Beyond Legacy: How Modern Analytics Can Shape Your Company's Future

In the ever-evolving world of business intelligence and analytics, the past two decades have been nothing short of revolutionary. As the founder of Mondo Analytics, I've been privileged to witness and contribute to this transformation, observing how advancements in reporting, analytics, and machine learning have redefined what's possible for businesses across the globe. The acceleration of change in our industry has been breathtaking, fueled in part by the dramatic decrease in the overall costs of analytics. Furthermore, the advent of new Artificial Intelligence tools from innovators like OpenAI, Google and Anthropic has opened unprecedented opportunities. We've just completed the first phase of an AI-based sales enablement tool that will drastically change how an internet security company gains a competitive advantage in a crowded industry. Early adopters of these technologies are not just staying ahead of the curve—they're defining it, leaving competitors scrambling in their wake.

This dynamic shift underscores a crucial reality for business leaders today: the tools and strategies we choose to analyze data can significantly impact our companies' future trajectories. Traditional Business Intelligence (BI) tools such as Tableau, Microsoft's BI suite, IBM Cognos, Business Objects, or Microstrategy have served us well. However, as the landscape evolves, so too must our approach to data analysis. Modern analytics platforms like Sigma Computing, Looker, and Metabase offer not just new features but new paradigms for how data can drive decision-making, innovation, and competitive advantage.

The transition to these modern tools is not merely a technical upgrade but a strategic imperative. Here are the top 5 reasons why migrating from legacy BI tools to modern analytics platforms is critical for shaping your company's future:

1. Enhanced Data Connectivity and Integration
   Traditional BI tools often face challenges in connecting seamlessly with the plethora of modern data sources, especially cloud-based and real-time streams. Modern analytics platforms are designed to effortlessly integrate with a broad spectrum of data sources, providing a comprehensive view for more informed decision-making. Everything is moving to the cloud for the simplicity and ease of integration.

2. Agility and Scalability
   The need for businesses to adapt quickly and scale efficiently has never been more critical. Modern analytics tools are inherently more flexible than their legacy counterparts, enabling organizations to respond swiftly to market changes and data demands without significant overheads or delays. When we were implementing systems 20 years ago, acquiring computing hardware was typically a multi-month process; today, an entirely new system can be up and running in a day.

3. Self-Service and Ease of Use
   The democratization of data is a key tenet of modern analytics platforms, empowering non-technical users to generate insights without heavy reliance on IT departments. This shift not only accelerates decision-making processes but also fosters a culture of data-driven innovation across the organization. Tableau was the initial driving force behind self-service analytics; today, Sigma Computing has evolved to become the leading SaaS reporting platform running on databases like Snowflake, Databricks, or BigQuery.

4. Advanced Analytics and AI Capabilities
   With the integration of advanced analytics, machine learning, and AI, modern platforms offer predictive insights that go beyond traditional data analysis. These capabilities enable companies to anticipate market trends, customer behaviors, and operational inefficiencies, providing a competitive edge. Artificial Intelligence is finally able to summarize unstructured data easily and comprehensively, providing meaningful insight and actions for your organization. Data strategies that were too complicated and costly are now possible.

5. Cost Efficiency and ROI
   The adoption of modern analytics tools goes beyond mere cost savings on licensing and maintenance. These platforms fundamentally transform the software development lifecycle (SDLC) by significantly reducing the time to market for data-driven applications and reporting. The intuitive design and advanced capabilities of modern analytics frameworks facilitate faster, easier, and better development processes. This efficiency not only lowers the overall cost of analytics initiatives but also enhances the return on investment. Organizations can deploy solutions more rapidly, react quicker to market changes, and allocate resources more effectively, further compounding their competitive advantage. With flexible pricing models and a reduced dependency on specialized personnel, the shift to modern analytics platforms is a financially strategic choice that enables companies to achieve a higher ROI while driving innovation and growth.

Tailoring the Choice to Your Company's Stage
Selecting the right analytics platform is contingent upon understanding your organization's current needs and future growth plans:

• Startups and SMB businesses might lean towards user-friendly and cost-effective solutions like Metabase.

• For mid-sized to large companies, platforms like Looker offer the perfect blend of scalability and advanced analytics capabilities within the Google Cloud Platform framework.

• Large enterprises or rapidly scaling startups will find the robust and comprehensive features of Sigma Computing indispensable for complex data environments.

Summary
In summary, the shift from legacy BI tools to modern analytics platforms is not just a technological upgrade but a strategic imperative for companies aiming to thrive in today's fast-paced business environment. By embracing platforms like Sigma Computing, Looker, and Metabase, organizations can enjoy enhanced data connectivity, greater agility and scalability, self-service capabilities, advanced analytics, and cost efficiency, leading to a higher return on investment. As we navigate through this era of digital transformation, making the right choices in analytics tools can significantly shape the future success and legacy of our companies. It's clear that the future belongs to those who are willing to go beyond legacy and leverage the power of modern analytics to drive their decision-making and innovation strategies forward.

Legacy business intelligence systems slowing down your modern analytics initiatives? There’s a fix for that.

Some business decisions can be difficult, especially when it comes to expensive choices like data modernization across your department or your entire organization. Projects like these can be daunting – especially given that sharing data across your company touches everyone and the associated costs can be enormous. I wanted to share some practical stories and nimble solutions that can save you and your organization a lot of headaches – and dollars.

The Problem With Progress

Most legacy business intelligence (B.I.) platforms are slow and cumbersome which can raise data anxiety and daily frustration. In addition, many companies tend to neglect their older systems – believing they will eventually replace them – instead of evolving into newer technologies. However, as time goes on, modern analytics initiatives get shifted down the priority ladder and companies remain reliant on the barely functioning, headache-inducing, never updated BI platforms.

