The Business Intelligence Blog

Given the frantic oil price rise, here is some insight into how oil companies use Business Intelligence to maximize profits. Great & Must Read.

Every Wednesday morning, the shouts and hand gestures that make the Nymex trading floor in New York frantic begin to calm. Petroleum traders are waiting for the release of data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) on countries’ inventories of crude oil and gasoline, as well as world crude prices.

At 10:30 a.m., the EIA’s website sees a storm of activity: 1,000 page views per second for 15 seconds, says Charlie Riner, a lead analyst for the site. Oil companies, commodities traders, analyst firms, and government agencies in the United States and other countries have written bots to collect the data. Then traffic ebbs.

In the oil and gas business, you are what you own. The amount of crude waiting to be refined, or the already-processed liquid in storage tanks ready to be sold and delivered, represents much of a company’s value at a given moment. As a refiner, Valero buys barrels of oil to heat and pressurize into other products, such as diesel fuel, asphalt and lubricants. The $95 billion downstream company owns 17 refineries that together can produce 3.1 million barrels of product per day.

But Valero doesn’t sell that much in a given day so it must store finished goods until they’re ready to be shipped to customers. The company tracks its own inventory movements the way a first-time mother studies her infant. How much of which products did we sell this morning? How about now? And now?

Market analysts run inventory reports “a few hundred times a day,” says Kirk Hewitt, vice president of accounting processing optimization . As the cost of crude fluctuates during trading hours, Valero sales and marketing staff want frequent updates so they can sell products at the most profitable price and buy crude to feed their refineries at the best price.

“We’re dealing with a commodity whose price changes every second,” Hewitt explains. “So our margins change every minute. Our costs change every minute.”

From Fin Express

The $1.1-billion company, that was acquired by IBM in January 2008, has currently about $4 million revenue from Indian operations. The company plans to take it to $40 million by next year and $45 million by 2012.

Joyer Mascarenhas, AVP, APAC professional services, Cognos, said, “India is an important geography for us and we are looking at more than 150% growth by next year. Most of our revenues come from enterprise and SMEs.”

Here’s a follow-up to the previously posted series, Breakthroughs in Analytics, from Tech News World.

In the latest update, Ned Madden talks about the various tools and vendors in the Analytics domain. Read more.

Today’s software packages are much more focused on the actual application of analytical approaches to specific types of decision problems and specific types of industries, according to Anthony Milano, GMI’s VP of professional services.

“In the old days, tools were typically very general purpose in nature,” Milano told TechNewsWorld. “Now, oftentimes, tools are much more focused on helping users solve specific types of problems in business verticals and industries.”

Vendors are even adapting their core analytical engines to specific needs by creating a packaged solution that includes a version of the engine, analytic models, processes, methodologies, add-ons and extensions that allow the product to solve a very specific need, Milano said.

“Importantly, this type of solution minimizes the amount of time required to solve the problem and makes it easier for the client to get the job done without requiring a deep topic expert,” he added. “In effect, these packaged solutions embed the expertise in the solution.”

Milano stressed the importance of analytics solutions that are provided under the rental model from an application service provider (ASP) as Software as a Service (SaaS).

“These software delivery models have proved to be very cost-effective and efficient for customers, particularly when all the costs of owning and installing your own software are understood,” he said.

From the Press Release -

Greenplum, a leading provider of database software for business intelligence, and Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: JAVA) today announced that Reliance Communications is using Greenplum Database, running on the Sun Data Warehouse Appliance, to power a range of applications, from legal and regulatory compliance to call detail record analysis.

Greenplum Database is the world’s fastest, most cost-effective solution for analyzing the massive amounts of information generated by surging worldwide usage of wireless and broadband services. The Data Warehouse Appliance powered by Sun and Greenplum is the industry’s first cost-effective, high-performance super-capacity data warehouse appliance. Purpose-built for high-performance, large-scale data warehousing, the solution integrates best-in-class database, server, and storage components into one easy-to-use, plug-and-play system.

