Mr Lau Shih Hor: With Ambience, we are putting business analytics onto the cloud platform.

Business intelligence (BI) solutions provider Elixir Technology has combined BI with cloud computing to address the issue of scalability in business analytics. Elixir Ambience is a new-generation business analytics platform that provides on-demand scalability, availability and flexibility for demanding business analytics applications. It is the latest offering in Elixir Technology’s BI product line.

Established in 1993, Elixir Technology introduced integrated BI on web services with the launch of the award-winning Elixir Repertoire in 2007. Two years later, it launched Elixir Accolades for Ad Hoc BI.

Explaining the evolution of Elixir’s BI product suite at a partner event on 21 July 2010, Mr Lau Shih Hor, the company’s Chief Executive Officer, noted that “no matter how you design the template, the end user wants to be empowered to make changes”.

To address this, Elixir Accolades was designed with a totally different interface to cater to the requirement for “self-service” BI. Accolades, which can be easily deployed as a plug-in, incorporates a built-in OLAP server and supports ad hoc analysis and ad hoc reporting.

However, by empowering users to do ad hoc analysis and reporting, another issue soon arose – that of scalability. “End users are not interested in optimising their queries,” noted Mr Lau. With a growing number of users, this could lead to performance issues. Furthermore, with users creating their own files and folders, there was also a need for efficient administration and management of the system.

Elixir Ambience, which was unveiled at Cloud Asia 2010, was introduced to address these issues. “With Ambience, we are putting business analytics onto the cloud platform. We are taking the technology to the cloud to achieve the goal of scalability and multi-tenancy,” said Mr Lau.

As he explained, there are two ways of scaling. One of these is to scale vertically, which means investing in bigger and faster machines. But, as he pointed out, the cost does not increase in a linear fashion – the cost of bigger machines tend to increase by a factor greater than the increase in their performance capabilities.

The cloud architecture will enable Elixir to achieve the goal of scalability and multi-tenancy.

The other option is to scale horizontally, which is the approach adopted by companies such as Google and Yahoo. This means running the software on clustered commodity hardware.

Adopting the same approach, Elixir spent more than a year to re-architect its BI offerings so that the underlying features are able to scale efficiently on multiple machines.

To resolve the administration challenges, a domain controller allows multiple zones to be created on multiple machines. Elixir has also provided a metering control for the cloud platform. “In the past, vendors charged by CPU but now, people are talking about utility pricing. We do not dictate the charging model. What we have done is to provide the metering control to give our partners greater flexibility in how they charge their customers.”

Elixir’s partner ecosystem includes solution providers, service providers who own the customer accounts, platform providers such as Amazon, as well as research consultants.

Built on open-source standards, Ambience will help further this partner strategy by allowing third party vendors to plug in solutions such as domain-specific applications or data mining tools into the BI platform.

Elixir currently has a base of over 600 customers in 50 countries, about 90 per cent of which come through partners, said Mr Lau. Its largest markets are Singapore, the United States, Japan and the Middle East.