AGENDA

Agile Analytics - Analytics as a Service

Oliver Ratzesberger

Abstract: Today's businesses are facing an ever increasing trend of time to market pressures for new ideas and strategies. No longer can companies afford to wait months for analytical results to become available. Time to market is measured in hours and days - not weeks and months. Analytics as a Service provides a framework that allows business units to come up with a concept or idea on day 1, load or combine data sources on day 2 and arrive at initial results on day 3 - literally. Leading companies require their teams to move at never before seen speeds. A proven methodology is being re-invented for Analytics: Learn to Fail Fast. Out of every 10 ideas and concepts maybe 1 will provide sufficient return to justify continued investment. Sometimes the best ideas fail due to wrong timing and need to be put aside for future re-evaluation. It is important to remove the risk of failure but rather speed up the process so that failing concepts can be eliminated quickly. Agile Analytics leverages virtualized Enterprise Analytics platforms in combination with concepts like Analytics as a Service to provide never before seen agility to global business user communities. Several years ago eBay set out to built the most flexible Agile Analytics platform possible. The resulting business intelligence platform allows its business units to perform rapid prototyping and sandboxing in a central service based framework.

Analytics as a Service has changed to landscape of data driven analysis at eBay. While only 3 years ago data marts where the common solve for departmental business needs, they have been virtually eliminated and are no longer part of the eBay infrastructure. Analytics as a Service combines enterprise level architecture with the ultimate in analytical application virtualization, combining the best of both worlds: Centralized platforms for extreme scalable processing coupled with decentralized management of incremental data sources and business unit specific requirements.

Oliver Ratzesberger: Oliver Ratzesberger is Senior Director of Architecture & Operations for eBay, Inc. In this position Oliver is responsible for Cloud Computing and Analytics as a Service Architecture and Operations for eBay on a worldwide basis. Oliver came to eBay with more than 10 years experience in extreme large scale massively parallel grid systems, Analytics and Data Warehouse infrastructures. He has lead Analytics implementations in the Financial and Telecommunications industries in US and Europe. Prior to his Data Warehousing experience he managed IT and software development. Oliver earned a BSEE (Ing) degree from HTL Steyr, Austria.