In response to a post I made on an unrelated topic, a reader said “I’m not really a fan of SSRS, preferring to use an ASP.NET and HTML interface…”

I’d like to move that discussion to the this thread and keep it on topic.  This is an interesting subject and one that I and many others have debated in the past.  The original thread is posted here but please reply to this topic in this thread.  Derek, I encourage you to post your previous reply to this thread.

Granted, using your suggested approach to start from scratch and write a custom application from the ground up affords more control and flexibility than some of the restrictions imposed by the Reporting Services interface.  However, unless you are dealing with nothing but very basic reporting requirements, writing a business report from the ground-up will take a number of hours exponentially greater than a report created using a capable enterprise reporting platform.  If I were to tell my clients that each of their analytical reports would take days, rather than hours, to design; they would not be able to pay for my services.  Nor would they be able to maintain or add additional features to existing reports.  Likewise, composite dashboards and the most complex reports would take months, rather than days. 

“If you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail”…  We’ve all heard that but to extend the analogy, if all I want to do is put two boards together, a hammer an nail is a great solution.  It’s quick and easy, but if I need to build a precision instrument – let’s say a Swiss watch or a telecommunications satellite, a hammer and nail aren’t going to cut it.  Every skilled craftsman carries many different tools and uses the right one for each task.

I agree with you that the parameter interface baked into the SSRS product is rudimentary, compared to something you can create yourself.  If you need to have more control over the parameter interface, than wrap the report in the ReportViewer control and pass the parameter values to the control, letting the report take care of the hard stuff like groups, filtering, calculations, drill-down and drill-through actions.  Beyond the report design experience and and user interface, our users and clients typically use features like the ability to render/export to multiple formats, instance caching and snapshots, alerting and subscriptions.  Duplicating these capabilities in a custom-built solution could take weeks or months at great expense

Yes, coding from scratch is a good solution for certain data-centric applications and simple reporting scenarios but not for complex, multi-element analytical business reports.

I welcome your comments and thoughts.

Advertisement

Like this:

Article source: http://sqlserverbiblog.wordpress.com/2012/03/03/ssrs-or-a-custom-web-form-pros-cons/

• SAP BusinessObjects Explorer for iPhone Now Available on Apple AppStore!
• IDC CEMA Business Intelligence Roadshow
• First Look at the New SAP BusinessObjects Exploration Views Prototype
• 2012: The Year Analytics Means Business

« Just Add Analytics – Even to Toothbrushes |

Posted by Timo Elliott on Friday, March 2, 2012 · 1 Comment 

(No Ratings Yet)

 Loading …

Steve Lucas and Timo Elliott onstage at SAP BI 2012, Las Vegas. Image courtesy of Matthias Wild

At this week’s SAP BI2012 conference, I had the honor of co-presenting the keynote, “How Big Data Shapes Business Results”  with Steve Lucas, SAP EVP Business Analytics, Database Technology, and with demo support from Fred Samson.

The big theme of the last year has been big data. There was a lot of innovation in many areas, but big data has had  a huge impact on both how organizations plan their overall technology strategy as well as affecting other specific strategies such as analytics, cloud, mobile, social, and collaboration.

Steve kicked off by addressing the confusion (and cynicism) about the definition of “big data” — noting that people had supplied at least twenty different definitions in response to his question on Twitter. The popularity of the term has been driven by the rise of new open-source technology technology such as Hadoop, but it is now typically used to refer to what Gartner calls “extreme data”.

Extreme data is on the high end of one or more of the ‘3Vs’: Volume, Velocity, and Variety (and some note that there’s a fourth V, validity, that must be taken account of: data quality remains the #1 struggle for organizations trying to implement successful analytic projects).

To address all of these effectively, any “big data solution” has to encompass a wide range of different technologies. SAP is proposing a new “Big Data Processing Framework” that includes integration to new tools such as Hadoop, but also addresses the need for the other ‘V’s for a global approach to ingesting, storing, processing, and presenting data from both structured and less-structured sources. Many more details about this framework will be available in the coming months.

The keynote session went on to talk about how big data is related to other technologies, such as real time, mobile, cloud, virtualization, and social, with highlight demonstrations of some of the latest SAP technology. These included: in-memory smart meter analytics, SAP BusinessObjects 4.0 running on Sybase IQ, BI On-Demand powered by HANA, SAP NetWeaver Landscape Virtualization Management, a mobile Hospital Oncology analytics application, and two new mobile consumer applications from SAP: Recalls Plus, and an upcoming project called iLike

Dave Rathburn put together a nice overview of the session, and Matthias Wild wrote up a post on the SDN site.

