The GPL is the most widely used open source software license. Currently, more than 60% of open source projects tracked on freshmeat.org are GPL-licensed. The GPL is well understood by the market and the legal community and has notable precedents such as MySQL, Java and the Linux kernel as GPL licensed projects. Because the GPL is what’s known as a “reciprocal license” it ensures that the software is open and remains open.

“Many companies hoping to compete on the strength of their data are running into hurdles because they can’t provide enough people access to all the data they need to execute more effectively,” said David Stodder, vice president and research director at industry analyst firm Ventana Research. “Companies should evaluate integrated solutions like the one stemming from the Pentaho-Vertica partnership, which could enable companies to affordably equip more workers with state-of-the-art BI software and give them faster ad-hoc access to larger amounts of historical and real-time data so they can innovate sooner and better than competitors.”

This partnership gives companies a blueprint for extending comprehensive data analysis throughout the enterprise. Connecting easy-to-use BI tools on employees’ desktops with high-performance database management systems sets the stage for self-service analytics. As more employees become empowered to make critical business decisions, a company can gain a market advantage by capitalizing more quickly on business opportunities. Moreover, the simplicity of this solution enables IT staff to spend less time on setup and tuning, and more time delivering invaluable information in the form of dashboards and reports to a wider audience.

“BI tools and database management systems deliver the best business results if they’re accessible to a broad group of employees,” said Richard Daley, founder and CEO of Pentaho. “Making more data available to more people faster and more conveniently helps companies be more agile and competitive, which is paramount to success today and is the promise of this partnership.”

The Vertica® Analytic Database delivers query results 50 to 200 times faster than other databases. Vertica’s RDBMS enables business people to make complex, ad hoc queries on the fly and affordably. Vertica also allows mixed workloads because users can continue making queries while data is loaded into the system, eliminating the wait and sluggish performance many databases experience during loading. Breakthrough data compression allows the Vertica Database to reduce storage requirements by as much as 90 percent, dramatically cutting hardware overhead and energy consumption so that customers can analyze larger amounts of historical data at a fraction of the cost.

The Pentaho Open BI suite provides a comprehensive BI platform for reporting, analysis, dashboards, data mining, and data integration. Pentaho’s platform consists of four key elements: Pentaho Analysis, based on Pentaho’s popular Mondrian open source online analytical processing (OLAP) server, lets users pose questions in business terms; Pentaho Reporting lets users create, generate and distribute rich and sophisticated report content from all sources of information; Pentaho Data Integration, based on Pentaho’s Kettle data integration project, uses extract, transform and load (ETL) technology to gather data from multiple sources and integrate it for faster, easier access and analysis; and Weka machine-learning software simplifies data mining.

The Vertica Analytic Database integrates with the entire Pentaho suite to enable companies to optimize storage space and complex/ad hoc query speed within a comprehensive BI platform. “This partnership delivers on the largely unrealized potential of BI technology by making it usable, affordable and critical to business success,” said Ralph Breslauer, CEO of Vertica. “With this integration, companies can not only learn more about their customers and their markets, but they can also access that information quickly and immediately capitalize on it to gain a competitive advantage.”

The release is an important milestone for fulfilling the company’s aspirations for providing practical and affordable Corporate Performance Management and Operational BI solutions. By merely expanding on the usability of data and existing IT infrastructure and technologies coupled with less training requirements that will result in better user take up and participation; ElegantJ BI ensures in giving companies the opportunity to make the most of their IT investments.
ElegantJ BI can be deployed to Plan, Monitor, Analyze, Direct and Improve corporate performance through scorecards and KPI implementations, for proactive, forward looking and competitive enterprises. It’s easier to monitor critical business metrics, be alerted about issues, manage goals, and track performance across the organisation. When used for Operational BI, it empowers executives, line-of-business managers and other business professionals across the enterprise with effective and efficient on-time, on-demand information critical to maintaining efficient operations and business goals.

Designed for diverse environments, and not limited to any specific type of user; ElegantJ BI will be able to provide a single enterprise data management platform facilitating reliable, consistent, data and information integrated from a range of data sources, applications and third party systems to executive management, managers and distributed teams matching every need of end-to-end business analysis and reporting.

The product is the result of innovation and understanding of customers’ current and future needs in mind. More often since the problem with existing business intelligence tools is that they are not intuitive enough for the “average” business user; managers have to routinely rely on external IT consultants to produce effective BI reports. One of the key aspects of ElegantJ BI is design with ‘simplicity, without compromising the power to deliver’. ElegantJ BI achieves this through an elegant design, deploying state of the art technology to deliver rich business intelligence and reporting functionality directly to the browser – accessible in the office and across the internet.

