DUBLIN–(BUSINESS WIRE)–
Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/31b2fe/business_intellige)
has announced the addition of the “Business
Intelligence Command and Control Center for the Chief Supply Chain
Officer” report to their offering.

This report benchmarked 149 supply chain related executives on their
business intelligence initiatives in March and April 2011. The top
pressure that companies are facing is the growing complexity of global
operations (57%), the lack of visibility at various nodes of the supply
chain (41%) and the need to improve top line revenue (40%). On the other
hand, only 33% of companies have had a supply chain business
intelligence initiative in place for more than two years. Given this
lack of maturity, the need for business intelligence is more than ever
before.

The focus of this benchmark report is to identify the top strategic
actions that Best-in-Class companies are taking and how they have
reached the process maturity required to sustain business value through
business intelligence.

This report used four key performance criteria to distinguish the
Best-in-Class from Industry Average and Laggard organizations.
Best-in-Class companies:

• Had an average cash conversion cycle time of 38.9 days.
• Possessed an average customer service level of 96% delivered to the
  customer.
• Had an average forecast accuracy rate of 78.7%.
• Decreased their actual warehouse operating cost by 2.1%.

Key Report Benefits:

• Boost Customer Service
• Increase Forecast Accuracy
• Cut Actual Warehouse Operating Costs

Aberdeen’s Research Benchmarks provide an in-depth and comprehensive
look into process, procedure, methodologies, and technologies with best
practice identification and actionable recommendations.

Key Topics Covered:

Executive Summary

• Best-in-Class Performance
• Competitive Maturity Assessment
• Required Actions

Chapter One: Benchmarking the Best-in-Class

• Business Context
• The Maturity Class Framework
• The Best-in-Class PACE Model
• Best-in-Class Strategies

Chapter Two: Benchmarking Requirements for Success

• Competitive Assessment
• Capabilities and Enablers

Chapter Three: Required Actions

• Laggard Steps to Success
• Industry Average Steps to Success
• Best-in-Class Steps to Success

Companies Mentioned:

• Sysco
• Cargill
• Coca-Cola
• Kraft
• Kellogg’s
• Hormel
• PF Chang’s
• Potbelly
• Famous Dave’s

For more information visit http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/31b2fe/business_intellige

Article source: http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/110719/20110719005950.html?.v=1

This is the second in a four-part blog series on cloud computing for BI professionals.

Cloud computing offers a compelling new way for organizations to manage and consume compute resources. Rather than purchase, install, and maintain hardware and software, organizations rent shared resources from an online service provider and dynamically configure the services themselves. This model of computing dramatically speeds deployment times and lowers costs. (See prior article “What is Cloud Computing?“)

Although cloud computing shares the above attributes, it can be deployed in several different ways. The key factor is whether the cloud service provider is an external vendor or an internal IT department. There are three deployment options for cloud computing:

• Public Cloud. Application and compute resources are managed by a third party services provider.
• Private Cloud. Application and compute resources are managed by an internal data center team.
• Hybrid Cloud. A private cloud that leverages the public cloud to handle peak capacity; a reserved “private” space within a public cloud; or a hybrid architecture in which some components run in a data center and others in the public cloud.

Public Cloud

Most of the discussion about cloud computing in the press refers to public cloud offerings. The public cloud offers the most potential benefits and the greatest potential risks. With a public cloud, organizations can obtain application and computing resources without having to make an upfront capital expenditure or use internal IT resources. Moreover, customers only pay for what they use on a usage or monthly subscription basis, and they can terminate at any time. Thus, public clouds accelerate deployments and reduce costs, at least in the short run. This is sweet news to BI teams that often must spend millions of dollars and months of development time before they can deliver their first application.

In addition, a public cloud also obviates the need for customers to maintain and upgrade application code and infrastructure. Many public cloud customers are astonished to see new software features automatically appear in their software without notice or additional expense. And the public cloud frees up IT departments to focus on more value-added activities rather than hardware and software upgrades and maintenance. In short, there is something for everyone to like about the public cloud.

Security and Privacy. But the public cloud also comes with risks. Security and privacy are the biggest bugaboos. Some executives fear that moving data and processing beyond their own firewalls exposes them to security and privacy risks. They fear that moving data across public networks and comingling it with other company’s data in a public cloud might make it easier for sensitive corporate data to get into the wrong hands.

