Dashboards, Reporting & Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence Overview

True value of Business Inteligence comes from recognizing and harnessing the power of technology to help change the way you do business. After all – unless there are real decisions made with the information provided by a data warehouse, all you have is a data warehouse, not a decision support application.

By utilizing information and insight gained from your data warehouse and analysis tools, The goal should be to help you keep track of the KPI (key performance indicators) in your business, and help you put into action changes that will improve your business.

The Business Intelligence Life Cycle http://www.infopurple.com/the-business-intelligence-life-cycle

Almost all the dashboards in the market can be categorized as “Lazy Dashboards”. Why? To see the information, you have to click on refresh or the “go” button.

InfoCaptor is going to become one of the first non-lazy dashboards. Based on user requirements and lot of thoughts, it will soon have the feature to refresh the contents automatically at certain present interval.

There are few benefits of this feature, for e.g one of my users is having the need to display dashboards on big televisions where everybody can glance at the numbers and charts as they walk by. In this situation, you definitely need the dashboards to refresh automatically.

InfoCaptor will have the ability to set the time interval in seconds in order to meet some of those demanding situations.

This is really getting cutting-edge….more about this later once it is eventually released!

Cognos on Wednesday said it has acquired dashboard software specialist
Celequest, which also brings to the business intelligence vendor a BI
appliance and a …
<http://www.intelligententerprise.com/channels/performance/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=196901646>

Oracle Applications provides users with the ability to conduct business
electronically between trading partners based on Electronic Commerce standards
and methodology. One form of Electronic Commerce is Electronic Data Interchange
(EDI). EDI is an electronic exchange of data between trading partners. Interface data
files are exchanged in a standard format to minimize manual effort, speed data
processing, and ensure accuracy. The Oracle e-Commerce Gateway (formerly
known as Oracle EDI Gateway) performs the following functions:

• Define trading partner groups and trading partner locations.

• Enable transactions for trading partners.

• Provide general code conversion between trading partner codes or standard codes and the codes defined in Oracle Applications.

• Define interface data files so that application data can integrate with your trading partner’s application or an EDI translator.

For inbound transactions, import data into application open interface tables so
that application program interfaces (API) can validate and update Oracle
application tables.
For outbound transactions, extract, format, and write application data to
interface data files.
Oracle e-Commerce Gateway augments the existing standard paper document
capabilities of Oracle Applications, or adds functionality where no corresponding
paper documents exist.

The Winter ‘07 release will offer “unlimited customization” for analytics and BI tools, including Business Objects Crystal Xcelsius. According to the “Future Visionâ€Â? presentation given by SF.com, what that loosely means is that “users will have the ability to fully componentize the on-demand CRM application’s analytical dashboards so they can mash up or bring together components of different vendors’ business intelligence (BI) software, which they can then share and manage. Users will be able to engage in a wide range of BI activities that can be displayed on their dashboards within Salesforce, including supply chain analysis, complex what-if scenarios and profitability analysis.â€Â? So far, only Business Objects is signed up.

Comment:

* This is an intention announcement; actual product is likely to vary from the vision.
* While SF.com claims 13 BI vendors, including JasperSoft are expected to support the project, only Business Objects and JasperSoft are mentioned by name.
* Since BI spans the enterprise, and customers are likely to have a broader range of enterprise applications, and therefore analytic requirements than CRM, why would a company create an analytic island on salesforce.com?

Pentaho announced the latest in a string of open-source project buys, with the acquisition of the Weka data mining and predictive analytics project developed by the University of Waikato in New Zealand.

The move follows the startup’s previous purchases of the Mondrian OLAP engine, the JFreeReport Java reporting library, and the Kettle ETL project.

So far, the start-up doesn’t provide customer numbers for its commercial software, but on the open-source side, Pentaho saw 85,000 downloads of its offerings in August.

According to the company, making money is not a priority. The CEO was quoted as saying, “Monetization is about fourth or fifth down the list in terms of our priorities.”

Pentaho plans to compete against Cognos and Business Objects and other open-source BI players like JasperSoft, in addition to SPSS and SAS.

