Because there are going to be so many of these providers for your to choose from, you will want to take some time to go online and look through the various options you have. In order to make sure that you can trust the IT provider that you are using for outsourcing work, it will be necessary to get references from a few of them. This way you will be able to see which one in particular can offer you the best services, so you can get your money’s worth. When it comes to finding the right IT outsourcing provider, you simply cannot be too careful as to which one you select.

The overall reputation that certain IT outsourcing providers have with their clients will also be something which you will need to take into consideration, which is precisely why you should get references and testimonials from each one. You should be able to find some useful information on these companies when you go online as well, so make sure that you spend some time browsing the web until you find one that you want to hire. In the end you will most likely find that doing all of this research will be well worth the effort.

You should also consider choosing a native provider for these services, simply because there are too many complications associated with selecting one in a completely different part of the world. With the language barrier, time zone difference, and other issues, it is just easier and a better idea all around to select a native IT outsourcing partner. Whether you are going to choose one of these companies domestically or abroad though, it will still be important to look very carefully into each one. This way you will be able to get a good idea as to which provider will be best-suited for your company.

You should also make sure that you get all of the costs of this outsourcing partnership upfront, because you don’t want any surprises later on. Also, it will be important to speak extensively with each potential partner, discussing your expectations and anything else that you feel is relevant to an important business decision such as this. It will also be important to find out how much overall experience each company has in the industry your business is involved in, because you will need to make sure they know what they are doing. After you have taken the time to do this research, you should be able to select your new outsourcing partner with no problems at all.

With the outsourcing market currently flourishing in Eastern Europe, it can be a very practical and cost-effective option to choose a certain company in one of these countries to do the work that you need done. It will however be important to look into some of the different options that you are going to have over here, especially if you want to get the best quality outsourcing for the money you spend. When you need to find the very best overseas company to contract for the work that needs to be done, it is highly recommended that you use the internet to your advantage when going about doing this type of research.

You will also want to take into consideration how much experience a certain consultant has in the type of industry your company is in, because they will need to be intimately familiar with it in order to effectively provide good business intelligence services. There are challenges that every business in every industry faces, but with the right consultancy services it will be possible to overcome and turn them into triumphs. Some of the different services that these companies offer includes customer analytics, workforce productivity, operational intelligence, and much more. Just make sure to take the time to look into what each of these companies can provide yours with.

Our company recently implemented a BI Reporting solution intended for a retail company with both, an offline retail chain and an online web-shop. This was a Demo project, so during the planning phase our team decided to use two different platforms, including different back-end and front-end software.

In general, we planned to compare the free and non-free software available for similar BI Reporting implementation.

We chose the following platforms for comparison:

• Oracle XE (Express edition) as DB/DWH + SpagoBI as reporting tool
• MS SQL Server as DB/DWH + MS SSRS as reporting tool

These two platforms were chosen due to the following reasons:

• Oracle XE is free and has only resources restrictions, so it is good for small and medium size projects.
• SpagoBI is free, open source software. Only technical documentation and support services are paid.
• MS SQL Server and MS SSRS are widely distributed and one of the least costly commercial products used for BI implementation.

To make this competition fair and comparable we used the same data sets on both DBs and were implementing the same reports with the same UI (or at least the most similar UI) on both front-end sides.

For data synchronization between the two DBs we used MS SSIS for ETL implementation (data was generated on Oracle and then moved to MS SQL).

After the decision of which two platforms are to be compared was made, the project was started.

Initial setup, tools tuning and preparation phase.

At the very beginning the software engineers successfully installed all MS software (Server + SSIS + SSRS), connected all the parts, built an ETL, etc. In general it took about one work week (5 work days) for all these activities. First positive conclusion about MS was that they can have really good documentation with no issues occurring during setup.

For testing, we used MS SQL Server 2008 R2.

The second platform was not as easy to setup. Although Oracle was installed pretty fast and without tweaks, dealing with SpagoBI was pretty tough. It took four work weeks for complete installation, tuning up, and removing all issues and side effects.

The following were the most cumbersome issues:

• Metadata scheme for Oracle is completely dysfunctional. We were a little disappointed with this conclusion, since Metadata was downloaded from the SpagoBI web-site.
• SpagoBI uses other reporting engines (like JasperReport iReport, etc.), which are embedded into it. When SpagoBI was installed, only few engines were working correctly, but most of them were non-usable and required a lot of additional tunings and tweaks to make them functional.
• Error logging was not very convenient. In most cases only “NullPointerException” occurs in the log, so it is impossible to detect the roots of the problem.
• Issues with data types (for example, SpagoBI has issues with understanding ‘date’ type, etc.).
• Manual tweaks for establishing connection to Oracle.

