A great opportunity to share your experiences with the community and to receive a free copy of some great research on the "Organization of Business Intelligence - Managing, Budgeting and Benefits of Business Intelligence Initiatives".

This research is provided by the BeyeNETWORK partners in Germany and will provide a global perspective on the topics. 

Business Intelligence is usually strongly focused on the technical implementation and challenges involved. However, organizational challenges need to be addressed as well.

This research examines how business intelligence initiatives are managed and budgeted and what the benefits of such initiatives are.

Get your free copy of the results and win $50 Amazon vouchers by taking part in the survey here:https://digiumenterprise.com/answer/?sid=416955&chk=ZCJHHU97

 

Thank you for your support!

Sometimes I feel like I live in an echo chamber this can be good or bad depending. The business intelligence and data warehouse community has been my home for over 15 years. So I guess that I shouldn't be surprised that from time to time I make assumptions based on my experiences. The other day a client asked me how popular the search term Business Intelligence was compared to Data Warehouse. My assumption.....BI would beat DW but they were both popular. According to the Google index over 54 million web pages contain at least one of these terms. I was half right. Business Intelligence did beat data warehouse but both are far from popular.

As you can see the two terms collided in late 2005 and business intelligence has held the top position ever since. The interesting thing is the decline. Its clear these terms are on their way out so it makes you wonder what term is leading the way.

I tried Performance management, MDM, Balanced Scorecard, Decision Support, Operational Data, even Enterprise 2.0 but none of them surpassed Business Intelligence. And then......

Yep, Analytics is hot, very hot and it got hot two full years before Tom Davenport published "Competing on Analytics".

So here's my last data tidbit of the day you can file this under things that make you go hmmmmmm. US based technology professionals have made up a very small percentage of users who search for these terms.

I don't have to tell you that Performance Management delivers some of the best ROI from your business intelligence systems. The ability to act upon your information or to be proactive is really what business intelligence is all about. Every year the smart folks over at BPM Partners do a comprehensive survey on the state of the market. It only takes about 15 minutes to participate and when the research is completed you will receive a copy of the results.

Take the Survey

Many of you have utilized the highly respected OLAP Report over the past 15 years when making vendor selections or researching the market. Keeping with the times The OLAP Report has a new name -- The BI Verdict -- and has now moved to a new Web site at www.bi-verdict.com

In the interest of being transparent I have to saw that I partner with the company who produces this product but for years prior we have had access to the research and found it to be some of the best in the business. The BI Verdict is produced by BARC's team of experienced business intelligence software analysts and industry guru Nigel Pendse.

The new version of the site offers a low-priced starter-level subscription -- entitled The BI Market Guide -- giving you access to an exclusive area of The BI Verdict Web site.

The BI Market Guide is designed to steer you through the early stages of your tool selection project. With an overview of the BI market, advice on selecting BI software and product strategy guides to some of the major vendors, it will help you:

• Get your BI software selection project up and running in the right direction
• Gain an understanding of the flavors of BI software available
• Find out which products are suited to your requirements
• Benefit from proven advice on how to run a successful project
• Save time and money by taking the advice of vendor-independent experts

If you decide to upgrade to a full subscription of The BI Verdict, you will benefit from a special upgrade price.

HP is rolling out a new version of HP Neoview today. The HP Neoview Advantage has been upgraded on both the software and hardware fronts. The hardware change is to the HP Integrity BladeSystem giving the solution a more modular design and allowing for a smaller footprint especially on larger configurations. HP has added more power to address real-time demands coming from their customer base by using the Neoview Transporter product to supply the appliance with a streaming real-time information feed. Improvements in I/O have provided for faster scans and higher performance on complex queries.

The best part of the offering is that the system is designed to allow for mixed work loads and can handle both transactional and analytical demands at the same time. Its a true appliance solution as its a pre-configured hardware and software bundled solution.