While security and privacy are always an issue, the fact is that most corporate resources are more secure in the public cloud than in a corporate data center. Public cloud providers, after all, specialize in data center operations and must meet the most stringent requirements for security and privacy. However, there are compliance regulations that legally require some organizations to maintain data within corporate firewalls or pinpoint the exact location of their data, which is generally impossible in a public cloud which virtualizes data and processing across a grid national or international computers.

Other Challenges. The public cloud poses other challenges:

• Reliability. Executives may question the reliability of public cloud resources. For example, Amazon EC2 has had two short, but high profile, outages, causing companies that ran mission critical parts of their business there to be left stranded without much visibility into the nature or longevity of the outage.

• Costs. It can be extremely difficult to estimate public cloud costs because pricing is complex and often companies can’t accurately estimate their usage (which is why they want to migrate workloads to the cloud in the first place.)

• Blank Slate. Administrators must redefine corporate policies and application workflows from scratch in the public cloud, which generally provides plain vanilla services.

• Vendor and Technology Viability. The public cloud market is evolving fast so it’s difficult to know which vendors and technologies will be around in the future.

Private Clouds.

Because of the above reasons, many organizations are beginning their journey into the cloud with private clouds. This is especially true in the infrastructure-as-a-service arena where IT administrators are implementing virtualization software to consolidate servers and increase overall server utilization, flexibility, and efficiency. In addition, a private cloud gives an organization greater control over its processing and data resources, providing ease of mind for worried executives, if not greater security and privacy for sensitive data. And since a private cloud runs in an existing data center, IT administrators don’t have recreate security and other policies from scratch in a new environment.

But the private cloud has its own challenges. IT administrators have to learn and install new software (hypervisors and cloud management utilities). They need to manage two compute environments side by side and keep IT policies aligned in both. This adds to complexity and staff workload. And it goes without saying that a private cloud runs in an existing corporate data center, which carries high fixed costs to maintain.

Hybrid Cloud

Companies are increasingly pursuing a two-pronged strategy that uses the private cloud for the bulk of processing and the public cloud to handle peak loads. The key to a hybrid cloud is obtaining cloud management software that spans both private and public cloud environments. The software supports the same hypervisors used in each environment (ideally it’s the same hypervisor) and has built-in interfaces to the public cloud provider so internal IT policies and virtual images can be transferred to the public cloud environment.

In addition, many public cloud vendors allow customers to carve out private clouds within the public cloud domain. For example, Amazon.com offers a virtual private cloud within its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) environment that lets customers reserve dedicated machines and static IP addresses, which they can link to their internal data centers via virtual private networks. Hybrid clouds are obviously more complex and challenging to manage. Currently, few people have experience blending private and public clouds in a seamless way.

Adding Public Cloud Components to a BI Architecture

Another form of hybrid cloud uses public cloud facilities to enhance an existing architecture. In a BI environment, there are several that organizations can mix and match public cloud offerings with their on premises software (which may or may not be running in a private cloud.)

Scenario #1 – Analytic Sandbox. When a data warehouse is running at full capacity, administrators might consider offloading complex ad hoc queries submitted by a handful of business analysts to a public cloud replica. In this scenario, complex queries submitted by the analysts are bogging down performance of the data warehouse. Since it’s difficult to estimate ad hoc processing requirements and the costs of replicating a data warehouse are high, the IT staff decides it’s faster and cheaper to create a new data mart in the public cloud and point the business analysts to it. The IT staff (or analysts) can increase or decrease capacity on demand using self-provisioning capabilities of the public cloud. (See figure 1.)

Figure 1. Analytic Sandbox Using a Public Cloud (click to expand)

The primary challenge in this scenario is the cost and time required to move data across the internet from an internal data center to the cloud. Since the initial load may take days or weeks depending on data volumes, IT staff will usually ship a disk to the cloud provider to load manually. Thereafter, the IT staff needs to figure out whether it can move daily deltas across the internet in time within an allotted batch window. Considering that it takes six days to move 100GB across a T-1 line, organizations may need to skip doing batch loads and instead trickle feed data into the data warehouse replica. In addition, it is often difficult to estimate pricing for such data transfers and charges may add up quickly. Cloud providers generally charge for transferring data in and out of the cloud and storing it. (Amazon, however, has recently discontinued fees for transferring data into EC2.)

