The Business Intelligence Blog

Some progress on the healthcare BI Apps. Read more from dBusiness News.

In the newly released benchmark report “Business Intelligence in Healthcare: Have Providers Found a Cure?,” Aberdeen Group, a Harte-Hanks Company , found that Best-in-Class organizations achieved a 15% increase in patient satisfaction scores through the use of Business Intelligence (BI) and analytical tools. This study collected data from nearly 100 healthcare providers and found that these organizations are increasingly deploying BI tools in the hospital in order to combat the challenges of rising healthcare costs and the pressing need to enhance patient care.

Prior Aberdeen research revealed that healthcare organizations have been hesitant to deploy analytical tools, lagging behind industry norms in both adoption and maturity of BI implementations. The challenge many hospitals face is making sense of a tangled web of disparate back-end data sources. Showing a lucid connection between analytical capability and enhanced quality of care is often a complicated task. Through the use of BI and analytical tools, healthcare organizations have been able to leverage financial and clinical data in order to better manage patient flow, streamline their operations, and deliver an elevated standard of patient care. Best-in-Class organizations have been able to achieve these performance improvements through an efficient combination of organizational capability and technology enablers such as HIS (Hospital Information Systems). Drawing on a solid foundation of organizational capability the Best-in-Class were able to drive an 11% reduction in overtime incurred, a stark contrast to all other organizations that experienced a 7% increase in overtime incurred.

From TMCNet -

Pentaho, the commercial open source alternative for business intelligence (BI), has announced the availability of a new Pentaho iPhone application, saying that it provides native iPhone web navigation of Pentaho BI content.

The integration was developed using the iUI project, currently hosted on Google Code. According to company officials, the new iPhone BI extension from Pentaho offers an intuitive way for business users to access and navigate business intelligence information.

“The demand to provide BI where business users operate has changed significantly as mobile devices like Apple iPhone have simplified business computing dramatically,” said Mark Smith, CEO & executive vice president of research at Ventana Research.

From ITP

The Oracle Business Indicators applications will take data from Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition Plus (OBIEE) and Oracle Business Intelligence Applications, Fusion Edition and push it to authorised iPhone users, allowing managers to receive alerts based on pre-defined parameters.

The applications are available from the Apple App Store, and are free to Oracle business intelligence customers. The application will provide data on business intelligence metrics in either graph or table form.

From InfoWeek’s blogpost by John Foley -

Open source software company SnapLogic has introduced a version of its data integration framework that’s tuned for Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN).com’s Elastic Compute Cloud, or EC2, Web service. It gives developers and IT departments the option of doing their data integration work in Amazon’s cloud rather than on their own servers.

Two-year-old SnapLogic’s framework consists of a design tool, metadata repository, server, and connector modules for Apache, Oracle (NSDQ: ORCL), Salesforce (NYSE: CRM), and other data sources. In May, the company released SnapLogic 2.0 as a VMware appliance. The framework is available free under the General Public License (v2) or via two subscription license options with various levels of support. InformationWeek profiled SnapLogic as our Startup Of The Week on May 31.

A blogpost on BI Vendors by Doug Henschen on Intelligent Enterprise -

In the “Advanced Analytics” camp, IDC’s stats show that Microsoft, SPSS and SAS were the fastest-growing vendors among the top five with 20.0%, 17.8% and 15.2% sales increases, respectively (see chart at left). Visual Numerics grew 9.3% and Teradata treaded water with 3.0% growth. Mind you, SAS and SPSS are in a league of their own with $440 million and $205 million in revenue, respectively, while all the others were in the Single-A, sub-$50 million ballpark.

SAS has plenty to crow about in IDC’s stats, so it has once again purchased rights to distribute an excerpt of the report as a free download. Unfortunately, this year’s excerpt only covers the top-five vendors in each category (last year’s excerpt covered 21 BI tools vendors and 13 analytics vendors). If you’re prepared to pay $3,500, you can purchase the complete “Worldwide Business Intelligence Tools 2007 Vendor Shares” report, which details sales among the top-15 vendors in BI in 2007 — a list that adds MicroStrategy, Information Builders, Actuate, QlikTech, Panorama Software, IBM (without Cognos), and TIBCO to the companies mentioned above.

From Business Week article -

Microsoft is buying Powerset, developer of what it hopes is a smarter way to search the Web. Powerset uses so-called “semantic Web” technology that brings up results based on an understanding of a word’s meaning and the context of its use. That’s in contrast to the method used by the major search engines, which work primarily by matching words in queries to those on Web pages. Microsoft announced the acquisition July 1 on a blog, saying it shares Powerset’s vision “to take search to the next level by adding understanding on the intent and meaning behind the words in searches and webpages.” News of Microsoft’s interest in Powerset was reported June 26 by industry blog VentureBeat. According to the article, Microsoft has offered more than $100 million to acquire the company. The purchase price was not disclosed.

