Business Intelligence Journal

Swedish pharmaceutical retailer Apoteket is the first customer in Europe to go live on Lawson Business Intelligence 9.0.2, the company’s globalized business intelligence solution. Apoteket incorporated the Swedish language version of Lawson Business Intelligence into the organization’s existing enterprise system. This helps key decision makers more effectively manage the company’s prescription fulfillment process and its supply chain.

The application, first introduced during the Lawson Conference and User Exchange (CUE) in March 2007, will also help the company improve visibility into the management of contractual terms and conditions, handling invoicing and settlement, and generating comprehensive reports associated with key business activities. Apoteket first became a Lawson customer in 1998 and is using Lawson S3 Financial Management, Process Flow, and Services Automation. Read the rest »

Business Objects announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Inxight Software, Inc. Based in Sunnyvale, Calif., Inxight is a leading provider of software solutions for unstructured information discovery, including text analytics, federated search, and data visualization. Financial details of the transaction, which is expected to close in July of 2007, were not disclosed.The combination of Business Objects and Inxight Software will provide organizations with a comprehensive BI solution to address all of their data assets. With the combined technology, companies will now have streamlined access to both structured information within databases and data warehouses, and unstructured information such as emails, documents, notes fields, and web content that is estimated to comprise more than 80 percent of all organizational data. Inxight brings a compelling combination of text analytics, federated search, and visualization capabilities to the BusinessObjects XI platform to enable customers to easily discover, manage, and analyze unstructured content inside and outside of their organization. Read the rest »

JasperSoft Corporation announced an unlimited subscription-based offering for its newly released JasperSoft Business Intelligence Suite Professional Edition 2.0. The special offer provides a 12-month, unlimited subscription to the entire JasperSoft BI Suite, which includes Gold Level support and direct access to an assigned technical account manager for $35,000.

With a JasperSoft unlimited subscription, an organization can develop, deploy and fully support any number of BI applications, driving business-wide value. This is an ideal opportunity for any organization that wants to broadly deploy BI and provide widespread access to its benefits. JasperSoft provides open source-based professional reporting, analysis and data integration solutions, which gives people a better way to manage their business at a fraction of the cost of traditional BI solutions. Read the rest »

Harry & David’s famous juicy pears will more easily find their way into the mouths of eager customers because of SAS Enterprise BI Server. SAS, the leader in business intelligence, is helping the Oregon-based gourmet food retailer to manage its marketing activities.

“The marketing department was forced to operate without a usable query tool,” said Tammy Miles, Senior Manager of Database Marketing at Harry & David. “Creating ad-hoc market analysis reports was a significant burden, and we knew we needed something more. We’ve been using SAS for more than 25 years at Harry & David, and it just made sense for us to stay with SAS. The SAS Enterprise BI Server’s high configurability and ease of use helped us keep the learning curve low. SAS is an ongoing success for us.” Read the rest »

More than 30,000 BI developers have registered for JasperForge.org since it was launched in July of 2006, creating a vibrant ecosystem of businesses and community developers that has already produced over 130 BI projects.

JasperForge.org is an online developer site that provides free access to software and tools to build, deploy, and extend open source BI software. Projects range from developer tools to integration toolkits to localization powered by an interactive online translation tool, JasperBabylon, where more than 30 different translation projects are underway. Some of the more popular JasperForge.org projects include the Drupal Bridge for JasperReports, iReport with Hibernate, Oracle Stored Procedures, Reporting and OLAP Analysis Tools for Bugzilla, and Jasper4Eclipse, an iReport plug-in project for eclipse.

“The rapid growth of JasperForge.org shows that open source BI provides unique value that goes beyond what proprietary BI solutions can deliver,” said Tim Cloonan, director of community relations at JasperSoft. “In JasperForge.org, we see both commercial businesses and independent community developers taking advantage of our free project hosting services to build solutions for their specific problems. The solutions are rapidly built with community support without having to wait for large proprietary software companies to understand and evaluate how to best address the needs of both groups.”

Reflecting the breadth and range of the Jasper community are projects from Cincom, a large software and services company, and John Bindel, a software developer who independently developed better file virtualization capabilities for JasperReports. Read the rest »

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 »