Also, depending on the speed of network connections, the business analysts might experience delays in query response times due to internet latency. Invariably, internet speeds won’t match internal LAN speeds so users might notice a difference. Finally, there are security and privacy issues discussed in the previous article. (See “What is Cloud Computing?”)

Scenario #2. Cloud-based Departmental Dashboard. A more common scenario is when a department head purchases a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) BI solution from a SaaS BI vendor, of which there are many. Here, an organization’s source systems and data warehouse remain in the corporate data center but the dashboard and associated data mart run in the cloud. (See figure 2.)

Figure 2. Cloud-based Departmental Dashboard

SaaS BI tools are popular among department heads who want a dashboard on the cheap and don’t want to involve corporate IT. Unfortunately, designing a data mart, whether in the cloud or on premise, is never easy or quick, especially if it involves integrating multiple operational sources. (See “Expectations Versus Reality in the Cloud: Understanding the Dynamics of the SaaS BI Market.”)
This is not a problem if organizations are willing to pay the costs of creating a custom data mart and wait about three to four months, which is the time it usually takes to build out a relatively complex, custom environment. It’s also not a problem if they simply want to visualize an existing spreadsheet. But if they believe the cloud provides quick, easy, and inexpensive deployments for any type of BI deployment, they will be disappointed. Also, they still need to transfer data to the cloud and users may experience response time delays due to internet latencies.

Scenario #3. BI in the Cloud Without the Data. To eliminate security, privacy, and data transfer issues, companies may want to keep data locally in a corporate data center while maintaining the BI application in the cloud. (See figure 3.) BI developers can configure the SaaS BI tool to meet their branding and workflow requirements, gaining the speed and cost advantages of cloud deployments, while minimizing data security and privacy problems.

Figure 3. BI in the Cloud Without Data

While this scenario sounds like it optimally balances the risks and rewards of cloud-based BI deployments, it has a major deficiency: it requires the IT department to open a port in the corporate firewall to support incoming queries. If the organization is worried enough about data security to want to keep data locally where it’s safe, they will kill it as soon as they recognize the security vulnerability it presents.

Scenario #4. Data Warehouse in the Cloud. The final scenario is to put the entire data warehousing environment in the cloud. (See figure 4.) Today, this only makes sense if all your operational applications also run in the cloud. Obviously, this scenario only applies to few companies, namely internet startups that have fully embraced cloud computing for all application processing. However, these companies have to manage all the problems associated with the public cloud (i.e., security, reliability, availability, and vendor viability). At some point in the future, this architecture may prove dominant once we get past security and latency hurdles.

Figure 4. Data Warehouse in the Cloud

Summary

There are three major deployment options for cloud computing: public, private, and hybrid. As in most things in life, there is rarely a clearcut solution. So, too, with cloud computing. Organizations will experiment with public and private clouds, and most will probably have a mix of both. Most data center shops have already implemented virtualization, which is the first step on the way to private clouds. Once they get comfortable with private clouds, they will soon experiment with hybrid cloud computing to support peak computing rather than spend millions on new hardware to support a few days or weeks of peak processing a year. And if the data is particularly sensitive, they may begin with a private virtual cloud inside a public cloud data center to ease their fears about security, privacy, and reliability.

When push comes to shove, economics and convenience always trumps principles and ideals. This is how e-commerce overcame the security bogeyman and gained its footing in the consumer marketplace, and I suspect the same will happen with cloud computing.

Article source: http://www.b-eye-network.com/blogs/eckerson/archives/2011/07/deployment_opti.php

WANTED Technologies delivers real-time insight into supply and demand
for talent to help Corporate HR accelerate recruiting for hard-to-fill
positions

NEW YORK, NY, July 19, 2011 /CNW Telbec/ – WANTED Technologies (TSXV:
WAN), the leading source of real-time business intelligence for the
talent marketplace, announced today that it has signed agreements with
leading corporate HR organizations to help streamline their recruiting
process. The new clients include: Ceridian Canada Ltd., Avanade, Cancer
Treatment Centers of America, and talentRISE.

