Siebel releases flood of BI applications
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InfoWorld - Capitalizing on the current trend within the enterprise to reduce the number of applications to support, Siebel Systems on Monday unveiled a package of business analytics solutions that can be deployed by IT as both extensions to current CRM applications or as stand-alone programs.
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IBM has announced a slew of new or upgraded products and services aimed at helping companies better integrate business processes and make their operations more efficient through the use of service-oriented architectures.
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Masala, an add-on to IBM's DB2 database, queries far-flung info sources on company networks.
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When Siebel (Nasdaq: SEBL) rolled out version 6 of its OnDemand application earlier this week, it proudly announced that this latest iteration of its hosted offering -- which first became generally available in Q4 2003 -- largely closed the functionality gap with competing vendors, such as Salesforce.com, NetSuite, Salesnet and RightNow.
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IBMÂ hopes to bring BI to a wider audience of midmarket customers with a new software stack developed in partnership with Business Objects SA, industry sources said.
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InfoWorld - Business Objects has released the second of three planned versions of its Crystal Decisions business intelligence software suite&#160;aimed at midmarket users.
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After a year of pilots and trials, Siebel Systems jumped with both feet into the SMB market Tuesday, announcing a new approach to offer Siebel Professional CRM applications to SMBs (small and midsize businesses) -- companies with revenues up to about $500 million.
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TechWeb - Anacubis Desktop 3.0 shows the BI potential of information visualization software.
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Business Objects, an SAP company, unveiled today the next iteration of its business intelligence platform, XI 3.0.Bigger and in some ways better than previous versions, it includes so many features that it may be a bit daunting to some users.Leveraging Business Objects' acquisition of InXight Software in May 2007, XI 3.0 ties together structured information with unstructured information."Now you can read through e-mails, Web pages, and documents to understand text and extract sentiment from text," said Franz Aman, vice president for business intelligence platform, product marketing at Business Objects.Josh Greenbaum, principal at Enterprise Applications Consulting, called the ability to include unstructured data a significant improvement in the platform. "It is an acknowledgement that data comes from all kinds of applications and all kinds of formats," he said.The technology parses and organizes unstructured data so that users can apply more traditional, i.e. more statistically-oriented, methods to the data.Greenbaum said that although it is a "somewhat artificial" structure, it does lend itself to data analysis, and he called that an enormous improvement for businesses that have grown so much more complex over the years. "ERP used to be about one activity, closing the books every quarter," he saidTraceability is another key feature in XI 3.0. The technology can trace back the so-called lineage of data in order to give users better insight into how the data was created, what transformation it might have gone through, and whether or not is was merged with another data set.While knowing the lineage of data is a must-have for regulatory and compliance, it is also essential to good business, said Greenbaum, noting that it is a vast improvement over the old days when executives sat around arguing over the data in a single cell in a spreadsheet.The lineage capability is only available to those who buy the optional Business Objects Data Services that combine Data Integrator and Data Quality components.Another significant improvement in the platform is a technology dubbed Polestar that gives non-technical users the ability to do complex searches and to make natural language queries. "You don't have to be a special user with SQL knowledge to find information," said Aman.??However, Greenbaum said that while XI does a good job in elevating the accessibility and comprehensiveness of BI it is also a "bit of a Swiss Army knife." "What haven't they put into this product?" he wondered.Nevertheless, it should also replace all the departmental one-off solutions that are typically floating around a company, according to Greenbaum.While XI 3.0 was in development long before Business Objects was acquired by SAP in January 2007, there are some unique linkages between XI 3.0 and SAP applications, said Aman. For example, XI is more tightly intertwined with the SAP Business Warehouse and offers faster performance when users tap into data that comes from R3 or the Warehouse than if the data was from a non-SAP source.Also, XI can tap into SAP's use of metadata so that if a user in North America searches for Total Revenue, and a user in France is looking for the same information, despite the fact that the French use a phrase other than Total Revenue, both will get back the same information because of the metadata layer.Business Objects 3.0 will be available later in the first quarter. Later in the year, it will also be available as a SaaS offering.
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Microsoft invites business users to preview its integrated performance management applications.
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With its eye firmly fixed on rival Salesforce.com, Siebel unveiled OnDemand Release 6 of its hosted CRM suite of applications last week, the first industry-specific version of its hosted software.
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Siebel is aiming to take a larger role in enterprises, by branching out from customer relationship management (CRM) and by making its tools easier to use.
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Siebel Systems announced this morning that it has signed a definitive agreement to purchase e-billing provider edocs. When the deal closes, Siebel will acquire 180 edocs employees, intellectual property and customer relationships of some 116 companies.
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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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Business Objects has integrated a suite of performance management tools gained through its acquisition of SRC Software with its own Business Objects XI business intelligence software.
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TechWeb - The vendor is offering free data migration to SalesForce.com and Siebel customers and a 1-gigabyte storage upgrade for paying customers.
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(InfoWorld) - MicrosoftÂ has taken another step to make it easier for customers and partners to customize its BI software suite. On Monday, the company announced the general availability of Dynamics CRM Analytics Foundation, a free bundle of customizable source code and documentation, for users of its CRM software. Customers and partners can use the tools "as-is" or build on them to create customized BI applications, including dashboards to run on top of Dynamics CRM 3.0, according to Christian Pederson, senior director for Microsoft Dynamics CRM. Microsoft is one of several applications vendors, including rivals OracleÂ and SAP, that are all touting the benefits of "BI for the masses," or the opening out of real-time information and metrics previously reserved for managers to a company's entire work force. The software firms hope such capabilities will encourage more sales and usage of their back-end applications across enterprises. Analytics Foundation draws on Microsoft's data management and analytics capabilities contained in BI products like its SQL Server 2005 relational database, SharePoint portal technologies, Office Business Scorecard Manager, and the vendor's Visual Studio 2005 development tools suite. The bundle includes sample code, prebuilt templates, and guidelines for building BI software on top of Dynamics CRM. "We're bringing the entire BI strategy from Microsoft to life," Pederson said. Analytics Foundation will serve as an important "proof point" in that strategy, bringing together the data mining and analytics capabilities of SQL Server with Dynamics CRM, he added. A future contributor to the Analytics Foundation bundle will be a new Microsoft offering, PerformancePoint Server 2007, due to ship later this year, Pederson said. In beta testing since November, PerformancePoint is a combination of technologies Microsoft acquired whenÂ it purchased BI player ProClarity in 2006Â and its own business intelligence technologies. PerformancePoint enables users to place their data and business rules on a central server and then integrate that information with a variety of BI functionalities, including planning, forecasting, analytics, and scorecarding. Microsoft is looking to integrate PerformancePoint's features into both its Dynamics CRM and ERP applications. Pederson gave two specific user scenarios for Analytics Foundation. In one, a company could use the technologies to engage in predictive analytics around customer behavior to cross-sell or up-sell additional products. When contacted by a customer, a salesperson at the company would be able to access from Dynamics CRM not just the information related to that individual's purchase history, but also compare it with other customers' buying patterns, better positioning the salesperson to recommend other products for the consumer to buy. In a second scenario, a salesperson could use predictive analytics to better prioritize their qualified sales leads by carrying out a historical analysis of the types of leads by industry and source that have resulted in sales in the past. Dynamics CRM Analytics Foundation is now available free for Microsoft CRM customers and partners from the vendor's CodePlex project hosting Web site. It's a shared-source download, meaning that users have the right to take the tools and reverse engineer the code. Â