The Business Intelligence Blog

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 Internet News, an article on how Web 2.0 is not the only new kid on the block.

“BI is getting bigger, growing from a departmental solution or application to an enterprise resource, so it needs an infrastructure that can support thousands or tens of thousands of users, not hundreds,” Microstrategy vice president of products Mark LaRow told InternetNews.com.

The traditional method of building reports on request consumes a lot of resources, and an IT department would have to build more than a million designs to cover a modest data warehouse, according to LaRow.

Now, IT designs “a small number of reports — maybe 1,000,” and users can take one report, click on different rows and columns to drill down, LaRow said.

He said they can surf the data they want, adding the data they need dynamically and either saving their version of the report or using it online.

For example, one of Microstrategy’s customers, the Loews (NASDAQ: LTR) hardware retail store chain, has 94,000 reports anyone can use. Only 3,000 were “explicitly designed by IT,” and the rest are variations of those with additional data added by users, LaRow said, adding that some of the derivative reports are “much larger than the originals.”

None of these approaches is fast enough for Terry Cunningham, the founder of Crystal Decisions, which sold the Crystal Reports BI tool. He is often considered the father of business intelligence.

BI is “evolving into what we call continuous BI; it never rests,” Cunningham told InternetNews.com. “Things need to be understood, and decisions need to be made in real time,” he explained. “There’s no such thing as ‘I’m going to run the report tomorrow and see how we did today.’”

A must read article for BI entusiasts on the recent consolidation of the BI industry. Well researched and informative article by Stuart Lauchlan, MyCustomer.com.

Still, it’s encouraging that the BI market is still showing signs of life after a period of considerable turmoil and consolidation over the past two years with IBM, Oracle and SAP swallowing up Business Objects, Cognos and Hyperion Solutions. Since March 2007, the three enterprise giants have dished out $15 billion to bolster their BI credentials. Oracle offered $S3.3 billion for Hyperion, SAP pitched $6.8 billion for Business Objects while picking up Cognos cost IBM $5 billion.

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Another development is the blurring of boundaries as BI starts to encroach on other technology areas. For example, Forrester Research cites the merging of BI and search technologies to provide business people with better context and information to make daily decisions. “As search and BI get ever closer, the lines could eventually blur to the point of simply going away,” said Forrester in its ‘Search + BI = Unified Information Access’ report. “This will help bridge the artificial system boundaries between structured data and unstructured content. It will not only affect the interfaces we use to search for, discover, analyse, and report on what we need to know, but help us learn more about what we don’t know.”

This is one of the immediate advantages of convergence between BI and search - the ability to discover things you didn’t know you didn’t know. Forrester noted: “As search gets more powerful and begins to understand the meaning behind unstructured text, entity extraction and other linguistic analysis methods will be able to be used to reveal unforeseen and highly illuminating connections among documents or between documents and data.”

From Fin Express

The $1.1-billion company, that was acquired by IBM in January 2008, has currently about $4 million revenue from Indian operations. The company plans to take it to $40 million by next year and $45 million by 2012.

Joyer Mascarenhas, AVP, APAC professional services, Cognos, said, “India is an important geography for us and we are looking at more than 150% growth by next year. Most of our revenues come from enterprise and SMEs.”

I had a chance to watch a Cognos 8.3 demo for evaluvation purposes. The Cognos Team had created a prototype cube for the demo. Having worked with Cognos for nearly 4 years at my previous assignment, this version of Cognos was completely new to me.

The version that I worked before Cognos EP Series 7. The latest version is Cognos 8.3 and there has been fundamanetal changes made to the UI as well as the architecture.

Here are some of the key improvements that I think are striking

- Metadata management has improved significantly. Instead of metadata being stored as a file, like the previous version(catalogs), they are now stored in the database, just like how Informatica stores them.

I wish Business Objects would also make metadata management as seamless as Cognos. File based metadata management will hit the file size limitations and then they cannot grow anymore.

- The client application’s UI has become simple and helps in faster authoring of reports.

- Their web interface is very intutive. With drill down/up capabilities, enterprises can now have business analysts do adhoc queries on the fly.

- Good integration of all the different tools into one big tool. Cognos used to have Impromptu, Powerplay and host of other tools. Now they all work as one Cognos tool. This could potentially make their prices high but it could help the enterprises with one BI tool solution and could also reduce licensing costs from various tools.

