For going on five years now, Forrester Research CEO George Colony has been calling for a name change for the IT function, from information technology to business technology. Colony contends this change would signal IT's intent to focus on business goals. Here's an excerpt from a 2009 interview Colony did with Forrester colleague Connie Moore:
... I believe by changing the name to BT, and changing its behavior to focus on the business of the business, the technology organization would transform its relationship with the business. I think it would begin to communicate in a different language (the language of business), the current lack of communication would dissipate, and we'd have a higher level of communication around the business problems and the business issues. Which, of course, the presidents and line execs think and care about every day, but all too often, the technologists don't.
When I wrote about it, I said the most important part of Colony's statement was the reference to IT not only changing its name but "changing its behavior to focus on the business of the business." That's obviously the key. I'd like to think that's what most IT departments are already doing. But are they? (Frankly, I can be pretty naive.)
Colony's quote came to mind as I read an interesting eBizQ interview with Roman Stanek, CEO and founder of GoodData, a provider of cloud-based business intelligence software. Check out the first sentence of Stanek's answer to ebizQ Managing Editor Peter Schooff's question about why BI has a bad reputation among business users:
I believe that it's because BI, even though it has "business" in its name it is actually fundamentally an IT initiative and I don't think that IT departments know how to solve business problems. IT departments are very good at solving IT problems. So BI shouldn't be about how big is my data warehouse and how much data did I collect and how big a version did I build because those lead to very brittle and not really widely used solutions. We usually say that enterprise data warehouse is the place where data goes to die and that's why BI has such a bad name because it's driven by IT, it's tethered to IT and its not readily being used by business users. ...
Stanek says the cloud can help put BI's focus back onto the business, where it belongs. This has been true for at least some companies. In November I wrote about nutrition company Shaklee's positive experiences with BI in the cloud. The company's CIO said he "knows I've got a winner" because users in multiple functional areas use multiple BI applications -- without being forced to do so. I think that's great. Really. But, as I warned a few weeks later, I hope companies don't think that putting BI the cloud will somehow automatically solve underlying business issues.
And not all cloud-based BI solutions are the same. Any companies considering BI in the cloud should first refer to a list of criteria suggested by Forrester Research analyst Boris Evelson that I pointed to in this post from December.
The cloud isn't the only way to make BI more palatable. Microsoft's PowerPivot technology promises to add new BI capabilities to Excel and SharePoint, two tools already popular with business users. Nigel Pendse, an analyst who writes for The BI Verdict, last October called PowerPivot (then known as Gemini) "an ingenious Trojan horse for analysis services." He wrote:
The seductively inviting Gemini world is refreshingly free of the off-putting jargon like star/snowflake schemas, fact tables, cubes, measures, dimensions, hierarchies, levels, attributes, aggregations, partitions, MDX calculations and scripts typically encountered in OLAP server deployments. Instead, Excel power users with Gemini installed will be able to analyze and summarize vast amounts of data with absolutely no need to pre-define models or structures. In true spreadsheet-style, they work with the available data, rather than having to first build structures to slot it into. Microsoft is betting that this concession to the natural style of the millions of Excel power users will finally deliver the "BI for the masses" that has so far proved so disappointingly elusive.
Microsoft and IBM are among vendors promoting the idea of using data mashups to make it simpler for business users to produce their own BI reports by solving some of BI's niggly data-integration issues in ways invisible to end users. (As Pendse points out.) Bringing it back around to the cloud, mashups can be used to help integrate on-premise data with data from software-as-a-service applications.
But just how comfortable are "average" business users with doing their own data analysis, even using tools like mashups? It's a good question, one I wrote about in December. The answer will likely vary from company to company. But many business users will likely need a crash course in general concepts of relational databases and some knowledge of analytical software/reporting tools.
by Ann All, itbusinessedge.com
Friday, February 19, 2010
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
IT pros must get smart about analytics: IBM
Today business intelligence may only reach 15 to 20 per cent of an organization's users, but that will explode to 65 per cent in the next five years, said an executive with IBM Canada Ltd.
And as users increasingly get acquainted with these analytic systems, IT pros will have no choice but to deal with the massive flood of queries and data requests that will undoubtedly follow, said Jason Gartner, business analytics development executive with IBM Canada.
"Every bit of information you give them they ask for twice more back," said Gartner. "You give them a global headcount. The next thing they are going to ask is give me a global headcount by geography. All of a sudden, it's four times the information."
Gartner spoke at a ComputerWorld Canada TechInsights event about driving business innovation with smart analytics.
As user requests grow exponentially, the daily challenge for IT pros will be to continue to serve those needs, said Gartner. He describes what he calls a "one-way mirror" which separates business users from IT who toil in the background ensuring the data is clean, rationalized and at the granular level users want it.
Microsoft, HP unveil 'breakthrough' stack integration
"(Users) don't care where the data comes from, they don't care how you got the data," said Gartner.
Also speaking at the event was Glen Sheffield, information management technical specialist with IBM Canada, who said the product landscape has become a lot more complex for IT pros in the last 15 years with all the possible options of databases, analytics, network, storage and servers. "The world got more confusing, there were more choices," said Sheffield. "It's time to start thinking about how we're going to start delivering this in a faster manner."
For this reason, Sheffield said the next trend among vendors, including IBM, is to address the simplicity of deployment with integrated hardware and analytics. IBM announced precisely this with its Smart Analytics last September. And just last January, Microsoft Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. unveiled what they called a "breakthrough" stack integration of both company portfolios.
Gartner said IBM is not attempting to solve all its customer problems with this integrated approach, rather it's about letting IT pros focus on the business needs and not on "all the little pieces and nuts and bolts."
IT pros can then customize available packaged analytics applications and add modules as needed, said Gartner.
Conan Lear, business intelligence consultant with Toronto-based T4G Ltd., attended the event wanting to find out more about IBM's analytics strategy. In an interview with ComputerWorld Canada, Lear said IBM's Smart Analytics approach is very ambitious. "I think it is great that they are thinking about solutions for every area and I love the idea of being modular," he said.
However, Lear thinks it's clear to IT pros that a one-vendor environment is never the entire answer. "I know customers are seeing that," he said. "Just because I've got IBM Cognos doesn't mean I need DB2."
As a consultant, Lear must assess how his clients understand business intelligence and what they expect from it. At present, he said he doesn't think the term is very well understood but that will change. "With the mergers and acquisitions that are going on at the moment, it's going to become more and more clear to them," said Lear.
Also in the audience was Alex Raul Pascua, a team lead for the business intelligence team at Scarborough, Ont.-based Toyota Canada Inc. Pascua said the objective at his company is to get to an enterprise-wide approach to data warehousing where eventually users will rely on self-service analytics tools.
IBM's Smart Analytics approach and recent acquisitions happen to work well for Toyota Canada because it was already using technology from data mining company SSPS Inc. and business intelligence vendor Cognos Inc. when IBM acquired those companies, said Pascua. "Now that IBM bought those two companies, integration would be a lot easier for us," he said.
Although an IBM shop, Pascua isn't ruling out other vendors' analytics tools should he find them better and users express greater comfort with them.
Follow Kathleen Lau on Twitter: @KathleenLau
And as users increasingly get acquainted with these analytic systems, IT pros will have no choice but to deal with the massive flood of queries and data requests that will undoubtedly follow, said Jason Gartner, business analytics development executive with IBM Canada.
"Every bit of information you give them they ask for twice more back," said Gartner. "You give them a global headcount. The next thing they are going to ask is give me a global headcount by geography. All of a sudden, it's four times the information."
Gartner spoke at a ComputerWorld Canada TechInsights event about driving business innovation with smart analytics.
