Creating a successful business intelligence strategy with SAS
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A Business Intelligence Competency Center (BICC) is a permanent formal organizational structure that exists to advance and promote the effective use of business intelligence in support of the organization's business strategy. This white paper explores the value that an organization can receive from a BICC. You will learn about organizational implications, how to fund such an effort, and how SAS can help ensure a successful BI strategy. The paper also includes a brief case study.
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Bookselling giant Barnes and Noble outlined plans to implement the SQL Server 2000 Business Intelligence offering. &quot;SQL Server 2000 will significantly reduce the time it takes our developers to aggregate data.
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A threat to traditional markets? JasperSoft has just released version 2.0 of its software, which makes this a good time not just to consider JasperSoft's latest capabilities, but also open-source business intelligence (BI) more generally.â¦
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SQL Server 2005 offers compelling reasons to embrace the Microsoft Business Intelligence platform for information needs across your enterprise. This paper explains the extensive feature set from the perspective of business value. It will help you make informed decisions about upgrading or migrating your business intelligence platform to SQL Server 2005.
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Computerworld and Cognos have teamed up to create a 4 part webcast series on Business Intelligence, "Pathways to BI Success: The Information Management Series". Watch part 1 of this webcast series right now!
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(Source: Tibco)  Every day, millions of individuals within large organizations make small, yet important business decisions based on their experience and whatever information happens to be available at the time. With little time to spare, these decisions are often taken with an incomplete view of the situation, as 'good information' is all too often still difficult to find. Faced with a backlog for new enterprise reports, out-of-control 'spreadsheet marts', and a plethora of custom applications all trying to accomplish similar goals, CIOs and business managers alike need to consider a new approach.
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It&#39;s been a bit more than two years since Ambuj Goyal launched IBM&#39;s Information on Demand strategy, an effort by the company to bring together a virtual menagerie of data management, access, and analysis software under a single heading.Goyal, general manager of information management in IBM&#39;s Software Group, has driven the effort partly through a seemingly relentless series of acquisitions.One of IBM&#39;s highest-profile grabs is undoubtedly its&#160;pending deal to purchase business intelligence vendor Cognos for $5 billion. It&#39;s also bought niche companies such as&#160;Solid Information Technology, a company that makes an in-memory database, and&#160;Princeton Softech, a data archiving firm.A central pillar in the strategy is IBM&#39;s Information Server, released in October. It is an integration platform for combining data from a variety of heterogenous sources.The company has yet to develop its own packaged enterprise applications, choosing to tackle that lucrative business through partnerships. Instead, IBM&#39;s goal is to become the leading supplier of a data infrastructure designed to make those applications more effective.IBM&#39;s core target remains large enterprises faced with an avalanche of business data, and there is plenty of opportunity here, according to IT analyst Judith Hurwitz: &quot;I think we&#39;re just scratching the surface of what companies want to do.&quot;For example, she said, &quot;Companies have to do [RFID tags] because companies like Wal-Mart insist upon it. They&#39;ve got all this RFID data, and they&#39;re not doing anything with it. The question is, is there a way they can actually start using that RFID data to make better business decisions?&quot;Goyal and his teams might tell you that they&#39;re trying their best to answer that question. In a recent interview at IBM&#39;s Somers, New York, facility, the executive painted his IOD strategy as a roaring success, yet one still in its earliest stages.IDGNS: From a business standpoint, how has the Information on Demand strategy played out so far?Goyal: It couldn&#39;t be better. The success ... has helped not only the information management software, but the Software Group and IBM as a company.... The Cognos acquisition alone is $5 billion. We would not be allowed to do that, the shareholders and board would not allow us to do that, unless we had made a return on our investment.IDGNS: You&#39;ve assembled a dramatic array of data-centric technologies but still aren&#39;t in the packaged ERP, CRM application business. Why?Goyal: Our strategy remains that we are not in the ERP, CRM space. We are not in the applications business, of that kind. There is the market for automation and the market for optimization. Automation is about having an application agenda. I either build custom applications with COBOL or Java, or I do packaged applications, or I do [service-oriented architecture] to say, &#39;I already have applications, let me get a combined application or composite application.&#39;That&#39;s a market for consolidation now. That&#39;s not where the growth is. What a lot of people are saying now is, &#39;Hey I&#39;ve automated the call center, can I improve my per-customer profitability?&#39; It&#39;s not about automation, it&#39;s about optimizing my business, and that&#39;s all about leveraging information.Even in China, the automation market is saturated. Everywhere, we are seeing the automation market is saturating. There are a lot of projects going on in automation, don&#39;t get me wrong. But in that market, people have made their decisions. Now people are saying, how can I optimize?We don&#39;t do supply chain software, but we make supply chain software better. We don&#39;t do core banking, but we make core banking better. That&#39;s the optimization market. It&#39;s a multi-tens-of-billions-of-dollars&#39; worth of market. That&#39;s where the world is starting to go.IDGNS: So who are you competing with?Goyal: It&#39;s not who, but what segment. All these companies have become very, very big. When we work with HP, some of IBM&#39;s business provides services and software on HP&#39;s hardware, and our hardware business competes with HP. Same thing with databases: We fight against Oracle. But when we work with Siebel and Peoplesoft, we work with Oracle.IDGNS:&#160;Microsoft just made an offer for Fast Search and Transfer, a high-end, pureplay enterprise search vendor. They clearly see it as a growth business. How important is search within the IOD strategy?Goyal: Search to me is an ingredient technology. People don&#39;t buy search. People buy improved interaction with a client. [Search] is an ingredient technology that helps me solve a particular problem. People tell me Yahoo and Google are in the search business. They&#39;re not, they&#39;re in the advertising business. Search is just an ingredient technology that they use. With everything we do in Information on Demand ... search will be one of the ingredient technologies to leverage structured information and unstructured information.IDGNS: Are you done buying companies?Goyal: If history is an indication of what we have done over the past seven years, we can predict the future. You can answer your own question as to whether I&#39;m done buying companies.We are now in the optimization space, where two decades ago the world was in the automation space. When JD Edwards came out, when the first sense of ERP started to emerge, and so on.We feel from a basic truth perspective we are in the best position. We now have information integration, master data management, we have BI, data warehousing, databases, content management, we have search.But the journey of optimization has just begun. It will take us in ways we don&#39;t understand, even today. We are going after information on demand in real time. Sub-second, sub-millisecond response times to a question asked in a call center and delivering information just in time to optimize a business process or a human decision. So this is a two-decade journey.