“WANTED Analytics™ significantly improves the sourcing strategy and sourcing process by
allowing a company to make intelligent recruiting decisions around
where to focus its talent sourcing and recruiting activities for
maximum chance of recruiting success,” said Carl Kutsmode, Partner and
Recruiting Solutions Consultant for talentRISE. “We also use Analytics™ to help our clients determine where to open their next office location
or where to target specific types of difficult-to-find talent by
identifying locations where the talent pool is plentiful and easier to
recruit with fewer competitors in that market.”

“Our WANTED Analytics^™ product makes the recruiting process more efficient, particularly for
hard-to-fill positions,” said Bruce Murray, President and CEO of WANTED
Technologies. “Our goal is to reduce time-to-hire and recruiting costs
by providing real-time intelligence on candidate supply and demand in
the marketplace,” Murray said.

The agreements signed in the past several months follow WANTED’s launch
earlier this year of its latest generation business intelligence
platform, Analytics 3.0™. The new product introduced features that address the needs of
recruiters in the corporate and staffing marketplace.

WANTED’s successful development and deployment of services for the
corporate sector are part of the company’s broader strategy to
diversify and grow its customer base beyond the media marketplace.

“We are the first to organize detailed, real-time information on the
supply and demand of talent in the marketplace,” said Murray. “We can
pinpoint where there is a large demand for candidates in certain
occupations and a limited supply of those candidates. In cases like
these, our clients can clearly see that filling open positions will be
difficult and time-consuming.”

The WANTED Analytics™ solution is a web-based online dashboard that provides detailed
information on which companies are currently hiring. Simultaneously,
WANTED Analytics^™ also estimates the number of candidates that are available for every
opening. Using these tools, recruiters can determine how difficult it
will be to find candidates.

Additionally, WANTED Analytics^™ also stores a record of every position ever advertised online for the
past five years. Recruiters can quickly focus their sourcing efforts on
companies that have recruited for specific positions in the past.

WANTED Technologies maintains a data warehouse of more than 600 million
online job postings that have been collected since June 2005.  The
company’s flagship product, WANTED Analytics™ (www.wantedanalytics.com) is a “software-as-a-service” solution that provides, for the first
time, a platform for recruiters and hiring managers to determine
together what kind of employee they should be targeting for hire and
how difficult it might be to find such employees. The tools and insight
in Analytics help recruiters unlock hidden reserves of candidates for hard-to-fill
positions.

In addition, WANTED’s clients in the media, staffing and government
sectors use Analytics™ to find sales leads, analyze employment trends, gather competitive
intelligence, forecast economic conditions.

Access to a free trial of WANTED Analytics™ is available at www.wantedanalytics.com.

About WANTED Analytics™

WANTED Analytics™ helps recruiting organizations make better decisions faster with
real-time business intelligence on jobs, employers, and talent. Analytics brings together, for the first time, years of hiring demand and talent
supply data to create a true talent intelligence platform for
hard-to-fill positions.

Clients in the staffing, HR, RPO, media, and government sectors use
WANTED Analytics™ to find sales leads, analyze employment trends, gather competitive
intelligence, forecast economic conditions, and source hard-to-fill
positions.

About WANTED Technologies Corporation

WANTED Technologies (TSX-V:WAN) provides real-time business intelligence
for the talent marketplace. Founded in 1999, the company’s headquarters
are in Quebec City, Canada, and it maintains a US-based subsidiary with
primary offices in New York City. WANTED began collecting detailed
Hiring Demand data in June 2005, and currently maintains a database of
more than 600 million unique job listings. For more information or to
sample WANTED’s services, visit www.wantedanalytics.com.

WANTED is also the exclusive data provider for The Conference Board’s
Help-Wanted OnLine Data Series™, the monthly economic indicator of
Hiring Demand in the United States.

The TSX Venture Exchange does not accept responsibility for the adequacy
or accuracy of this release.  Any statement that appears prospective
shall not be interpreted as such.

For further information:

Article source: http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/July2011/19/c6289.html

(click image for larger view and for slideshow) IBM’s 12% jump in second-quarter revenue indicates that, despite doubts about the economy, businesses will continue to invest in technologies that can help them operate more efficiently, compete for new customers, and expand their geographic reach.