Here we used Oracle XE 11g and SpagoBI 3.6.0.

SpagoBI installation and tuning would be much easier with manual in hands and support service from SpagoWorld, but we agreed to make the experiment fair and not pay any money in this case.

Although our team is already experienced with SpagoBI installation and next time it will take no more than one week to complete, for new users it may be challenging at first.

Nevertheless, all troubles were eventually eliminated and the team was ready to start on the next task.

Data preparation

The next stage of our project was all about data preparation. Here is what we did:

• Generated customer lists with their attributes (first name, last name, date of birth, marital status, place of residence, etc.)
• Generated products with attributes (name, category, sub-category, price, etc.)and matched them to commodities
• Generated vendors and connected them to commodities
• Generated stores and assigned geographical information to them
• Generated marketing campaigns with all attributes (begin data, end date, promo channel, promo sales, etc.)
• Generated transactions (both offline and online) with all the attributes

All generated data was carefully validated and a lot of improvements were made to make the data as close to real retail data as possible. We were using this “fake” data to secure the real retail data and customer information.

The same data set was used to test both platforms.

Reports implementation

This project phase was most enjoyable. In this phase a real “battle” between SpagoBI and SSRS took place.

We implemented a set of different reports intended for company executives and the marketing department in order to track company performance using benchmarks and KPIs, review sales performance, analyze effectiveness of marketing campaigns, and analyze customer segments and their behavior.

In this task, both MS SSRS and SpagoBI proved to be good tools, providing good graphic capabilities with some differences in implementation of the UI.

Below you will find the most remarkable pros and cons of each tool.
 

SpagoBI

Jasper Engine embedded into SpagoBI

Pros:

• An impressive number of various charts and UI elements
• Convenient implementation of links between documents (for drills implementation)
• Interactive charts, which allow information change without necessity to re-run the whole report

Cons:

• No full support of iReport functionality (for example, Spago column sorting in iReports does not work)
• Pagination is not supported in iReport under Spago
• Expand/Collapse functionality is missing in the tables

Composite Document Engine

Pros:

• It is possible to combine few documents in one using frames. It is very convenient to update one document’s information basing on actions performed in other document.

Cons:

• Frame size could not be set in some proportion or dynamically, it is just static
• Unable to drill from the frame

Geo engine

Pros:

• Geo report is a combination of SVG and the data set
• Data set could be built using various data sources like SQL, Groovy, JS, etc.
• SVG is convenient since it could be edited in any graphic editor

Cons:

• It is impossible to choose document map as document parameter
• It is impossible to drill from the map
• Scaling is very slow
• Not all browsers support SVG format, so maps can often not be displayed

MS SSRS

In general, SSRS is a really nice and usable reporting solution.

We observed the following:

Pros:

• Really powerful out-of the-box Geo Reports
• It is possible to source maps on Geo Reports from data sets
• It is possible to use ARC maps (a widely distributed maps format)

Cons:

• Static charts
• It is impossible to add additional axis on charts
• It is impossible to customize filters in the report parameters
• It is impossible to expand standard SSRS reporting functionality with 3^rd party engines

Afterword

We’ve successfully developed BI Reporting, with both solutions currently live and fully functional. Some users of these reports prefer SSRS , others prefer SpagoBI reports. The users keep arguing which solution is better and what functionality is more convenient in the 1st and in the 2nd case.

In general, both solutions are usable and BI Reporting systems can be built using either of the platforms. The following statements provide deeper insight into our findings:

• MS SSRS is good as out-of-the box tool: easy to install and easy to develop reports
• SpagoBI is a bit hard to tune and use when you are a new user
• SpagoBI is pretty flexible and provides much more powerful capabilities when you’re familiar with this software
• SpagoBI is free, while MS SSRS is not

You will also need to make sure that the company you want to hire for outsourcing services understands your overall mission and can work with you to accomplish it. Once you have taken the time to place phone calls to some of the potential outsourcing partners around the world, you will be able to get some sense as to which ones you are seriously interested in. Whatever you do, it will be important to avoid rushing into a final decision of any kind. The more time you take to look at these options the better, because you will need to find the right people match your needs exactly.

Reliability is key when it comes to choosing the right company for outsourcing in Eastern Europe, so you will therefore have to find one with a good overall reputation. The longer you take to look through your outsourcing options in this part of the world, the better your chances will be of finding what you need. You will also need to choose a company that can save you a significant amount of money, because otherwise it simply isn’t worth it. You will however never want to trade savings for quality when it comes to the services you get, because it will be important for them to help make your company successful in all of its endeavors.