SCOTTSDALE, Ariz., March 15, 2012 /PRNewswire/ – According to strategy acceleration firm Compass Intelligence, the top three telecom operators have the  highest ranked Small Business portals out of a  ranking of 49 companies.   The year-end review examines more than 20 capabilities across four parameters over the four quarters of 2011.   The research shows that Verizon, ATT and Sprint have built some of the most comprehensive and diverse experiences for  Small  Business  customers  in  2011.  Vendors  are  scored  and  ranked  each  quarter  in  terms  of  their  ability  to provide relevant online experiences that extend beyond e-commerce.  Aspects, such as online learning, site design and  messaging,  in  addition  to  e-Commerce  capabilities  are  examined,  using  monthly  research  with  decision- makers in this market as guidance.

“Creating a relevant experience for the Small Business market continues to be a challenge – one which vendors are taking head on.  Today’s Small Business portals are cleaner and more elegant than ever.  They are also starting to include improved content hierarchies and thought leadership tailored to this market,” says Kneko Burney, Founder  CEO  of  Compass  Intelligence.  “By  creating  an  experience  that  is  architected  around  the  way  in  which  Small Businesses operate and/or their goals – vendors can position their solutions in more relevant ways – resulting in better conversion rates over time.”

The  research  conducted  in  2011  suggests  that  a  strong  self-learn  environment  coupled  with  simple,  intuitive navigation will result in an “ideal” Portal environment for this market.   Sean Rowe, Portal Researcher at Compass Intelligence  adds,  ”Sometimes  less  is  more,  and  Small  Business  Decision-makers  want  to  spend  as  little  time possible researching and purchasing products. I expect to see a lot of focus on tools and capabilities that help with the sale of products, being incorporated into product pages rather than external resource centers.”

Key Findings include:

• 2011 Top 10 – Verizon, ATT, Sprint, Cisco, XO Communications, Dell, IBM, Windstream, cBeyond and CenturyLink
• Best Practice this period: Theme-based Simplicity – a clean site experience built around contextual content relevant to the target segment.
• Best Help Support: Sprint offers an extremely intuitive Help Support center, which incorporates multiple media types.
• Best Learn Experience: ATT’s InSite offers the most to Small Businesses wanting to develop and grow.
• Best e-Commerce: Dell offers tools to help Small Businesses by providing comparison tables, user ratings and product images.
• Click to here to download a summary of this period’s customer research

About Compass Intelligence

Compass Intelligence, a strategy acceleration firm, specializes in providing decision-support from idea to execution, including  customer  analytics  for  the  high-tech  and  telecom  industries.  Our  team  of  experts  deliver  insights through  a  variety  of  resources,  from syndicated  reports,  market  forecasts,  expert  videos  to  information  portals such as SBOnline and www.ne2ne.com (an M2M community).  Find us on http://www.compassintelligence.com or follow us on Twitter (@compassintel).

For Interview or Other Requests
Kneko Burney
President Chief Strategist
kneko@compassintelligence.com 

Sean Rowe
Portal Researcher Expert Guide
srowe@compassintelligence.com

Article source: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/compass-intelligence-ranks-key-small-120000374.html

U.S. Economy Hopes Continue to Buoy MarketsAP

European stocks eked out some more gains Thursday as optimism over the U.S. economy and a waning of concerns over …

Article source: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/research-markets-global-business-intelligence-155300219.html

March 14 (Bloomberg) — Margaret Brennan reports that today’s “Help Wanted” is for a Business Intelligence Analyst for the Dungeons and Dragons roleplaying games. Must have sorcerer skills including statistics, math, or engineering. She speaks on Bloomberg Television’s “InBusiness With Margaret Brennan.” (Source: Bloomberg)

Margaret Brennan reports that
today’s “Help Wanted” is for a Business Intelligence Analyst
for the Dungeons and Dragons roleplaying games. Must have
sorcerer skills including statistics, math, or engineering. She
speaks on Bloomberg Television’s “InBusiness With Margaret
Brennan.” (Source: Bloomberg)

Running Time: 00:33

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Article source: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-03-14/help-wanted-business-intelligence-warlock-.html

DUBLIN–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Research and Markets(http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/ab6b49/global_business_in)
has announced the addition of the “Global
Business Intelligence Tools Market 2010-2014” report to their
offering.

TechNavio’s analysts forecast the Global Business Intelligence Tools
market to grow at a CAGR of 7.5 percent over the period 2010-2014. One
of the key factors contributing to this market growth is the need to
improve competitive responsiveness. The Global Business Intelligence
Tools market has also been witnessing introduction of user-friendly
predictive modeling to the information workplace. However, cost
associated with implementing business intelligence tools could pose a
challenge to the growth of this market.

