TORONTO, March 24 /PRNewswire/ -- Panorama Software, a global leader in proactive Business Intelligence (BI) solutions, today announced a major partner initiative that will revolutionize the world of BI on Microsoft. In response to a high volume of partnership inquiries following the platform's tight technological alignment with the upcoming launch of Microsoft Office/SharePoint 2010, Panorama has greatly simplified the registration process for VARs and consultants interested in joining the Microsoft BI eco-system.
While it usually takes months with other vendors to verify and complete partnership registration, the new accelerated Panorama Software's partner initiative is a simple process that can be filled out in minutes, putting resellers on the fast track to BI excellence.
Following the new registration process, partners are equipped in a matter of minutes with all of the tools they need to demo and sell the NovaView BI Suite to their clients. Accelerating the registration process greatly eases the waiting time that new VARs and consultants would usually undergo to get their business intelligence offering off of the ground. A few simple steps now stand between resellers and a complete end-to-end BI solution for the Microsoft Platform.
"As Microsoft now drives business intelligence through SharePoint and Office, thousands of Microsoft partners can now deliver a complete business intelligence solution to their customers," said Eynav Azarya, CEO Panorama Software.
"One of the reasons Panorama NovaView is so crucial for our clients is because it is the only BI suite that has the same set of applications for relational, OLAP and in-memory (PowerPivot) data sources," said Andre Mullan, Managing Director of Luxar. "And now, after becoming a Panorama Software partner, we can be one of the first to extend PowerPivot/SharePoint 2010 to the enterprises."
To learn more about Panorama's new partner initiative, please visit http://www.panorama.com/partners/
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Professors cite challenges in teaching BI
Although BI (business intelligence) is one of the hottest areas of enterprise IT, college professors around the world say they face a variety of challenges in training the next generation of BI workers, according to a new study.
Study author Barbara Wixom, an associate professor at the University of Virginia, received responses from 85 institutions worldwide. Wixom is also co-executive director of Teradata University Network, a learning portal sponsored by Teradata that has participation from vendors such as Microstrategy.
Mike Goul, a professor at Arizona State University who took part in the study, said he struggles to find "real-life" data sets, culled from actual company data, instead of textbooks, in order to make sure "students don't play with toy problems ... so they understand that things are messy," he said.
In addition, available BI case studies often give a good overview of a project's business goals, but don't provide enough technical information, as companies are loath to reveal such details, he said.
Many students today initially shun computer science studies because "they think that it's something that's going to be outsourced or offshored before you know it," Goul added. "One of the interesting things about BI is that it's easy to explain to both parents and students that this is a non-commodity skill set."
Major trends such as health-care reform are going to generate a lot of BI-related hiring moving forward, Goul said. "The big challenge is getting this message across."
While some of BI's grunt work -- such as developing basic reports -- could be vulnerable to offshoring, that's not the case for more advanced skills as well as for emerging areas like predictive analytics, Goul said.
"Part of the job that has no danger of being outsourced is the people who are the business analysts," added professor Hugh Watson of the University of Georgia's Terry College of Business.
In contrast to Goul, Watson expressed few worries about the availability of training materials or software.
"Now there's a lot of good resources available. They're so good I don't even use a textbook anymore," he said. Sources such as Teradata's university portal, along with organizations such as The Data Warehousing Institute provide ample pickings, he said.
"Resources aren't really the particular problem. The broader problem for business schools in general, is the kind of hands-on skills we're providing our students is not where they need to be." These students tend to be familiar with Microsoft Word or Excel, but that's about it, he said.
Therefore, finance or marketing students should be encouraged to minor in information systems, Watson said.
He recalled a case study involving a bank that had turned to BI to improve customer relations. Previously, the bank's strategy "consisted of tellers giving out balloons and [lollipops] at the teller line."
