An Idea Whose Time Has Come (Again)

A press release issued earlier this morning (US EDT) by Star Analytics touts the company's offering. Star Command Center 3.0. Star Command Center isn't really a business intelligence (BI) software package itself. Rather, it sits on top of other vendors' BI platforms, providing a single interface to all your enterprise's BI applications. (Enterprise? Star Command? Hmm . . .)

Of course, there's really nothing new in the concept. Back in the days when MS-DOS dominated the personal computer landscape, programmers who became weary of typing endless lines of code into the command line in order to launch applications would create applications called "shells." On system start-up, the shell program would load and provide an interface (or as much of an interface as you could get with DOS) to allow the user to launch all of his/her programs from a single place.

In effect then, one could argue that Star Command is merely the next evolution of that shell. To be fair though, Star Command is much more advanced and functional than that. The notion of being able to access and manage multiple platforms from a single user interface that can be deployed anywhere (desktops, mobile devices, etc.) is an exciting one for those struggling with complex hybrid BI environments.

All of this can be good or bad for your BI strategy. If you have a very complicated environment with multiple BI vendors, users can find it daunting to learn all the different tools available to them. Administators may find themselves hard-pressed as well trying to manage multiple environments. In these cases, having a single point of access to the entire business intelligence toolkit can be very handy and, properly managed, provide real productivity benefits.

But be wary. Having a tool like Star Command Center at your disposal is not a substitute for true enterprise application integration (EAI). Put another way, if half your users are going to their Oracle applications and half to Microsoft applications with no real integration across and underneath your whole BI environment, what you're doing is really not much different than sweeping dust under a lovely rug.