Built on a single, user-friendly zero footprint browser interface; business users at every level of the organisation can create their own analysis and reports without depending on IT support using key features including intuitive, personalized dashboards; dynamic analysis on the fly with one click drillable reports, high-impact OLAP, graphical visualization of underlying data for deeper insight into information, automated alerts and scheduled reports, and exception management and reporting. Requiring no software to be installed for end users, it’s fast to roll out and requires minimal maintenance. Also, being delivered on a scalable, consistent high-performance platform, ElegantJ BI will meet the increasing data volumes, user base and information needs, anytime in the future.

The Mobile Dashboard allows administrators, working from a Web browser, to configure mobile users of devices such as RIM BlackBerry, Microsoft Windows Mobile, Palm Treo, and Java-enabled smartphones to receive pre-existing, internal reports from spreadsheets or business applications right on those devices. The reports are dynamically generated and preserve the look and feel of each handheld device, tailoring themselves to the native screen sizes.

The Mobile Dashboard Appliance is a completely preconfigured, self-contained server providing the Mobile Dashboard service that fits in a standard rack and delivers the Mobile Dashboard to upwards of 500 mobile users, with clusters supporting up to 10,000. Its installation is essentially “turnkey,” and it can be securely configured and managed with a simple, Web-based interface.

The appliance will prove particularly valuable to companies that prefer to maintain their critical information behind the firewall, rather than using a hosted outside service.

Top markets for the Webalo Mobile Dashboard Appliance are financial services, healthcare, and government sectors, as well as any company that would benefit from the simple delivery of critical business intelligence and reports to its mobile workforce. Webalo’s Mobile Dashboard Service is a highly secure hosted service, which while ideal for most applications, may be impermissible in the most sensitive markets such as those mentioned. The Mobile Dashboard Appliance neatly solves this problem.

“Competition for the right to manage an organization’s money is fierce. The timely provisioning of strategic data to sales and service personnel helps both to attract and to retain clients,” said Charles Morse, Vice President of Loomis Sayles. “However, data security is a big concern for any financial services company and its clients. Why ship data to a delivery vehicle when the delivery vehicle can be brought to the data? The Mobile Dashboard Appliance removes an important risk factor from the security equation.”

The Mobile Dashboard Appliance is a pre-configured, 2U rack mount server with Gigabit Ethernet. The Appliance supports scheduled backups of encrypted data via SMB or NFS, and can be configured for automatic updates from Webalo. Once it has been installed on the enterprise network, it can be administered by business intelligence professionals or other employees with basic Web and Microsoft Excel skills.

“Many of our customers and systems integrator partners have been asking for a version of the Mobile Dashboard service that they can host internally,” said Peter Price, Webalo’s president and CEO. “With the appliance, we are now able to serve this large segment of a market that wants easy mobile information access but must meet heightened compliance requirements.

“We have chosen to name the company after our core technology and product, PivotLink,” said David L. Weld, president and chief executive officer of SeaTab Software. “The PivotLink name is known to the tens of thousands of people who use PivotLink every day to run their businesses. The brand will scale well as we continue to grow the company and to extend our platform and solution set.”

“For almost 10 years, PivotLink has delivered solutions to direct customers and for partners on top of the PivotLink Framework,” said Q. “Ching” Wan, founder and chief technology officer of PivotLink. “By continuing to enhance our data platform and by offering new solutions, both directly and through partners, we will be able to deliver more and more value to our customers. In particular, we will be able to continue to deliver business intelligence with extremely compelling price/performance to a much broader section of the mid-market, an important and dramatically underserved segment.”

PivotLink is the provider of business intelligence solutions that meet the needs of organizations in a variety of industries. Our PivotLink Solutionsâ„¢ and the PivotLink Frameworkâ„¢ data platform put the full power of business intelligence in the hands of people who need it, with tailored environments for each user from the CEOs to line employee. PivotLink’s unique, self-directed reporting and analytics are based on the SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) delivery model and provide users with complete analytical freedom without requiring IT involvement.

The HR analytics module in ARC 5.6 facilitates a host of analysis areas like recruitment analysis, head count trend analysis by demography, succession planning based on attrition, compensation analysis based on appraisal and payroll, absenteeism and training analysis to name a few. Retailers can now easily drive employee best practices and process benchmarks from top stores to the rest of the organization.

Manthan managing director and CEO, Atul Jalan said, “ARC 5.6 will provide a comprehensive & powerful analytics platform for the retail enterprise and will set the benchmark higher for retail BI solutions. This is a result of our continuing and tireless efforts to bring the best of BI to retailers by focusing exclusively on this industry’s needs. We have gone one step higher in our aim to transform retail organizations by empowering their ‘Analytical Quotient’.”