"The bank head said, 'before we went to BI, we had 12 marketing analysts,'" Watson said. After the project was complete, there were still 12 positions, "but none of the same people were in the same jobs. They either couldn't handle the analytics or didn't want to."
But the real key is for students to develop both technical acumen and business savvy, since many companies are now working to evolve department-level BI efforts to enterprise-wide deployments, he added: "There are a lot of organizational and management issues. We need to turn students out who are ready to help with that."
Source:itworldcanada.com
Study author Barbara Wixom, an associate professor at the University of Virginia, received responses from 85 institutions worldwide. Wixom is also co-executive director of Teradata University Network, a learning portal sponsored by Teradata that has participation from vendors such as Microstrategy.
Mike Goul, a professor at Arizona State University who took part in the study, said he struggles to find "real-life" data sets, culled from actual company data, instead of textbooks, in order to make sure "students don't play with toy problems ... so they understand that things are messy," he said.
In addition, available BI case studies often give a good overview of a project's business goals, but don't provide enough technical information, as companies are loath to reveal such details, he said.
Many students today initially shun computer science studies because "they think that it's something that's going to be outsourced or offshored before you know it," Goul added. "One of the interesting things about BI is that it's easy to explain to both parents and students that this is a non-commodity skill set."
Major trends such as health-care reform are going to generate a lot of BI-related hiring moving forward, Goul said. "The big challenge is getting this message across."
While some of BI's grunt work -- such as developing basic reports -- could be vulnerable to offshoring, that's not the case for more advanced skills as well as for emerging areas like predictive analytics, Goul said.
"Part of the job that has no danger of being outsourced is the people who are the business analysts," added professor Hugh Watson of the University of Georgia's Terry College of Business.
In contrast to Goul, Watson expressed few worries about the availability of training materials or software.
"Now there's a lot of good resources available. They're so good I don't even use a textbook anymore," he said. Sources such as Teradata's university portal, along with organizations such as The Data Warehousing Institute provide ample pickings, he said.
"Resources aren't really the particular problem. The broader problem for business schools in general, is the kind of hands-on skills we're providing our students is not where they need to be." These students tend to be familiar with Microsoft Word or Excel, but that's about it, he said.
Therefore, finance or marketing students should be encouraged to minor in information systems, Watson said.
He recalled a case study involving a bank that had turned to BI to improve customer relations. Previously, the bank's strategy "consisted of tellers giving out balloons and [lollipops] at the teller line."
"The bank head said, 'before we went to BI, we had 12 marketing analysts,'" Watson said. After the project was complete, there were still 12 positions, "but none of the same people were in the same jobs. They either couldn't handle the analytics or didn't want to."
But the real key is for students to develop both technical acumen and business savvy, since many companies are now working to evolve department-level BI efforts to enterprise-wide deployments, he added: "There are a lot of organizational and management issues. We need to turn students out who are ready to help with that."
Source:itworldcanada.com
Monday, March 15, 2010
The Perfect Purchase Cycle: Portal Software
Collaboration and social networks are more important than ever, but despite their popularity, businesses are still struggling with how to use them effectively. In fact, according to recent research from Microsoft Corp., half of enterprise content management (ECM) deployments fail, which is clearly a low success rate.
In many cases these solutions are built in a vacuum, without the end-user in mind. Or, by the time a solution is rolled out, the business requirements have changed. Here’s what you need to know to ensure your deployment doesn’t crash and burn.
The players
Portals are considered a single point of access for presentation-level integration of information, but there’s also collaboration, Web content management and search components, and increasingly workflow business process and business intelligence components.
“It’s evolved into a Swiss Army knife-type market,” said Al Hilwa, IDC’s program director of applications development software. “This is something Microsoft has capitalized on. One might even say they’ve led that by integrating a lot of functionality into SharePoint.”
In a recent study, IDC interviewed companies using SharePoint with 1,000 to 10,000 employees. Almost all were using it for a variety of reasons, even though they weren’t using its capabilities to the max. They all had a significant number of licences and were planning to get more.
