BI Insight

Informatica Announces Data Integration Marketplace

Like Salesforce’s AppExchange for cloud computing, the idea behind the data integration marketplace is to enable its large community of developers and partners to share information and products such as mapplets, vertical solutions and connectors.

“This is a place where we can bring together the 52,000 developers in our community and allow them to showcase their wares,” said Tony Young, CIO at Informatica.

To ensure quality control, initially Informatica will be vetting what goes onto the marketplace to check code is viable. But once Marketplace is more established, it hopes to introduce certification programme and to adopt a peer review process with a start rating calibrating the success of the product and any documentation that goes with it.

“One of the unique things we’re doing is creating a marketplace for buyers to post what they want from sellers, such as a connection to an innocuous system that is not readily used by many people. People can go out and work on that for you,” said Young.

It is also an open platform and the products traded may not specifically be related to Informatica. The company is not aiming to make money from the venture, but hopes that creating an open platform for discussion among customers, partners and developers will provide useful feedback on future product directions and strategy.
The beta version is up and running now.

This BI Insight news item contains information from a recent press release by the company mentioned.

Systech’s expertise in Informatica covers a variety of databases and integration software enabling us to deliver Informatica solutions across different platforms.

View Systech’s Informatica Technology Practice

http://www.systechusa.com/informatica/

Healthcare IT is Transforming from Supporting Administrative Processes to Supporting Patient Care, Survey Says

Inadequate focus on reliable IT infrastructures will hobble healthcare organizations’ efforts to automate critical operations to improve patient care while cutting costs, according to a commissioned study of 102 U.S. healthcare IT professionals conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Stratus Technologies. Server Availability Trends in the Time of Electronic Health Records: What the Move to Paperless Medical Records Means for Server Reliability finds that, despite debate on the rate of growth or barriers to adoption, EHRs are growing and here to stay. This is transforming the role of IT — and the IT organization — from supporting administrative processes to supporting patient care.

Policy makers, patient advocates and healthcare companies themselves agree that electronic patient records and care management systems will improve treatment by reducing error rates and costly duplication. A focus on front-end applications and the handheld devices they run on, however, has overshadowed the server and network layers of the IT infrastructure, where the critical data processing and retrieval will occur, the study said. Without highly reliable server infrastructures, patient information systems are likely to perform poorly and lead to frustrated medical personnel, lower quality care and lost revenues.

Although healthcare IT professionals are aware of their needs at the server and network levels, they face scant financial and staff resources for meeting them. “Healthcare IT professionals face significant challenges in maintaining server availability,” according to the study’s findings. “And the impact on the delivery of care and operations of the hospital or physician practice were significant, ranging from overtaxed and disgruntled medical staff to delays in patient care. Availability has become an imperative, yet health care IT professionals struggle to meet the challenge,” the study said.

The survey recommends a three-pronged strategy for developing a durable, reliable server infrastructure:
• Assess your entire server portfolio and identify critical and key points of failure that impact care. Identify the function and the process role of each server and assign a rating to the impact of a failure.
• Develop a strategy for server availability around a solid set of tools that minimize the cost impact.
• Align with a vendor that understands health care’s requirements for availability. Sixty-eight percent of survey respondents felt that having a server vendor that understood the health care sector’s unique needs was a critically important factor to them.
“Between the focus on health care at the national level and the federal funds available, there may never be a better time for healthcare organizations to convert to electronic healthcare records,” said Karen Ramirez, Stratus healthcare sales executive. “They have a lot of anxiety about how to do it correctly and within their means. With the right combination of forethought, planning and product selection, healthcare IT can provide the reliability and performance that patient healthcare applications need to deliver cost savings and better quality care.”

This BI Insight news item contains information from a recent press release by the company mentioned.

Systech’s Healthcare Analytics solution helps integrate patient data across the enterprise and makes it available at the point-of-service to help providers improve customer service, reduce medical errors, improve productivity and enable patient-centric processes – the prerequisite for improving the care delivery process.

View various applications and benefits of Healthcare Analytics developed at Systech.

http://www.systechusa.com/healthcare-analytics/

Gartner Identifies Four Information Management Roles IT Departments Need to Remain Effective for 2010

Gartner, Inc. has identified four information-management roles that IT departments need to establish and recruit from outside the IT team in a major trend that will affect both IT and business.

“Over the next two years, business demand for IT-driven growth and innovation will outstrip the supply of qualified people to fulfill job roles and as result traditional IT tasks are moving outside the IT department,” said Debra Logan, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “The future of IT lies outside the IT department. Increasingly CIOs are coming from “the business” and “users” are taking control of their own information delivery infrastructure.” By the end of 2010, Gartner predicts that 40 percent of people who report into IT in a matrixed fashion or directly will have substantial business and non-IT experience.

