Datawatch Delivers BI Sans Data Warehouse

With the delivery of version 5.0 of the Monarch Business Intelligence Enterprise Server, formerly known as Datawatch ES, users can access a customizable user interface and generate reports in a standard Microsoft Excel format.

This latter capability is potentially critical because many other BI solutions are essentially advocating for the elimination of personal productivity tools in BI applications. Conversely, the Datawatch approach allows users to load data into the server in any format. That data, says Datawatch chief marketing officer John Kitchen, is then indexed by an internal database that is never directly accessed by the end user. Instead, the end user can model a report based on all the data that has been indexed by the Monarch BI Enterprise Server with no intervention required from the IT department.

In effect, the Monarch BI Enterprise Server provides the functional equivalent of a datamart but eliminates all the cumbersome processes associated with extracting, transforming and loading (ETL) data. The data residing inside the Monarch BI Enterprise server can be modeled as a report, spreadsheet or even in a cube, said Kitchen.

While the Monarch BI Enterprise Server may not be the answer to the enterprise needs of large corporate customers, Kitchen said the server can save thousands of dollars at the departmental level by giving end users BI applications with a minimal amount of IT overhead.