But IBM Corp. likely has the biggest share in this space, he said, which would include a fair amount of content management.
“It’s a different kind of product at a different price point, so it’s not a direct comparison, but IBM has the capability of everything in SharePoint, they just sell it differently,” said Hilwa. “Microsoft has an approach of simplicity with a single brand.”
A lot of companies are also playing with open source tools. “They simply don’t do a lot of the office integration that SharePoint does, so they’re more usable for the outside world,” said Hilwa.
Portals are dumb devices. The trick is what we plug into them, whether it’s records management, collaboration or standardized templates, said George Goodall, senior research analyst with Info-Tech Research Corp.
The large platform vendors provide services to, in large part, enterprises with rigorous needs, such as Open Text Corp. with its ECM Suite, EMC Corp. with Documentum and IBM with FileNet. When we look at any of those subsets, like records management, there are a number of smaller players that provide specific solutions; with tools for dealing with Web content management, there’s traction in open source.
A typical purchase cycle
This usually begins when disparate offices discover a need to share files or push information to employees, said Wanda Yu, senior SharePoint product manager with Microsoft Canada. The IT department usually buys and deploys the portal.
“SharePoint out of the box does a lot of what it’s intended to do already,” she said. “Then customers start to look at different usages for SharePoint.” And this, she says, leads to viral adoption, where it becomes used as a hub for all communications, and that’s when you’ll start to see the adoption of more enterprise functionality. In many cases that’s business-driven, where pockets of departments start using enterprise capabilities and IT realizes it makes sense to deploy those capabilities broadly across the organization.
Realistically, you’re looking at a week to maybe three weeks to implement a portal and collaboration solution, said Yu. With line-of-business solutions, SharePoint is modular, so additional features can be turned on or off or customized through partners.
In many cases, half the time is spent gathering the business requirements, so it can take a week to a month or two for a specific module, depending on its complexity. Customers can deploy pieces at a time, so they’re able to immediately gauge what works and what doesn’t and apply that learning to the next component they’re building out. While the cost ranges anywhere from 20 to 30 per cent of an IT budget, it will ultimately depend on the size of the organization.
What goes wrong
The challenge in purchasing portal software is isolating what you’re looking for. If you look at how many different technologies Open Text now has for Web content management, said Goodall, it’s a lot, so it can be confusing. But it comes down to size, functionality and overall IT strategy.
People often get stuck focusing on a specific business need, but the problem that’s here and now might not be the problem you’ll have in two years. Most organizations haven’t embraced the Web 2.0 paradigm of sharing different types of documents and even grappling with the way they’ve built communities online. “Most IT managers are worried about it. They don’t have a strategy. They have rogue users doing what they want and CEOs saying, ‘wouldn’t it be great?’ even though there’s no budget,” said Goodall.
Often, the biggest consideration is on the operations side. People will rush into purchases without having a fully baked idea of how it’s going to operate, so there’s a real possibility they end up with a huge collection of garbage – it’s not going to grow well, users aren’t going to like it, so you’ll have low adoption. That also leads to unforeseen problems, such as doubling or tripling project costs. “The technology is fairly straightforward, but the operation isn’t,” he said. “There can be issues around scalability and compatibility of existing technology.”
At the end of the day, price is important. The ongoing maintenance might become an IT budget item, but the implementation is generally a line item that has to come out of an annual budgeting cycle, so it’s a significant investment.
Be a better buyer
Not everyone is an insurance claims agent. The average knowledge worker just wants something that integrates with the desktop so they can contribute content. “SharePoint is a great answer for that, but the problem with SharePoint is it’s kind of like Lotus Notes was many moons ago – very viral, spread mostly by users, not controlled by IT, much to their chagrin, so you run out of space or at least you get to large-scale implementations that run out of bandwidth on a SQL Server,” said Whitney Tidmarsh, chief marketing officer with EMC Corp.’s Content Management and Archiving Division.
