Business Intelligence and the Cloud. Creating Business Intelligence Solutions with Windows Azure

      Аннотация: In October 2011 Gartner highlighted cloud computing as one of the Top Ten Strategic Technologies for 2012, whereby a strategic technology is a technology “with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years”. Also Gartner forecasts the “worldwide market for business intelligence (BI) software is […] to grow 9.7 percent to reach US $ 10.8 billion in 2011”. These two reports from Gartner show that any company working either with cloud computing or business intelligence technologies should consider combining their approach with the other one. Moreover companies which are planning to make the move to one of these technologies should also think about the benefit of this combination. Also the increasing relevance of concepts like mobile business intelligence, which provides the ability to do analytical work on a phone or a tablet, makes cloud services more and more attractive for companies. This thesis will show how to build a business intelligence application from end to end with Windows Azure. It shows what is currently possible, what can be done with some effort and where current limitations are. The result of this thesis will be a roadmap for decisions makers, which will help IT managers decide if subsets of a business intelligence solution in Windows Azure can be completely or partly created in their company.

Ключевые слова: Business Intelligence, Cloud Computing, Windows Azure