As user requests grow exponentially, the daily challenge for IT pros will be to continue to serve those needs, said Gartner. He describes what he calls a "one-way mirror" which separates business users from IT who toil in the background ensuring the data is clean, rationalized and at the granular level users want it.
Microsoft, HP unveil 'breakthrough' stack integration
"(Users) don't care where the data comes from, they don't care how you got the data," said Gartner.
Also speaking at the event was Glen Sheffield, information management technical specialist with IBM Canada, who said the product landscape has become a lot more complex for IT pros in the last 15 years with all the possible options of databases, analytics, network, storage and servers. "The world got more confusing, there were more choices," said Sheffield. "It's time to start thinking about how we're going to start delivering this in a faster manner."
For this reason, Sheffield said the next trend among vendors, including IBM, is to address the simplicity of deployment with integrated hardware and analytics. IBM announced precisely this with its Smart Analytics last September. And just last January, Microsoft Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. unveiled what they called a "breakthrough" stack integration of both company portfolios.
Gartner said IBM is not attempting to solve all its customer problems with this integrated approach, rather it's about letting IT pros focus on the business needs and not on "all the little pieces and nuts and bolts."
IT pros can then customize available packaged analytics applications and add modules as needed, said Gartner.
Conan Lear, business intelligence consultant with Toronto-based T4G Ltd., attended the event wanting to find out more about IBM's analytics strategy. In an interview with ComputerWorld Canada, Lear said IBM's Smart Analytics approach is very ambitious. "I think it is great that they are thinking about solutions for every area and I love the idea of being modular," he said.
However, Lear thinks it's clear to IT pros that a one-vendor environment is never the entire answer. "I know customers are seeing that," he said. "Just because I've got IBM Cognos doesn't mean I need DB2."
As a consultant, Lear must assess how his clients understand business intelligence and what they expect from it. At present, he said he doesn't think the term is very well understood but that will change. "With the mergers and acquisitions that are going on at the moment, it's going to become more and more clear to them," said Lear.
Also in the audience was Alex Raul Pascua, a team lead for the business intelligence team at Scarborough, Ont.-based Toyota Canada Inc. Pascua said the objective at his company is to get to an enterprise-wide approach to data warehousing where eventually users will rely on self-service analytics tools.
IBM's Smart Analytics approach and recent acquisitions happen to work well for Toyota Canada because it was already using technology from data mining company SSPS Inc. and business intelligence vendor Cognos Inc. when IBM acquired those companies, said Pascua. "Now that IBM bought those two companies, integration would be a lot easier for us," he said.
Although an IBM shop, Pascua isn't ruling out other vendors' analytics tools should he find them better and users express greater comfort with them.
Follow Kathleen Lau on Twitter: @KathleenLau
NetApp Announces Results for Third Quarter of Fiscal Year 2010
NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) today reported results for the third quarter of fiscal year 2010, which ended January 29, 2010. GAAP revenues for the third quarter of fiscal 2010 were $1.01 billion, compared to GAAP and non-GAAP revenues(1) of $746 million and $874 million, respectively, for the same period one year ago.
For the third fiscal quarter of 2010, GAAP net income was $108 million, or $0.30 per share(2) compared to GAAP net loss of $82 million, or ($0.25) per share for the same period in the prior year. Non-GAAP(3) net income for the third fiscal quarter of 2010 was $144 million, or $0.40 per share, compared to non-GAAP net income of $93 million, or $0.28 per share for the same period one year ago.
GAAP revenues for the first nine months of the current fiscal year totaled $2.76 billion, compared to GAAP and non-GAAP revenues of $2.5 billion and $2.7 billion, respectively, for the first nine months of the prior fiscal year.
GAAP net income for the first nine months of the current fiscal year totaled $255 million, or $0.73 per share, compared to GAAP net loss of $4 million, or $0.01 per share for the first nine months of the prior fiscal year. Non-GAAP net income for the first nine months of the current fiscal year totaled $350 million, or $1.00 per share, compared to non-GAAP net income of $262 million, or $0.78 per share for the first nine months of the prior fiscal year.
"The NetApp team demonstrated remarkable execution this quarter. With record revenues, record profits and record EPS, the company produced double-digit year over year revenue growth and our operations team shipped a record number of systems, despite persistent supply constraints," said Tom Georgens, president and CEO. "I am very pleased with the breadth of our progress. Business levels grew in every major geography, we gained momentum in both our channel and our direct business, and clearly gained market share this quarter."
Outlook
* NetApp estimates revenue for the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2010 to be in the range of $1.07 billion to $1.10 billion.
* NetApp estimates share count for the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2010 to increase by about 6 million shares.
* NetApp estimates that the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2010 GAAP earnings per share will be approximately $0.31 to $0.33 per share. NetApp estimates that the fourth quarter fiscal year 2010 non-GAAP earnings per share to be approximately $0.42 to $0.44 per share.
Business Highlights
In the third quarter of fiscal year 2010, NetApp made several key announcements regarding new and expanded alliances with top IT industry leaders, the delivery of new products and solutions designed to drive greater efficiency in customers' shared data center infrastructures, and several industry awards and accolades. Key business highlights during the quarter included the following.
New and Expanded Strategic Alliances
* Cisco, NetApp, and VMware Expand Longstanding Collaboration. Cisco, NetApp, and VMware collaborated to deliver new design architectures that help customers make their virtualized data centers more efficient, dynamic, and secure. The companies introduced an end-to-end secure multi-tenancy design architecture that provides enhanced security when sharing data center resources across virtualized and enterprise cloud environments. Cisco, NetApp, and VMware will also offer a cooperative support model for these pretested and validated design architectures to help customers quickly build a unified, virtualized infrastructure.
* Microsoft and NetApp Announce Strategic Alliance. Microsoft and NetApp announced a new three-year agreement to collaborate on and deliver technology solutions that span virtualization, private cloud computing, and storage and data management. This will enable customers to increase data center management efficiencies, reduce costs, and improve business agility. The strategic alliance will deepen product collaboration and technical integration and will extend joint sales and marketing activities to customers worldwide.
* Fujitsu and NetApp Plan to Expand Their Global Partnership. Fujitsu and NetApp announced their intention to deepen their partnership globally and to provide more tightly integrated and automated storage and data management solutions. The companies intend to jointly develop integrated products and services specifically in the areas of virtualization, storage and data management, and storage services and solutions. The expanded relationship will enable customers to derive greater value and efficiencies from their dynamic infrastructures.
New Products and Solutions
* New Tools to Manage Virtual Desktops in VMware Environments. NetApp introduced new tools and support to help customers deploy and manage virtual desktops through VMware® View™ 4. With the release of NetApp® Rapid Cloning Utility 3.0, customers can simplify the way they provision VMware virtual machines and streamline their business.
* New Virtualization Solutions for Microsoft Environments. NetApp unveiled NetApp SnapManager® for Hyper-V™ and SnapManager 6.0 for Microsoft® Exchange Server to minimize the complexity of physical and virtualized infrastructures.
Industry Awards and Accolades
* NetApp Named a Great Place to Work. NetApp was ranked #7 in FORTUNE magazine's "100 Best Companies to Work For" list. This is the second consecutive year that NetApp ranked in the top 10 and the fourth consecutive year it ranked in the top 15.
* Gartner Positions NetApp as Leader in Midrange Enterprise Disk Array Magic Quadrant. NetApp was positioned by Gartner, Inc. in the Leaders quadrant in its recently released research note "Magic Quadrant for Midrange Enterprise Disk Arrays."(4) Vendors in the Leaders quadrant have the highest scores for their ability to execute and their completeness of vision.