And because IT can’t control it, they can’t reclaim any of that space, and they’re getting asked to provision new machines at their cost. “It’s completely chaotic, and IT doesn’t quite know what to do with that,” she said. So EMC is starting to see customers plug Documentum into the backend of something like SharePoint for policy management, scale, security and overall IT control – and users never know the difference.
When money was much more free-flowing, companies were at liberty to spend with an eye toward the future. “That just doesn’t fly in this economy,” said Tidmarsh. “Every dollar is triple-justified and you have to have provable ROI.”
But even if you’re buying smaller, you still need to think big. “It doesn’t mean you won’t make those purchases downstream, it just means you’re probably not buying as much upfront,” she said. “Buy and think today, but plan and look ahead to tomorrow, and make sure the vendor you’re ultimately selecting is capable of going there with you.” Don’t get so focused on the here and now that you lose sight of the bigger picture.
Do an inventory of the existing line-of-business or individual solutions in your organization. You might find 10 or 12 tools that have varying functionality but a lot of overlap, said Yu. When considering end-user adoption, it’s crucial to have a technical stakeholder and a business stakeholder onboard.
It’s all about keeping it simple and taking a phased approach. “We see customers trying to understand and plan for every single function within the platform before they take the first step,” said Yu. “Where we see more success is when they phase in those features rather than take a big bang approach.”
Source:itworldcanada.com
In many cases these solutions are built in a vacuum, without the end-user in mind. Or, by the time a solution is rolled out, the business requirements have changed. Here’s what you need to know to ensure your deployment doesn’t crash and burn.
The players
Portals are considered a single point of access for presentation-level integration of information, but there’s also collaboration, Web content management and search components, and increasingly workflow business process and business intelligence components.
“It’s evolved into a Swiss Army knife-type market,” said Al Hilwa, IDC’s program director of applications development software. “This is something Microsoft has capitalized on. One might even say they’ve led that by integrating a lot of functionality into SharePoint.”
In a recent study, IDC interviewed companies using SharePoint with 1,000 to 10,000 employees. Almost all were using it for a variety of reasons, even though they weren’t using its capabilities to the max. They all had a significant number of licences and were planning to get more.
But IBM Corp. likely has the biggest share in this space, he said, which would include a fair amount of content management.
“It’s a different kind of product at a different price point, so it’s not a direct comparison, but IBM has the capability of everything in SharePoint, they just sell it differently,” said Hilwa. “Microsoft has an approach of simplicity with a single brand.”
A lot of companies are also playing with open source tools. “They simply don’t do a lot of the office integration that SharePoint does, so they’re more usable for the outside world,” said Hilwa.
Portals are dumb devices. The trick is what we plug into them, whether it’s records management, collaboration or standardized templates, said George Goodall, senior research analyst with Info-Tech Research Corp.
The large platform vendors provide services to, in large part, enterprises with rigorous needs, such as Open Text Corp. with its ECM Suite, EMC Corp. with Documentum and IBM with FileNet. When we look at any of those subsets, like records management, there are a number of smaller players that provide specific solutions; with tools for dealing with Web content management, there’s traction in open source.
A typical purchase cycle
This usually begins when disparate offices discover a need to share files or push information to employees, said Wanda Yu, senior SharePoint product manager with Microsoft Canada. The IT department usually buys and deploys the portal.
“SharePoint out of the box does a lot of what it’s intended to do already,” she said. “Then customers start to look at different usages for SharePoint.” And this, she says, leads to viral adoption, where it becomes used as a hub for all communications, and that’s when you’ll start to see the adoption of more enterprise functionality. In many cases that’s business-driven, where pockets of departments start using enterprise capabilities and IT realizes it makes sense to deploy those capabilities broadly across the organization.