IBM, whose results are seen by most analysts as a bellwether for the broader tech industry, posted strong gains in sales of cloud computing platforms, energy and space-saving servers, business intelligence and data mining tools, and global services. All of those products represent offerings that customers appear willing to invest in to boost their competitive posture, even while streamlining and automating IT operations.

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For Big Blue, the numbers validate a strategy in which it has chosen to develop or acquire products and services that help customers differentiate themselves in the marketplace while trimming price-sensitive commodity offerings like PCs and printers from its lineup.

“As growth markets continue to mature, IBM’s investments in key areas such as cloud, and BI, and analytics will continue to drive growth across its portfolio,” said Allan Krans, senior analyst at Technology Business Research, in a note Tuesday.

IBM saw revenue from mainframes jump a whopping 61% year-over-year. The company said businesses are discovering that the big iron is no longer just for research institutions or Wall Street trading floors–it can benefit any organization that is looking to consolidate its server footprint and reduce data center costs by hosting numerous virtual machines on a single piece of hardware.

In a conference call after the company reported earnings Monday, CFO Mark Loughridge noted that IBM’s new zEnterprise 114 midrange server, unveiled last week, “can consolidate workloads from up to 300 competitive servers.”

Sales of Netezza data warehousing platforms, which IBM acquired for $1.8 billion last year, and other information management systems designed to help customers store and interpret so-called big data from mushrooming sources like mobile devices, websites, contact centers, and smart sensors, jumped 18%.

“In business analytics, we’re helping customers optimize the massive amounts of data they’re dealing with,” said Loughridge, who noted that IBM’s revenue from business analytics products was up 20% through the first six months of 2011.

IBM’s cloud offerings comprise numerous individual products, from hardware to virtualization technologies embedded in key software packages such as Websphere middleware, sales of which were up 55% year over year, and Tivoli management software, revenue from which jumped 9%. More and more businesses are eyeing cloud architectures, hosted or in-house, as a means to lower infrastructure costs, quickly scale capacity as required, and standardize IT across offices and divisions.

“In cloud, we had over 2000 wins year to date. In private cloud, our average transaction size has tripled from a year ago,” Loughridge said. IBM does not break out a specific revenue number for cloud computing sales, but Loughridge said the company is on pace to double sales it attributes to cloud installations from a year ago.

Big Blue’s global technology services outsourcing arm, meanwhile, also enjoyed solid gains, with revenue up 12%, or 3% excluding currency benefits. IBM has established a strong services footprint in emerging markets like Brazil, Russia, India, and China, with an eye to providing local assistance to Western companies looking to tap new markets or lower-cost labor forces in those regions. It’s also looking to sell services to domestic firms in emerging markets that need modern IT infrastructures.

Earlier this year, IBM announced a partnership with Bharti Airtel under which it will deploy and manage apps to support Airtel’s rollout of mobile services in Africa. Services growth “was led by our performance in the growth markets,” with revenue from those regions up 10% at constant currency, Loughridge said.

Overall, IBM beat estimates for its second quarter Monday, as earnings per share (EPS) increased 18% year-over-year to $3.09, while revenue climbed 5%, excluding currency gains, to $26.7 billion. Net income rose 11%, to $3.8 billion. Wall Street analysts were, on average, expecting Big Blue to post quarterly earnings of $3.03 on revenue of $25.35 billion.

IBM raised its full-year 2011 guidance for operating EPS to $13.25. The company has said publicly that it’s targeting EPS of $20 by the year 2015.

IT is caught in a squeeze between requests for new applications, services, and device support and demands from upper management to keep budgets lean, staffing light, and operations tight. These are irreconcilable objectives as long as we spend the vast majority of our resources on legacy services. Read our report now. (Free registration required.)

Article source: http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/info_management/231002065

CARY, N.C.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–A leader in the French premier banking market, Barclays Bank doubled its
point-of-sale locations across the country with expectations to increase
financial advisers by 35 percent over a two-year period. To help manage
this growth spurt within sales teams, the bank’s management uses SAS^®
Business Intelligence, from the leader in business
analytics software and services, behind a portal-based dashboard to
identify and implement key performance indicators (KPIs).

“Our
objectives were to improve sales efficiency – including a better
approach to sales meetings – and to give managers motivation tools and
the ability to synchronize activities through shared KPIs.”