* NetApp eBI Project Earns InfoWorld 100 Award. NetApp's enterprise business intelligence (eBI) project was honored as part of IDG's InfoWorld 100 Awards for 2009, which recognize the 100 most innovative uses of IT initiatives that further business goals.
* NetApp Receives WRAP Award for Waste Management Programs. The California Integrated Waste Management Board honored NetApp with a 2009 Waste Reduction Awards Program (WRAP) award. The award recognizes NetApp's corporate waste and recycling program and its achievements in minimizing its environmental impact through the conscientious use of products, activities, and services.
For the third fiscal quarter of 2010, GAAP net income was $108 million, or $0.30 per share(2) compared to GAAP net loss of $82 million, or ($0.25) per share for the same period in the prior year. Non-GAAP(3) net income for the third fiscal quarter of 2010 was $144 million, or $0.40 per share, compared to non-GAAP net income of $93 million, or $0.28 per share for the same period one year ago.
GAAP revenues for the first nine months of the current fiscal year totaled $2.76 billion, compared to GAAP and non-GAAP revenues of $2.5 billion and $2.7 billion, respectively, for the first nine months of the prior fiscal year.
GAAP net income for the first nine months of the current fiscal year totaled $255 million, or $0.73 per share, compared to GAAP net loss of $4 million, or $0.01 per share for the first nine months of the prior fiscal year. Non-GAAP net income for the first nine months of the current fiscal year totaled $350 million, or $1.00 per share, compared to non-GAAP net income of $262 million, or $0.78 per share for the first nine months of the prior fiscal year.
"The NetApp team demonstrated remarkable execution this quarter. With record revenues, record profits and record EPS, the company produced double-digit year over year revenue growth and our operations team shipped a record number of systems, despite persistent supply constraints," said Tom Georgens, president and CEO. "I am very pleased with the breadth of our progress. Business levels grew in every major geography, we gained momentum in both our channel and our direct business, and clearly gained market share this quarter."
Outlook
* NetApp estimates revenue for the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2010 to be in the range of $1.07 billion to $1.10 billion.
* NetApp estimates share count for the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2010 to increase by about 6 million shares.
* NetApp estimates that the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2010 GAAP earnings per share will be approximately $0.31 to $0.33 per share. NetApp estimates that the fourth quarter fiscal year 2010 non-GAAP earnings per share to be approximately $0.42 to $0.44 per share.
Business Highlights
In the third quarter of fiscal year 2010, NetApp made several key announcements regarding new and expanded alliances with top IT industry leaders, the delivery of new products and solutions designed to drive greater efficiency in customers' shared data center infrastructures, and several industry awards and accolades. Key business highlights during the quarter included the following.
New and Expanded Strategic Alliances
* Cisco, NetApp, and VMware Expand Longstanding Collaboration. Cisco, NetApp, and VMware collaborated to deliver new design architectures that help customers make their virtualized data centers more efficient, dynamic, and secure. The companies introduced an end-to-end secure multi-tenancy design architecture that provides enhanced security when sharing data center resources across virtualized and enterprise cloud environments. Cisco, NetApp, and VMware will also offer a cooperative support model for these pretested and validated design architectures to help customers quickly build a unified, virtualized infrastructure.
* Microsoft and NetApp Announce Strategic Alliance. Microsoft and NetApp announced a new three-year agreement to collaborate on and deliver technology solutions that span virtualization, private cloud computing, and storage and data management. This will enable customers to increase data center management efficiencies, reduce costs, and improve business agility. The strategic alliance will deepen product collaboration and technical integration and will extend joint sales and marketing activities to customers worldwide.
* Fujitsu and NetApp Plan to Expand Their Global Partnership. Fujitsu and NetApp announced their intention to deepen their partnership globally and to provide more tightly integrated and automated storage and data management solutions. The companies intend to jointly develop integrated products and services specifically in the areas of virtualization, storage and data management, and storage services and solutions. The expanded relationship will enable customers to derive greater value and efficiencies from their dynamic infrastructures.
New Products and Solutions
* New Tools to Manage Virtual Desktops in VMware Environments. NetApp introduced new tools and support to help customers deploy and manage virtual desktops through VMware® View™ 4. With the release of NetApp® Rapid Cloning Utility 3.0, customers can simplify the way they provision VMware virtual machines and streamline their business.
* New Virtualization Solutions for Microsoft Environments. NetApp unveiled NetApp SnapManager® for Hyper-V™ and SnapManager 6.0 for Microsoft® Exchange Server to minimize the complexity of physical and virtualized infrastructures.
Industry Awards and Accolades
* NetApp Named a Great Place to Work. NetApp was ranked #7 in FORTUNE magazine's "100 Best Companies to Work For" list. This is the second consecutive year that NetApp ranked in the top 10 and the fourth consecutive year it ranked in the top 15.
* Gartner Positions NetApp as Leader in Midrange Enterprise Disk Array Magic Quadrant. NetApp was positioned by Gartner, Inc. in the Leaders quadrant in its recently released research note "Magic Quadrant for Midrange Enterprise Disk Arrays."(4) Vendors in the Leaders quadrant have the highest scores for their ability to execute and their completeness of vision.
* NetApp eBI Project Earns InfoWorld 100 Award. NetApp's enterprise business intelligence (eBI) project was honored as part of IDG's InfoWorld 100 Awards for 2009, which recognize the 100 most innovative uses of IT initiatives that further business goals.
* NetApp Receives WRAP Award for Waste Management Programs. The California Integrated Waste Management Board honored NetApp with a 2009 Waste Reduction Awards Program (WRAP) award. The award recognizes NetApp's corporate waste and recycling program and its achievements in minimizing its environmental impact through the conscientious use of products, activities, and services.
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
SA's top BI projects shortlisted
The final nominees for the inaugural ITWeb Business Intelligence Excellence Awards are in. The three finalists are Metropolitan Life, The South African Revenue Services (SARS), and Engen Oil.
The awards, sponsored by BI Practice and Microsoft, will run alongside the ITWeb BI Summit, being held at The Forum, in Bryanston, from 23 to 25 February. The winner and runner-up will be announced at the official awards ceremony, which will be hosted on the evening of 23 February.
Metropolitan Life entered its Cognos Now project. It says Cognos Now was implemented to deliver real-time reporting on production business, across product lines, and to replace the existing real-time reporting. This was being provided manually in Excel spreadsheet format on a two-hourly basis to executives, explains the company.
SARS entered a project which saw its enterprise data warehouse being integrated with BI capabilities. In so doing, the company was able to align strategic, tactical, operational reporting, and advanced analytics with data, information and knowledge across the organisation.
Engen Oil entered its Engen Project Portfolio Management (PPM) initiative, which was adopted to provide an aggregated view of planned capital investments and to ensure an appropriate investment pattern is followed throughout the organisation, offers Engen.
On making it through to the final round, Engen Oil PPM project manager, Vaughn Cooksey, says: “We are delighted to be named a finalist as our team has put in a colossal effort and it is great to give people recognition for the work they have done.
“So often we work within our companies doing what we believe adds value to the business, but it can be quite introspective, even though the benefits are tangible. To have an external panel recognise the value of the project is a real honour.”
“Opportunities to firstly enter the awards and then to be nominated as a finalist go a long way to boosting team morale and help drive the value which the BI team have to offer the Metropolitan Group,” states Sean Woodley, Metropolitan Life.
SARS' Eugene Wessels agrees: “Our thoughts are two-fold. Firstly, the honour of being selected as a finalist serves as recognition and motivation for a large team of competent and committed resources that have matured BI in SARS over many years.