The session was recorded, and is due to be online next week – I’ll update this post with the details when it is available. In the meantime, here’s a copy of the presentation available for download:

• How Big Data Shapes Business Results (pdf)
• How Big Data Shapes Business Results (ppt)

Related posts:

• Needle in a Haystack Blog Area
• AFSUG Business Intelligence Special Interest Group
• Carbon Footprint Analysis Leads to Concrete Savings: Walkers Crisps
• Data Analysts, Data Scientists, and the Rest of Us

Article source: http://timoelliott.com/blog/2012/03/presentation-how-big-data-shapes-business-results.html

From Apps to Access: How Desktop Virtualization Increases Employee Productivity.

Article source: http://siliconangle.com/servicesangle/blog/2012/03/01/data-science-opportunity-or-threat-to-business-intelligence-professionals/

Email | 

Comment

Share

Estarta Solutions
PO Box 941934
Amman, Jordan

Press release date: February 14, 2012

Amman – Estarta Solutions, the leading regional IT provider and innovator, in cooperation with the Arab Potash Company (APC), has concluded successfully the implementation of the Business Intelligence (BI) solution.

Based on Microsoft SharePoint and SQL Server, Estarta’s BI solution aims at providing the APC with a centralized database; that captures and analyzes data, and issues reports spontaneously. The system also seeks to link the database to the concerned departments to assess progress, boost productivity, and increase the work efficiency of the sales marketing department.

“The BI solution will help us unify the way we explore data and provide the required information through info sharing environment; that can be easily used by the administrative sections to analyze the overall performance and take strategic decisions to solidify our company’s competitiveness”. Head of APC IT Department, Rami Malkawi, said.

“Moreover, the employees at the sales and marketing department will be able to save their time and effort in retrieving information and this will facilitate work and increase our sales”. Malkawi added.

In addition to its ability to perform data analysis and comparison processes and issue reports, tables, and charts, the BI system enjoys high levels of comprehensiveness and flexibility which satisfy the Arab Potash Company’s future visions and plans to strengthen its global market share.

Mr. Husni Khuffash, Microsoft Jordan Country Manager, added: “Microsoft BI tools were implemented by our strategic partner Estarta to enable Potash business to have better insights about the performance and profitability, making them able to take the right decisions based on a realistic data-connected view. The power of integration in Microsoft technologies and our strategic partnership with Potash ensured the customer attains the best return on their investment while maintaining the best integrated user-experience possible”.

On the other hand, Estarta’s Acting CEO, Samir Abu Nemeh, said, “The Business Intelligence enables the company’s decision makers to timely access the right information, and transform it into insightful knowledge and smart decisions to improve the performance management. Additionally; it could be merged seamlessly with systems and multiple-data sources in the company’s infrastructure. “

Abu Nemeh added, “We are keen to deploy our technical capabilities and programming expertise to assist Arab institutions to develop their work. As a pioneering regional company in this field that understands the needs of the various sectors, Estarta is committed to improving the BI system which includes tools and practical applications designed for carrying out planning and integration operations, issuing reports and balanced score cards, performing analysis, and managing basic data.”

It is worth mentioning that Estarta Solutions, which has a qualified expertise in designing and implementing e-services, provides technical and practical software solutions that advance the efficiency of institutions and increase their productivity.

For more information about the company, visit: www.estartasolutions.com

Email | 

Comment

Share

Article source: http://news.thomasnet.com/companystory/Arab-Potash-Deploys-Estarta-s-Business-Intelligence-System-851139

The hype and reality of the Big Data movement was on full display this week at Strata Conference in Santa Clara, California. With a sold-out show of 2,000+ attendees and 40+ sponsors, the conference was the epicenter of all things Hadoop and NoSQL–technologies which are increasingly gaining a foothold in corporate computing environments.

Most of the leading Hadoop distributions–Cloudera, Hortonworks, EMC Greenplum, and MapR–already count hundreds of customers. And it’s clear that Big Data has moved from the province of Internet and media companies with large Web properties to nearly every industry. Strata speakers described compelling Big Data applications in energy, pharmaceuticals, utilities, financial services, insurance, and government.

Even IBM, which is not considered a main tent player in the movement and did not exhibit at Strata Conference, has 200 customers using or testing its BigInsights Hadoop distribution, according to Anjul Bhambhri, vice president of Big Data at Big Blue. One IBM customer, Vestas Wind Systems, a leading wind turbine maker, uses BigInsights to model larger volumes of weather data so it can pinpoint the optimal placement of wind turbines. And a financial services customer uses BigInsights to improve the accuracy of its fraud models by addressing much larger volumes of transaction data.