“We needed the KPIs to support our strategy and sales management team,”
explained Patrick Moyon, Head of Tools and Commercial Support. “Our
objectives were to improve sales efficiency – including a better
approach to sales meetings – and to give managers motivation tools and
the ability to synchronize activities through shared KPIs.”

The performance management dashboard consists of three primary modules.
The first module manages activity for about 300 sales managers, who
monitor KPIs through a color-coded alert system. A second module shares
information at each point of sale, helping financial advisers track
historical activity and monitor progress against the defined business
objectives. The result is every manager has data to motivate sales
teams, reward best performers and identify areas needing improvement.
The third module forecasts each adviser’s business schedule for every
manager and at the Barclays head office as a proactive performance
overview at each point of sale.

“Ease of use has been integral to user adoption of the SAS Business
Intelligence dashboard,” said Anne de Palma, IT Project Leader, who
worked with business intelligence consultants Micropole
on the implementation. “It has been essential to sharing key business
expansion information.”

“The SAS Business Intelligence dashboard optimizes proactive decision
making related to sales activity and business management,” said Moyon.
“We can clearly see how the business is building through individual
performance improvement.”

About Barclays

Barclays is a major global financial services provider engaged in retail
banking, credit cards, corporate and investment banking and wealth
management with an extensive international presence in Europe, the
Americas, Africa and Asia. With over 300 years of history and expertise
in banking, Barclays operates in over 50 countries and employs 147,500
people. Barclays moves, lends, invests and protects money for customers
and clients worldwide. For further information about Barclays, please
visit our website www.barclays.com.

About SAS

SAS is the leader in business
analytics software and services, and the largest independent vendor
in the business intelligence market. Through innovative solutions
delivered within an integrated framework, SAS helps customers at more
than 50,000 sites improve performance and deliver value by making better
decisions faster. Since 1976 SAS has been giving customers around the
world THE POWER TO KNOW^®. SAS and all other SAS Institute
Inc. product or service names are registered trademarks or trademarks of
SAS Institute Inc. in the USA and other countries. ® indicates USA
registration. Other brand and product names are trademarks of their
respective companies. Copyright © 2011 SAS Institute Inc. All rights
reserved.

Article source: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20110718005093/en/SAS%C2%AE-Business-Intelligence-Accompanies-Barclays-Bank%E2%80%99s-Development

Quest Software, owner of PacketTrap MSP, has quietly invested in Jaspersoft, which develops open source business intelligence software. The big question: Will Quest eventually connect the dots between PacketTrap, managed services and BI software capabilities?

To be clear: Jaspersoft has multiple investors — including Red Hat, SAP and numerous venture capitalists. Also, Jaspersoft has received multiple rounds of financing. So Quest doesn’t directly control Jaspersoft. Still, Quest Software seems serious about the BI market.

In a prepared statement, Quest Software Managing Director of Corporate Development Shayne Higdon said: “We’re very glad to be investing in Jaspersoft right now. This is the time for scalable, affordable, self-service BI, With the right resources and this management team, we believe Jaspersoft will continue to set the modern BI industry agenda.“

Jaspersoft has a growing channel partner program. And Quest recently launched Partner Circle, a unified partner program that covers all of Quest’s IT management and systems management products. Quest has also launched migration services for customers that want to embrace Microsoft’s Office 365 cloud.

So where does BI fit into the story? To see where Quest is potentially heading with Jaspersoft take a look at Quest’s existing Spotlight product portfolio, which allows customers and channel partners to pinpoint database performance issues. Quest’s Spotlight on SQL Server Enterprise, for instance, features BI monitoring and works with Foglight for SQL Server. As a result, database administrators (DBAs) can more easily detect, diagnose and resolve SQL Server performance issues for customers.

MSPmentor wonders if Quest will unlock additional database management opportunities through the Jaspersoft investment…

Read More About This Topic

• Panorama: Social Media Meets Business Intelligence
• SMB Hosted BI Market on Way to $500M
• TechlabCloud No Longer Hosting LabTech Software
• SEC Filing: Quest Software’s PacketTrap MSP Business Accelerates
• PacketTrap Business Acceleration Program: MSP Profit Boost?