“The Sun Data Warehouse Appliance running Greenplum Database is helping Reliance meet its goal of superior responsiveness in a challenging data environment — one that is characterized by rapid growth and increasing user demand,” said Raj Joshi, VP and Head (Decision Support Systems) at Reliance Communications Limited. “Deploying the joint Greenplum and Sun solution improved our response times and enabled Reliance Communications to improve our data management.”

Reliance Communications Limited is the telecommunications company of Reliance ADA Group which is one of India’s largest industrial groups. Reliance Communications is known for its innovative market offerings and practices. As Reliance has grown to more than 40 million subscribers, providing accurate and timely data support and analytics to all parts of the business has been a challenge. Turning an ad hoc request from historical records could take multiple hours; even loading a day’s worth of data into the system could take up to three hours.

HP Unveils Worlds First 2-in-1 Server Blade for Cloud Environment

HP released a new ProLiant blade enclosure Wednesday with higher server densities designed for cloud computing and other computing-intensive applications.

With up to 32 server nodes in a single 10U blade chassis, the new BladeSystem can scale up to 128 servers, 1,024 CPU cores and 2TB of RAM in one standard-sized rack consisting of four enclosures, HP says. The new blade offers double the density of its HP predecessors by fitting two servers into each slot, says Paul Miller, HP’s marketing vice president.

Amazon finding money in the ‘cloud’

But Bezos simplified the business of Amazon.com — which has ventured into a whole new arena of computing services — by breaking down its customers into three groups: consumers, third-party sellers and developers.

Third-party sellers account for 30 percent of the units sold on Amazon, Bezos said.

The amount of bandwidth used by Amazon Web Services, which includes cloud computing and server storage space, recently surpassed the bandwidth used for its retail business, he said.

The Web services division was formed about four years ago.

News from TDWI Conference, Chicago -

At last week’s TDWI World Conference, held in Chicago, a bevy of vendors announced new DW appliance packages — with a twist.

In the past, several vendors have promoted the DW appliance as a technology which effectively sells itself — e.g., as a turnkey panacea for the performance, capacity, and cost issues that frequently combine to make high-end data warehousing so expensive.

At TDWI last week, however, three vendors (Dataupia Inc., ParAccel Corp., and Sybase Inc.) unveiled new DW appliance packages that they say are designed to address specific business problems.

Dataupia’s offering bundles the company’s Satori server appliance with best-of-breed data visualization software from Tableau Inc. ParAccel announced a new analytic appliance offering it co-developed with storage giant EMC Corp. Sybase unveiled an all-in-one, best-of-breed analytic appliance (complete with Sybase IQ, Sybase PowerDesigner, and Sybase ETL; BI software from MicroStrategy Inc.; and System p RISC/Unix servers from IBM Corp.). In all three cases, the vendors are emphasizing business practicality and business usability in addition to better and cheaper performance.

From TDWI Article -

To start down this path, you will obviously need to take a more holistic view of your organization’s information and technology architecture to learn what data is available to your end users. You also need to spend time learning what is missing today from the BI environment. Don’t be surprised if people at first cannot articulate their needs in this arena — most people do not believe current tools can support this analysis!

In conjunction with this internal fact-finding, stay abreast of the evolution of “unstructured” content software and service solutions. Although these concepts have been around for some time, some technological developments have emerged only recently to allow some of the more interesting analysis and integration opportunities in this area.

Finally, keep experimenting! The BI market has grown and matured substantially in the last several years, and this is an exciting new area where we can all stretch and investigate. As famous engineer Richard Buckminster Fuller once quipped, “There is no such thing as a failed experiment — only experiments with unexpected outcomes.”

Interesting article on Data Quality from B To B Mag-

Today, most corporations are tightening the screws on their corporate cash drawers. In attempts to conserve funds yet still reach stated revenue goals, businesses are turning to their existing customer bases to generate incremental revenues. This is a logical step as the costs to cross-sell additional products and/or services to existing customers are far less than those required to attract new customers. Obviously, this puts tremendous pressure on the accuracy of databases.

