The Business Intelligence Blog

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.”

From the Press Release -

Informatica Corporation (Nasdaq: INFA), the leading independent provider of data integration software, today announced that SmartStream Technologies, a leading provider of software to the financial services industry, is OEMing the Informatica PowerCenter data integration platform as part of its flagship Transaction Lifecycle Management (TLM) solutions.

In making Informatica PowerCenter the foundation of its SmartStream TLM Business Integration (TLM BI) offering, SmartStream is empowering those customers with complex data environments to accelerate the return on investment of their TLM deployments through the high-performance and cost-effective integration of data involved in transaction cycles.

“The increasing drive to streamline global banking practices means our software needs to manage highly complex and rapid transactions across platforms and different banks. By using Informatica, rather than continually creating bespoke data interfaces, we can enable a faster ROI while freeing our professional services teams to provide more value to customers,” said Neil
Vernon, head of SmartStream’s Product Management Group. “We selected Informatica to power TLM BI following an evaluation where they scored highest against our key criteria of usability, reusability and performance. In addition, it was critical that TLM BI have the focus and support of a recognized best-of-breed vendor such as Informatica.”

From Aptech Press Release -

There’s a fine line between having the right information you need to make hotel budgets and solid business decisions, and being confronted by so much data that it paralyzes thinking. For numbers-driven hotel companies, information should be king. But today it is too often the opposite, arriving as a stack of spreadsheets that managers must carefully review and analyze to see how their organization is performing–or was a week or more ago.

Business Intelligence (BI) applications solved this problem and are now widely used throughout the hospitality industry. A true BI system consolidates information from financial and non-financial sources such as multiple property management systems and financial planning software, Smith Travel Research (STR), guest satisfaction scoring, payroll and other systems and delivers an analysis that enables users to identify the reasons behind the numbers that affect how their hotel management business is performing. Today, over 20 hotel management companies and ownership groups with over 2,500 total properties use Aptech’s BI solutions to automate, analyze and deliver forecasting and performance information.

To make business intelligence data more accessible and the systems easer to use, hospitality BI leader Aptech Computer Systems, which utilizes the Cognos database engine, is rolling out a new version of its Execuvue Business Intelligence System based on the latest Cognos 8.3 technology that provides a much wider scope of data delivery options and formats. The new Execuvue BI platform ‘humanizes hotel software’ by making the system easier to use and enables a hotel company to customize its BI information output so each manager sees the data they need in the delivery format they can use best for faster and more profitable decisions.

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.

From the Press Release -

“With unicode, data agnostic and grid enabled computing functionality embedded in its technology Datactics can resolve complex data quality issues emerging as a result of the global nature of businesses. “Being an innovator in the data quality management arena, Datactics’ applications have evolved to incorporate sophisticated functionality that exceeds the requirements of traditional data cleansing,” says Sarah Bearder, Cofounder of Datactics. “Datactics can effectively manage product data in multiple languages and metrics distributed across various computing resources to increase global purchasing leverage and optimize supply chain operations. Foremost the deployment of grid enabled computing means organizations can now manage highly intensive data quality processes by simply adding in-house commodity computers to increase processing speed, which provides a cost effective means of gaining super computing power.”

One Petabyte of mixed relational and unstructure data. That’s neat.

More from the Sybase Press Release -

Sybase, Inc. (NYSE: SY), the largest enterprise software and services company exclusively focused on managing and mobilizing information, today announced that the Sybase® IQ analytics server has set a new Guinness World Record™ by powering the world’s largest data warehouse on a Sun™ SPARC® Enterprise M9000 server. This accomplishment was achieved using Sybase IQ, BMMsoft ServerSM and the Sun Microsystems® Data Warehouse Reference Architecture. This winning combination enables more data to be stored in less space, searched and analyzed in less time, while consuming 91 percent less energy and generating less heat and carbon dioxide than conventional solutions.