“Secondly, SARS's selection will hopefully contribute towards a positive image of SARS, and ultimately inspire other public institutions to pursue the same achievements.”
The BI excellence award recognises outstanding BI practice in SA, and the finalists recognise the need for such an event in the local ICT landscape.
The event will help drive awareness around the importance of BI within the IT industry and the value it provides to organisations, comments Woodley. “Knowing that there is a platform to obtain industry recognition helps BI teams to deliver on their solutions and projects,” he adds.
“The BI Awards will positively impact the industry as both a catalyst and reactor,” says Wessels. “As a catalyst, the BI Awards will recognise and promote the value of business intelligence in organisations. As a reactor, the BI Awards will stimulate competitiveness between organisations in the ultimate pursuit of excellence in the field of information management.
“At the very least, the BI Awards should prompt organisations to continuously evaluate the return on investment of their BI implementations,” he concludes.
Source:itweb.co.za
The awards, sponsored by BI Practice and Microsoft, will run alongside the ITWeb BI Summit, being held at The Forum, in Bryanston, from 23 to 25 February. The winner and runner-up will be announced at the official awards ceremony, which will be hosted on the evening of 23 February.
Metropolitan Life entered its Cognos Now project. It says Cognos Now was implemented to deliver real-time reporting on production business, across product lines, and to replace the existing real-time reporting. This was being provided manually in Excel spreadsheet format on a two-hourly basis to executives, explains the company.
SARS entered a project which saw its enterprise data warehouse being integrated with BI capabilities. In so doing, the company was able to align strategic, tactical, operational reporting, and advanced analytics with data, information and knowledge across the organisation.
Engen Oil entered its Engen Project Portfolio Management (PPM) initiative, which was adopted to provide an aggregated view of planned capital investments and to ensure an appropriate investment pattern is followed throughout the organisation, offers Engen.
On making it through to the final round, Engen Oil PPM project manager, Vaughn Cooksey, says: “We are delighted to be named a finalist as our team has put in a colossal effort and it is great to give people recognition for the work they have done.
“So often we work within our companies doing what we believe adds value to the business, but it can be quite introspective, even though the benefits are tangible. To have an external panel recognise the value of the project is a real honour.”
“Opportunities to firstly enter the awards and then to be nominated as a finalist go a long way to boosting team morale and help drive the value which the BI team have to offer the Metropolitan Group,” states Sean Woodley, Metropolitan Life.
SARS' Eugene Wessels agrees: “Our thoughts are two-fold. Firstly, the honour of being selected as a finalist serves as recognition and motivation for a large team of competent and committed resources that have matured BI in SARS over many years.
“Secondly, SARS's selection will hopefully contribute towards a positive image of SARS, and ultimately inspire other public institutions to pursue the same achievements.”
The BI excellence award recognises outstanding BI practice in SA, and the finalists recognise the need for such an event in the local ICT landscape.
The event will help drive awareness around the importance of BI within the IT industry and the value it provides to organisations, comments Woodley. “Knowing that there is a platform to obtain industry recognition helps BI teams to deliver on their solutions and projects,” he adds.
“The BI Awards will positively impact the industry as both a catalyst and reactor,” says Wessels. “As a catalyst, the BI Awards will recognise and promote the value of business intelligence in organisations. As a reactor, the BI Awards will stimulate competitiveness between organisations in the ultimate pursuit of excellence in the field of information management.
“At the very least, the BI Awards should prompt organisations to continuously evaluate the return on investment of their BI implementations,” he concludes.
Source:itweb.co.za
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Feature: Gaining business intelligence insight
Getting access to sales information, store margins and gross performances hasn’t always been straightforward for retailers. With new technologies, this information can be available at the click of a button. Lindsay James reports.
The role of business intelligence (BI) in retail is more important now than it has ever been. Embattled retailers are finally starting to realise that they need to gain insight into every aspect of their business in order to stay ahead of competitors. Not only this, but they need to understand how one area of business impacts another, who their customers are and how successful a particular promotion is likely to be.
“Retailing is a complicated business with tech-savvy consumers leveraging multiple channels to both purchase and talk about the products and stores that they shop at,” says Ed Dupee, vice president for retail solutions at Teradata. “This is producing a wealth of information about customers and their shopping habits. Retailers that have an effective BI strategy and supporting technology to capture and integrate this wealth of information into their decision making across all key areas of their business will be able to stay competitive.”
“In these financially difficult times, BI is more essential than ever for helping to ensure the success of a retail business,” says David Hobbs-Mallyon, Microsoft’s UK data management and business intelligence product manager. “BI allows you to quickly understand which areas of the business are either under- or over-performing, allowing organisations to quickly shift focus to the important areas.”
ShiSh Shridhar, Microsoft’s retail industry market development manager, echoes this view and explains that the new economy is driving retailers to increasingly move toward ‘right product, right place, right time, right price’ product and promotion initiatives. “We have seen an increased interest in demand intelligence technologies to reduce out of stock and overstock situations,” he says. “Those forward-thinking retailers are looking at predictive analytics to better determine the right assortment of products and forecast inventory needs in specific geographies. In addition to this, retailers are also looking to be more agile with self-service BI solutions that empower everyone within the organisation to connect to relevant data, gain insight and act on it.”
Although the top industry players are looking at these solutions, the reality is that the majority of retailers have dated BI solutions that don’t provide the right people with the right information. “A number of retailers would state they have been using BI techniques for many years, but when you look at this a little closer, it may not be entirely true,” says Alister Jones, business intelligence manager at K3 Business Technology Group. “This is because many retailers regard their static weekly and monthly reports as BI. While standard report generation plays a part in delivering BI solutions, it doesn’t make a BI solution. When faced with some of the day to day ad-hoc questions that pop up, answering these suddenly becomes a problem.”
What’s really important right now is performance reporting tools at an affordable price and this is where Microsoft and its partners excel – they have a fantastic roadmap for the future
Sahir Anand, Aberdeen The majority of retailers’ solutions are disjointed and focus primarily on methodology, technology and data usage to drive decision making. Users can develop historical, current, and predictive analyses by combining operational and strategic views, though the process is generally lengthy and tools are cumbersome. Andrew West at Kronos agrees. “Various business applications have embedded third party business intelligence tools,” he says. “This unfamiliar and often complex technology creates a significant overhead for IT. These siloed approaches have made it difficult to create a meaningful set of enterprise intelligence, and the problem is intensified by managers’ inability to access the data through familiar desktop tools.”
Kevin Lief, Microsoft’s channel development manager for business intelligence, says that, much like other industries, retailers find that BI solutions often tend to be expensive per user, and therefore remain the domain of the few rather than becoming pervasive throughout the organisation. “This is often coupled with a tendency for different departments to buy point solutions to solve their own information needs, rather than adhering to a corporate strategy for BI,” he says.
Clearly this is not an effective way of working. “The challenge for retailers is to ensure that affordable, scalable tools are adopted organisation-wide,” says Lief. “This allows business intelligence to be used by many more employees and teams than at present.”
“It’s hard to compete these days without continuous improvement, and business intelligence is imperative for those initiatives,” says West. “Retailers have long used consumer intelligence to improve merchandising and marketing, and must now use business intelligence for a deep, introspective look into opportunities for reducing expense and increasing margins.”
Jason Foster, managing consultant for the Microsoft BI practice at Blueprint, says that retailers can’t get away with not having a BI solution. “In an environment coming out of a credit crunch, where custom is at a premium and retailers fight on the high street to make a difference through price and offering, access to the data that tells people about how and where the organisation is performing and being able to react to business activity is paramount,” he says.