As one-to-one relationship marketing becomes more the norm, databases are expanding at exponential rates. In fact, corporate databases double in size roughly every six to nine months. These two factors alone should be sufficient stimulus for businesses to get their databases in order in a cost-effective manner. The average business database contains a staggering amount—15% to 40%—of bad data. That means roughly one in four pieces of marketing material mailed is worthless.

I had a chance to watch a Cognos 8.3 demo for evaluvation purposes. The Cognos Team had created a prototype cube for the demo. Having worked with Cognos for nearly 4 years at my previous assignment, this version of Cognos was completely new to me.

The version that I worked before Cognos EP Series 7. The latest version is Cognos 8.3 and there has been fundamanetal changes made to the UI as well as the architecture.

Here are some of the key improvements that I think are striking

- Metadata management has improved significantly. Instead of metadata being stored as a file, like the previous version(catalogs), they are now stored in the database, just like how Informatica stores them.

I wish Business Objects would also make metadata management as seamless as Cognos. File based metadata management will hit the file size limitations and then they cannot grow anymore.

- The client application’s UI has become simple and helps in faster authoring of reports.

- Their web interface is very intutive. With drill down/up capabilities, enterprises can now have business analysts do adhoc queries on the fly.

- Good integration of all the different tools into one big tool. Cognos used to have Impromptu, Powerplay and host of other tools. Now they all work as one Cognos tool. This could potentially make their prices high but it could help the enterprises with one BI tool solution and could also reduce licensing costs from various tools.

- Though I didn’t dig too much into their scorecarding tools, scorecard portlets is a cool concept.

Looks like Cognos 8.4 is at Beta and is expected to hit the markets soon.

CRM Buyer has a series on breakthrughs in analytics world. A good read. Part 1 and Part 2.

While BI is about quickly obtaining enterprise information, Web analytics encompasses the collection, analysis and reporting of information about user activity on company Web sites. This process of analyzing the behavior of Internet visitors involves the study of the impact of a Web site on its users.

Distinctions between the two should be disappearing fairly quickly, according to Gary Angel, president and CTO of Semphonic, a tool-independent Web and search engine marketing analytics consultancy.

“I think it’s clear that there’s an increasing merger between traditional BI and Web analytics,” wrote Angel on his SemAngel blog. “This is true both in terms of data integration and tools. That’s certainly going to accelerate, and I see no reason why, in three years, the two disciplines will be separate in any meaningful sense. In addition, I think we’ll start to see much more ‘data-driven’ analysis within Web analytics.”

In 2006, IDC estimated the size of the 2005 Web analytics market at US$318 million and projected it to more than double in the ensuing five years. JupiterResearch put the size of the Web analytics market at $463 million in 2006. Today, the market is above $500 million.

This growth has occurred because the Web has become a part of the marketing mix model and is proving its value, according to Jim Sterne, president of the Web Analytics Association (WAA).

“Today, Web analytics tools can do their magic from afar,” Sterne told TechNewsWorld. “Ten years ago, we weren’t thinking about selling Software as a Service. Today’s tools are also much more capable of capturing the growing quantity of data and segmenting visitors to ensure the best possible response to a click. Further, 21st century tools are becoming more integrated with other marketing systems like e-mail, direct mail, telemarketing and in-store sales.”

E-commerce companies often use Web analytics software to measure such concrete details as how many people visited their site, how many of those visitors were unique visitors, how they came to the site (i.e., if they followed a link to get to the site or came there directly), what keywords they searched with on the site’s search engine, how long they stayed on a given page or on the entire site, what links they clicked on and when they left the site. Web analytic software can also be used to monitor whether or not a site’s pages are working properly.

With this information, Web site administrators can determine which areas of the site are popular and which areas of the site do not get traffic. They can then use this data to streamline a site to create a better user experience.