Business Intelligence Journal

To support its growing business intelligence (BI) initiatives, Life Fitness, a division of Brunswick Corp. (NYSE: BC), has consolidated its BI and data warehousing platforms on Oracle. Life Fitness selected Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition (EE) to replace its existing BI solution and is upgrading its data warehouse to Oracle Database 10g Release 2. Life Fitness is the global leader in designing and manufacturing a full line of reliable, high-quality fitness equipment for commercial and home use. Read the rest »

MicroStrategy announced its plans to launch MicroStrategy Mobile(TM), a new product that delivers timely BI information directly to BlackBerry(R) smartphones from Research In Motion (RIM) . MicroStrategy Mobile will be introduced tomorrow at the MicroStrategy Symposium in London.

MicroStrategy Mobile provides mobile workers with access to BI reports on their BlackBerry smartphones. With MicroStrategy Mobile, business users will receive the same reports on their BlackBerry smartphone as they receive on their desktop, without the need for reformatting or retrofitting existing reports. The report manipulation features available in MicroStrategy Mobile allow users to view even the largest reports within the compact screen size of the BlackBerry smartphone. Read the rest »

Nearly 60 percent of respondents agree that knowledge workers throughout organizations should have access to Business Intelligence capabilities.

A new survey of business intelligence (BI) professionals worldwide reveals that while they overwhelmingly believe that their companies can benefit from the insights BI provides, the perceived high costs of implementing a BI system have prevented more than two-thirds of them from doing so throughout their firms.

A majority of survey respondents also believe that corporate-wide implementation of BI systems supports the opportunity for greater insight and wider access. They said it delivers increased value over department-level BI, even though the latter may cost less and provide a more targeted focus to specific information. Read the rest »

To improve service to its customers and to enhance member health outcomes, CIGNA HealthCare has selected SAS business intelligence (BI) to help analyze and communicate critical information in support of its health outreach and health advocacy programs. CIGNA has been a customer of SAS, the leader in business intelligence and analytics, for more than 20 years.

CIGNA HealthCare is one of the largest health services businesses in the United States and provides medical benefits plans, dental coverage, behavioral health coverage, pharmacy benefits, and products and services that integrate and analyze information to support consumerism and health advocacy. Read the rest »

Netezza Corporation announced a partnership with Manthan Systems, a provider of business intelligence (BI) and analytics solutions for retailers. The combination of the Netezza Performance Server system and Manthan‘s ARC retail BI suite provides a high-performance business intelligence solution that integrates data from disparate information systems in a centralized, easy-to-access repository, enabling reporting, analysis and collaboration based on common business rules.

ARC is a retail data warehouse and an integrated BI suite specifically architected for retail. As a specialized product exclusively built for retail, ARC dramatically reduces the deployment lifecycle and the total cost of ownership by cutting down the time needed to customize a business intelligence platform to the retail industry‘s specific needs. ARC’s retail data model variants enable various retail analytic formats like fashion & apparel, food & grocery, specialty and mass merchandise. Read the rest »

Actuate Corporation announced the informative results of its 2007 Open Source Software Survey, conducted across North America, Germany and the United Kingdom. Actuate Corporation is the founder and co-sponsor of the Open Source Business Intelligence project, BIRT (Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools), with the Eclipse Foundation.

This global survey focused on the following key areas concerning Open Source software: awareness and adoption levels; benefits and barriers to adoption; adoption influences and Open Source Business Intelligence (BI). More than six hundred IT and business professionals from financial services and other industries provided detailed data showing enhanced awareness and adoption of Open Source software. The results indicate that 42.9 percent of respondents are already using Open Source, 23.6 percent are currently using Open Source BI and 31.2 percent are likely or very likely to consider using Open Source BI solutions. Read the rest »

If you are a business owner, money and debt may be a continuous issue. When you encompass significant business debts, you have minimal options of what you can do to eliminate your debt problems. You can cut back, expand, or go out of business.

Cutting Back

Featured below are several different ways you save money on your business’ overhead:

• Control labor costs. Evaluate your employee situation and make certain that you are not overstaffing your business. Another consideration is to determine if the cost of labor can reduce by making an employee and independent contractor, thus eliminating insurance, benefits and tax withholding out of the labor equation. Utilize a voicemail system as opposed to a receptionist.
• Reduce overhead. Reduce entertainment and other perks, compare insurance carriers and cut back on travel expenses. Cutting back on travel means staying at less expensive hotels, traveling by car if possible, etc.
• Reward productivity and efficiency. Reward your employees with bonuses when they help the business by pointing out money saving areas that may have been overlooked by you and the other powers that be. Also, let it be known that employees will benefit with pay increases and bonuses for high work output.

Expanding

Even though it may seem ironic, one method for a business to get out of debt is to fall more into debt. More specifically, by applying for a small business loan, not only will you satisfy your cash needs, you have the option of growing your business.

There are a variety of personal loan options for you and your business. It is important to note that when you utilize business financing, that you make certain your loan is not going to bolster bad business practices, but will instead allow you get through an unexpected money crisis. Read the rest »

Corporate Express US, a wholly owned subsidiary of Corporate Express NV (NYSE: CXP), has selected MicroStrategy for its online customer reporting application. Corporate Express US Inc. is one of the world’s largest business-to-business suppliers of essential office and computer products and services.

With MicroStrategy, Corporate Express customers will be able to run reports and analyze data related to their office supply purchases. More than 10,000 customers are expected to use this online service, which will be available through Corporate Express’ award-winning EWAY Internet ordering site. Corporate Express customers, from executives to business analysts, will be able to view procurement data using at-a-glance dashboards and standard reports and by drilling down to transaction-level data for more detailed investigation. Corporate Express currently uses MicroStrategy to monitor business performance at the corporate and
divisional levels and to perform interactive enterprise reporting and analysis. Read the rest »

Business Objects announced the launch of Business Objects Crystal Decisions Professional. This new edition of the Business Objects Crystal Decisions suite is tailored specifically for the needs of small and mid-sized companies and is the second mid-market offering launched by the company since February 2007. The announcement underscores an aggressive commitment from Business Objects to continue to deliver flexible, easy-to-deploy, and affordable BI solutions for mid-market companies – those companies with less than $1 billion in annual revenues or fewer than 1,000 employees. Business Objects is the first and only BI vendor to offer an all-in-one business intelligence and data integration product designed for the mid-market.

Business Objects Crystal Decisions Professional offers the benefits of highly developed data integration functionalities as well as intelligent reporting, ad hoc query and analysis, and dashboards capabilities. The data integration feature provides the ability to extract data from different database types that include Microsoft SQL Server, IBM DB2, Oracle, Ingres, and many others, and integrate that data into a single target source. This is especially critical for small and mid-sized companies that need to integrate their business intelligence functionality across multiple data sources. Companies new to Business Objects Crystal Decisions will also find Professional provides the flexibility to deploy and use business intelligence to complement existing business applications, data sources, and platforms, and delivers insight in a single, affordable package to help solve their business problems. Read the rest »

Jenzabar, Inc. is extending its long-standing partnership with Cognos by offering the powerful Cognos 8 Business Intelligence suite to new and existing Jenzabar customers.

In conjunction with the Jenzabar family of administrative solutions, Cognos 8 BI will deliver a complete range of BI capabilities to Jenzabar clients: reporting, analysis, scorecarding, dashboards, and business event management as well as data integration on a single, proven architecture. The solution will also deliver powerful search functionality for both BI and Enterprise Search. Cognos 8 BI offers schools a simplified BI environment that improves user adoption, enables better decision-making, and serves as an enterprise-scale foundation for performance management. Read the rest »