Business Intelligence Journal

Business intelligence, data warehousing and analytics news and resources

SAS Brings Business Intelligence to the IBM Mainframe

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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 more…]

Oco Deploys Business Intelligence Solution For Dunkin’ Donuts in Six Weeks

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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 more…]

Gartner Names SeaTab Software a “Cool Vendor” in Business Intelligence

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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 more…]

Panorama Software Launches Business Intelligence Virtual Appliance

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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 more…]

IBM in “Leaders Quadrant” for Business Intelligence Services

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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 more…]