Powered by the category-leading column-oriented database Sybase IQ, the data warehouse is certified to support a record-breaking one petabyte of mixed relational and unstructured data—more than 34 times larger than the largest industry standard benchmark1 and twice the size of the largest commercial data warehouse known to date2. In total, the data warehouse contains six trillion rows of transactional data and more than 185 million content-searchable documents, such as emails, reports, spreadsheets and other multimedia objects.
..
..
Designed from the ground up as an analytics server, Sybase IQ produces its impressive results because of a unique architecture combining a column-oriented data structure with patented indexing and a scalable grid. Sybase IQ offers extraordinarily high performance at a lower cost than a traditional, row-oriented database. And, unlike traditional row-based data warehouses, the stored data in Sybase IQ is compressed by up to 70 percent of its input size, creating the most optimal and elegant analytics solutions.

“The results of this benchmark showcase Sybase IQ’s capabilities to handle real-world scenarios, querying vast amounts of data representing the transactions processed across the worldwide financial trading networks over multiple years.” said Francois Raab, president, InfoSizing, the consulting firm that oversaw the benchmarking of the record. “Sybase IQ has proven its production strength in handling the volume of multimedia documents representative of the electronic communication between half a million financial traders.”

Content ETL is designed to structure and industrialize the transfers and transformations between all content-repositories. Its features ensure full traceability of all movements.

Content ETL offers:
- connection to all the company’s content repositories
- graphic conception and planning of all document transfers
- documents and metadata transformation management
- delegation of transfer management to end-users

The software is using EntropySoft’s exclusive portfolio of bidirectional connectors to access the information system. Content ETL’s easy-to-use interface helps putting into end-users’ hands the planning and execution of the company’s document processes.

Inside Content ETL, two clients, Content ETL Studio and Content ETL Web, are implementing the software’s features. Content ETL Studio is for advanced users who want to graphically design and plan document processes. Content ETL Web is for all users to manage transfers on a day-to-day basis.

- From Press Release.

Unstructured data is pretty shabby(oxymoron). Very recently the ETL vendors like Informatica have started to take this into consideration. And here’s another one from EntropySoft.

Varolii Corporation today announced Varolii Predictive Analytics(TM), an on-demand service that helps organizations understand, analyze and strategically target more effective customer outreach for collections, customer service and loyalty programs. Varolii unveiled Predictive Analytics at Interaction ‘08, the company’s inaugural customer conference.

Combining client data with the behavioral insight gleaned from billions of Varolii-led customer interactions, Varolii Predictive Analytics helps companies identify who to contact, when to contact them, through what channel, using which treatment, and how frequently in order to generate the greatest response. This combined data offers much more than a simple success or failure measurement; it’s a complete record of customer interaction and response on an individual level. The application is designed to gain intelligence from these conversations and progressively “learn” to predict customer behavior.
..
..
At the highest level, Varolii Predictive Analytics can help companies analyze contact strategy options (e.g., automated communications, an in-house call center, outsourced agents, or a combination of them) and select which will work best to solve their specific needs. At a more tactical level, it can help decide such things as an appropriate collection strategy based on Varolii and customer history, including probability to pay, days delinquent, and other metrics for improved results.

Read more from the Press Release.

From EFY Times -

More than 800 organisations across Asia Pacific have adopted components of Oracle Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) and Business Intelligence (BI) software, said Oracle, to transform how they manage, interact with and utilise financial and operational information to drive insights into better business results.

Oracle Business Intelligence is a portfolio of technology and applications that provides end-to-end Enterprise Performance Management System, including performance management applications, BI applications, BI foundation and tools, and data warehousing.

You can check out the list of Top 100 Most Influential Technology Vendors for 2008 as anounced by the Aberdeen Group.

My takeaway was that the Top 4 vendors [Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and IBM] of this list are already biggies in the Business Intelligence world. And that’s another evidence that BI is the way to go in the coming years.