Organizations need staff with different skills from the ones they were originally hired for. These are not IT people as organizations know them. “Staying relevant in this changing environment will require a new way of thinking about organizational models and staffing in IT projects,” added Ms Logan. The four job roles that IT will need to support within the business or within IT are:

Legal and IT Hybrids
Gartner predicts that 20 percent of Global 2000 companies will add the role of litigation support manager by 2010, up from less than 5 percent in 2005. Legal and IT hybrids create policies and schedules, help design and execute discovery exercises for regulators, and mediate between legal and IT departments. Organizations can fulfill the role by retraining security professionals in law or giving legal professionals some IT training.

“IT leaders with responsibility for information management have been in a stalemate for more than five years over what to do about legacy information, how long information should be kept, and what the legal precedent is for doing so,” said Ms Logan. “The lawyers won’t tell companies what to do, but they won’t listen to anyone but other lawyers. The records managers want to implement retention schedules as they did in the paper world, and IT departments just want someone to tell them what to do with all the e-mail that is bringing their exchange servers to their knees and all the personal folders clogging the storage devices.”

Digital Archivists
Digital archivists will be required to appraise arrange and preserve digital records for legal and regulatory purposes. Gartner expects around 15 percent of companies to add a digital-archivist role by 2012 compared with fewer than 1 percent in 2009. Suitable candidates can be found in library and information science (LIS) schools or existing employees nearing the end of their careers.

“Organizations typically have vast quantities of records, which require specialist expertise to access, appraise and preserve,” said Ms Logan. “This isn’t a job for conscientious users to perform if they have time; it requires training and expertise. If you have never heard of persistent uniform resource locators (PURLs), don’t know what PREservation Metadata: Implementation Strategies (PREMIS) is and are unaware that there are reasons why Portable Document Format (PDF) is not a suitable preservation format for e-mail, you need a digital curator.”

Business Information Managers
Twenty percent of business managers rated the information that they get from IT as poor, according to the Gartner Business Pulse survey conducted from June through August 2009*. “Information management has never been an explicit job role: IT manages the technology, business manages the domain, but who manages the information?” said Ms Logan. “Companies have allowed a huge gap to open up, and consequently, everyone has been the manager of their own information.”

There will be an increasing trend to combine business and information management expertise in a single role, carried out by a single person, rather than a “business and IT partnership” with two people, two hierarchies and two sets of reporting relationships. One company already taking this approach achieved all its objectives including a cost reduction for the department of 10 percent in the first year. Gartner expects 20 percent of companies to employ business information managers by 2013, compared with 5 percent in 2009.

Enterprise Information Architects
Within IT itself, enterprise information architects will be required to create taxonomies, document templates and data models. Gartner has observed several additional roles within the title of information architect, which has developed to include a mix of skills to enable both structured and unstructured content to be managed effectively. In some cases, the same person may fill more than one information architecture role, such as business-level information architect, data-integration architect, application-oriented information architect and content-oriented information architect. All these roles focus on adding structure and context to data so that the data can be leveraged to increase its value and maximise efficiency and reuse.

“Despite difficult economic conditions and disruptive technology, business and demographic trends, IT organizations have not changed their priorities or behaviors,” said Ms Logan. “If IT responds the way it always has, IT operations face obsolescence. The role of technology will now be to augment human contributions, rather than automate them. The only way to manage information better is to manage information better with people.”

This BI Insight news item contains information from a recent press release by the company mentioned.

Fordham University and IBM Launch Business Analytics Curriculum to Prepare Students for Careers

Fordham University and IBM are collaborating on a new business analytics curriculum to help prepare college students for careers in key industries such as energy and utilities, healthcare, education, transportation and public service that are expected to benefit from $1.8 trillion in global stimulus investments.

Businesses and governments are now driving transformation projects including smart grids that lower energy consumption, sensors that help reduce traffic congestion, electronic medical records for personalized healthcare and RFID tags that trace food and medicine for consumer safety. The digital infrastructures supporting these projects will generate enormous amounts of data requiring a skilled workforce to make sense of it in a meaningful way. For example, computing systems today are generating 15 petabytes of new information every day — eight times more than the combined information in all the libraries in the U.S.

In a recent IBM Global CIO Study, 83 percent of respondents identified business analytics — the ability to see patterns in vast amounts of data and extract actionable insights — as a top priority and a way in which they plan to enhance their competitiveness. As the adoption of business analytics grows within organizations, the need for analytics skills across all functions of a business rises as well.

