARGIT CTO. “This is done using simple drag and drop functionality, so the bottleneck in the IT department is eliminated. And it’s done with the complete reassurance of robust data governance. Users won’t see any of the randomness that’s found with Excel or other pure play data exploration tools.”
TARGIT Data Discovery features moves beyond the existing reporting and BI platform to give more robust insight into company performance. Users can import their own external data sources and analyze in conjunction with existing data.
“It’s unique that we enable the line of business to take information from the centralized data warehouse and mash it up with other internal or external data sets,” continues Pedersen. “This allows companies to answer questions such as, is my performance affected by the weather? If it is, what sells better on a rainy day? What prices do my three main competitors advertise on their website, and do I see my performance fluctuate with changes in their advertised prices? That is the kind of power we put at the fingertips of even the non-IT savvy business analysts with this release, allowing companies to become truly data driven throughout the entire organization.”
The latest Data Discovery release is packed with new and updated features that bring powerful new functionality to better connect, manipulate and transform data. New data sources open up millions of external data sets that can be combined with internal data to reveal more actionable insight than ever before.
In addition to improved data mashup capabilities, the new TARGIT Data Discovery release also boasts 70 percent faster data loads for large files and a substantial improvement in query performance when used with TARGIT Decision Suite 2015 HF2. Here’s what else:
- New format option: A new format option is available for all data sources. The easy-to-access format engine offers a wealth of possibilities for improving data without the need to write complex ETL scripts.
- New calculation engine: All columns in a data source can be utilized in the new calculation engine, giving users more than 50 functions with syntax for cleaning up and improving raw data that has been imported. Users proficient with Excel will find it simple to clean data, calculate averages, create custom bins, and much more.
- New unpivot feature: Dynamically transform data in selected columns of data sources with just a few clicks. Or add new columns to existing CSV or Excel files without the need to edit the existing data source. No macro or manual Excel work is needed to mix with existing data sets.
- Improved connections: Improvements in data load speed and query performance have been made to existing data sources including Directory, HTML tables and Google Analytics.
- Advanced cube functionality: The new TARGIT Analysis data source lets users combine data from existing data warehouse solutions with live data from online data sources or Excel files.
New data sources: An array of new data source connections have been added to the already robust list of data sources. New data sources include:
– MongoDB
– Salesforce
– Datetime
– Stored Procedures
– Microsoft Access
– Microsoft SharePoint (native connector with possibilities to filter data)
– R scripts with support for the full R-Project engine
– DB2
– Import.IO
– Wine.com