The most effective BI solutions support workflows, key performance indicators, alerts, and other notifications of live operational procedures to gain a competitive advantage. “This includes supporting all of the processes required for localised pricing, promotions and assortments,” says Shridhar. “The right tools can help retailers streamline processes and reduce costs by using role-based workflows and electronic forms to apply a consistent and systematic approach to improve and automate daily tasks and back-of-the-house functions. Triggers can also be set up to engage the next step automatically while routing and tracking the overall process through to completion.”
Another way that BI can enable a smarter, leaner operation is by enabling retailers to proactively manage and monitor their stores’ IT environment and provide alerts if a hard disk drive is failing or a POS print malfunction holds up a checkout lane. “A support engineer can be alerted and quickly analyse the issue from any remote location by drilling down all the way to the retail peripherals connected to the POS device. Stores can also monitor key performance indicators such as service wait-times to ensure the optimal level of service, especially at peak times.”
In addition to real-time alerts, business intelligence solutions are giving retailers the necessary tools to analyse and collaborate on performance and operational data in real time to improve efficiencies and lower costs. “Ten years ago the top retailers would have a manager go from store to store armed with complex spreadsheets based on historic data,” says Sahir Anand, research director for the retail and hospitality sector at Aberdeen. “Now, with the latest business intelligence solutions, store managers have access to dashboards which contain real-time data that they can access at the touch of a button. Using this information in the right way can not only motivate employees, but it can empower employees to change their performance instantly.”
Kai Robert Hallberg, sales manager for retail and hospitality at Profitbase, says that the progress of both hardware and software in handling large data volumes has given retailers a much broader spectrum of opportunities in analysing data. “In previous years the big data volumes were preventing retailers from using the power of the analytical capabilities in the BI tools,” he says. “Now, new analytical methods such as data mining have given retailers numerous opportunities to detect fresh income and cost-saving potential.”
But the benefits of good business-wide BI solutions should filter further than the hands of retail employees – they should impact the customer too. “Besides the operational aspects, BI is used in setting strategy for retailers,” says Teradata’s Dupee. “One example of this is as it relates to the customer – and customer centricity. Retailers are using customer segmentation to better understand and serve their customers. This is becoming central to their whole company strategy. Tesco and Best Buy are good examples of retailers that have done this very effectively.”
“Retailers collect a lot of data about customer buying behaviour and preferences,” says Shridhar. “Using this data to better target and enhance customers’ buying experiences can help create better value and hence increase loyalty. Business intelligence solutions based on SQL Server 2008 can help retailers collect, analyse and use customer data effectively to create the ultimate customer experience. Enhanced value also means providing a great experience for the customer with the right assortment of products at the right price. Assortment planning solutions and price optimisation solutions become very important as a result.”
K3’s Jones agrees that SQL Server is a very useful tool. “The single most important technology that underpins our BI solutions is SQL Server,” he says. “It provides many of the ingredients for a successful BI implementation. These include the storage capability of a terabyte warehouse, the technology for shifting and transforming large volumes of data, and the capability of easily identifying deltas in data to reduce processing time.”
Microsoft’s business intelligence solutions like SQL Server 2008 and SharePoint Server 2007 have already gained respect in the retail industry, but the technology provider isn’t stopping there. At the recent SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas, Microsoft chief executive officer Steve Ballmer announced the public beta of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 and Office 2010, and revealed some of the new products’ capabilities for the first time.
“By taming the overflow of information across systems and technologies, SharePoint enables organisations to thrive,” Ballmer said. “SharePoint 2010 is the biggest and most important release of SharePoint to date. When paired with Microsoft Office 2010, it will transform efficiency by connecting workers across a single collaboration platform for business.”
Shridhar says that SharePoint 2010 will transform business intelligence for retailers. “Whether deployed as an on-premise or hosted service, SharePoint’s integrated capabilities are enhanced by search technologies and enable retailers to rapidly respond to changing business needs by making data-driven decisions and by deploying customised solutions quickly and securely.”
With Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 capabilities, retail employees can create and share powerful analysis from their desktops or a browser. With improved analysis capabilities, they can make better, smarter decisions and share sensitive business information more broadly with co-workers, customers and business partners in a security-enhanced environment. This democratisation of business intelligence can enable retail organisations to be more agile and competitive.
Retail managers can be more proactive to situations if they have access to real-time scorecards and analytics. “PerformancePoint Services in SharePoint 2010 enables retailers to deploy rich, interactive, context-driven dashboards that enable users to access the information they need, no matter the source, combining multiple systems and content into a single browser-based experience,” explains Shridhar.
But this isn’t all. Microsoft PowerPivot for Excel 2010 is a data analysis add-on to Sharepoint 2010 that gives retailers the power to create self-service BI solutions, facilitates sharing and collaboration on user-generated BI solutions in a Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 environment, and enables IT organisations to increase operational efficiencies through Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2-based management tools. These new tools will empower retailers to extend the benefits of BI across their ranks to information workers with minimal reliance on IT to help drive smarter, quicker decision-making, free up IT staff for more valuable activities, and dramatically drive down deployment costs.
Microsoft is clearly doing a great job in the BI space. “What’s really important right now is performance reporting tools at an affordable price and this is where Microsoft and its partners excel – they have a fantastic roadmap for the future,” says Aberdeen’s Anand.
Anand highlights recent research which illustrates Microsoft’s strength in business intelligence technology. “Our data shows that those retailers that are using Microsoft BI infrastructure, applications and delivery tools are seeing better results in terms of return on investment, customer retention and gross margin than those that rely on other solutions,” he says.
This article first appeared in the Spring 2009 edition of Retailspeak magazine.
The role of business intelligence (BI) in retail is more important now than it has ever been. Embattled retailers are finally starting to realise that they need to gain insight into every aspect of their business in order to stay ahead of competitors. Not only this, but they need to understand how one area of business impacts another, who their customers are and how successful a particular promotion is likely to be.
“Retailing is a complicated business with tech-savvy consumers leveraging multiple channels to both purchase and talk about the products and stores that they shop at,” says Ed Dupee, vice president for retail solutions at Teradata. “This is producing a wealth of information about customers and their shopping habits. Retailers that have an effective BI strategy and supporting technology to capture and integrate this wealth of information into their decision making across all key areas of their business will be able to stay competitive.”
“In these financially difficult times, BI is more essential than ever for helping to ensure the success of a retail business,” says David Hobbs-Mallyon, Microsoft’s UK data management and business intelligence product manager. “BI allows you to quickly understand which areas of the business are either under- or over-performing, allowing organisations to quickly shift focus to the important areas.”
ShiSh Shridhar, Microsoft’s retail industry market development manager, echoes this view and explains that the new economy is driving retailers to increasingly move toward ‘right product, right place, right time, right price’ product and promotion initiatives. “We have seen an increased interest in demand intelligence technologies to reduce out of stock and overstock situations,” he says. “Those forward-thinking retailers are looking at predictive analytics to better determine the right assortment of products and forecast inventory needs in specific geographies. In addition to this, retailers are also looking to be more agile with self-service BI solutions that empower everyone within the organisation to connect to relevant data, gain insight and act on it.”
Although the top industry players are looking at these solutions, the reality is that the majority of retailers have dated BI solutions that don’t provide the right people with the right information. “A number of retailers would state they have been using BI techniques for many years, but when you look at this a little closer, it may not be entirely true,” says Alister Jones, business intelligence manager at K3 Business Technology Group. “This is because many retailers regard their static weekly and monthly reports as BI. While standard report generation plays a part in delivering BI solutions, it doesn’t make a BI solution. When faced with some of the day to day ad-hoc questions that pop up, answering these suddenly becomes a problem.”