Big Data Drivers

Hadoop clearly fills an unmet need in many organizations. Given its open source roots, Hadoop provides a more cost effective way to analyze large volumes of data compared to traditional relational database management systems (RDBMS). It’s also better suited to processing unstructured data, such as audio, video, or images, and semi-structured data, such as Web log data for tracking customer behavior on social media sites. For years, leading-edge companies have struggled in vain to figure out an optimal way to analyze this type of data in traditional data warehousing environments, but without much luck. (See “Let the Revolution Begin: Big Data Liberation Theology.”)

Finally, Hadoop is a load-and-go environment: administrators can dump the data into Hadoop without having to convert it into a particular structure. Then, users (or data scientists) can analyze the data using whatever tools they want, which today are typically languages, such as Java, Python, and Ruby. This type of data management paradigm appeals to application developers and analysts, who often feel straitjacketed by top-down, IT-driven architectures and SQL-based toolsets. (See “The New Analytical Ecosystem: Making Way for Big Data.”)

Speed Bumps

But Hadoop is not a data management panacea. It’s clearly at or near the apogee of its hype cycle right now, and its many warts will disillusion all but bleeding- and leading-edge adopters.

For starters, Hadoop is still very green behind the ears. The Apache Foundation just released the equivalent of version 1.0. So there are plenty of basic things missing from the environment–like security, a metadata catalog, data quality, backups, and monitoring and control. Moreover, it’s a batch processing environment that is not terribly efficient in the way it exploits a clustered environment. Hadoop knock-offs, like MapR, which embed proprietary technology underneath Hadoop APIs claim up to five-fold faster performance on half as many nodes.

In addition, to actually run a Hadoop environment, you need to get software from a mishmash of Apache projects, with razzle dazzle names like Flume, Sqoop, Ooze, Pig, Hive, and Zookeeper. These independent projects often contain competing functionality, have separate release schedules, and aren’t always tightly integrated. And each project evolves rapidly. That’s why there is a healthy market for Hadoop distributions that package these components into a reasonable set of implementable software.

But the biggest complaint among Big Data advocates is the current lack of data scientists to build Hadoop applications. These “wunderkinds” combine a rare set of skills: statistics and math, data, process and domain knowledge, and computer programming. Unfortunately, developers have little data and domain experience and data experts don’t know how to program. So there is a severe shortage of talent. Many companies are hiring four people with relevant skills to create a virtual data scientist.

Evolution

One good thing about the Big Data movement is that it evolves fast. There are Apache projects to address most of the shortcomings of Hadoop. One promising project is Hive, which provides SQL-like access to Hadoop, although it’s stuck in a batch processing paradigm. Another is HBase, which overcomes Hadoop’s latency issues, but is designed for fast row-based reads/writes to support high performance transactional applications. Both create table-like structures on top of Hadoop files.

In addition, many commercial vendors have jumped into the fray, marrying proprietary technology with open source software to turn Hadoop into a more corporate-friendly compute environment. Vendors, such as Zettaset, EMC Greenplum, and Oracle have launched appliances that embed Hadoop with commercial software to offer customers the best of both worlds. Many BI and data integration vendors now connect to Hadoop and can move data back and forth seamlessly. Some even create and run MapReduce jobs in Hadoop using their standard visual development environments.

Perhaps the biggest surprise at Strata was Microsoft’s announcement that it plans to open source its Big Data software by donating it to the Apache Foundation. Microsoft has ported Hadoop to Windows Server and is working on an ODBC driver that works with Hive as well as a Javascript framework for creating MapReduce jobs. These products will open Hadoop to millions of Microsoft developers. And of course, Oracle has already released a Hadoop appliance that embeds Cloudera’s Hadoop distribution. If Microsoft and Oracle are on board, there’s little that can stop the Big Data train.

Cooperation or Competition?

Although vendors are quick to jump on the Big Data bandwagon, there is some measure of desperation in the move. Established software vendors stand to lose significant revenue if Hadoop evolves without them and gains robust data management and analytical functionality that cannibalizes their existing products. They either need to generate sufficient revenue from new Big Data products or circumscribe Hadoop so that it plays a subservient role to their existing products. Most vendors are hedging their bets and playing both options, especially database vendors who perhaps have the most to lose.

In the spotlight of Strata Conference, both sides are playing nice and are eager to partner and work together. Hadoop vendors benefit as more applications run on Hadoop, including traditional BI, ETL, and DBMS products. And commercial vendors benefit if their existing tools have a new source of data to connect to and plumb. It’s a big new market whose sweet tasting honey attracts a hive full of bees.

