The Business Intelligence Blog

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.

Microsoft’s Advance08 - the advertising conference featuring James Cameroon & Bill Gates, starts today at Redmond.

The prime focus is on digital advertising and how the future of digital media will touch people’s life. This event is also looked forward as this will be Bill Gate’s one of his last public appearances as a full-time Microsoft employee.

The global advertising community’s most influential leaders have come together at advance08 to debate and discuss the factors affecting the future of advertising media:

How is new media reshaping the relationship between brands and consumers?
How do marketers work and communicate with their target audience?
Where is the future of media heading, and what does it look like?

Building on the successful format of SAS, advance08 focuses on the main themes that are reshaping the landscape of digital marketing. Learn more about these topics from prominent figures in the global advertising community, from Michael Eisner and James Cameron to visionary Bill Gates.

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.

In a data-rich world, businesses are inundated with information. Yet used strategically, it can guide decision making and boost performance. That’s why Business Intelligence is on every CIO’s must-have list for 2008 – and why you should attend the Gartner Business Intelligence Summit.

The Gartner BI Summit 2008 is happening next week(Apr 1-3, 2008) at Hyatt Regency Chicago.

The Agenda seems interesting with an impressive list of Keynote speakers like Ian Ayres of the Super Crunchers fame, Howard Dresner of the Performance Management Revolution, the concept that truly inspiring the BI world and the Co-Author of Balanced Scorecard concept, David P. Norton.

I’m looking forward to see the Keynote Videos. Will link them if there are available on the Gartner site. Read More >>

The Data Warehusing Institue’s World Conference is happening at Chicago from May 11-16, 2008. For more information on registrations, here. Here’s a PDF brochure.

I missed last year’s Microsoft’s Business Intelligence Conference as I was on a vacation during the month of May. But this year, I wouldn’t want to miss it and hence I reserving my seat this time. Especially because its a must-go for Business Intelligence professionals and secondly its happening here at Seattle.

This is the 2nd Business Intelligence Conference conducted by Microsoft and it should be interesting to see their roll-out of new products.

From the Conference Microsite -

This exciting and informative conference will showcase Microsoft’s market-leading business intelligence (BI) products, solution expertise and customer successes. The event is designed to educate customers and partners on every aspect of Microsoft’s BI offering. You can also expect even more educational tracks and sessions by Microsoft product and industry experts, customer best practices sessions, the second-annual Microsoft BI Customer Awards presentation, hands-on labs, and much more!

Check out the last year’s Microsoft BI Conference.

BTW, The Gartner Business Intelligence Summit 2008 begins from today at Amsterdam, Netherlands.

The US version of this Gartner BI summit is scheduled for the month of April with a keynote from Ian Ayres, the author of the recent swashbuckling book, Super Crunchers. Will write a review about this book here, very soon.