Gaining the Advantage

Corporate competitiveness has been undergoing a remarkable transformation lately .  Indeed, many of the old (and sometimes contradictory!) success models like total quality management, departmentalisation, and corporate  conglomeration are rapidly giving way to new and exciting ideas like “Just In Time” and “Zero Inventory.”  Companies are struggling to redesign their organisational structures to take advantage of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) packages like SAP® and Oracle PeopleSoft®.  The push to reengineer the corporation has never been stronger.

This all suggests that fast access to information is no longer merely a competitive advantage in today’s knowledge economy; it has become a critical success factor.  Witness the extraordinary growth of the World Wide Web, the world’s largest distributed database, as it grows monthly by terabytes.  People and companies throughout the world are all sharing in the goal of providing fast and easy access to any and all information that a seeker (potential customer?) might find useful.

The same idea of information sharing is active at the internal company level – although there is a growing threat.  As the natural result of reduced barriers to exit and entry for employees, today’s workforce has become highly mobile.  This means that corporate knowledge is also potentially highly mobile, and the smarter companies are taking steps to ensure that their intellectual capital stays centralised and accessible.

A Model for Success

At the heart of this new paradigm is the need for a reliable mechanism to store and return the data that will be used to generate useful information.  The requirements for such a data store are very clear:  

	High reliability: a transaction-based system that supports high-availability concepts like server clustering and data replication.
	High scalability: robust enough to store and accurately return potentially huge amounts of data, in a very short time.
	Highly structured: an indexed system that supports modern data-mining tools like natural language queries and on-line analytical processing (OLAP).
	Built-in intelligence: as trained IT staff becomes increasingly scarce, the system must be intuitive and graphical, as well as self-tuning.

Quest Consultants’ Database Implementation knowledge area focuses entirely on cutting-edge SQL Server® solutions – including installation and configuration, security, database design, and virtual server clustering for high-availability. Quest Consultants has significant experience in designing and implementing SQL Server solutions that leverage all of these capabilities – for any solution, whether it be  ERP, Accounting, E-Commerce, Systems Management, or any customised application that requires a highly robust data warehouse.