What’s really important right now is performance reporting tools at an affordable price and this is where Microsoft and its partners excel – they have a fantastic roadmap for the future
Sahir Anand, Aberdeen The majority of retailers’ solutions are disjointed and focus primarily on methodology, technology and data usage to drive decision making. Users can develop historical, current, and predictive analyses by combining operational and strategic views, though the process is generally lengthy and tools are cumbersome. Andrew West at Kronos agrees. “Various business applications have embedded third party business intelligence tools,” he says. “This unfamiliar and often complex technology creates a significant overhead for IT. These siloed approaches have made it difficult to create a meaningful set of enterprise intelligence, and the problem is intensified by managers’ inability to access the data through familiar desktop tools.”
Kevin Lief, Microsoft’s channel development manager for business intelligence, says that, much like other industries, retailers find that BI solutions often tend to be expensive per user, and therefore remain the domain of the few rather than becoming pervasive throughout the organisation. “This is often coupled with a tendency for different departments to buy point solutions to solve their own information needs, rather than adhering to a corporate strategy for BI,” he says.
Clearly this is not an effective way of working. “The challenge for retailers is to ensure that affordable, scalable tools are adopted organisation-wide,” says Lief. “This allows business intelligence to be used by many more employees and teams than at present.”
“It’s hard to compete these days without continuous improvement, and business intelligence is imperative for those initiatives,” says West. “Retailers have long used consumer intelligence to improve merchandising and marketing, and must now use business intelligence for a deep, introspective look into opportunities for reducing expense and increasing margins.”
Jason Foster, managing consultant for the Microsoft BI practice at Blueprint, says that retailers can’t get away with not having a BI solution. “In an environment coming out of a credit crunch, where custom is at a premium and retailers fight on the high street to make a difference through price and offering, access to the data that tells people about how and where the organisation is performing and being able to react to business activity is paramount,” he says.
The most effective BI solutions support workflows, key performance indicators, alerts, and other notifications of live operational procedures to gain a competitive advantage. “This includes supporting all of the processes required for localised pricing, promotions and assortments,” says Shridhar. “The right tools can help retailers streamline processes and reduce costs by using role-based workflows and electronic forms to apply a consistent and systematic approach to improve and automate daily tasks and back-of-the-house functions. Triggers can also be set up to engage the next step automatically while routing and tracking the overall process through to completion.”
Another way that BI can enable a smarter, leaner operation is by enabling retailers to proactively manage and monitor their stores’ IT environment and provide alerts if a hard disk drive is failing or a POS print malfunction holds up a checkout lane. “A support engineer can be alerted and quickly analyse the issue from any remote location by drilling down all the way to the retail peripherals connected to the POS device. Stores can also monitor key performance indicators such as service wait-times to ensure the optimal level of service, especially at peak times.”
In addition to real-time alerts, business intelligence solutions are giving retailers the necessary tools to analyse and collaborate on performance and operational data in real time to improve efficiencies and lower costs. “Ten years ago the top retailers would have a manager go from store to store armed with complex spreadsheets based on historic data,” says Sahir Anand, research director for the retail and hospitality sector at Aberdeen. “Now, with the latest business intelligence solutions, store managers have access to dashboards which contain real-time data that they can access at the touch of a button. Using this information in the right way can not only motivate employees, but it can empower employees to change their performance instantly.”
Kai Robert Hallberg, sales manager for retail and hospitality at Profitbase, says that the progress of both hardware and software in handling large data volumes has given retailers a much broader spectrum of opportunities in analysing data. “In previous years the big data volumes were preventing retailers from using the power of the analytical capabilities in the BI tools,” he says. “Now, new analytical methods such as data mining have given retailers numerous opportunities to detect fresh income and cost-saving potential.”
But the benefits of good business-wide BI solutions should filter further than the hands of retail employees – they should impact the customer too. “Besides the operational aspects, BI is used in setting strategy for retailers,” says Teradata’s Dupee. “One example of this is as it relates to the customer – and customer centricity. Retailers are using customer segmentation to better understand and serve their customers. This is becoming central to their whole company strategy. Tesco and Best Buy are good examples of retailers that have done this very effectively.”
“Retailers collect a lot of data about customer buying behaviour and preferences,” says Shridhar. “Using this data to better target and enhance customers’ buying experiences can help create better value and hence increase loyalty. Business intelligence solutions based on SQL Server 2008 can help retailers collect, analyse and use customer data effectively to create the ultimate customer experience. Enhanced value also means providing a great experience for the customer with the right assortment of products at the right price. Assortment planning solutions and price optimisation solutions become very important as a result.”
K3’s Jones agrees that SQL Server is a very useful tool. “The single most important technology that underpins our BI solutions is SQL Server,” he says. “It provides many of the ingredients for a successful BI implementation. These include the storage capability of a terabyte warehouse, the technology for shifting and transforming large volumes of data, and the capability of easily identifying deltas in data to reduce processing time.”
Microsoft’s business intelligence solutions like SQL Server 2008 and SharePoint Server 2007 have already gained respect in the retail industry, but the technology provider isn’t stopping there. At the recent SharePoint Conference in Las Vegas, Microsoft chief executive officer Steve Ballmer announced the public beta of Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 and Office 2010, and revealed some of the new products’ capabilities for the first time.
“By taming the overflow of information across systems and technologies, SharePoint enables organisations to thrive,” Ballmer said. “SharePoint 2010 is the biggest and most important release of SharePoint to date. When paired with Microsoft Office 2010, it will transform efficiency by connecting workers across a single collaboration platform for business.”
Shridhar says that SharePoint 2010 will transform business intelligence for retailers. “Whether deployed as an on-premise or hosted service, SharePoint’s integrated capabilities are enhanced by search technologies and enable retailers to rapidly respond to changing business needs by making data-driven decisions and by deploying customised solutions quickly and securely.”
With Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 capabilities, retail employees can create and share powerful analysis from their desktops or a browser. With improved analysis capabilities, they can make better, smarter decisions and share sensitive business information more broadly with co-workers, customers and business partners in a security-enhanced environment. This democratisation of business intelligence can enable retail organisations to be more agile and competitive.
Retail managers can be more proactive to situations if they have access to real-time scorecards and analytics. “PerformancePoint Services in SharePoint 2010 enables retailers to deploy rich, interactive, context-driven dashboards that enable users to access the information they need, no matter the source, combining multiple systems and content into a single browser-based experience,” explains Shridhar.
But this isn’t all. Microsoft PowerPivot for Excel 2010 is a data analysis add-on to Sharepoint 2010 that gives retailers the power to create self-service BI solutions, facilitates sharing and collaboration on user-generated BI solutions in a Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010 environment, and enables IT organisations to increase operational efficiencies through Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2-based management tools. These new tools will empower retailers to extend the benefits of BI across their ranks to information workers with minimal reliance on IT to help drive smarter, quicker decision-making, free up IT staff for more valuable activities, and dramatically drive down deployment costs.
Microsoft is clearly doing a great job in the BI space. “What’s really important right now is performance reporting tools at an affordable price and this is where Microsoft and its partners excel – they have a fantastic roadmap for the future,” says Aberdeen’s Anand.
Anand highlights recent research which illustrates Microsoft’s strength in business intelligence technology. “Our data shows that those retailers that are using Microsoft BI infrastructure, applications and delivery tools are seeing better results in terms of return on investment, customer retention and gross margin than those that rely on other solutions,” he says.
This article first appeared in the Spring 2009 edition of Retailspeak magazine.