I'm glad to see an announcement from HP on Neoview the industry is hearing a lot from the competition in this space Oracle, Teradata, Netezza and IBM have all had large user conferences in the past 6 weeks unveiling new strategies around appliance style solutions. The competition is getting fast and furious in the 4th quarter of 2009.

The SaaS space continues to roll forward at lightening speed and Birst is moving faster than most. With only a year on the market they are launching Version 4.0 and adding features to their system that will make the enterprise IT guys stand up and take notice.

SaaS BI is a great way for many companies to address analytic needs but since the beginning security, data integration, governance and control have made many tentative to embrace the technology. Birst's latest upgrade addresses all of these hurdles. The parts I liked most are Birst Live Access it allows you to access your own data from behind the firewall and include it in your SaaS based analysis. They have also built out connectors that will allow you to integrate data from other applications like SalesForce and Google Analytics and even connectivity to desktop Access DB's and Excel to bring together a federated view of your business data.Your data stays where you have it but at the same time you benefit from a SaaS hosted BI application. The other exciting feature here is if the data you own is configured in a real-time model you can leverage that performance on Birst so real-time in the cloud becomes much simpler too.

Version 4 also has added Birst Advanced ETL this upgraded feature gives you the ability to customize the ETL to meet special corporate and analytical requirements.

There are many other feature upgrades in this version including newly enhanced dashboards and administration that now includes Flash Flex providing a more rich and interactive experience with the solution. On the Dashboard front the Flex Flash provides the business user with a more discovery rich interface allowing for easier drill downs, views and even drag and drop features to make getting answers from the data easier.

SaaS continues to be a leading area of interest with our audience at the NETWORK and these types of product announcements are proof that the segment is evolving fast to meet the needs of the growing user base.

BIREADY&trade has just announced that they are making their Data Warehouse automation software free. The 'no license fee, just maintenance' offer is valid until the end of the year. BIREADY&trade helps you design a DW and develop ETL by eliminating manual work that you generally need to do to start a project. The company helps fortune 100 and SMB's so regardless of your size you may want to take a look at the offering.

For more information visit www.biready.com.

We get to attend some very interesting events through the BeyeNETWORK as a matter of fact I am typing this blog post from the 37th floor of Caesars Palace in Las Vegas where I am attending the IBM Information On Demand Event and the SAS Premier Leadership Conference both are great events.

In a couple weeks the Network is helping to sponsor a very unique event in Boulder Colorado called the Defrag. The event focuses on topics such as:

Business Intelligence Business Process Management Social Computing and Analytics Next-level Discovery

Enterprise 2.0 Next-Gen Email The Semantic Web Social Media Monitoring and Engagement

The list of topics and speakers is fantastic and I have 1 Free Conference Pass to give away. So.....if you are interested and can guarantee that you are available to attend send me an email and I will do a random drawing on Friday of this week. (This pass doesn't include airfare or hotel) The event is November 11th and 12th and the free pass is valued at $1,495

Email me and I'll see you at Defrag 2009!!!

I am happy to be at another Oracle OpenWorld event in San Francisco. Hanging out with 37,000+ customers and partners. The morning session was kicked off by the Co-Presidents Charles Phillips and Safra Catz. The theme today was two fold and focused on reminding people that over the years Oracle has acquired over 50 companies and has a positive track record of keeping the technology and improving it. They spend 3 Billion a year on R&D updating and improving the stack of technology they have brought together. The message was clearly aimed at the SUN deal that has become bogged down over concerns around the MySQL database product and community and weather it competes with the Oracle database.

The team then demonstrated how well integrated and "open" the solution stack is. Safra Catz said "We are slavishly devoted to open standards..." and the team showed off how well the various stack components work together starting out with project planning jumping to integrated budgeting with the PeopleSoft and Hyperion technology then to the Retail solutions and CRM.

Overall a nice beginning to the day. I am off to sessions....

The Twitter tag for the event is #OOW09 its a lot to consume but many good items are coming through. @Merv Merv Adrian is also here and he's doing a great job covering things.