FAST's AIW unleashed

FAST has introduced its Adaptive Information Warehouse (AIW), which it says allows users to capitalize on their entire collection of information to make better informed decisions for competitive advantage. The company further says that FAST AIW integrates an end-to-end framework of products to unify search and business intelligence.

FAST claims AIW fundamentally redefines business intelligence with a shift away from the traditional data warehouse. Further, the company says, it directly addresses the limitations of data warehouses--cost, architecture complexity and limited scalability--as well as the inherent restrictions on traditional BI tools that cannot deliver timely, dynamic data to all users. Alternatively, FAST puts the business intelligence solutions on top of the search platform to integrate and orchestrate all of the information needed to make BI truly effective. Users can directly search and navigate business intelligence data in an ad hoc manner, then display relevant, usable information to users without the need for predefined report creation.

Additionally, says FAST, AIW also leverages the knowledge buried within all of an organization's unstructured content to provide actual business intelligence, enabling companies to generate new business insights from their unstructured information.