CTO and product head at Manthan, Vikas Gupta comments, “With ARC 5.6 we will provide greater width and depth in ARC’s retail data model to power new functional areas like Human Resources, and also provide more measures and complex KPIs in the existing functional areas like Merchandising, Customer, and Sales. The model also offers greater metrics coverage for retailers of fashion and apparel merchandise. These are significant wins in our mission to provide the most extensive enterprise retail data model in the BI industry today.”

Commenting on the improved analytic capabilities of ARC 5.6, Vikas says, “Our users have valued the rich and intuitive user experience of ARC, and with this new release we have packaged a host of new and powerful features like personalized interactive dashboards, new actionable utilities for analysis & monitoring like dynamic trending, on-the-fly traffic-light visual/conditional exceptions, and smart measure benchmarking. The new full-function metadata management capability will significantly improve BI customization & maintenance capability.”

The new product version is expected to further differentiate this retail specialist in the BI space. Anand Sri Ganesh, director of marketing at Manthan cites, “Today retailers are clearly favouring an industry-specific BI solution because of the greater business value it drives for BI users. Furthering our rapid growth over the last couple of years, ARC 5.6 will accelerate our traction in the retail BI market. We’re pleased to see our peerless industry focus driving cutting-edge innovations in retail analytics. In the coming years, we are uniquely positioned to capture a larger share of market from our generic BI competitors.”

Palo Server facilitates high speed by keeping processed data in memory (In-Memory OLAP). Queries for base and also aggregated data cells take place in real-time and provide results quickly. With that, Palo Server provides a great contrast to popular multidimensional databases, which are based on relational technologies (ROLAP). Further, in-memory planning – both top/down as well as bottom/up – is supported by the functionality to write-back data into the cubes.

“Speed is one of the most frequently mentioned BI application requirements and, interestingly enough, is among its top points of criticism. Data queries that take longer than two to three seconds are no longer acceptable to most users. This threshold is not exceeded by Palo Server 2.0; data query results are generally displayed within milliseconds”, Kristian Raue, CEO of Jedox GmbH, explains.

Palo Server 2.0 is particularly suitable as the data engine for Microsoft Excel. Palo extends Excel by the missing back-end technology and thereby standardizes the data basis of Excel applications distributed throughout the corporation. The multi-dimensional data server centrally maintains any number of spreadsheet cells, which may be spread across several data cubes. The resulting Enterprise Spreadsheets ensure consolidation, control and distribution of the Excel data, while users continue to benefit from Excel’s advantages. The Worksheet Server technology offered by Jedox allows for Palo data to be queried and entered via the Web.

Version 2.0 enables data- and structure-driven analyses of corporate figures, e.g. ABC and Top/Down Analyses. Such instruments, adjustable to meet individual requirements, are a great tool for users to conduct specific situational and planning analyses. The resulting figures facilitate executives in their business decision-making.

The open API provided by Jedox facilitates the development of interfaces that connect Palo Server with other applications.

The Jedox team provides consulting and support services to their clients to assist them in implementing Palo Server 2.0 quickly and enable them to fully utilize the server’s flexible application capabilities.

MicroStrategy Mobile offers powerful features that enable business users to receive the same reports on their BlackBerry smartphone that they receive on their desktop, without the need for reformatting or retrofitting existing reports. Each user can design and save his own personal report preferences to ensure optimal viewing of even the largest reports on his BlackBerry smartphone. Reports can also be accessed while offline or when the BlackBerry smartphone is not within connectivity range.

“After evaluating building our own mobile solutions as well as other commercially available products, we found MicroStrategy Mobile to be intuitive and feature rich, and we plan to use it for a large deployment all the way up to our CEO,” said Len Nicolas, COO and CTO at Nygard International. “The fact that Nygard’s existing reports can be viewed on a mobile device without modification is a major advantage for both our Business Intelligence team and, more importantly, for the users. We are working on several different mobile applications for BlackBerry smartphones, and we anticipate that this will save us time and money. MicroStrategy has really set the standard on this one.”

“Today’s workers are on the go but they don’t want to leave their data behind,” said Wayne Eckerson, Director of Research at The Data Warehousing Institute. “Mobile BI technology is the next wave in advancing the delivery of analytical information to business users via wireless devices. Delivering interactive reports to BlackBerry smartphones and other mobile devices is the next step in making BI truly pervasive. MicroStrategy is on the forefront of this new wave with its latest release.”

MicroStrategy Mobile leverages the same security features of the MicroStrategy platform, as well as the security and connectivity infrastructure provided by the BlackBerry® Enterprise Server. MicroStrategy Mobile dynamically optimizes the use of network bandwidth, based on the quality of the signal and usage by other mobile applications.

“In the development of MicroStrategy Mobile, we focused on making the user interface highly intuitive so that no training would be required,” said Sanju Bansal, MicroStrategy COO. “We also paid close attention to underlying issues of efficient memory management, data compression, security, and network bandwidth optimization to ensure that MicroStrategy Mobile would work well for mission-critical applications at high scale.”

