Business Intelligence Journal

Cognos (Nasdaq: COGN; TSX: CSN) today previewed Cognos 8 BI Analysis for Microsoft Excel®, a new enterprise BI capability that enables Microsoft Excel users to directly access centrally controlled and secured Cognos 8 BI performance information for improved decision-making.

The self-service nature of the new capability will make it easy for business analysts, financial analysts or line of business managers to interactively explore and analyze multidimensional information within Microsoft Excel, without draining valuable IT resources. Using formula-based data access, business users will be able to find answers, solve business problems and report key results in the format most convenient to them, while leveraging the Cognos 8 BI infrastructure for data consistency, freshness and security. For richer analysis and formatting, or for broader enterprise distribution of reports, they can re-use the results of their exploration within other worksheets or Cognos 8 BI’s proven reporting and analysis capabilities.

“The ability to conduct drag and drop exploration and analysis of controlled BI data within Excel will really benefit the business analyst who wants to solve analytical problems in a familiar spreadsheet environment,” said Vivian Adashek, financial systems project specialist, Manpower. “These analysts are gaining direct access to the underlying data sources within Excel so they can flexibly analyze trusted secure information from Cognos 8 BI together with other data sources without requiring IT to do this for them. As always, Cognos is listening and partnering with its customers on new product innovations.” Read the rest »

Information Builders announced that Ace Hardware Corporation, the largest retailer-owned hardware cooperative in the industry, has chosen WebFOCUS as its enterprise reporting tool due to the solution’s ease of development, scalability, and data access and integration capabilities.

Founded in 1924, Ace grew a few Chicago hardware stores into a company that includes more than 4,600 stores in 50 states and over 70 countries. As the company grows in size, employees and revenues, it has become critically important to have a business intelligence (BI) standard that can get users the information they need, when they need it, for better decision-making. Read the rest »

Mainframes are established critical components in an organization’s technology infrastructure, housing vast amounts of data that decision makers can use to gain historical hindsight and predict future outcomes. This is why SAS has tightly integrated its Enterprise Intelligence Platform – which includes data integration, intelligence storage, business intelligence and analytics software – with the IBM System z mainframe. In addition, the introduction of sub-capacity pricing – a pricing structure that reflects the industry movement towards server consolidation – provides SAS mainframe customers with a cost-effective way of adding new workloads and new applications to the System z platform.

“As the only combined BI and advanced analytics vendor to run on the mainframe, SAS is clearly committed to helping organizations take advantage of IBM’s application and data access solutions for System z,” said Claudia Imhoff, President of Intelligent Solutions, Inc. “The BI market is growing, mainframes are established elements of a company’s technology foundation and leveraging the two together just makes sense for long-term success. Regardless of size, SAS and IBM have declared that they are in it for the long haul – enabling enterprises to perform sophisticated data analysis and other BI functions while protecting and leveraging their mainframe investments.” Read the rest »

Cognos (Nasdaq: COGN; TSX: CSN) announced today that Achmea Insurance Group has standardized on Cognos 8 Business Intelligence to support its financial and business planning and reporting.

Achmea, the largest insurance group in the Dutch market, employs 22,000 people working in six departments: Care, Pensions, Social Security, Direct Distribution, Monetary Distribution and Intermediary Distribution, and Group IT Services. Each division has its own key activities and operates under several brands. Cognos will be implemented across the enterprise to support business-critical and strategic goals, including financial and business scenario-based planning.

With Cognos 8 BI, Achmea will have a single product that easily integrates into its existing infrastructure, which has multiple systems and data sources. After Cognos successfully implemented two performance management projects for the Social Security Division in 2006, Achmea decided to implement Cognos across its enterprise. The Cognos consulting organization played a crucial role in the successful completion of the projects by aligning Achmea’s strategic objectives with the Cognos 8 BI implementation.

“We use integrated business performance management to monitor the strategy execution,” said Miloje Stevanovic, Manager of Change Management and IT at Achmea. “Cognos 8 BI provides us with a very solid base and a strong information platform.” Read the rest »

Oco, Inc. announced a new customer deployment for Dunkin’ Donuts. This new application from Oco gives Dunkin’ Donuts management and reporting capabilities for franchise development, supporting the company’s aggressive growth plans.

With Oco’s fixed cost, fixed time approach, Dunkin’ Donuts was up and running in just six weeks. Oco’s solution replaced a manually intensive approach used previously and the intuitive web interface resulted in rapid user adoption. Oco aligned their solution with Dunkin’ Donut’s business processes, and the benefits of the “software as a service” model put minimal demands on internal IT resources.

The six week implementation began with a profiling session to understand how Dunkin’ Donuts tracks and manages its franchisees, and how different users would need to see the information. To capture and host the franchising data for Dunkin’ Donuts, Oco’s uses proprietary technology based on an artificial intelligence engine which takes data from multiple sources, then cleanses, normalizes and organizes it into an intelligent data schema, all in a matter of days. By the second week of the implementation, Dunkin’ Donuts’ managers were reviewing their franchising reports with actual data. Read the rest »

SeaTab Software was named a “Cool Vendor” by Gartner in a report titled “Cool Vendors in Analytics, Business Intelligence and Corporate Performance Management, 2007″. The report features five vendors cited by Gartner analysts for their innovation and market impact.