Why Invest in Proprietary Tools? But customers are already asking whether data warehouses and BI tools will eventually be folded into Hadoop environments or the reverse. Why spend millions of dollars on a new analytical RDBMS if you can do that processing without paying a dime in license costs using Hadoop? Why spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on data integration tools if your data scientists can turn Hadoop into a huge data staging and transformation layer? Why invest in traditional BI and reporting tools if your power users can exploit Hadoop using freely available programs, such as Java, Python, Pig, Hive, or Hbase?

The Future is Cloudy

Right now, it’s too early to divine the future of the Big Data movement and predict winners and losers. It’s possible that in the future all data management and analysis will run entirely on open source platforms and tools. But it’s just as likely that commercial vendors will co-opt (or outright buy) open source products and functionality and use them as pipelines to magnify sales of their commercial products.

More than likely, we’ll get a mélange of open source and commercial capabilities. After all, 30 years after the mainframe revolution, mainframes are still a mainstay at many corporations. In information technology, nothing ever dies; it just finds its niche in an evolutionary ecosystem.

Article source: http://www.b-eye-network.com/blogs/eckerson/archives/2012/03/the_hype_and_re.php

LeanLogistic won gold and bronze awards at the 2012 Stevie Awards for sales and customer service. 

The logistics company provides supply chain and transportation management services.

Its LeanDex transportation rate index, which assembles and reports on shipping rates, won a gold Stevie Award in the category of Business Intelligence Solutions.

In the category of Airlines, Distribution and Transportation Industries, the company earned a bronze award in recognition of its exceptional customer service.

LeanLogistics is located at 1351 S. Waverly Road, Holland.

For more information, visit www.LeanLogistics.com.

Article source: http://www.hollandsentinel.com/communities/holland_area/x1014036916/LeanLogistics-wins-award-for-sales-and-customer-service

LONDON–(Marketwire – Feb 29, 2012) – Elsevier Business Intelligence, the medtech industry’s leading provider of strategic partnership and investment conferences, announced today that it will host the ‘IN³ Medical Device 360° London’ investor conference on April 25-26, 2012, at the Millennium Gloucester Hotel Conference Centre London.

The Investment in Innovation (IN³) Medical Device 360° London conference will feature presentations by more than 20 early-, mid- and late-stage start-up companies that are seeking funding and/or strategic partnership across the spectrum of diagnostic and therapeutic device markets. The conference also will feature an outstanding agenda of panels, networking sessions and meet-and-greets with industry thought leaders discussing the most pressing issues facing the global device industry in 2012 and beyond. Participating speakers confirmed to date include senior-level investors from Covidien, Delta Partners, Earlybird Venture Capital, Edwards Lifesciences, Forbion, Fountain Healthcare Partners, Gilde Healthcare Partners, Family Office Fund, NBGI Ventures, Peppermint VP, Philips, Seroba Bioventures, Sofinnova Partners, Sorin Group, Stryker, Wellington Partners, and many more. Panel topics will include: what corporate buyers are looking for in 2012; what venture dealmakers are looking for in emerging med device companies; the shift toward overseas clinical trials; and other timely topics. In addition, large company/VC meet-and-greets will be held to facilitate interaction between these two influential groups and conference participants. Partnering software will be available to all registered attendees prior to the conference so that one-on-one onsite meetings can be pre-arranged.

This two-day special event will benefit a wide variety of participants in the medical device sector: start-ups seeking investment or strategic partnerships, investment firms, VCs, mid-size and large medical device manufacturers, and service providers. Emerging medtech companies that would like to apply to present in London should contact Kayleen Kell at 949-797-7142, or email k.kell@elsevier.com.

IN³ Medical Device 360° London will be held at the Millennium Gloucester Hotel Conference Centre London. Event co-sponsors to date include Ronald Trahan Associates Inc., Aptiv Solutions, Marketwire, Mass Medical Angels and Life Science Intelligence and Scisive Consulting LP. Visit www.IN3London.com for full conference and registration details. EBI will be hosting two additional IN³ Medical Device 360° events in 2012, in Boston and San Francisco; visit www.elsevierbi.com/conferences for more information.

About Elsevier Business Intelligence
Elsevier Business Intelligence (EBI), an Elsevier company built on the heritage of F-D-C Reports, Windhover Information and Medtech Insight, is a global information supplier providing business intelligence on regulatory, business and reimbursement issues that are vital to the healthcare industry. Through a range of products including publications, conferences, databases and reports, EBI places biopharma and medical device professionals, and those who focus on these industries, at the forefront of knowledge, by providing the perfect combination of news and information together with penetrating insight and analysis. EBI (www.elsevierbi.com) has offices in the U.S. in Bridgewater, N.J.; Norwalk, Conn.; Rockville, Md.; and Irvine, Calif.

