The Business Intelligence Blog

Satish Dharmaraj, former founder and CEO of Zimbra talks about the trends he is looking at in his role at Redpoint Ventures, a Silicon Valley venture firm.

There are two areas Redpoint is looking at for cloud computing and virtualization.

Taking applications that used to run behind firewall and moving them to the cloud. This as a big trend for SMB and emerging for enterprise-class applications. SMBs are enjoying this trend now because they don’t have large IT departments already in place. In some cases, Redpoint also thinks that large enterprises will adopt these. It gives them more freedom of choice.

The second thing Redpoint is looking at is where large enterprises have data centers that are becoming a private cloud, and running vendor software on your own infrastructure that has been packaged for virtualization footprint. The new data center is an on-demand set of services that supports elastic computing. In the future, there will be similar advantages the public cloud offers, but for internal departments. They will be able to order computing services with a Web form and expect their delivery in hours, rather than weeks or months. With this will come applications for billing, provisioning and configuration management. Redpoint ahs invested in one company already in this space, VMOps, which is considered a IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) company.

Additionally, there is a big trend in service providers with Web hosting operations (like 1&1 and Savvis). They are finding that they can cut costs by 1/10th by moving dedicated server business to virtual server business. Most of dedicated servers are running at 10% of the time and it makes sense for them – and for their customers – to reduce the data center footprint and cost infrastructure.

Short and Interesting Post by Jason Busch -

There are a few reasons why the nirvana of BI supplier and supply chain visibility is most certainly a noble objective, but one that is unlikely to ever fully take hold outside of a few very expensive, highly customized implementations. For one, BI tools (especially those we think of, which are tied to an underlying data warehouse) mimic the inflexible characteristics of the ERP systems, which generate the data that we need to analyze. In other words, once you “pour the enterprise-data concrete” so to speak, such systems become rigid and unbending and make it difficult to rapidly adopt new data sources into an analysis. Perhaps there’s a new third-party data enrichment that you want to add (one not supported or resold by your BI vendor), or maybe you’ve acquired a new facility from a supplier that is running a different ERP environment. Good luck rapidly adding these new data sources into any BI model.

From BEye Networ article on Knowledge Management/Business Intelligence –

If you’re a KM or BI champion looking for ways to boost your discipline’s visibility, take a cue from the communication masters: politicians. Campaign platforms are based on three principles: clarity, consistency and frequency. Every stump speech, every sound bite, every public conversation is rigorously “on message,” and yours should be too.

There’s usually a flabby communication strategy behind any really good idea that doesn’t quite get off the ground. KM and BI evangelists often focus so intently on the business case that they fizzle out on the “hearts and minds” part; namely, communicating with key constituents before, during and after the launch.

And which are the key constituencies for knowledge management and business intelligence? In the government, you must address at least the principal users of the tools, the funders of your initiative and those who will benefit from it.

From Press Release -

Forrester evaluated the top nine predictive analytics and data mining (PA/DM) solution vendors across 53 criteria, segmenting them into the three categories including current offering, product strategy, and market presence. As a leader offering “mature, high-performance, scalable, flexible, and robust PA/DM solutions,” Portrait received the 3rd highest score for Product Strategy & the 6th highest score for Current Offering.”

Among the vendor products the Forrester(TM) Wave evaluated were Portrait Customer Analytics, Portrait Uplift Optimizer, and Portrait Self-service Analytics. According to the Forrester(TM) Wave, “Portrait provides a user-friendly, feature-rich PA/DM solution portfolio in support of real-time scoring, interaction optimization, uplift optimization, and campaign management for customer analytics.”

“Powerful customer analytics have always been the core driver of Portrait’s innovative marketing solutions, but analytics itself only takes you so far,” said Luke McKeever, CEO, Portrait Software. “Portrait’s ability to not only incorporate analytics but to action the insights they deliver enables us to provide our customers with highly intelligent solutions that help them operate as a customer-centric organization, differentiating them from their competitors while simultaneously improving their marketing ROI.”

