The variety, volume and velocity (the “holy trinity”) of enterprise data coupled with the rapid pace of changes in enterprise data management technologies has left many business executives stumped.  Technology choices around enterprise data management seem overwhelming and unclear – SAP Hana or Hadoop? How about SAP Sybase?  What is MapReduce? More importantly, is there a compelling business case to make changes or is status quo good enough? Where do I start?

Well, this is a great place to start. This primer will show you how the enterprise data landscape has changed and map those changes to your enterprise level requirement.

First things first, let’s get some basic definitions out of the way.

Business Intelligence is an umbrella term to describe a set of software tools used to raw data into actionable insights for business decision making. Data Warehouse is a large ‘store’ of enterprise data on supply chain, products and customers. Together, BI and DW comprise the Enterprise Data System and form the backbone of business intelligence, required to sustain competitive advantage.