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.”

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.

Tableau Software today announced that Tableau was named as a gold medal winner of the “2009 Editors’ Best Awards” in the Business Intelligence and Reporting Tool by Penton Media’s SQL Server Magazine.

Tableau’s BI suite brings dashboards and data visualization to organizations of all sizes. Award-winning Tableau Desktop lets people create interactive reports, dashboards and visualizations using an easy drag & drop interface. Tableau Server, also an award winner, is a complete web-based business intelligence solution.

“Our win as Best Business Intelligence tool is attributable to the fact that we are invading an industry dominated by complicated, expensive solutions and providing a fun, rapid-fire alternative,” said Christian Chabot, Tableau’s CEO and co-founder. “Now more than ever, companies need rapid access to business analytics. At the same time, few can afford traditional business intelligence platforms with high fees, complicated architectures and long roll-outs. Customers tell us that Tableau is a new kind of BI – rapid-fire BI – that gives people of all skill levels the power to build and share data visualizations and fast analytics in just minutes.”

Ventana Research today introduces its 2009 Value Index for Business Intelligence, the second of a new category of quantified, research-based Indexes. This new Value Index provides research-based metrics that will enable organizations to ascertain the value to them of existing and future business intelligence technologies, systems and tools for business and IT in a simple and easy-to-use manner. Using the Value Index, businesses will be able to meet the challenge of evaluating vendors and their products and making choices based on an understanding of how well the offerings meet their needs.

The Value Index is the result of more than a decade of analysis of technology suppliers’ products. The methodology used to produce the Value Index for Business Intelligence evaluates in detail aspects of product functionality and suitability-to-task as well as the effectiveness of vendor support for the buying process and customer assurance. The Index represents the value offered by a vendor and its products, using both a clear and accessible graphic representation in thermometer form and a precise numerical index. Those technology vendors earning the highest Hot Vendor classification are those that Ventana Research certifies best represent buyer value based on a thorough evaluation and audit – that is, based on research and verifiable facts. The Value Index is not just a selection of “cool” products, and rather than merely representing a vendor on a four-quadrant chart, the Index provides a specific thermometer reading with a series of component metrics for a technology buyer to consider. Organizations can use the Value Index by determining their priorities and then consulting the Index to determine which vendors best meet those needs.

The 2009 Value Index for Business Intelligence indicates that the company delivering the highest value on an overall weighted evaluation basis is Information Builders, which earned the “Hot Vendor” rating, followed by IBM Cognos Software, Infor, Softscape and arcplan, all of which earned the “Warm” rating. Drilling down, the Value Index evaluation of product functionality using the Ventana Research Business Intelligence methodology identified (in order) Information Builders, Infor, IBM Cognos Software, Actuate, Symphony-Metreo, Microsoft and arcplan as Hot Vendors in this category.

From Ventana Research’s Press Release.

The cloud computing space is getting heated-up. VMWare’s latest major update to their existing ESX server will be an addition to the portfolio of cloud computing software.

VMware on April 21 launched vSphere 4, a major update to its ESX Server hypervisor, declaring it to be the first operating system specifically engineered for cloud computing. It is the first major upgrade to the product since 2006.

vSphere 4 amounts to a rebuild of VMware’s core virtualization platform. Fundamentally, it combines virtual resources in the data center into one centrally managed pool of computing power. It will be made available in the second quarter of 2009, the company said.

vSphere 4′s second purpose is to facilitate delivery of IT infrastructure as a service to enterprises, so IT departments can build their own private cloud systems to provide business services internally for the company and for trusted partners, supply chain participants and other business associates.

From eWeek’s article.

The Small Business Intelligence Summit (SBIS) will kick off the first of a nationwide series of events in Dallas, Texas on Thursday, May 14, with intensive sessions to help small businesses succeed in the current challenging economy. The events will allow existing and developing companies to connect and collaborate on solutions that support their business in today’s environment and well into the future.