The purchase could give Microsoft a big leg up in efforts to catch Google. Powerset and other semantic search engines outperform Google in some cases (BusinessWeek.com, 9/17/07). They respond particularly well when users want detailed answers to questions in specific subject categories for which there are a lot of Web pages with similar keywords, such as health or law. “Semantic search takes it to the third level,” says Eric Tilenius, an early investor in Powerset and Kango, which applies semantic search technology to travel.

From IT Web Article -

Business intelligence firm SAS is set to release a solution that enables companies to measure how their operations impact the environment – a tough sell for now but a step in the right direction, according to one analyst, says Inquirer.net.

SAS says its Sustainability Management solution allows end-users to measure business based on what it refers to as the “triple bottom line” of environmental, social and economic indicators.

SAS says its solution uses predefined “green” metrics from the Global Reporting Initiative, used by more than thousands of businesses to measure the environmental impact of their operations.

From Intelligent Enterprise -

In leveraging the new technologies, Jaspersoft has built a UI that runs in all the major browsers and uses a drag-and-drop approach to using business intelligence tools.

Users start with a list of domains, such as billing, inventory, sales, marketing or any other topic for analysis and reporting. Under each domain is a list of data items organized in a typical tree structure. After a user drags data items to the workspace on the right side of the UI and clicks “done,” the software automatically generates the SQL statements for querying data stores.

Once the queries have been generated, the retrieved data can be dragged onto a designer workspace for generating reports that can be saved in the Jaspersoft repository and then used in a variety of ways, such as in a PowerPoint presentation, Excel spreadsheet, a PDF document or email.

From Silicon Republic, an interesting article on the exponential growth of data -

CURRENTLY the amount of data worldwide is doubling every 11 months – by 2010 it will double every 11 hours.

Ireland stands in the direct path of this tidal wave of data, warns a senior executive with business intelligence (BI) giant SAS.

Dr John Brocklebank, director of analytic solutions at privately held software giant SAS Institute, believes Irish firms are ill-equipped to deal with this rapid growth in the world’s data.

He says the challenge for Irish companies is to capture and exploit the 1-2pc of data that is relevant to their decision-making processes and strategic objectives.

“We know that, on average, managers spend two hours a day looking for data and that more than half of this is useless to their decision-making process,” Brocklebank explains.

“Most frightening is that 42pc of managers say they accidentally use the wrong information to make a decision at least once a week. So never mind trying to deal with the data in its entirety; it needs to be made meaningful and accurate to support business decisions.

From Informatica Press Release, this is an important win for Informatica.

Informatica Corporation (NASDAQ: INFA), the leading independent provider of data integration software and services, today announced that it has been positioned by Gartner, Inc. in the leaders’ quadrant in the 2008 Magic Quadrant for Data Quality Tools report.

Ted Friedman and Andreas Bitterer, authors of the report state, “leaders in the market demonstrate strength across a complete range of data quality functionality, including profiling, parsing, standardization, matching, validation and enrichment. They exhibit a clear understanding and vision of where the market is headed, including recognition of noncustomer data quality issues and the delivery of enterprise-level data quality implementations. Leaders have an established market presence, significant size and a multinational presence.”

According to the report, “growth, innovation and volatility (via mergers and acquisitions) continue to shape the market for data quality tools. Investment on the part of buyers and vendors is increasing as organizations recognize the value of these tools in master data management and information governance initiatives.” The complete report, including the quadrant graphic, is available on the Informatica web site at http://www.informatica.com/dq_mq/.

From Press Release -

Kathleen Schaub, Vice President of Product Marketing for Intelligent Enterprise for Sybase, Inc., recently participated in an exclusive interview with Ron Powell and the Business Intelligence Network (www.BeyeNETWORK.com). In this interview, Schaub explains how Sybase IQ handles the most challenging data warehousing requirements, meeting the demand for advanced analytics and fast reporting, and delivering unsurpassed query performance at the lowest price/performance available.

“Sybase IQ allows customers to achieve analytic feats they never dreamed possible with ordinary data bases,” Kathleen Schaub, Vice President of Product Marketing for Intelligent Enterprise for Sybase, Inc. “Sybase IQ is well suited for organizations with extreme analytics requirements such as analytics service providers, financial services and insurance companies.”

“Sybase is very focused on high performance and the ability to query large amounts of data,” says Ron Powell, Cofounder and Editorial Director of the Business Intelligence Network. “With Sybase IQ’s unique indexing and column-based processing, Sybase customers receive faster results for mission-critical business intelligence, data warehouse and reporting solutions on any standard hardware and operating systems.”