Conducted by independent analyst Nigel Pendse and BARC, The Business Application Research Center, The BI Survey 7 compiled the BI experiences of nearly 2,000 respondents. The Survey found that MicroStrategy had the highest Web Deployment Rate of 79.2%, meaning 79.2% of MicroStrategy’s customers reported that they have deployed BI via the Web to at least 50% of their
users.

                       BI Product        Web Deployment Rates (%)

                       MicroStrategy               79.2

                       Cognos Reporting            66.3

                       Cognos Analysis             56.0

                       BusinessObjects             52.9

                       SAP BW                      35.4

                       Hyperion Essbase            32.8

                       Crystal Reports             30.9

According to The BI Survey 7, BI applications deployed via the Web deliver greater business value and benefits than those deployed via client/server technology. Information reach is improved, and setup and maintenance costs are significantly reduced.

“Since the inception of this Survey, MicroStrategy sites have had the highest rates for Web deployment,” said Nigel Pendse, author of The BI Survey 7. “The MicroStrategy product line was designed from the ground up for large scale Web deployments, rather than being converted from older desktop or client/server architectures as other vendors have chosen to do. This provides an advantage for MicroStrategy’s customers, who report on far more data, to more users, and who are much more likely to be Web connected than those using other products.”

“We are pleased that The BI Survey, once again, found that MicroStrategy customers have greater success in deploying BI via the Web than customers of other BI providers,” said Sanju Bansal, MicroStrategy’s COO. “The Web continues to be a highly effective delivery mechanism for deploying BI to large user populations. MicroStrategy’s full-featured Web interface provides an intuitive array of one-click actions to make business users highly productive in their viewing and exploration of data.”

The BI Survey is an annual report based on the world’s largest independent survey of Business Intelligence (BI) and Performance Management (PM) users in the world. The BI Survey 7 is published by BARC (The Business Application Research Center), and the author, Nigel Pendse, is a highly respected industry expert and lead analyst for The OLAP Report. With over 1,900 users and consultants plus 365 vendor staff participating in The BI Survey 7, the analysis covers a broad range of business intelligence tools.

“The addition of Teragram’s domain expertise and NLP technology will change the landscape of the BI and analytics markets,” said SAS CEO Jim Goodnight. “Teragram’s technologies augment, strengthen and extend SAS’ ability to combine structured and unstructured data - not only in our text mining solution but embedded across the entire SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform - to drive better answers faster.”

Teragram, a 40-person firm headquartered in Cambridge, Mass., will be run as a SAS company. Terms of the acquisition deal were not disclosed. Teragram’s NLP technology is well-established, with a customer base including CNN, Forbes.com, NYTimes Digital, Sony, WashingtonPost.com, Wolters Kluwer, the World Bank and Yahoo!

“As the data explosion continues, companies need an intelligent way to make sense of it all, whether data is in structured databases or in the huge variety of unstructured sources,” said Yves Schabes, President of Teragram. “Teragram and its technology fit perfectly into SAS’ analytics and text mining efforts, as SAS continues to innovate in this rapidly growing market. We’re pleased to join a company that delivers the software businesses need to blend structured and unstructured data and reach better, timelier and more accurate decisions.”

Natural Language Processing

Teragram’s natural language processing (NLP) technologies help turn text - in many languages and from many sources - into useable information. NLP enables richer data processing at the level of words, linguistic relations and word meanings. Teragram has developed and maintains large annotated dictionaries containing several hundred million words in more than 30 languages.

Automatic Categorization

Teragram’s advanced categorization technologies provide instant, advanced classification of documents according to custom criteria, applied throughout the organization. This enables faster and more accurate access to documents organized by specific topics that match the interest of a given user, regardless of the original document’s location.

Natural Language Enterprise Search

For enterprise search, Teragram’s NLP technologies scan structured corporate databases and unstructured sources including text-based reports and Web pages to provide comprehensive answers from these multiple information sources.

“With today’s multinational companies and distributed workforces, as well as tremendous amounts of data in disparate systems and formats, it’s more important than ever to get quick and accurate answers to key business questions,” said Schabes. “Enterprise search is a competitive weapon for tapping an organization’s existing data resources. Combining SAS’ business intelligence, data integration and advanced analytics with Teragram’s NLP technologies will deliver answers to search queries in seconds.”