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
QlikTech Positioned in the Challenger Quadrant Based on Review of its QlikView Product in 2010 Busin
QlikTech, a leading business intelligence company, today announced it's been positioned by Gartner, Inc. in the challengers Quadrant in the Enterprise Business Intelligence Suites (EBIS) Magic Quadrant' report(1) for based on review of its QlikView product.
"It's great to be positioned by Gartner as a Challenger," said Anthony Deighton, Senior Vice President of Products for QlikTech. "As the company that pioneered the in memory business intelligence space, we understand what it means to have a technology offering that challenges the status quo. We look forward to continuing to challenge the incumbents with a totally different approach than traditional business intelligence platforms. We're happy to have over 12,000 customers around the world who have reaped the benefits of QlikView's ease of use and rapid deployment that speeds time to critical business answers."
Gartner comments on the evolution of the business intelligence in the report: "Organizations are rapidly embracing the idea of providing data to end users and empowering them with an ability to navigate and visualize the data in a "surf and save" mode as an alternative to a report-only architecture. Threatened by the success of these vendors (and adding to their credibility), traditional BI platform vendors are attempting to imitate them with easy-to-use interactive visualization alternatives often incorporating in-memory technology. This imitation, coupled with a growing recognition by user organizations that data discovery tools can be used as full-functioned BI platforms for a broader range of BI platform capabilities and use cases (beyond rapid prototyping), justifies the significant move of these vendors from the Visionaries to the Challengers quadrant."
About Gartner's Magic Quadrant
The Magic Quadrant is copyrighted 2010 by Gartner, Inc. and is reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner's analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the "Leaders" quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
About QlikTech
QlikTech pioneered the in-memory business intelligence space on the premise that meaningful analysis belongs in the hands of the users who need the information, when they need it. Its QlikView product is designed to deliver immediate business answers and enable users to easily explore their data without limits. Unlike traditional BI, QlikView can deliver value with payback measured in days or weeks rather than months, years, or not at all. It can be deployed on premise, in the cloud, or on a laptop or mobile device--from a single user to the largest global enterprise. QlikTech has more than 12,000 customers in 95 countries and over 800 partners worldwide. For more information, please visit www.qlikview.com.
QlikTech and QlikView are trademarks or registered trademarks of QlikTech International AB. Other company names, product names and company logos mentioned herein are the trademarks, or registered trademarks of their respective owners.
(1) The "Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms" report is available for purchase directly from Gartner.
Source: QlikTech
"It's great to be positioned by Gartner as a Challenger," said Anthony Deighton, Senior Vice President of Products for QlikTech. "As the company that pioneered the in memory business intelligence space, we understand what it means to have a technology offering that challenges the status quo. We look forward to continuing to challenge the incumbents with a totally different approach than traditional business intelligence platforms. We're happy to have over 12,000 customers around the world who have reaped the benefits of QlikView's ease of use and rapid deployment that speeds time to critical business answers."
Gartner comments on the evolution of the business intelligence in the report: "Organizations are rapidly embracing the idea of providing data to end users and empowering them with an ability to navigate and visualize the data in a "surf and save" mode as an alternative to a report-only architecture. Threatened by the success of these vendors (and adding to their credibility), traditional BI platform vendors are attempting to imitate them with easy-to-use interactive visualization alternatives often incorporating in-memory technology. This imitation, coupled with a growing recognition by user organizations that data discovery tools can be used as full-functioned BI platforms for a broader range of BI platform capabilities and use cases (beyond rapid prototyping), justifies the significant move of these vendors from the Visionaries to the Challengers quadrant."
About Gartner's Magic Quadrant
The Magic Quadrant is copyrighted 2010 by Gartner, Inc. and is reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner's analysis of how certain vendors measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the "Leaders" quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.
About QlikTech
QlikTech pioneered the in-memory business intelligence space on the premise that meaningful analysis belongs in the hands of the users who need the information, when they need it. Its QlikView product is designed to deliver immediate business answers and enable users to easily explore their data without limits. Unlike traditional BI, QlikView can deliver value with payback measured in days or weeks rather than months, years, or not at all. It can be deployed on premise, in the cloud, or on a laptop or mobile device--from a single user to the largest global enterprise. QlikTech has more than 12,000 customers in 95 countries and over 800 partners worldwide. For more information, please visit www.qlikview.com.
QlikTech and QlikView are trademarks or registered trademarks of QlikTech International AB. Other company names, product names and company logos mentioned herein are the trademarks, or registered trademarks of their respective owners.
(1) The "Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms" report is available for purchase directly from Gartner.
Source: QlikTech
Sunday, February 7, 2010
Creating "Enterprise 2.0' at SharePoint 2010 SocialFest
(Media-Newswire.com) - MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Feb. 5, 2010 – For many software developers—particularly those focused on social computing—the world of deep enterprise computing seems far removed from a world of widgets and tweets.
But social computing has become a driving force behind “Enterprise 2.0” – aimed at making large companies more collaborative and agile. Next-generation social computing tools are rapidly re-shaping the ways in which corporations create and share information. For developers the challenge is no longer whether to target enterprise IT, but how. What platform is best? How do you accelerate bringing the power of social computing to the enterprise? How can the new communication tools deliver value on existing IT investments?
Enter the SharePoint 2010 SocialFest
Those questions were at the heart of SharePoint 2010 SocialFest, an event held in the Silicon Valley the week of Jan. 25, providing a blend of hands-on development work, coaching, and community building around Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010.
Microsoft released the beta version of that product last November to positive media and customer reaction, much of it in regards to the product’s development platform capabilities. SharePoint enables rapid deployment of enterprise applications that take advantage of the collaboration capabilities of a portal-based platform. This latest version builds on the broad market acceptance of SharePoint for sharing and collaboration across the enterprise.
Seven startups from Brazil, France, the U.K., and the U.S. participated in SharePoint 2010 SocialFest: Calinda Software, Cortex Intelligence, Confer, Huddle , Leverage Software, Liaise, and Loqu8. During the event the startups competed in building social media applications based on the new platform.
Solid Results
During the week-long competition the startups created a wide range of solutions:
• Calinda MindUP developed a SharePoint 2010 “mail space” that groups related conversations, enhancing collaboration by helping teams get a better view of their projects.
• Confer's SharePoint 2010 integration extends the simplicity of its microblogging Web application within a SharePoint installation. Confer bridges the gap between internal and external employees, and simplifies the communication process.
• Cortex Intelligence’s market intelligence service allows SharePoint 2010 users to pull in relevant data from external sources, enabling users to share, discuss and act on insights gained by the market intelligence.
• Huddle for SharePoint 2010 enables enterprise teams to invite external users into their daily workflow and synchronize their SharePoint document libraries with content stored on the Huddle network, or on other SharePoint sites.
• Leverage Software DesignSpace transforms a set of e-mail threads into an on-demand social workspace—automatically, with no data entry or administration required—and then lets users share that information with others through SharePoint 2010.
• Liaise for SharePoint 2010 turns text in e-mail messages into structured KeyPoints ( actions/issues, due dates, people and priorities ) and ensures that SharePoint is always up-to-date.
• With Loqu8 Prelude users can instantly access their SharePoint data by hovering their mouse over a word in their document. The Loqu8 Prelude pop-up window displays contextually relevant information from SharePoint 2010.
In the end Huddle received the SocialFest judges’ nod as the best SharePoint 2010 implementation. As the winner, Huddle will attend the next Enterprise 2.0 conference with the marketing support of the SharePoint team.
BizSpark Resources for Startups
SocialFest is the latest implementation of the broader Microsoft BizSpark effort to connect a global community of startup developers, supporting partners and customers, backed by tools, guidance and involvement from Microsoft. Launched in November 2008, BizSpark is designed to help entrepreneurs around the world bring new software solutions to life using Microsoft platform technologies. More than 30,000 startups worldwide have joined BizSpark since its inception.