The events will feature expert speakers, including sessions with:

– Chuck Wilsker, president and CEO of the Telework Coalition and co-
author of numerous articles, including “Unleashing the Hidden Productivity
of Your Small Business. Unified Communications: A Key Component of Your
Telework Program”
– Bob Burg, corporate speaker and author of “Endless Referrals: Network
Your Everyday Contacts Into Sales”
– Christopher Justice, CEO of Sparksight, a small business-marketing
agency
– Small and Mid-size Business experts from Avaya, a global leader in
communications technology.

From the Press Release. More from the official site – SBIS09.

SAP BusinessObjects Polestar Delivers the Value of BI to Everyone

With intuitive BI tools and increased support for customers using non-SAP applications, users gain better visibility into business information from across their organization–regardless of their skill level or IT system.

Business users within organizations of any size need simpler, more intuitive BI tools that allow them to quickly search, explore and retrieve business information.

With SAP BusinessObjects Polestar provided as part of SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI, now employees can use an easy-to-use keyword search to find information from any data source. This solution displays results like reports and easy-to-read dashboards, automatically creating visual representations of data, such as charts and graphs.

SAP BusinessObjects Polestar has intuitive data exploration and visualization capabilities that let users drill down into a particular topic, like sales by region, by simply clicking on the report, data set or dashboard. No prior BI training or IT expertise is required.

From PR Newswire

ARRIS (Nasdaq: ARRS), a global video, data, voice and next-generation advertising technology supplier and OpenTV Corp. (Nasdaq: OPTV), a leading software and technology provider of advanced digital television and advertising solutions, announced that they will present a joint demonstration of their next generation linear television ad platform at the upcoming NCTA Cable Show, April 1-3 in Washington, D.C. The collaboration is designed to make TV advertising more relevant, accountable and dynamic and revolutionizes traditional ad insertion technologies.

From Press Release.

The “Microsoft SMB Insight Report” reflects the insight of Small Business Specialists from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, France and Brazil. The following are some of Microsoft’s key findings on the technologies most likely to drive growth and profitability for SMBs in 2009:

— Fifty percent of the surveyed Small Business Specialists identified virtualization or IT consolidation through a small or midsize server as the technology most likely to reduce operating costs.
— The Small Business Specialists expect a 20 percentage point increase this year in the number of SMBs that use software as a service.
— More than 50 percent of the Small Business Specialists considered customer relationship management (CRM: 34.05, 0, 0%), virtualization or IT consolidation through a small or midsize server as the best investment for maximizing business growth in a down economy.
— Nearly 40 percent expect an increased interest in business intelligence and identified it as a critical tool for helping improve a customer’s experience and increase loyalty.
— More than half of the surveyed Small Business Specialists anticipate an increase in the number of SMB remote workers, and nearly 60 percent expect that the shift to more remote workers also will lead to bigger roles and more responsibilities for those individuals working remotely.

The key here is the increased interest in business intelligence which I think makes total sense given the state of business. From the PRNewswire[Fox]

The challenging economic climate has caused many organizations to take a closer look at their IT strategies in an effort to reduce costs while still maintaining quality. One particular emerging area that is being reevaluated because of its significant licensing, maintenance and specialized support cost is that of business intelligence platforms.

The release of Microsoft SQL Server 2008, with enhanced business intelligence features, has provided Innovative Architects, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner located in Duluth, GA, with several clients ready to migrate from various competing platforms solely to SQL Server. Innovative Architects has developed proprietary conversion accelerators that provide software automation for converting from other competing point products to the Microsoft BI platform. Innovative Architects’s BI conversion accelerators can reduce the time and cost of replatforming by as much as 50%.

“Our clients rarely use the sophisticated modeling features that they are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for and, ultimately, ‘export to Excel’ to actually perform much of their data analysis. When we demonstrate the full capabilities for information insight that the combination of SQL Server 2008 and Excel 2007 can provide, our clients have been amazed,” said Tony Baldwin, Director of Enterprise Solutions at Innovative Architects.

More from PRNewsWire