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.