Comments:

* While the company is filling out its BI stack, there are no identifiable customers for the commercial version of its software. It is clear that enterprise customers are still leary of betting the farm on an unproven product, not matter how low the cost. Downloads are not an accurate measure of customers, as they include multiple downloads, evaluations, etc. No matter how much the company claims that money is not important, their $6MM in venture funding will only go so far. Eventually, paying customers will have to fund ongoing investments in development/acquisitions and sales.

Pentaho announced the near-term availability of Pentaho Open BI Suite 1.2, which they claim offers significant ease-of-use enhancements and the broadest open source BI offering available. Upgrades include report templates, new chart types, drag-and-drop BI workflows, and a variety of enhancements to increase administrator productivity.

Pentaho Open BI Suite 1.2 contains numerous enhancements to the Pentaho Design Studio, where administrators create and maintain BI applications. The user interface has been streamlined and now supports drag-and-drop creation of BI workflows with a new design panel that provides a graphical, flowchart-style view of BI workflows, including report bursting, business logic and more.

According to Ventana Research, “Our research shows that having a complete BI offering is the most valuable feature in an open source BI offering. Users are clearly looking for more than just reporting in open source BI offerings.”

Comments

* While Pentaho appears to be the farthest along in offering a complete BI stack, than other open source offerings, there are still no identifiable customers, let alone any proof points at enterprise scale. For customers looking for proven scalability, enterprise security and integration with enterprise applications, open source, at whatever price will not be a viable option at this point in time.

http://www.tdwi.org/News/display.aspx?ID=8106

After decades of executing exclusively with direct sales, SAS Institute is launching its first reseller program, giving participants access to parts of a product line.

It is offering its partners margins not only on initial product license sales but also on the recurring revenue stream it derives from annual maintenance renewals. If partners meet criteria such as certification and customer-satisfaction goals, they will receive 25 percent of the renewal fee each year on deals they landed, SAS executives said.  Other BI vendors do not give partners a cut of the maintenance fees.

Two dozen resellers have already signed on with SAS since the program’s April launch.

SAS wants its resellers to target midmarket companies with less than $1 billion in annual revenue. According to SAS, the company’s internal sales team will be compensated very competitively on deals done through the channel, receiving commissions on 50 percent of the software’s list price.

SAS aims to sign up 50 partners this year and 150 by the end of next, concentrating on selling to midmarket customers with revenue of less than $1 billion.

Comments

* In spite of SAS’s already initially favorably priced BI Server platform with a direct sales force, up take of the R9 platform has been slow. An estimated 90% of SAS revenue comes from renewal revenue, and most of this from its flagship data mining and statistics products. Customers aren’t buying into SAS because the products aren’t best of breed, are difficult to use, are proprietary, and require a large yearly renewal fee. Offering incentives to channels is unlikely to changes this reality.
* Let’s not forget that SAS recently laid off employees, very much against its corporate culture. And, much like the other pure play vendors is trying new ways to bolster growth and remain profitable in the face on intense competitive pressure from Oracle, Microsoft and SAP.

In a last ditch effort to save itself from oblivion in the data warehouse market, with the help of a series of acquisitions, Sybase has cobbled together a data integration platform. The acquisitions first started with EII vendor, Avaki Corp., and then German ETL and EII vendor Solonde AG.

Sybase announced Sybase Data Integration Suite (SDIS), which is intended to integrate the acquired assets together. It is intended to provide a common set of modeling, design, development, and administration services for Sybase’s data integration tools.

Comments

SDIS will not be a panacea for Sybase in the data warehouse market:

* While Sybase PowerDesigner does support modeling, data design, and metadata management in SDIS 1.0, Sybase’s re-branded version of the former Solonde Transform On Demand product�i.e., Sybase ETL�won’t be incorporated into SDIS’ modeling, design, metadata, and administrative purview until Sybase delivers version 2.0 of that product, which isn’t expected until late next year.
* According to Mike Schiff, a principal with data warehousing consultancy MAS Strategies,  “If Sybase can find a way to get developers interested in more than just their mobile [SQL Anywhere technology], in IQ or what they’re doing with data integration … then maybe they could make a modest comeback,â€Â?
* The composite suite, while new for Sybase, delivers little, if anything, in the way of new data integration functionalityâ€�while the EII capabilities are there, due to the acquisition of  Avaki, the suite still lacks an integrated ETL component.  The separate Sybase ETL tool itself is little more than just a re-branded version of Solonde’s On Demand ETL product.