Realistically, you’re looking at a week to maybe three weeks to implement a portal and collaboration solution, said Yu. With line-of-business solutions, SharePoint is modular, so additional features can be turned on or off or customized through partners.
In many cases, half the time is spent gathering the business requirements, so it can take a week to a month or two for a specific module, depending on its complexity. Customers can deploy pieces at a time, so they’re able to immediately gauge what works and what doesn’t and apply that learning to the next component they’re building out. While the cost ranges anywhere from 20 to 30 per cent of an IT budget, it will ultimately depend on the size of the organization.
What goes wrong
The challenge in purchasing portal software is isolating what you’re looking for. If you look at how many different technologies Open Text now has for Web content management, said Goodall, it’s a lot, so it can be confusing. But it comes down to size, functionality and overall IT strategy.
People often get stuck focusing on a specific business need, but the problem that’s here and now might not be the problem you’ll have in two years. Most organizations haven’t embraced the Web 2.0 paradigm of sharing different types of documents and even grappling with the way they’ve built communities online. “Most IT managers are worried about it. They don’t have a strategy. They have rogue users doing what they want and CEOs saying, ‘wouldn’t it be great?’ even though there’s no budget,” said Goodall.
Often, the biggest consideration is on the operations side. People will rush into purchases without having a fully baked idea of how it’s going to operate, so there’s a real possibility they end up with a huge collection of garbage – it’s not going to grow well, users aren’t going to like it, so you’ll have low adoption. That also leads to unforeseen problems, such as doubling or tripling project costs. “The technology is fairly straightforward, but the operation isn’t,” he said. “There can be issues around scalability and compatibility of existing technology.”
At the end of the day, price is important. The ongoing maintenance might become an IT budget item, but the implementation is generally a line item that has to come out of an annual budgeting cycle, so it’s a significant investment.
Be a better buyer
Not everyone is an insurance claims agent. The average knowledge worker just wants something that integrates with the desktop so they can contribute content. “SharePoint is a great answer for that, but the problem with SharePoint is it’s kind of like Lotus Notes was many moons ago – very viral, spread mostly by users, not controlled by IT, much to their chagrin, so you run out of space or at least you get to large-scale implementations that run out of bandwidth on a SQL Server,” said Whitney Tidmarsh, chief marketing officer with EMC Corp.’s Content Management and Archiving Division.
And because IT can’t control it, they can’t reclaim any of that space, and they’re getting asked to provision new machines at their cost. “It’s completely chaotic, and IT doesn’t quite know what to do with that,” she said. So EMC is starting to see customers plug Documentum into the backend of something like SharePoint for policy management, scale, security and overall IT control – and users never know the difference.
When money was much more free-flowing, companies were at liberty to spend with an eye toward the future. “That just doesn’t fly in this economy,” said Tidmarsh. “Every dollar is triple-justified and you have to have provable ROI.”
But even if you’re buying smaller, you still need to think big. “It doesn’t mean you won’t make those purchases downstream, it just means you’re probably not buying as much upfront,” she said. “Buy and think today, but plan and look ahead to tomorrow, and make sure the vendor you’re ultimately selecting is capable of going there with you.” Don’t get so focused on the here and now that you lose sight of the bigger picture.
Do an inventory of the existing line-of-business or individual solutions in your organization. You might find 10 or 12 tools that have varying functionality but a lot of overlap, said Yu. When considering end-user adoption, it’s crucial to have a technical stakeholder and a business stakeholder onboard.
It’s all about keeping it simple and taking a phased approach. “We see customers trying to understand and plan for every single function within the platform before they take the first step,” said Yu. “Where we see more success is when they phase in those features rather than take a big bang approach.”
Source:itworldcanada.com
Saturday, March 6, 2010
Improving efficiencies within Windows environment
The Independent Development Trust (IDT) has made a strategic decision to implement Microsoft Systems Center, with the assistance of IT services and solutions provider, Datacentrix.
