Business Intelligence Tutorial, Data Warehouse guide

Agile business intelligence (BI) doesn't have to have a bottom-up thrust, of course, but for many vendors at last week's conference, agility definitely starts in the trenches.

Take BI integration firm Kapow Technologies, which champions a pragmatic take on data integration: if data can be exposed in the context of a Web browser, Kapow promises to get to it. The company says their technology can be used as a quick-and-not-entirely-dirty means to integrate publicly-available or subscription data and or as a means to integrate data from internal sources (including portals or Web-enabled legacy applications) that IT hasn't yet brought into the data warehouse.

Cloud computing isn't just a way to try to save money on IT infrastructure; it's a way to accelerate business agility and innovation, according to a recent report by PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Traditional, rigid IT infrastructures get in the way of innovation because they take months or years to deploy when a business decides to try something new, the report said, whereas on-demand computing services can be set up in days.