Article source: http://www.mspmentor.net/2011/07/18/quest-software-invests-in-open-source-business-intelligence/

CARY, N.C.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–A leader in the French premier banking market, Barclays Bank doubled its
point-of-sale locations across the country with expectations to increase
financial advisers by 35 percent over a two-year period. To help manage
this growth spurt within sales teams, the bank’s management uses SAS^®
Business Intelligence, from the leader in business
analytics software and services, behind a portal-based dashboard to
identify and implement key performance indicators (KPIs).

“Our
objectives were to improve sales efficiency – including a better
approach to sales meetings – and to give managers motivation tools and
the ability to synchronize activities through shared KPIs.”

“We needed the KPIs to support our strategy and sales management team,”
explained Patrick Moyon, Head of Tools and Commercial Support. “Our
objectives were to improve sales efficiency – including a better
approach to sales meetings – and to give managers motivation tools and
the ability to synchronize activities through shared KPIs.”

The performance management dashboard consists of three primary modules.
The first module manages activity for about 300 sales managers, who
monitor KPIs through a color-coded alert system. A second module shares
information at each point of sale, helping financial advisers track
historical activity and monitor progress against the defined business
objectives. The result is every manager has data to motivate sales
teams, reward best performers and identify areas needing improvement.
The third module forecasts each adviser’s business schedule for every
manager and at the Barclays head office as a proactive performance
overview at each point of sale.

“Ease of use has been integral to user adoption of the SAS Business
Intelligence dashboard,” said Anne de Palma, IT Project Leader, who
worked with business intelligence consultants Micropole
on the implementation. “It has been essential to sharing key business
expansion information.”

“The SAS Business Intelligence dashboard optimizes proactive decision
making related to sales activity and business management,” said Moyon.
“We can clearly see how the business is building through individual
performance improvement.”

About Barclays

Barclays is a major global financial services provider engaged in retail
banking, credit cards, corporate and investment banking and wealth
management with an extensive international presence in Europe, the
Americas, Africa and Asia. With over 300 years of history and expertise
in banking, Barclays operates in over 50 countries and employs 147,500
people. Barclays moves, lends, invests and protects money for customers
and clients worldwide. For further information about Barclays, please
visit our website www.barclays.com.

About SAS

SAS is the leader in business
analytics software and services, and the largest independent vendor
in the business intelligence market. Through innovative solutions
delivered within an integrated framework, SAS helps customers at more
than 50,000 sites improve performance and deliver value by making better
decisions faster. Since 1976 SAS has been giving customers around the
world THE POWER TO KNOW^®. SAS and all other SAS Institute
Inc. product or service names are registered trademarks or trademarks of
SAS Institute Inc. in the USA and other countries. ® indicates USA
registration. Other brand and product names are trademarks of their
respective companies. Copyright © 2011 SAS Institute Inc. All rights
reserved.

Article source: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20110718005093/en/SAS%C2%AE-Business-Intelligence-Accompanies-Barclays-Bank%E2%80%99s-Development

Published by Dresner Advisory Services LLC, the report features four different BI industry sub-categories in which to group vendors and analyze market behavior and direction. Titans are the largest vendors, with extensive product and service offerings – including Business Intelligence.

According to the report,“Oracle was ranked number one – overall – for its segment for 2010. It retains the number one position for 2011. It generally exceeded the peer average and was ranked number one in its peer group for both Sales and Value. Its 2011 performance improved in the areas of Sales, Value, and Product.”
The Oracle Business Intelligence (BI) Foundation Suite offers organizations a complete, open, and architecturally unified BI solution. The suite serves every class of user, providing multiple channels of information access, and supporting all enterprise BI requirements.

The software’s hot-pluggable design enable organizations to extend BI capabilities to existing Oracle and third-party data sources and applications, including SAP.

Supporting Quote
“We are pleased to be recognized as a business intelligence category leader for second year in a row in the Wisdom of the Crowds vendor study,” said Paul Rodwick, vice president of Product Management, Oracle Business Intelligence. “The last two years have borne major new features and enhancements to Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation and Oracle Business Intelligence Applications driven by customer input and feedback. We’re committed to continuing to extend our lead in business intelligence.”

Supporting Resources
About Oracle Enterprise Performance Management and Business Intelligence
Read Analyst Report
About Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation
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(1) Dresner Advisory Services, LLC “2011 Wisdom of Crowds Business Intelligence Market Study,” May 18, 2011.