Microsoft’s continued investment in delivering high-performing, low-cost BI solutions for all business users via the Microsoft Office experience and SQL Server 2005 has customers taking notice.

“Like most companies, we experience a constant flow of change. Having the ability to monitor my business, analyze key business data, act on it and see real-time results gives me the competitive edge my business needs to survive,” said Michael Saunders, corporate vice president and chief information officer for Kellwood Co. “Microsoft has given us the ability and confidence to allow our employees at all levels to make informed decisions.”

SQL Server has established itself as an enterprise-class data platform. A recent BZ Research study found that 74.7 percent of enterprises use SQL Server, compared with 54.5 percent for the nearest competitor.

The Rise in Demand for Pervasive Business Intelligence

In its analysis, IDC states that the BI market grew by more than 11 percent in 2006. The BI tools market continues to be driven by the need for improved performance management and, to a lesser extent, compliance. “Performance management can take on the form of various decision-support and reporting functions to improve revenue, profit and operational efficiency; decrease costs; uncover new opportunities; or mitigate risk,” said Dan Vesset, an analyst with IDC. “Microsoft had another strong year in this market.”

To give businesses a step in the right direction, Microsoft will launch Microsoft Office PerformancePointâ„¢ Server 2007 on Sept. 19, and SQL Server 2008 is scheduled to ship in the second quarter of 2008. Customers are invited to attend an event on Sept. 20 to learn more about Office PerformancePoint Server 2007.

“We are focused on helping our customers achieve higher levels of business performance by allowing them to take advantage of the rich BI capabilities offered through Microsoft business intelligence,” said Chris Caren, general manager of Office Business Applications at Microsoft. “We are excited to help companies integrate efficiently with one another to ensure all employees are held accountable for their actions across the entire business.”

In preparation for the upcoming releases, Microsoft issued its fourth and final community technology preview (CTP) for Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 as well as the July CTP for SQL Server 2008.

Bridging the BI Divide

Both releases promise significant enhancements to the BI landscape. PerformancePoint Server 2007 helps organizations align their processes by streamlining into a single application the monitoring, analysis and planning activities needed to improve business performance. By deploying PerformancePoint Server 2007, businesses can achieve better results by allowing individuals across the organization to improve performance. SQL Server 2008 will help organizations deliver a more secure, reliable data platform for storing business-critical information and delivering the right information to all users, while reducing the time and cost of managing data.

PerformancePoint Server is tightly integrated with the familiar and easy-to-use Microsoft Office system, allowing organizations to better align employees across divisions and make them accountable for their actions. In addition, PerformancePoint Server 2007 takes advantage of the enterprise-grade reliability, high performance, security technology and scalability of SQL Server 2005, enabling more people at all levels of the organization to transform disparate enterprise data into shared information they can use to make decisions and take actions that improve business outcomes.

“TCS and Microsoft are working together to invest in developing industry-leading, world-class BI solutions that enable our customers to experience certainty,” said Santosh Mohanty, global director and head of the Business Intelligence and Performance Management practice at Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. “We are seeing significant market momentum and double-digit growth for BI solutions built on the industry-leading Microsoft technology stack. This growth, being fueled by demand from some of the largest corporations in the world, has enabled us to aggressively push our strategic objective of building a $100 million BI practice on the Microsoft technology stack.”

Nestlé has already deployed SAP Business Warehouse as its global standard for data warehousing and analytical reporting. The company will use Cognos 8 BI to complement the SAP Business Warehouse front end to give power users the ability to handle ad hoc reporting and grouping of data. It also provides the ability to merge external data from any source with data from SAP Business Warehouse, push pre-formatted and easily printable reports to end users, and adapt reports in line with different user needs.

The decision to use Cognos was made after a thorough competitive evaluation. Nestlé selected Cognos 8 BI because of its tight integration with SAP Business Warehouse, ability to empower end users through self-service reporting, simplified administration, and robust report distribution capabilities.

“Nestlé operates in a fast-moving sector where time to market and the ability to analyse products and performance by country, team or brand is critical,” said Dave Laverty, CMO and senior vice-president of marketing at Cognos. “Giving staff access to the Cognos 8 BI reporting solution will help them better monitor, analyse and track performance so they can make decisions that directly influence the overall success of the business. Cognos 8 BI is flexible enough to meet the diverse information needs of the many communities within the Nestlé group.”

Cognos 8 Business Intelligence provides decision makers at all levels in the enterprise with a range of capabilities to better manage performance by delivering a consistent, accurate view of all business information. Powered by SAP NetWeaver, Cognos 8 BI easily integrates into existing infrastructures with multiple systems and data sources. It simplifies the Business Intelligence environment, improves user adoption, enables better decision-making and provides a robust foundation for enterprise Business Intelligence and performance management.