These startups are a driving force within the rapidly expanding ranks of developers—more than 5,000 to date—who are enabling social and collaborative solutions for more than 17,000 SharePoint customers worldwide.
Five of the competing startups in SocialFest are participants in BizSpark One, the newest extension of BizSpark, targeting select startups with significant potential to impact the market. BizSpark One companies work one-on-one with Microsoft and are supported by BizSpark Network Partner experts in financing, marketing and other fields, to hone their business as well as product strategies, to give them the best possible entry into the commercial market.
Lynda Ting, director of business development with Microsoft’s Strategic and Emerging Business Team ( SEBT ), focuses on emerging software startups in the area of collaboration and communication, all in support of BizSpark. In her role, Ting talks to a wide variety of software startups. She recently started noticing a trend.
Social Networking Comes to the Enterprise
“I noticed over the last several months that dozens of social media startups were eager to move into the enterprise space. They wanted to bring capabilities like micro-blogging and external communities into Enterprise 2.0 environments,” Ting says. “But they did not necessarily have a good sense of the full potential of SharePoint as the way to bring their innovations to market. They were asking me, ‘How do I integrate with SharePoint? How do I integrate with SharePoint to accelerate the IT sale?’”
That realization led Ting to work with the Microsoft SharePoint team and .NET development experts to hatch the idea for a SharePoint competition that would jump-start development work for the enterprise, and SocialFest was the result.
While the development competition during SocialFest was intense, all the seven startups were able to participate in a broad range of other activities during the week—including a business review by a panel of venture capitalists ( VCs ). The sessions not only gave the VCs a chance to dive into the product strategies of the startup companies, but also to critique their broader business planning and go-to-market approaches.
“The startups were challenged in those sessions,” Ting said. “It gave them a great deal of insight into making sure they had strong value propositions, and were ready to sell to the commercial enterprise software market. VCs were really impressed with the quality of the startups, not just their technology. Connections were made.”
But social computing has become a driving force behind “Enterprise 2.0” – aimed at making large companies more collaborative and agile. Next-generation social computing tools are rapidly re-shaping the ways in which corporations create and share information. For developers the challenge is no longer whether to target enterprise IT, but how. What platform is best? How do you accelerate bringing the power of social computing to the enterprise? How can the new communication tools deliver value on existing IT investments?
Enter the SharePoint 2010 SocialFest
Those questions were at the heart of SharePoint 2010 SocialFest, an event held in the Silicon Valley the week of Jan. 25, providing a blend of hands-on development work, coaching, and community building around Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010.
Microsoft released the beta version of that product last November to positive media and customer reaction, much of it in regards to the product’s development platform capabilities. SharePoint enables rapid deployment of enterprise applications that take advantage of the collaboration capabilities of a portal-based platform. This latest version builds on the broad market acceptance of SharePoint for sharing and collaboration across the enterprise.
Seven startups from Brazil, France, the U.K., and the U.S. participated in SharePoint 2010 SocialFest: Calinda Software, Cortex Intelligence, Confer, Huddle , Leverage Software, Liaise, and Loqu8. During the event the startups competed in building social media applications based on the new platform.
Solid Results
During the week-long competition the startups created a wide range of solutions:
• Calinda MindUP developed a SharePoint 2010 “mail space” that groups related conversations, enhancing collaboration by helping teams get a better view of their projects.
• Confer's SharePoint 2010 integration extends the simplicity of its microblogging Web application within a SharePoint installation. Confer bridges the gap between internal and external employees, and simplifies the communication process.
• Cortex Intelligence’s market intelligence service allows SharePoint 2010 users to pull in relevant data from external sources, enabling users to share, discuss and act on insights gained by the market intelligence.
• Huddle for SharePoint 2010 enables enterprise teams to invite external users into their daily workflow and synchronize their SharePoint document libraries with content stored on the Huddle network, or on other SharePoint sites.
• Leverage Software DesignSpace transforms a set of e-mail threads into an on-demand social workspace—automatically, with no data entry or administration required—and then lets users share that information with others through SharePoint 2010.
• Liaise for SharePoint 2010 turns text in e-mail messages into structured KeyPoints ( actions/issues, due dates, people and priorities ) and ensures that SharePoint is always up-to-date.
• With Loqu8 Prelude users can instantly access their SharePoint data by hovering their mouse over a word in their document. The Loqu8 Prelude pop-up window displays contextually relevant information from SharePoint 2010.
In the end Huddle received the SocialFest judges’ nod as the best SharePoint 2010 implementation. As the winner, Huddle will attend the next Enterprise 2.0 conference with the marketing support of the SharePoint team.
BizSpark Resources for Startups
SocialFest is the latest implementation of the broader Microsoft BizSpark effort to connect a global community of startup developers, supporting partners and customers, backed by tools, guidance and involvement from Microsoft. Launched in November 2008, BizSpark is designed to help entrepreneurs around the world bring new software solutions to life using Microsoft platform technologies. More than 30,000 startups worldwide have joined BizSpark since its inception.
These startups are a driving force within the rapidly expanding ranks of developers—more than 5,000 to date—who are enabling social and collaborative solutions for more than 17,000 SharePoint customers worldwide.
Five of the competing startups in SocialFest are participants in BizSpark One, the newest extension of BizSpark, targeting select startups with significant potential to impact the market. BizSpark One companies work one-on-one with Microsoft and are supported by BizSpark Network Partner experts in financing, marketing and other fields, to hone their business as well as product strategies, to give them the best possible entry into the commercial market.
Lynda Ting, director of business development with Microsoft’s Strategic and Emerging Business Team ( SEBT ), focuses on emerging software startups in the area of collaboration and communication, all in support of BizSpark. In her role, Ting talks to a wide variety of software startups. She recently started noticing a trend.
Social Networking Comes to the Enterprise
“I noticed over the last several months that dozens of social media startups were eager to move into the enterprise space. They wanted to bring capabilities like micro-blogging and external communities into Enterprise 2.0 environments,” Ting says. “But they did not necessarily have a good sense of the full potential of SharePoint as the way to bring their innovations to market. They were asking me, ‘How do I integrate with SharePoint? How do I integrate with SharePoint to accelerate the IT sale?’”
That realization led Ting to work with the Microsoft SharePoint team and .NET development experts to hatch the idea for a SharePoint competition that would jump-start development work for the enterprise, and SocialFest was the result.
While the development competition during SocialFest was intense, all the seven startups were able to participate in a broad range of other activities during the week—including a business review by a panel of venture capitalists ( VCs ). The sessions not only gave the VCs a chance to dive into the product strategies of the startup companies, but also to critique their broader business planning and go-to-market approaches.
“The startups were challenged in those sessions,” Ting said. “It gave them a great deal of insight into making sure they had strong value propositions, and were ready to sell to the commercial enterprise software market. VCs were really impressed with the quality of the startups, not just their technology. Connections were made.”
Saturday, February 6, 2010
Inform Business Impact
Today is another first for us. We are proud to announce our intention to acquire Inform Business Impact. The company is a global leader in business analytics and workforce planning, and it is a pure play Cloud company and has world-class consulting capabilities, kind of like the McKinsey of this industry. As you know, we are aggressively building out our BizX road map. We have a three-pronged approach, internal development, partnerships and M&A. there is a lot of business intelligence software, but it is all based on the code general ledger and accounting. That is not going to work for our customers. SuccessFactors needed to drive workforce information to drive business decision. Our customers need technology that’s built based on the general ledger, sales and workforce information. With Inform, we can do all three.
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