“It is an honor for SeaTab and the nearly 12,000 companies that use our solutions to be acknowledged by Gartner,” said David Weld, CEO of SeaTab Software. “Accolades for technology and innovation are wonderful, but we’re most proud of what we believe to be recognition for delivering extremely powerful, self-directed business intelligence to our users.” Read the rest »

Panorama Software announced the availability of the Panorama NovaView® Virtual Appliance. The first-of-its-kind, the Panorama NovaView Virtual Appliance is a pre-built, pre-configured and ready-to-run software-based appliance with an operating system and a pre-configured suite of BI applications inside a virtual machine. Panorama Software’s Virtual Appliance enables customers to download and configure an enterprise ready version of Panorama NovaView in just a few hours.

Utilizing leading-edge technology from VMware, the global leader in virtual infrastructure software for industry-standard systems, Panorama Software has built the first-of-its-kind Virtual Appliance to provide customers with the most cost-effective and user-friendly means to deploy their flagship enterprise BI solution - Panorama NovaView®.

“Panorama is changing the rules on how business intelligence applications are deployed and put into the hands of the information worker,” said Oudi Antebi, Vice President Marketing and Strategy, Panorama Software. “The value and importance of BI continues to grow within companies of all sizes and across all industries. With more decision makers accountable for the results within an organization, the last thing a company wants to deal with is complex BI deployments that consume precious IT resources. The value of BI is getting critical information into the hands of the people who need it. Today’s announcement of the first BI Virtual Appliance will help companies to get one step closer to meeting that goal.” Read the rest »

WhereScape Software, provider of the first lifecycle management software solution specifically designed for data warehouses, announced today a technology agreement with MicroStrategy, a leading worldwide provider of business intelligence software.

WhereScape will deliver a version of WhereScape RED that integrates with MicroStrategy and enables users to easily create new data warehouses and data marts at least 30 percent faster, or in a matter of hours or a day, compared to traditional methods which take weeks and months. Not only does this make developers more productive but it slashes data warehouse development costs by as much as half. With WhereScape RED, MicroStrategy users also will be able to quickly and easily create meta data for new MicroStrategy “projects” that will help minimize the complexity and time to create business intelligence reports. A “project” is a mapping that communicates with MicroStrategy business intelligence tools on what data will be available to the users and how to access it.

WhereScape RED addresses the growing need for an Integrated Development Environment that supports the entire data warehouse lifecycle and provides enterprises with far more productivity, flexibility and speed in building, prototyping and enhancing data warehouses. WhereScape RED provides a complete and integrated data warehouse lifecycle management environment for data warehouses developed on Oracle, SQL Server or Teradata. Read the rest »

Gartner has positioned IBM in the Leaders Quadrant in its report, “Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Services, North America, 2007.” According to Gartner, “the Leaders provide offerings that meet demand, as well as demonstrate the vision necessary to sustain their position as requirements evolve in the Business Intelligence (BI) market.” The report also states, “BI and performance management have significant impact across an enterprise. Organizations seek to achieve business value from the analysis of their information through the use of IT. Gartner forecasts the market for BI-related services to grow at a five-year compounded annual rate of 5.8 percent worldwide and reach more than $20 billion by 2010.” According to the IBM Global Innovation Outlook, the amount of digital information is expected to double every 11 hours by 2010. The most successful corporations will be those who master structured and unstructured information flow throughout their organization thus improving decision making and overall business performance. IBM’s Global BI Practice is committed to helping businesses gain more value from these information assets. As the complexity of managing these information architectures increases, organizations are facing new challenges that require new approaches and technologies.

IBM Global Business Services’ BI practice provides the industry’s broadest and deepest BI services, by providing the right balance and combination of industry, functional/operational, technical and change management skills to deliver comprehensive, value-added BI solutions. This combination provides a basis for integrated, business-driven solutions with demonstrable business return throughout the enterprise. Read the rest »

Priceline.com (Nasdaq: PCLN) has chosen MicroStrategy to anchor key marketing reporting capabilities. Priceline.com is an Internet-based travel service that offers leisure airline tickets, hotel rooms, rental cars, vacation packages, and cruises.

Priceline.com selected MicroStrategy to enhance its analytic and reporting capabilities and provide greater insight into key operational data for search engine marketing. With the ability to obtain and analyze granular data, Priceline.com marketing analysts will have actionable data that they can use to improve the return-on-ad-spend of its search engine marketing campaigns.

MicroStrategy was selected by Priceline.com for its Web-based platform, data and user scalability, advanced reporting and analytical capabilities, and integrated metadata for automated maintainability. Priceline.com marketing analysts will run reports and perform analyses against an Oracle(R) data warehouse. Read the rest »