- Though I didn’t dig too much into their scorecarding tools, scorecard portlets is a cool concept.

Looks like Cognos 8.4 is at Beta and is expected to hit the markets soon.

Business Intelligence goes mobile with IBM planning to offer Cognos over Blackberry devices.

The Cognos program, which sells at a list price of $300 per user, allows customers to view real-time analytics on the state of their business on their BlackBerrys.

The computing giant has also introduced programs that allow BlackBerry users to quickly locate and communicate with colleagues with expertise in specific business areas.

More from Reuters.

Its interesting that more and more sports associations are starting to use Business Intelligence software to analyze statistics. As Ian Ayres points out in his latest book, Super Crunchers, the competition between the traditional experts and number crunching softwares has ended. And number crunching softwares are being increasingly used by tranditional “intutional” experts to analyze the data better.

These are clearly the days of Data Mining Softwares. This one is about IBM Cognos. Read more -

“Our analysis of player performance is as complex and dynamic as the work of high-powered business analysts in Fortune 500 companies, and we need to use the same robust, flexible interface to achieve reliable results,” said Doyle Pryor, Assistant General Counsel of the MLBPA. “Conducting complex analysis in real-time allows us to improve our planning processes and IBM Cognos TM1 Executive Viewer enables the agents themselves to view reports and perform almost limitless ‘what-if’ scenarios for further analysis of the data.”

“The interface for analysis will provide sophisticated users with the tools they’re familiar with and the ability to quickly modify views and reports with as little effort as possible,” said Doug Barton, vice president, product marketing, Cognos, an IBM Company. “Users of IBM Cognos TM1 Executive Viewer continue to gravitate to its features that provide interactivity, immediacy, and flexibility, which, in turn, enable them to accelerate the management of their business’s performance.”

From Fox Business

Comparing a peer group of BI products reviewed in The BI Survey 7, the customer loyalty scores were as follows:

Overall Customer Loyalty Score
MicroStrategy .846
Cognos Reporting .725
Cognos Analysis .653
BusinessObjects .641
SAP BW .641
Oracle Hyperion Essbase .565

“It is a remarkable achievement that MicroStrategy was rated number one in customer loyalty for the fourth year in a row,” said Nigel Pendse, author of The BI Survey 7. “As in the past, the Survey found that well-known vendors with growth strategies based on acquisitions covering the entire BI spectrum have low, and in some cases declining, customer loyalty. MicroStrategy, with its single product architecture and organic growth, was at the top once again. The fact that no other product has achieved such high levels of consistency suggests that MicroStrategy’s customers are extremely loyal and see no alternative to the product.”

This is a great article on how Mohamad Ali, the man behind the $5bn IBM Cognos Deal that happened late last year, communicate the deal and also the next steps of integrating these two companies.

To do that, of course, he needs the help of the 4,000-plus Cognos employees. So on day one — a half-day presentation-cum-celebration welcoming the newcomers shortly after the deal closed Feb. 1 — he began communicating the plan as vigorously as possible. Other experienced integrators stage similar events, but few do them on IBM’s scale. For Cognos, based in Ottawa but operating multinationally, there were 20 day ones in quick succession around the world. Besides learning about their mission, the new employees all received ThinkPad laptops and even saw a video documentary about IBM, which George Clooney narrated. Engineered by IBM’s M&A communications team, day-one events have grown steadily more polished over IBM’s 95 acquisitions, including the 12 Ali has now led for information management

This was just a beginning and there was alot to be done. Read the complete story.

Not a suprising story for a BI professional but certainly very interesting read. Good to see BI spreading to all types of businesses.

Read the story at Computer World -

Valle says Papa Gino’s began considering BI tools about two years ago. Early last year, the chain chose the Cognos 8 product line and began installing the software.

Customer satisfaction levels improve, he says, if pizza buyers are given more accurate delivery times, even if the time window they’re given is longer — maybe 30 minutes as opposed to 20. He adds that Papa Gino’s could already tell from the point-of-sale system at a restaurant what time an individual order was received, when the customer was promised delivery, when the employee making the delivery left the store and when he or she returned. But before the BI tools became available, that information was stored in spreadsheets and was hard to access.

Papa Gino’s executives now use Cognos 8 to analyse the data and look for exceptions, both positive and negative, in an effort to improve delivery-time estimates. Valle says he thinks the analysis results will help show restaurant managers how to ensure that customer expectations are set correctly, and possibly how to speed up deliveries.