Teragram’s sophisticated search capabilities deliver an easy-to-use environment for BI, extending the availability and use of BI throughout organizations. The combination of SAS and Teragram technologies provides indexing driven not just by a report’s header, but by its actual content and the metadata associated with it.

Mobile Search

Teragram also brings SAS the next generation of mobile search, helping individuals scan information remotely and get answers faster. Using Teragram’s mobile search technology, individuals can store and retrieve information, connect to outside applications such as BI systems, and search databases from their BlackBerry, smart phone or other mobile device.

An Explosion in Unstructured Data

Business management expert Bill Jensen first decried the downsides of today’s information explosion back in 2001, in his book “Simplicity.” According to his research, echoed by others, the most conservative estimates currently show that business information is doubling every eighteen months. This data flood has only grown more pronounced in recent years, and much of this data lies outside traditional, “structured” databases. According to estimates, unstructured data comprises up to 70% of all business data. This unstructured data resides in customer comments and service notes, e-mail and chat threads, documents and surveys, blogs and RSS feeds, warranty claims, resumes, voicemail and phone logs, among other sources.

If businesses fail to include this unstructured data in their analyses – of customers, market opportunities, internal operations, supply chains, etc. – they are only seeing part of the complete picture, and can make bad decisions as a result. Powerful analytics like SAS’ can help organizations weave structured and unstructured data to uncover hidden patterns and trends, and then use this insight to make better decisions, solve problems and take advantage of opportunities.

SAS: A Pioneer in Text Mining

SAS has offered text mining capabilities within its software for more than a decade, and launched a specific text-mining product, SAS Text Miner, in 2002.

Today, SAS Text Miner is included in several industry-specific solutions, including SAS Warranty Analysis. Manufacturers such as Sub-Zero and Shanghai General Motors use this solution to bring together and analyze warranty claims and service data, much of it unstructured. They can discover potential problems early enough to take quick action, leading to improved product quality and enhanced customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Banks use text analytics on transcripts of customer calls and related metadata (such as length of call, hold time, number of transfers) to determine customers’ satisfaction sentiment and predict outcomes (is a customer a good credit risk or are they likely to close an account, for example). Insurance companies use text analytics on adjusters’ claim notes and demographic information to detect possible fraudulent claims.

“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 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.

As MassHousing’s EIS has matured, so have the requests and needs of its 300-plus users who require more reports, increased customization, enhanced security, and better visibility into the agency to better manage the business. In addition, new departments such as human resources and compliance and diversity have requested access to Cognos reports to meet regulatory requirements. To continue to meet these evolving demands, MassHousing has migrated to Cognos 8 BI. The agency created an internal portal referred to as “My MassHousing” that provides access to agency news, timesheets, and the Cognos 8 BI solutions, including budget information and trend reports. With the portal, users see the relevant information they need to drive their organization’s performance at the start of, and throughout, every day.

In addition, Cognos’ consulting and training services have helped MassHousing build its BI Competency Center (BICC), a dedicated team of six people in its Business Intelligence and Corporate Reporting department officially designated in 2006 and separate from the traditional IT department. The MassHousing BICC is tasked with making sure that both existing and new systems do not affect the overall reporting needs of the agency

“Cognos is the lifeblood of our agency, and we continue to evolve our business practices with Cognos business intelligence,” said Carl Richardson, BI project manager at MassHousing. “As executives’ needs continue to grow, they’re pushing us to implement smarter and more efficient Cognos solutions rather than the other way around. This has helped us become a leader among our peers, as managers from other agencies ask to see what we’re doing with Cognos. By taking our implementation to the next level, we can meet the specific needs of our individual end users and at the same time, get a complete picture of our overall performance. This is priceless.”

“MassHousing is a shining example of a performance management implementation that started with departmental functionality and has since expanded to encompass a broad set of users across several functions and levels within the organization,” said Terence Atkinson, director of government and education solutions at Cognos. “As a result, the organization can gain increased efficiencies of business reporting and a unified picture of the overall business, and yet deliver a highly customized experience to meet the unique needs of its diverse users.”

The new version offers a new user interface that represents a significant advancement in usability and visual appeal. It includes such features as intuitive drag-and-drop report configuration, easy-to-use conditional alerts and fully interactive, rich data visualizations. The release also supports the company’s growing business in embedded BI by enabling rapid creation of user-interface “skins”, enabling customers and OEM partners to quickly and easily customize and brand PivotLink OnDemand in their own environments.

