These applications are able to thrive because of the abilities of their enabling technologies to deliver consistent, compatible data quickly and in a form optimized for user analysis. Today the decision support market is a fast-changing phenomenon with new applications and new enabling technologies appearing almost daily. Enabling technologies must facilitate the transfer and sharing of control information among these components and they should permit centralized systems management and control. Decision support increasingly presents an enterprise-wide view of corporate information, and so must draw from incompatible sources. As decision support becomes more wide-ranging, robust enabling extract and transformation tools are required to reconcile the data drawn from mainframe, relational and enterprise resource planning data.
New applications demand high-performance enabling technologies.
The sheer volumes of data grow exponentially. Enabling technologies must possess industrial-strength data cleansing abilities, and they must be able to quickly transform data and deliver it to the waiting applications. Business needs change rapidly. Enabling technologies must help users adapt quickly to new analytic needs. Some user groups might wish to combine their applications to make use of the same source data.