The Business Intelligence Blog

From CNN -

This new version of Behavioral Analytics(TM) software also enhances the analysis of non-interaction time (long periods of hold and silence) in contact center interactions. Non-interaction time is a significant issue for contact centers as it often represents up to 30% of a contact center’s total talk time. Behavioral Analytics(TM) clients will now have a more detailed understanding of what CSR’s do during periods of non-interaction. These insights will enable companies to better manage CSR performance variability and improve inefficient business processes.

As part of its Managed Services delivery model, eLoyalty has made significant investments to continuously upgrade the functionality of Behavioral Analytics(TM) software. These investments include multiple dedicated development environments; a large database of test customer interactions; regression testing tools; and numerous highly skilled linguists, analysts and developers.

Big story straight from keynote of Gartner BI Summit 2008 that’s happening currently at Chicago. This is Gartner’s Kurt Schlegel talking about search, analytics and visualization.

We’re going to focus on three clear areas of innovation. The first — and I’d say this comes closest to being the essence of the conference overall — is about creating a BI strategy that is focused on making decision making a core competency as opposed the just reporting measures. Today we have very IT-centric BI teams that view their job as “let’s get the data right and let’s report to the right users at the right time.” That’s obviously essential and everybody has to be very good at that, but we view that as table stakes. Everyone has to be good at that. The folks that take it up a notch create a BI strategy that’s less IT-centric, more business-centric and more focused on decision making itself.

The second innovation is about emerging technologies and addressing the problem that BI is too hard. All sorts of anecdotal evidence suggests that there’s 15 percent to 20 percent penetration among users and that’s about it. We’re reaching the people who are comfortable with Excel and grids, but we could be giving a lot more people the power to report on and analyze information and make better decisions. One way to do that is with some of the emerging technologies, particularly search and visualization, which have been proven to have mainstream appeal.

The third and final innovation is about the BI market itself. It’s a bit complicated, but it’s focused on integration and the fact that BI has always been overtly disconnected from business processes and applications. Given the market consolidation and the stack centricity of what a lot of these vendors are doing, there’s going to be a much greater focus on integrating BI with an application and process stack. I think that’s going to be very helpful, but there are other aspects to this area of innovation. I think software as a service (SaaS) and cloud computing are going to give rise to an array of different types of BI offerings. That’s going to change the market from what it looks like today.

This is and much more including Saas and SOA. Must Read.

From Intelligent Enterprise -

Logi ETL is a Web-based data integration application that can transfer data from diverse sources directly to multiple destinations, be invoked by predefined processes, including scheduling; or be triggered by application actions, the company said.

“The new Logi ETL product is comprehensive and rich in functionality, easy-to-use and integrate,” Arman Eshraghi, chief executive and founder of LogiXML, said in a statement. “The product embraces XML technologies and is operationally more Web-oriented than any other ETL product in the market.”

That’s really a great news to the BI world during these dull days of business. I’m sure other companies will start becoming confident on the never understood phenomenon of ROI. Makes a day !!

According to research presented in a new report, “Data Management for Business Intelligence,” 77% of Best-in-Class companies are able to automate the integration of data from multiple sources, compared to 54% of Industry Average companies, and only 22% of Laggards. This capability was identified by respondents as being critical for solving the top business pressure — the need to reduce the time-to-information for non-technical end-users.

Best-in-Class companies are making investments in technology enablers to alleviate this pressure. 82% of Best-in-Class companies are currently utilizing data warehousing software solutions, versus 56% of all other respondents. 80% of Best-in-Class companies are currently deploying Business Intelligence query and reporting tools, versus 47% of all other respondents. Finally, 68% of Best-in-Class companies are currently implementing data warehouse appliance technology (packaged hardware and software solutions) versus only half that number (34%) of all other respondents.

From Fox Business-

Teradata Corporation, the leader in enterprise data warehousing, announced today that it was selected by Caterpillar, the world’s leading manufacturer of construction and mining equipment, diesel and natural gas engines and industrial gas turbines, to supply licensed software applications and enterprise data warehouse services to support Caterpillar’s global rollout of SAP, a program supporting business information management.

Caterpillar purchased Teradata’s market-leading analytical software running on a LINUX-based three-node 5500H server, plus an additional hot standby node and six terabytes of storage capacity.

Bitam is set to showcase Bitam G6, the next gen BI tools. Here’s more info at Fox Business.

Last month, Bitam announced the release of its latest version of Enterprise Performance Management (EPM: 4.40, -0.15, -3.29%) solutions, Bitam G6. On Thursday, April 10, 2008, Bitam is hosting a live Webinar to demonstrate how companies of any size can use Bitam G6 to significantly improve their business performance. Bitam’s sixth generation of applications for EPM enables users to reach new levels of control, accuracy and flexibility in their decision making process and achieve success with greater confidence.

We will show how early adopters of Bitam G6 have captured the power of their data, aligned their metrics with corporate strategy, and optimized performance,” said David Abdo, CEO of Bitam. “Simple user interfaces allow workers at all levels to create dashboards of graphically-rich operational information, measure key performance indicators (KPIs), align strategies to corporate objectives, and drill down into data for more detailed analysis — freeing IT staff to work on other projects.”

To register for this free Webinar, visit http://www.bitam.com. The event will also be held live in Monterrey, Mexico on Thursday, April 10th at 10:15 a.m. (EDT).