The story started me thinking about software compliance which has unfortunately gained a dominant presence in the Business Intelligence space in the last couple of years. While it is known that in some parts of the world, software is often pirated or used illegally that is not usually the case in North America. Most companies use their software according to the license under which they purchased it.  However, as hardware technology has improved with dramatic increases in processing power and memory capacity along with even more dramatic reductions in price, software companies have felt a need to change their licensing rules so they would not lose out on revenue and profits. So with the onset of multi-core CPU processors, there is often a fee with the additional cores. For example, with BusinessObjects software, a dual-core CPU may be charged at 1.5 CPU’s for software licensing (1 CPU for the first core and 50% for additional cores) and a quad-core CPU would be charged at 2.5 CPU’s.  So if you own a 2 CPU license of your BusinessObjects software and then move it to a new server that has 2 CPU’s but those CPU’s happen to be quad-core processors, you would actually find yourself needing to buy 3 more CPU licenses of the software in order to be in compliance. Any configuration that results in a half CPU  (like 3 x Dual Core CPU’s equally 4.5 CPU’s) will be rounded up to the next whole number of CPUs (5 CPU’s). Since it is very hard to purchase single core CPU processors these days, many companies are finding themselves facing unexpected and significant software fees. The software companies themselves have caught on to this and sometimes send out an audit form the customer must fill out to state the hardware that the software is running on or, sometimes, they perform remote audits by phone or web cast.

If your BusinessObjects software is licensed by Named User as opposed to CPU, there is no limitation on the number of CPU’s and servers that you can deploy on with the Enterprise level products (EDGE is restricted to one server). This is an advantage from the standpoint of performance and scalability but it also means that you need to purchase a separate license for each named user who will be using the software. In the BusinessObjects world, access to the different products and functions is controlled through the Central Management Console (CMC).  Sometimes customers accidently turn on functions, like the Web Intelligence Interactive Viewer, without knowing if they are licensed to use this or for how many users.  Other companies will map their Active Directory users to the CMC without realizing that they may not own sufficient licenses for all the users in Active Directory.

So how can you check your Business Intelligence software licensing is in compliance and avoid these accidental non-compliance issues before you are faced with a large, unexpected and unwelcome invoice? 

One way is to use a company like InfoSol who is intimately familiar with the BusinessObjects licensing rules to perform a Software License Audit service to validate what you are actually using versus what you are licensed to use.  There is also a software product that InfoSol uses in its audit service called Integrity that automatically checks the CMC for license compliance. This product may also be purchased through InfoSol. These services can be performed remotely or on-site and are a fraction of the cost that most license non-compliance situations would cost.

Of course, you could try the same approach as the farmer who built his castle behind the haystacks but it may not be a risk worth taking.

If you wish to read the story about the Hidden Castle, visit  Telegraph.co.uk

This is a brief summary of the differences between these 3 options which may be helpful.

QaaWS is a BusinessObjects web service that access BusinessObjects universes (and only universes) to pull back data.  Each time a dashboard is opened and selections are made, a real-time query is launched against production data, which, depending on the amount of data requested, can take many long seconds or minutes.  I have not found it to be very effective, and the few companies that do use it, have highly summarized tables in their data warehouse to use for this purpose (i.e. lots of preparation work).  The only upside I see to this method is that security is already in place based on BO user ids, and, real-time data retrieval (if that is the requirement). Large amounts of data (i.e., more than 500 rows of data) returned by the web service will significantly slow down the performance of the dashboard.  

With Live Office you can access Web Intelligence or Crystal reports as your data source and use the functionality of these reporting tools to summarize, crosstab and format your data.  The advantage is that you can schedule these reports to refresh in BO (InfoView) and then use the latest instance of that report for your Xcelsius data source, without waiting for it to refresh.  The disadvantage is that it requires users to log into BusinessObjects every time they access the dashboard.  (Supposedly you can use single-sign-on with this, but I have not seen it working anywhere).  Obviously, if you want to deploy this solution outside of BusinessObjects, like hosting the SWF file on SharePoint or an Intranet, most companies do not like having to sign on again.  Also, it would not work if you want to deploy outside the network (outside a firewall).  There have been many posts on the forums about the “flakiness” of LiveOffice, often losing connections and unable to refresh reports.  Since Live Office has to hold the data in the Xcelsius spreadsheet, the amount of data returned will have a negative impact on dashboard performance.  This last item has been the biggest barrier to our customers, who often wish to show granular data in their dashboards, or a significant amount of historical data.

InfoBurst XDS and XDM were designed to overcome these obstacles.  XDS can use Web Intelligence or Desktop Intelligence reports as data sources for pulling data, which it can refresh overnight (based on a schedule) and convert this data to xml.  XML is the fastest way to load data into Xcelsius.  XDS does not require a BusinessObjects login.  XDS also has the option of accessing a database directly (any database that can be accessed via an ODBC connection) through SQL queries, which can also be scheduled and converted to XML.  XDS also provides options for distributing the dashboard (putting on a network share, an intranet site, or as an email attachment or embedded in an in-line html email).  The biggest advantage, though, is the Intelligent Cache feature which allows dashboard developers to “cache” a very large set of data (I am currently working on a data set of over 18,000 rows of data), and then pass parameters through the xml code, based on selections the user makes on the dashboard, which then returns the small data set needed for that particular chart.  (On the above example I am passing parameters, based on drop-down menus, for Division, Plant, Department, Day and Shift, which returns the 6 rows of data I need to display – shift hours per day per Department.)  Since the dashboard is only loading these 6 rows of data, obviously the performance is very fast.    We recently converted a QaaWS dashboard where the data loading time when changing customers went from 2 minutes or so to less than 10 seconds, using Intelligent Cache filtering.