And yet, one of the single biggest -- and most costly -- mistakes a company can make is throwing out its legacy B.I. systems. There are two main reasons to keep legacy reporting systems in tact:

1 - Modern analytics tools will not provide pixel perfect reporting solutions that can meet the complex needs of finance and operations. All of the newer tools like Tableau, Looker or Power BI have implemented basic frameworks and forms that will meet your informational needs but lack the abilities that were baked into older tools like SAP Business Objects, IBM Cognos or MicroStrategy.

 2 - Knowledge is power. Chances are your existing legacy BI system is crammed full of unimaginable reporting solutions that have been created over the past decade or longer. The goal of immediately replacing 5,000 reports into a new modern analytics tool may be noble but it's also unrealistic.

One of the best strategies employed in implementing a modern analytics framework is to preserve the historical knowledge locked inside your legacy systems while also providing a completely new, ultra-fast and super flexible self-service data environment to empower your employees with the best tools and technology available. These frameworks provide access to that valuable historical data and erase the headaches of dealing with slow, dinosaur databases.

How Forking Can Help

One very easy and fast way to enable new modern analytics data frameworks is by forking, which allows you to keep your old data inside the old relational databases that are feeding your critical legacy tools -- while also funneling your data into ultra-fast columnar cloud data warehouses like Snowflake, Google Big Query or Vertica. An unknown feature to a lot of information technologists is the concept of a "bulk copy process" that can dump a database table into a file in seconds. This magical feature goes by many names: In the SQL Server world it's called BCP, in Oracle it's called OracleBulkCopy, in Postgres there is a function simply called Copy.

No matter what you call it, by using a bulk copy program, you can transfer your legacy relational data and easily start up a modern analytics initiative with new tools in a fraction of the time and cost.

Viva Metadata

Finally, I'm dating myself but back in the 1990's Cognos introduce a tool called PowerPlay which was able to take the metadata (data about data) and spin a small data cube that was columnar, to simply display a drag and drop reporting environment exposing all of a company’s key information like customers, sales and product hierarchies. I remember doing product demo's and (as a nerd) feeling the excitement in a room when people were able to easily visualize their data. For so many, that was their first real exposure to what was possible from their data.   

A lot has happened over the past 2 decades. Data volumes exploded and those awesome little PowerCubes weren't designed for or capable of handling the vast amounts of information we started pouring into our business systems. The good news is our new modern analytics databases have an infinite ability to scale and new associated visualization tools are able to once again put the power of data back in the proper hands.

About Us:

Mondo Analytics is a boutique consulting firm in San Rafael, California. For help creating frameworks to unlock the power of your legacy data – while implementing new modern analytics tools, contact me @ john@mondoanalytics.com

Struggling with financial reporting calendar headaches? Try this free, automated solution available through Snowflake’s Data Exchange

Comparing quarterly numbers should be easy.

But every finance manager knows -- the inconsistencies of any analysis against a standard calendar when every quarter has a different number of days than the last – costs time, money and headaches for their departments, and can make delivering an apples-to-apples comparison of financials by quarter way more difficult than it needs to be.

So for example, I’m the CFO of a company, I need a fiscal calendar to report consistent results quarter over quarter or year over year. I’ve chosen a 4-5-4 calendar, but I want to run an analysis on performance on the current period versus the relative date of the prior year.

The only way to get the information I need – and get my benchmarks perfectly aligned – is to have a fiscal calendar that compares the same number of days from the current quarter to the same quarter of the prior year. Under the constraints of standard calendar reporting – this accurate comparison is impossible without manual intervention.

That’s where we come in.

At Mondo Analytics, we’ve developed a free, fully automated financial calendar data-as-a-service available at the Snowflake Data Exchange marketplace that allows financial managers to get an accurate and fully automated financial report, no matter where they are in the current reporting period.

The variations of calendar we’ve automated include:

·         A standard fiscal calendar

·         4-5-4 calendar

·         5-4-4 calendar

·         4-4-5

Additionally, these calendars contain every analytics trick we've ever deployed to our customers including:

·         Different date formats YYYY/MM/DD

·         Day of the week (Mon, Tues, Wed, etc)

·         Flags for Week-to-Date versus Last-Week

·         Flags for Year to Date

·         Flags for Holiday's

·         Current Day Function

And the list goes on and on. If you would like to review all of the features, please check them out on our website.

Whether you’re a retailer or manufacturer or even a b-to-b technology company – where period over period reporting of sales, inventories or cost numbers are critical to accurate forecasting and purchasing decisions, our automated calendar tools, will save you time, money and hassle.

All four of these calendars are free to Snowflake customers. We expect this will provide enormous time savings and value to both finance and information technology departments as this is just the beginning of being able to help our customers take another step towards being data driven.

If you would like to sign-up and be a data driven customer, please feel free to check out our data offering as well as all of the other Snowflake Data Exchange offerings on the data exchange website.

Finally, if you’re looking for a strategic partner to help analyze and create technology solutions to save you time and money and help drive business growth, contact Mondo Analytics for a free strategy review.

Managing your Business Bottlenecks

You know those days. You wake up in the morning with a headache, your neighbor has stolen your newspaper (again) and you pour a cup of coffee to find you've run out of creamer?

Some days your business systems are suffering, too. Bad data is slowing them down, or someone has unknowingly kicked off a bad report, bringing your business systems to a frustrating halt?

If the above sounds familiar, and your business systems have had too many bad days in recent memory, talk to one of our system architects about our complimentary one-day system review. There's a good chance we could find some very simple solutions to your business bottlenecks. And if it only takes a day to solve your problem - that day is on us. We're here to help. So get in touch and we'll make sure there are only good days ahead for your business systems -- and for you.

 Sincerely,            

Mondo Analytics