A decision for Enigin developers: onsite or offsite BI server?

Enigin Business Intelligence > Enigin Development
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The development team here at Enigin have a decision to make regarding the new Business Intelligence (BI) server platform I mentioned a few days ago. Do we buy an in-house server to run the system on our local network or use a remotely hosted server?

Here are the main benefits of each

In-House Server

+ One off hardware cost
+ Faster local network access

Remotely Hosted Server

+ Lower monthly payments
+ No additional load on local network resources
+ 24hr hardware callout included in monthly fee
+ Faster Internet connection
+ On the same LAN network as our other servers
+ Accessible from any Internet-enabled computer in the world

So we have a clear winner!

New Enigin BI Platform in Development

Enigin Business Intelligence > Enigin Development
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Enigin

As a holiday project for myself, I’ve taken on the job of rewriting our Business Intelligence platform. The Enigin management team use this platform to view statistics about the business in terms of lead generation for Enigin and lead generation for our Distributors.

Developing BI ‘dashboards’ can sometimes be a complex and time consuming task as it requires obtaining information from a number of sources (in our example 20 different sources across 3 Enigin servers). Once this information has been extracted, it needs to be processed into the required format and loaded into a database. From here, we can then display the data in a way which is visually-pleasing and easy to understand.

Once the new Enigin platform is live, I’ll upload some screenshots with explanations.

Enigin uses ‘Business Intelligence’ to make smart decisions

Enigin Business Intelligence
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This article is intended as an Introduction to Business Intelligence. More in-depth posts will be written over the coming months.

Business Intelligence (BI) is vital to the continued success of your enterprise. It enables you make smart decisions based on Statistics and facts by analysing data collected from your customers and business practices.

Wikipedia defines Business Intelligence as:

“Business Intelligence (BI) refers to skills, processes, technologies, applications and practices used to support decision making.”

At Enigin, we utilise many different systems for use in our decision making. The most basic (but very, very powerful) is Google Analytics. This is provided free from Google for you to monitor activity on your website and includes reports about the ‘referrers’ who send traffic to your site. This allows you to monitor the best performing sources of traffic and adjust your marketing spend accordingly.

We have also built our own bespoke BI systems at Enigin allows us to track initial enquiries right through to Distributor appointment.