“The primary objective of this project was to design and implement Microsoft System Center in order to empower IDT to proactively manage its Windows server infrastructure,” says Agnat Makgoale, Business Unit manager at Datacentrix. He further explains that IDT was experiencing problems around its ability to report accurately on software and hardware assets.
“In addition, IDT had identified high travel expenditure for its IT team, which provides support to its remote sites, as well as primarily being reactive in providing support for its IT environment and problems with software distribution.”
System Center provides end-to-end service management that is easy to customise and extend for improved service levels across the IT environment.
This enables operations and IT management teams to identify and resolve issues affecting the health of distributed IT services.
In addition, System Center automates routine, redundant tasks and provides intelligent reporting and monitoring to help increase efficiency and enable greater control of the IT environment. Role-based security, Active Directory integration and new infrastructure elements make it easier to monitor, configure and deploy in complex environments. Support for high-availability features such as clustering and failover ensure the IT environment is always monitored.
Makgoale continues to say: “IDT has already seen an improvement in the speed of rolling out new software and is also experiencing better reporting on IT assets.”
The organisation opted to partner with Datacentrix due to its proven track record of delivery, its cost effectiveness and deep understanding of IDT’s problem areas as well as coming up with effective solutions for System Center.
“Datacentrix has built significant expertise in the Microsoft arena,” explains Makgoale. “This pertains to both the implementation of Microsoft enterprise infrastructure solutions as well as development and integration capabilities on the Microsoft-based platform.”
Datacentrix’ Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Competencies include Advanced Infrastructure Solutions, Custom Development Solutions, Data Management Solutions, Information Worker Solutions, Licensing Solutions such as LAR and ESA, Microsoft Business Solutions and OEM Hardware Solutions. Its Specialisations include: Active Directory and Identity Management, Business Intelligence, License Delivery, Messaging and Collaboration, Microsoft Business Solutions – Great Plains, Software Asset Management, System Building and Web Development.
Source:mybroadband.co.za
“The primary objective of this project was to design and implement Microsoft System Center in order to empower IDT to proactively manage its Windows server infrastructure,” says Agnat Makgoale, Business Unit manager at Datacentrix. He further explains that IDT was experiencing problems around its ability to report accurately on software and hardware assets.
“In addition, IDT had identified high travel expenditure for its IT team, which provides support to its remote sites, as well as primarily being reactive in providing support for its IT environment and problems with software distribution.”
System Center provides end-to-end service management that is easy to customise and extend for improved service levels across the IT environment.
This enables operations and IT management teams to identify and resolve issues affecting the health of distributed IT services.
In addition, System Center automates routine, redundant tasks and provides intelligent reporting and monitoring to help increase efficiency and enable greater control of the IT environment. Role-based security, Active Directory integration and new infrastructure elements make it easier to monitor, configure and deploy in complex environments. Support for high-availability features such as clustering and failover ensure the IT environment is always monitored.
Makgoale continues to say: “IDT has already seen an improvement in the speed of rolling out new software and is also experiencing better reporting on IT assets.”
The organisation opted to partner with Datacentrix due to its proven track record of delivery, its cost effectiveness and deep understanding of IDT’s problem areas as well as coming up with effective solutions for System Center.
“Datacentrix has built significant expertise in the Microsoft arena,” explains Makgoale. “This pertains to both the implementation of Microsoft enterprise infrastructure solutions as well as development and integration capabilities on the Microsoft-based platform.”
Datacentrix’ Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Competencies include Advanced Infrastructure Solutions, Custom Development Solutions, Data Management Solutions, Information Worker Solutions, Licensing Solutions such as LAR and ESA, Microsoft Business Solutions and OEM Hardware Solutions. Its Specialisations include: Active Directory and Identity Management, Business Intelligence, License Delivery, Messaging and Collaboration, Microsoft Business Solutions – Great Plains, Software Asset Management, System Building and Web Development.
Source:mybroadband.co.za
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