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 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.

As a result of the recently announced acquisitions of Cognos by IBM and Business Objects by SAP, customers of these two BI vendors may have concerns about ongoing product support, product direction, and migration efforts. The MicroStrategy License Replacement program enables customers of Cognos and Business Objects to trade in their existing BI licenses for MicroStrategy licenses at little or no replacement cost.

“The big three former independent BI players have fallen like dominos this year, aligning themselves with application/database vendors and trading market heft for independence,” said Wayne Eckerson, Director, TDWI Research. “This obviously presents a great opportunity for remaining independent players to capture the sizable segment of customers who prefer best-of-breed tools versus an all-in-one stack pushed by aggressive account teams selling everything from servers and databases to applications and services.”

Customers of other BI vendors often switch to MicroStrategy to benefit from the increased performance, scalability, and data visualization that MicroStrategy offers. Several examples of MicroStrategy customers that have switched from other BI vendors are Corporate Express, La Poste, and Dick’s Sporting Goods.

Corporate Express selected MicroStrategy as its enterprise BI standard and replaced its existing installation. By migrating from its previous solution to MicroStrategy, Corporate Express was able to achieve greater efficiencies and faster access to the information they needed. Corporate Express recently expanded its use of MicroStrategy to provide more than 10,000 customers with an online reporting application, enabling them to run reports and analyze data related to their office supply purchases.

La Poste, which operates the postal service of France, replaced its BI provider and chose MicroStrategy to support its sophisticated Human Resource (HR) application. With MicroStrategy, La Poste monitors data for 280,000 employees. Managers and operational staff use the HR application to report on and analyze data to efficiently manage personnel objectives across key indicators.

Dick’s Sporting Goods replaced its existing BI installation with the MicroStrategy Business Intelligence Platform(TM). Dick’s Sporting Goods’ employees, including store managers, merchandising analysts, and senior management, use MicroStrategy software to analyze a 2 terabyte Oracle(R) data warehouse. End users are able to perform sales, category, and inventory analyses to more effectively track product sales, product mix, and inventory levels.

“Historically, companies have switched from Business Objects and Cognos to MicroStrategy when they ran into scalability roadblocks,” said MicroStrategy COO Sanju Bansal. “MicroStrategy 8 delivers high scalability with high performance. We have talked with companies who have been dissatisfied with their Business Objects or Cognos systems and want to avoid the turmoil of the transition and migration that will result from the acquisitions of these vendors. This replacement program is intended to ease the adoption of MicroStrategy by lowering or eliminating the acquisition cost of MicroStrategy licenses.”

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.”