From the Press Release:

WiseWindow, developer of Mass Opinion Business Intelligence, the next generation of web measurement, today announced that company founder and chief technology officer, Rajiv Dulepet, has been named advisor and architect for a new project funded by the National Institute of Health and executed by Caltech. The open-source project will develop a web-based bio-computational tool that allows bio-scientists and bio-computation engineers to “crunch data in the cloud” for large-scale tasks such as processing gene sequence data sets on a large cluster of computers. The new tool allows scientists to save considerable time that’s now spent waiting for computations on their desktops by moving these operations to the cloud, thereby freeing up their computers for other work.

“Working as a lead advisor to Caltech on cloud computing is both a privilege and passion for me,” said Dulepet. “It allows me to exercise skills in Internet data gathering and analysis as well as computational framework development.”

The Ness Technologies Market Pulse Study of top level business and IT executives at companies with over $500 million in revenues was conducted in the fourth quarter of 2009. Among the major findings are:

– BI initiatives are being driven by the ability to have better
transparency into company data for business planning and decision-making
(54%), a desire for more insight into the business to keep up with rapid
change (43%), and real-time analysis capabilities (43%).

– Although companies feel they have adequate access to planning
data (73%) and financial data (61%), they are less comfortable about
their access to customer data (53%) and market trend data (52%).

– The top four BI pain points are all centered on data: data silos
(47%), data integration (35%), mapping data (31%), and data
cleansing/modeling (31%).

– More than half of respondents report that results achieved are
lagging expected outcomes in 14 of 16 potential outcome categories. The
largest gaps are in business agility, data integration, and new revenue
opportunities.

What contributes to BI success?
The survey uncovered actions companies can take to increase the effectiveness of their BI programs. Alignment with business strategy and good organizational communications are strong indicators of success for BI initiatives.

“Although the benefits of BI have been elusive to many organizations, there are steps that can be taken to move the needle on your BI program from expected to achieved outcomes,” continued Scott. “Managing data integration more effectively and ensuring alignment across the company or business unit can bring companies both operational and competitive advantage.”

More from the Press Release. And more.

This year’s MS BI conference takes place in New Orleans in conjunction with Tech·Ed 2010.

More from the site:

The co-location allows Microsoft to meet the needs of customers and partners looking to focus specifically on Business Intelligence while also significantly increasing the opportunity to learn about this critical technology for all Tech·Ed attendees.

While these are separate conferences, BI Conference attendees will be exposed to additional networking opportunities with customers and partners as part of Tech·Ed, and will also have access to the Tech·Ed Keynote, Pre-Conference Seminars, more Hands-on Labs, onsite Certification Testing as well as a larger Expo showcasing more Microsoft demo stations, Exhibitors and Sponsors.

More on Microsoft BI. Follow them on Twitter.

Microsoft has made much of the self-service Business Intelligence and integration with Office. In order to make best use of the BI features it is definitely worth upgrading to Office 2010, released to beta last week. A beta version is available for download here. Excel 2010 allows much better slicing and dicing of data, and through the SQL Server PowerPivot add-in for Excel that was known as Gemini, users can investigate data to reveal the information hidden therein.

The Report Builder is also much improved and looks much more like one of the Office 2010 family. It has become much easier to split out various components of a report: If you have a grid, a map and a logo in a report, these can be copied to a Report Part Gallery, effectively a library of elements that can be used time and time again.

A look at SQL Serrver 2008 R2 Preview.

There’s been a general outcry lately about how vendor marketing organizations are abusing the cloud by force-fitting many new and existing products into the cloud computing mold.

Still, some cloud-like things actually do fit without the aid of a crow bar. A case in point is IBM’s Smart Analytics Cloud.

The Smart Analytics Cloud is a solution set and reference model based on an IBM-internal Business Intelligence (BI) project code-named Blue Insight, which IBM claims to be the largest private cloud built to date. Blue insight has allowed IBM to eliminate multiple BI systems that were all performing essentially the same extract-transform-load (ETL) processes for different user groups.

More here…

A good starter video for someone who is completely unaware of what BI is all about.