Basis Technology Corporation announced today that it has entered in an extensive, long-term licensing agreement with Microsoft Corp. to provide advanced linguistic technology for Bing web search. The company's Rosette(R) Platform is used in Bing search to identify and analyze text in several languages, enabling the creation of a high quality index, which in turn contributes to a high quality search experience. The Rosette Platform is also used to locate entities within web documents such as people, places and organizations. The entity identification is used by Bing's clustering algorithms to automatically categorize news topics, enabling users to find relevant news topics.
Under the new agreement, Bing will have access to the latest version of this platform, Rosette 7, recently announced by Basis Technology. Rosette 7 has enhanced entity extraction accuracy, as well as expanded language coverage, cross-language name matching and translation. Basis Technology will collaborate closely with Microsoft to continually improve and expand the features of Rosette to meet the demanding requirements of large scale web search applications.
Rosette is a high performance linguistic analysis platform that has been deployed in hundreds of text solutions around the world to classify, standardize and process unstructured text so it can be used for analytic and intelligence purposes. It includes support for dozens of world languages, including languages of Europe, East Asia, the Mideast, and Central Asia. Basis Technology has been delivering Rosette to OEM, SaaS and enterprise users since 1997.
"Basis Technology has been a great partner for Microsoft and Bing," said Harry Shum, corporate vice president for Search Product Development at Microsoft. "We selected the Rosette Platform to enhance the precision of our Web search results, and found the quality of the software and support from Basis Technology to be excellent."
"Microsoft is a sophisticated user of the Rosette Platform," said Steve Cohen, COO of Basis Technology. "We're focused, along with Microsoft, on delivering the best linguistics and the best relevance to Bing users in all locales. We look forward to helping Microsoft deploy Rosette 7 and meeting the increased demands that Bing search will place on the platform."
About Basis Technology Basis Technology (www.basistech.com) provides software solutions for text analytics, information retrieval, and name resolution in over twenty languages. Our Rosette(R) Linguistics Platform is a widely-used suite of interoperable components that power search, business intelligence, e-discovery, and other enterprise applications. Our company is at the forefront of applied natural language processing using a combination of statistical modeling, expert rules, and corpus-derived data.
Leading software vendors, content providers, financial institutions, and government agencies rely on Basis Technology's solutions for Unicode compliance, language identification, multilingual search, entity extraction, name matching, and name translation. Our products and services are used by over 250 major firms, including Cisco, EMC, Endeca, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Oracle, and Symantec. Our text analysis products are widely used in the U.S. defense and intelligence industry by such firms as CACI, Lockheed Martin, MITRE, Northrop Grumman, SAIC, and SRI. We are the top provider of multilingual technology to web search engines, such as Amazon.com, Ask.com, Bing, Google, and Yahoo.
Company headquarters are in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with branch offices in San Francisco, California; Herndon, Virginia; and Tokyo, Japan. For more information, visit www.basistech.com or call 800-697-2062.
For more information:
Basis Technology Corp.
Miryon Pak, 617-386-2050
SOURCE: Basis Technology Corporation
Monday, April 12, 2010
DundeeWealth Selects Oracle(R) CRM On Demand as Core Platform
DENVER, April 12 -- Decentrix, Inc. today announced their new Master Data Management tool called BIAnalytix™ MDM Mapper, which targets mapping large amounts of historical data within a warehouse to master data lists. For corporations with large amounts of historical data that has been collected in a data warehouse, the BIAnalytix™ MDM Mapper software is truly a major breakthrough to transform this asset so that meaningful reporting and analysis can take place.
"Media Companies, Telecommunication companies and Advertising Agencies today are overwhelmed by the challenge of the large amount of data they collect about their business on a daily basis and their inability to readily access that data in a meaningful and strategic way," said Wayne Ruting, CEO and President of Decentrix. "In order to access these strategic insights that lie buried in the data, it is necessary to transform the granular historical database to conform to master data naming conventions. This is precisely what Mapper does. What historically may have taken years to accomplish, can now be accomplished very rapidly with the BIAnalytix™ Mapper tool."
"We use the Decentrix Mapper Tool here at Comcast and it has solved, in just a few short weeks, a very challenging problem that we have wrestled with for many years," said Bob Rittler, VP of Information Systems and Technology. "The amount of data elements we deal with are massive and Mapper deals with this elegantly and easily."
"Decentrix is a great example of how partners are utilizing Microsoft technologies to power solutions that solve real business needs for their customers," said Gabriele Di Piazza, managing director for the Media & Entertainment business in the Communications Sector at Microsoft Corp. "Solutions such as BIAnalytix MDM Mapper provide media and entertainment companies with the level of insight necessary to compete in today's market."
Decentrix is a technology and consulting company specializing in Media Business Intelligence (MBI™) and Media Data Warehouse Solutions tailored specifically to the needs of Media, Telecommunications and Advertising companies. Founded by technologists with decades of experience in media transactional systems, Decentrix offers a fast track, fully working solution for Media BI built on Microsoft SQL Server 2008. The BIAnalytix(TM) Solution was purpose built to help media companies solve the challenge of readily accessing the large amount of data locked up in their "transactional" systems, in a fast, meaningful and strategic way, by consolidating that data into a single corporate media data warehouse.
For more information visit www.BIAnalytix.com or call Nancy Pennica at 303-899-4000 x 200.
Contacts:
Nancy Jean Pennica
Executive Vice President
303 899 4000 x200
npennica@decentrix.com
"Media Companies, Telecommunication companies and Advertising Agencies today are overwhelmed by the challenge of the large amount of data they collect about their business on a daily basis and their inability to readily access that data in a meaningful and strategic way," said Wayne Ruting, CEO and President of Decentrix. "In order to access these strategic insights that lie buried in the data, it is necessary to transform the granular historical database to conform to master data naming conventions. This is precisely what Mapper does. What historically may have taken years to accomplish, can now be accomplished very rapidly with the BIAnalytix™ Mapper tool."
"We use the Decentrix Mapper Tool here at Comcast and it has solved, in just a few short weeks, a very challenging problem that we have wrestled with for many years," said Bob Rittler, VP of Information Systems and Technology. "The amount of data elements we deal with are massive and Mapper deals with this elegantly and easily."
"Decentrix is a great example of how partners are utilizing Microsoft technologies to power solutions that solve real business needs for their customers," said Gabriele Di Piazza, managing director for the Media & Entertainment business in the Communications Sector at Microsoft Corp. "Solutions such as BIAnalytix MDM Mapper provide media and entertainment companies with the level of insight necessary to compete in today's market."
Decentrix is a technology and consulting company specializing in Media Business Intelligence (MBI™) and Media Data Warehouse Solutions tailored specifically to the needs of Media, Telecommunications and Advertising companies. Founded by technologists with decades of experience in media transactional systems, Decentrix offers a fast track, fully working solution for Media BI built on Microsoft SQL Server 2008. The BIAnalytix(TM) Solution was purpose built to help media companies solve the challenge of readily accessing the large amount of data locked up in their "transactional" systems, in a fast, meaningful and strategic way, by consolidating that data into a single corporate media data warehouse.
For more information visit www.BIAnalytix.com or call Nancy Pennica at 303-899-4000 x 200.
Contacts:
Nancy Jean Pennica
Executive Vice President
303 899 4000 x200
npennica@decentrix.com
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Panorama Software to Expand the Worldwide Microsoft BI Eco-System
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/
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/
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
Friday, February 19, 2010
Is 'Business' Intelligence Really About the Business?
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
... 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
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