Key vendors dominating this market space include SAP AG, IBM Corp., SAS
Institute Inc., and Oracle Corp.

Commenting on the report, an analyst from TechNavio’s Enterprise
Applications team said, Business intelligence is one of the few segments
of the IT market that has achieved significant market growth in a
difficult economic environment. Mega-acquisitions have had a
far-reaching effect on this development. Large companies such as IBM,
SAP, and Oracle have entered the Business Intelligence Tools market by
acquiring some of the pure-play vendors. These acquisitions are
propelling the IT majors to position themselves further away from being
focused only on a certain type of data format, toward improved
capabilities of controlling diverse data types and formats.

According to the report, many businesses are exposed to increasing
competition due to the increase in customer demand and pricing pressure.
This has led to the need to reduce cycle time by increasing the speed of
processes that support competitive strategies. Business intelligence
applications provide real-time information that can help businesses
avoid process delays and centralize management to improve decision
making and market response. In addition, to achieve competitive
advantage, organizations are required to transform the data into
actionable intelligence by constant improvement of customer-facing
strategies.

For more information visit http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/ab6b49/global_business_in

Article source: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20120314006076/en/Research-Markets-Global-Business-Intelligence-Tools-Market

CBR Staff Writer
Published 15 March 2012

Insight increases knowledge sharing efficiency across sales, marketing, and product management

Win/Loss technology and consulting applications provider Ignite Intelligence Solutions has introduced Insight, a software platform that captures and consolidates sales force intelligence, transforming it into clear strategies to help companies improve win-rates, enhance product features and reduce competitive risks.

Insight enables salespeople to capture what worked and what didn’t during the sales cycle, making their information permanently part of the organisation’s knowledgebase.

The business intelligence provided by the Insight platform transforms collected sales information into actionable data that provides feedback and increases knowledge sharing across sales, marketing and product management.

Insight can be deployed as a stand-alone tool or used to complement traditional win/loss review programmes and adheres to the data principle of ‘enter once, use often,’ leveraging and augmenting information that already exists in a company’s CRM system.

Win/Loss Reviews: A New Knowledge Model for Competitive Intelligence author Rick Marcet said a product like Insight, which is designed to capture key deal factors around a win or loss, makes it easy for organisations to launch a sales-driven win/loss review programme and achieve results faster.

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Article source: http://bi.cbronline.com/news/ignite-intelligence-solutions-introduces-new-bi-platform-150312

Something that got a bit of attention last week on Twitter, but which may not have filtered through into the wider SSAS community yet, is the fact that Microsoft has renamed the Vertipaq engine that’s inside PowerPivot and Analysis Services 2012 Tabular. It’s now called “the xVelocity in-memory analytics engine”, and the term “xVelocity” is also going to be used to refer to the column store index feature in the SQL Server 2012 relational database. For more details see the official announcements:

http://blogs.technet.com/b/dataplatforminsider/archive/2012/03/08/introducing-xvelocity-in-memory-technologies-in-sql-server-2012-for-10-100x-performance.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/analysisservices/archive/2012/03/09/xvelocity-and-analysis-services.aspx

Personally I liked the old Vertipaq name and as I said recently, I think these umbrella marketing terms that refer to lots of different things cause confusion. But it’s only a name so there’s nothing much to get upset about – just don’t say Vertipaq any more, say xVelocity.

Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/wordpress/Cpjz/~3/tNOBj16dovQ/

After unwittingly getting involved recently in a code vs GUI discussion another pro GUI vote came in yesterday when presenting to a customer’s internal user group. When creating and using prompts in SAS Enterprise Guide, it is a no-brainer to recommend leveraging the %_eg_WhereParam as it handles all the special coding requirements to process prompts. Here are three very quick movies to show how it is done.

Single Selection Prompt in SAS Enterprise Guide

Use SAS Enterprise Guide to generate a single selection prompt off of a static list of values.

Multiple Selection Prompt in SAS Enterprise Guide

Use SAS Enterprise Guide to generate a multiple selection prompt off of a static list of values.

Date Range Prompt in SAS Enterprise Guide

Generate a date range prompt for only 2011 data and apply to the data table.

Need more ideas/information?

For more information on using SAS Enterprise Guide Prompt Manager, refer to my SAS Global Forum 2011 paper “Creating Reusable Programs Using SAS Enterprise Guide Prompt Manager”.

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Article source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/RealBusinessIntelligenceForRealUsers/~3/lS99Sojf4dc/