Article source: http://www.businessreviewusa.com/press_releases/elsevier-business-intelligence-ebi-to-host-in3-medical-device-360-london-april-25-26-2012

11:28, March 3, 2012

By Valerie Hopkins

Journalists were paid to provide information to the intelligence firm Stratfor, according to the latest  tranche of company emails leaked by WikiLeaks.

The firm courted media outlets in almost 50 countries, according to the documents.

Stratfor largely had significant contacts in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.  In 2009 and 2010, the firm signed contracts with the Azerbaijan Press Agency, Serbia’s Politika and B92, HotNews in Romania, The Baltic Times,Georgia’s The Messenger, and the Georgia Times, Moldova’s Jurnal Trust Media, Macedonia’sMakFax, Poland’s Warsaw Business Journal, the European Union’s EurActiv, Kyrgyzstan’s The Central Times of Asia, and more.

Among the contributors was the English-language newspaper Kyiv Post, an OCCRP partner.  Editor Brian Bonner says his newspaper provided the Texas-based firm with information and sometimes published their analysis reports on their site.

“Stratfor, while it bills itself exotically as a private strategic intelligence service, is nothing more from what I can see than a paid subscription service that employs a worldwide network of contributors, analysts, informants that collect open-source information and analyze it for their paying customers, which include businesses, governments and think tanks,” he wrote in an email to OCCRP.

Bonner maintains that working with Stratfor does not run contrary to journalistic norms.

“If Stratfor did anything illegal or unethical, I don’t know about it — and it would cause us to review our partnership with them,” he wrote.

Bonner said the information his journalists provided “valuable on-the-ground information, but nothing that any good, well-connected journalist working in Ukraine didn’t know or couldn’t discover.”

Stratfor’s agreements with media in so many countries were a big cause for concern, said WikiLeaks when they released the list on February 27.

“While it is acceptable for journalists to swap information or be paid by other media organisations, because Stratfor is a private intelligence organisation that services governments and private clients these relationships are corrupt or corrupting.”

But Jo Jakobsen, a professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology who has spent much of his career studying Risk Analysis firms, says risk analysis firms of all stripes, especially those which are not focused on one country or region, “get sources on the ground” including journalists.

“The impression you get from Wikileaks is that this Stratfor firm does a lot of shady things, corruption, and all that, but I don’t really see that, because paying sources on the ground is not a matter of corruption, necessarily.  Not that I know all the details, but newspapers do that as well, as a matter of necessity.”

He says Stratfor, which he characterized as a medium to small sized company,  portrays itself as a semi-CIA type intelligence agency, but it is not.

“If you’re going to be a CIA type organization, it requires a lot of resources, and Stratfor just doesn’t have a lot of resources.  As far as I understand, the attack on Stratfor’s computer system, was really down to Stratfor not implementing standard ordinary protection, because it cost too much.”

One problem journalists face working for private intelligence firms is that it is not clear who the firms themselves are working for.  They may be providing data for predatory businessmen, corrupt officials or even organized crime groups.

Risk analysis and business intelligence firms often court journalists, says Brant Houston, the the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation Chair in Investigative and Enterprise Reporting and former executive director of Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE).

“There’s no question that intelligence firms are interested in good reporters because they work quickly, they track things down very quickly and given what they’re normally paid they usually don’t cost that much if they have the potential to hire them,” he told OCCRP.

Houston said the problem lies in the lack of a sustainable business model in which journalists can be paid decently for their work.

“Journalists have been underpaid and undervalued for the work that they do, particularly investigative journalists, there comes to be a point where they have to work for other people to make ends meet.”

But, he says, crossing over into the intelligence industry can cost a publication’s credibility or strain relationships with governments.  If a newspaper choses to do it, they must be transparent and should have firewalls or other means of separating the journalism from the corporate intelligence, he counsels.

“And in the end the public will decide how satisfied they are with that.  And the second question is will the government of the country that you’re in be satisfied or will they see you as someone working for another government’s intelligence organization.”

Many organizations spurned Statfor’s offers. According to the documents, Stratfor tried but could not find partners in Nigeria, Kenya and South Africa, and they had a difficult time finding partners inLatin America. Only Colombia’s El Espectador signed a contract in 2009. Brazil’s O Tempo,Argentina’s La Nacion, and Peru’s La Republica were not interested.

http://www.reportingproject.net/

Article source: http://hetq.am/eng/news/11409/journalists-linked-to-private-intelligence-firm.html