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BI want to break free Whitepaper Business Intelligence (or BI) is often promoted as a âget out of gaol freeâ card â surely, intelligence in business is a good thing (although perhaps we wouldnât know, we havenât met much of it), so paying lots of money for a BI package is a no-brainer?â¦
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(Source: Tibco)  So you have a few analysis-savvy experts but a lot of business users needing to solve both repeatable and unpredictable problems. What do you do to scale properly? Using Guided Analytics, expert business professionals can use powerful and easy-to-use data analysis applications to easily and quickly create analysis templates and recommended workflows, thus effectively transferring their best-practice analytics to general corporate users, without IT intervention! That speeds up decision-making by automating common analysis tasks, capturing best practices and providing a framework for distribution of analysis applications to meet the ever-changing needs of their organization.
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You want a business plan? Here's a strategic vision you can't refuse.
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(Source: Oracle)  Hyperion's 2007 survey of requirements for business intelligence and enterprise performance management soltuions revealed the differences in requirements, evaluation criteria, and purchase influencers between emerging businesses and large enterprises. Learn more in this new white paper.
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The SAS Institute has updated its products for data mining and forecasting.The releases represent a greater leap in functionality over other recent revisions, according to Mary Grace Crissey, a product marketing manager for SAS. The earlier versions were &quot;much more GUI-driven,&quot; she said.Enterprise Miner 5.3 features 15 new analytical tools and additional algorithms, the company said. An accompanying Text Miner product can analyze unstructured data, such as blogs or customer feedback forms.Forecast Server 2.1, another updated product, includes improved filtering, more than a dozen additional project management macros, and scalability improvements for working with large data sets.One satisfied customer is Tim Rey, manager of the data-mining and modeling group at Dow Chemical. He said that the firm took &quot;a considerable amount of time to study both Enterprise Miner and Forecast Server before we purchased.... The products are well-designed, supporting many robust methods that are enabled by easy-to-use interfaces and supported by functional graphics.&quot;Rey&#39;s company has not yet deployed the newest versions, but it has &quot;reviewed what was coming and thinks they are welcome additions,&quot; he said.Dow is using Forecast Server to build forecasting models for a variety of scenarios, such as demand and raw materials costs. The firm is using Enterprise Miner in a number of areas, including finance, fraud, engineering, research and development, supply chain, and human resources, he said.Rey noted that &quot;in both products, you have to have your data in SAS format prior to using them.&quot;To that end, Enterprise Miner 5.3 includes a new wizard designed to make it easier for users to push their data into SAS&#39; software, Crissey said. Longtime SAS customers tend to keep preformatted data sets at the ready, she said.Enterprise Miner licensing starts at $120,000, with the Text Miner add-on costing an additional $80,000. There is a desktop version of the product that costs $40,000, plus $20,000 for the text-mining option. Enterprise Forecaster pricing begins at roughly $150,000. SAS charges annual renewal fees that are a percentage of the initial cost, according to a company spokesman.
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Ask any corporate executive the secret to success and there's a good chance you'll hear that the management team must work on the same goals using the same assumptions and facts -- with transparency to the CEO and board. Yet most companies don't work that way, setting the stage for missed opportunities, hidden problems, and political gaming that uses siloed data and its analysis as a departmental weapon rather than as an enterprise asset.
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SAP has launched SAP Security Optimization, a service that evaluates a customer&#39;s SAP system to identify and eliminate potential vulnerabilities and minimize the risk of intrusions.
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Microsoft has extended the reach of its business data platform, demonstrating new business intelligence capabilities for SQL Server 2000 and SQL Server 2005.
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JasperSoft&#39;s next upgrade of its open-source business intelligence suite, due out Nov. 1, will improve the ability for users to create their own customized reports.
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This article provides an overview of ITIL, a management-level set of best practices and guidelines for an integrated and process-based approach to IT and security.