OLAP or On-line Analytical Processing technology has been around awhile.Lately, with the advent of social networking and Web 2.0 applications, raw data by itself has lost meaning. Conversion of raw data into useful information is taking up much of the effort in combination with collection, collation and gathering of data. OLAP by its very definition is a tool to present cogent and reliable information for management.

Most of the OLAP vendors are essentially operating in the database or data handling space. It is seen that the bigger players are consolidating on their strength by buying off niche OLAP players. The vendor scenario underwent a drastic overhaul with Oracle and SAP leading the way with the purchase of Hyperion Solutions and Business Objects respectively. What can be clearly observed is that major enterprise resource processing or ERP firms are eagerly lapping up the OLAP offering. Also relevant is the purchase of Cognos by IBM. Those in the know are aware that Cognos has been on the OLAP radar for quite a while and considered as a thought leader in this field.

OLAP has been used, with mixed success, in the consumer goods or FMCG and financial sectors. The availability of data is crucial to the implementation of OLAP. Data manipulation being the essence of OLAP tools, it must have multiple presentation options, which can be used by different groups by extracting relevant information from a single data set. This flexibility is important because groups within a single organization have different decision making roles, but essentially depend on the same dataset.

The action in the OLTP space has almost become frenetic, mostly because of the need to make sense out of zillions of bytes of data captured by modern day organizations. Customer relationship management (CRM) is dependent on data extraction capabilities of software. Information discovery and resultant customer retention and conversion strategy are closely interlinked. OLAP has therefore become critical to the entire marketing and sales effort. In fact, OLAP is important for business operations from the stand point of data analysis and the process of discovery.

It has been argued that OLAP is a data extraction process and acts as a middleware rather than a data collection tool. By far this assumption seems to be fair , though it is predicted that the entire data environment including data collection(database) , business intelligence(BI) , Enterprise resource planning(ERP) and data presentation ( front ends and web-sites) would all come together as one monolithic tool.

By Odalys Anton, VP Web/Application Development

GreenCode Technologies, Inc.

(954) 840-8068