“Our customers achieve stellar results by deploying our business intelligence solutions broadly and deeply among their employees,” said Aaron Burnett, vice president of marketing for SeaTab Software. “We remain dedicated to making BI as powerful, intuitive and easy-to-use for a non-technical business user as it is for an experienced business analyst. PivotLink 4.0 is another major step in that direction.”

Specific new features within PivotLink OnDemand 4.0 include:

— “Drag-and-drop” functionality — for management of report Headers, Rows
and Metrics (calculations), creating a cleaner report view
— New Metrics interface — makes creating custom mathematical functions
as easy and intuitive as using a calculator
— Conditional Alerts — enable users to configure a number of
visualizations for inclusion when values of columns, rows or cells
signal an important change in business operations
— Rich 3D visualizations — can be combined with tabular report results
or used to create custom dashboards. Visualizations are fully
interactive for drill-through to underlying, granular data and can be
animated by the user for more dynamic presentation.
— “Tab” feature — delivers the ability to view complex report results by
separating data into panels that can be toggled on the report page
— Subscription functionality - powers the automated email distribution of
reports in a number of format options (such as Excel or PDF) to a user-
defined set of recipients.

SeaTab Software is the leading developer of enterprise-grade, on-demand business intelligence solutions. SeaTab’s PivotLink OnDemand puts the full power of business intelligence in the hands of people who need it, with tailored environments for each user — from CEOs to rank-and-file employees, from vendors to customers. SeaTab’s unique, self-directed analytics capabilities provide these users with complete analytical freedom without requiring IT involvement.

Several key factors motivated Life Fitness to reevaluate its BI platform strategy. Specifically, Life Fitness sought to take advantage of Oracle Business Intelligence Suite EE’s architectural advantages, information delivery capabilities, and its integration with Oracle Database, Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle Fusion Middleware products — all of which Life Fitness relies upon.

The Life Fitness evaluation of Oracle Business Intelligence Suite EE found that the product included key functionality in a single solution that was not included with its existing BI tool. Rather than going through the time-consuming process of running multiple different reports in series to get the information they need, Life Fitness constituents will be able to quickly access and view all of their BI information simultaneously in one place through Oracle Interactive Dashboards. Life Fitness will also implement Oracle Delivers, a proactive intelligence solution that helps to enable pervasive BI by providing business event monitoring and alerting to users via email, dashboards, and mobile devices. Oracle Delivers will free Life Fitness analysts from having to continuously run activity reports to search for exceptional conditions. Instead, they will be alerted only when specific conditions, opportunities or problems arise.

“Choosing Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition made sense technically and strategically for Life Fitness,” said Peter Malling, Senior Manager of Data Warehousing and Network Operations, Life Fitness. “Technically, we value having a single, unified BI metadata model because we’ve struggled to maintain consistency across different subject areas of data with our other BI tool. Strategically, we expect significant benefits from having a BI platform that is more tightly integrated with our other key applications and infrastructure software including Oracle Database, Oracle Portal and Oracle E-Business Suite. Oracle is best positioned to help us get the most value out of those products.”

Life Fitness will upgrade its existing Oracle data warehouse to Oracle Database 10g Release 2 running on IBM AIX to take advantage of its enhanced manageability and performance capabilities. The centralized data warehouse contains inventory, manufacturing, supply chain and transactional data extracted from Oracle E-Business Suite as well as from systems of its
international subsidiaries. “We expect Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition is going to utilize every drop of data warehousing features and functionalities within Oracle Database 10g,” added Malling.

Headquartered near Chicago in Schiller Park, Ill., Life Fitness is the leading brand of fitness equipment in health clubs worldwide and distributes its equipment in more than 120 countries. Since 1999, Life Fitness has relied on business intelligence (BI) to distill and disperse critical information to key constituents and decision makers within the company as well as to external dealers, suppliers and large customers. BI is critical for the enterprise globally and supports engineering, field sales, finance, inventory management, order management, and supply chain
management. For example, the Life Fitness sales organization relies on BI to track sales and order pipeline related to goals, while the order management and supply chain organizations relate projected and actual sales information to available inventory, assuring adequate product availability to meet demand.