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Article source: http://www.newswiretoday.com/news/94314/Oracle_Leader_in_2011_Wisdom_of_Crowds_Business_Intelligence_Market_Study/

Socially-Enabled Panorama Necto Works with Windows Azure’s Cloud-Based Platform-as-a-Service for Unparalleled Enterprise Scalability

TORONTO, July 14, 2011 /PRNewswire/ — Panorama Software, a global leader in proactive Business Intelligence (BI) solutions, announced today its socially-enabled BI platform Necto is now interoperable with the Windows Azure cloud-based application platform.

Panorama Necto embodies Web 2.0 communication by allowing users throughout the enterprise to interact within a social, relevant, and user-centric BI platform. Azure is a cloud-based application for the development and management of off-site applications.

Able to support thousands of enterprise users, Necto using the Azure platform allows businesses to enjoy a sophisticated end-to-end BI solution without the costs and time required for an on-premise solution.

“Panorama’s Necto BI solution on top of the Windows Azure cloud platform gives enterprise clients the power of social intelligence and our Automated Relevant Insights with the scalability of the Azure cloud platform,” said Eynav Azarya, CEO of Panorama Software. “We are very pleased to present our latest solution with Microsoft, and anticipate considerable enterprise adoption of Necto using the Azure platform due to the substantial cost and performance benefits.”

“Time and again, we see innovations from Panorama that add value for our end users,” said Kim Akers, General Manager for Global ISV partners at Microsoft Corp. “Necto is a web-based BI solution that takes social media from a personal context and introduces it to the enterprise business realm. Windows Azure provides Necto users with flexibility in a security-enhanced cloud environment.”

For more information about Panorama Necto with Windows Azure, visit www.panorama.com/necto.

About Panorama Software:

Panorama Software empowers individuals and global organizations with the ability to rapidly analyze data, identify trends, maximize business opportunities and improve corporate performance and results through a complete SaaS and on-premise BI solution.

Panorama Necto™ is the industry’s first socially-enabled Business Intelligence solution that offers a new way to connect data, insights, and people in the organization. The patent-pending solution represents a new generation of BI that enables enterprises to leverage the power of Social Intelligence to gain insights more quickly, more efficiently, and with greater relevancy.

Founded in 1993, Panorama is a leading innovator in Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) and Multidimensional Expressions (MDX). Panorama sold its OLAP technology to Microsoft Corporation in 1996; the technology was rebranded as SQL Server Analysis Services and integrated into the SQL Server platform.  Panorama supports over 1,600 customers worldwide in industries such as financial services, manufacturing, retail, healthcare, telecommunications and life sciences.  Panorama has a wide eco-system of partners in 30 countries, and maintains offices throughout North America, EMEA and Asia. Visit our website to learn more about Panorama’s Business Intelligence Solutions.

Necto, NovaView and the Panorama logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Panorama Software Ltd.  All other company product or brand names are the trademarks or the registered trademarks of their respective companies.  Panorama Software Ltd. is not responsible for errors or omissions.  Copyright 2009 Panorama Software Ltd.  All rights reserved.

SOURCE Panorama Software

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Article source: http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/panorama-brings-enterprise-bi-to-the-cloud-using-windows-azure-125555363.html

Quest Software Inc., an Aliso Viejo information technology manager, has joined with existing investors to put $11 million into Jaspersoft, a business intelligence software developer.

The investment was led by existing investors Red Hat, an open source Internet company, and SAP Ventures, a venture capital firm specializing in enterprise application software.

“We’re very glad to be investing in Jaspersoft right now. This is the time for scalable, affordable, self-service (business intelligence),” said Shayne Higdon, managing director of corporate development at Quest Software.

Jaspersoft CEO Brian Gentile said, “The business intelligence market is growing rapidly and Jaspersoft’s position within it continues to strengthen. Our growth has resulted in significant interest from world-class investors and so this became a perfect time for Jaspersoft to take on new, strategic funding. The additional financing provides us with more agility and flexibility as we consider build-versus-buy opportunities to accelerate our growth in embedded, self-service, and mobile BI.” Read the rest of this entry »

Article source: http://www.ocregister.com/articles/software-308489-jaspersoft-business.html