“Analytics can vastly improve our lives and provide new job opportunities for college students entering the workforce,” said W. Raghupathi, Professor of Information Systems, Fordham University School of Business. “Fordham has a long history of collaboration with IBM that has brought innovative new skills to our curriculum to prepare students for future jobs. With this effort, Fordham is preparing students with marketable skills for a coming wave of jobs in healthcare, sustainability, and social services where analytics can be applied to everyday challenges.”

Fordham’s Schools of Business, which offers undergraduate and graduate programs in information and communication systems, is addressing the need with a first-of-its kind Business Analytics for Managers course based on IBM analytics technology. Beginning Spring 2010, students can register and get hands-on training in business intelligence, data analytics, data warehousing, data mining and online analytical processing (OLAP) techniques. Students will also learn managerial decision making and how analytics technology can improve the effectiveness of key business functions such as marketing, sales, finance, business development, human resources and manufacturing. Additional topics include:

Reporting: Students will become proficient at authoring, using and sharing any type of report — drawing on any data source — so they can present business analytics information in a consistent and easy-to-use way.

Analysis: Students will learn how to analyze and report against online analytical processing (OLAP) and dimensionally aware relational data sources. This will help them learn how to spot trends and see business issues from a variety of dimensions.

Score carding: Students will master the art of building easy-to-use scorecards to align teams and tactics with business strategy. They can communicate business goals company-wide and let people monitor performance against their targets.

Dashboards: Students will learn how to communicate complex information quickly using dashboards, which provide a single view of information that business professional, can use to make key decisions.

Business and governments alike are using the power of analytics to better manage the information explosion and make informed decisions to better serve customers and citizens.

This BI Insight news item contains information from a recent press release by the company mentioned.

Over the years Systech continues to develop skills, knowledge, work processes and technologies to effectively deliver BI solutions across the globe.

View Systech’s Training model and road to building leaders in BI

http://www.systechusa.com/training-model/

Kaleida Health Monitors Flu Cases with Oracle

Kaleida Health, the largest health care provider in Western New York, is monitoring daily cases of patients showing flu symptoms being treated across its five- hospital system with the help of business intelligence (BI) dashboard developed using Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition (Oracle BI Suite EE).

The dashboard enables a team of 35 at Kaleida Health including hospital presidents, Chief Nursing Officers, Chief of Emergency Medicine, Chief Medical Officer, and others, to understand trends related to patients with flu symptoms, and track trends related to staff with flu-like symptoms.

Additionally, the dashboard tracks how the trending information impacts staffing levels at its hospitals, and report the number of cases of patients with flu symptoms to the New York State Department of Health.

The Flu Monitoring Dashboard is updated automatically daily and replaces previously manual efforts by hospital staff to track patients showing flu-like symptoms from reports run daily.

Flu Monitoring Dashboard Part of Broad BI and Analytics System Deployed by Kaleida Health

Kaleida Health’s Flu Monitoring Dashboard highlights:

Current in-house patients with flu symptoms in aggregate, per hospital and as a percentage compared to the total number of in-house patients across Kaleida Health hospitals;

Graphs tracking trends of patient visits to Emergency Departments with flu symptoms at each of Kaleida Health’s hospitals;

In-house patient and outpatient with flu symptoms trends over the last 13 months; and,

Total number of Kaleida Health employees calling in sick with flu-like symptoms by day, by role and by hospital

The Flu Monitoring Dashboard, prototyped and developed within a week’s time in September 2009, is just one of over 25 executive dashboards available to Kaleida Health’s management team via the organization’s “Magellan” Balanced Scorecard system, which is powered by Oracle BI Suite EE.

Magellan helps Kaleida Health’s management team monitor metrics and Key Performance Indicators across five categories: Financial, Quality, Staffing, Operational, and Growth and Strategic.

In addition to offering executives an accurate overview of daily operations and finances, the system’s dashboards helps guide strategic decision-making from exploring expansion and development of new lines of business, to physician recruitment and staff retention, and beyond.

Oracle BI Suite EE runs on top of an Oracle Database-powered data warehouse that includes data from various systems running at Kaleida Health including financial, billing, payroll and clinical applications.

Buffalo, New York-based Kaleida Health went into production with Oracle BI Suite EE in August 2009.

Magellan will be rolled out to over 600 employees across Kaleida Health in 2010.

“With the flu season starting up in early September, we were able to pull together all of the necessary information on a single dashboard page in about a week’s time,” said Dan Gerena, Director of Business Intelligence and Corporate Analytics, Kaleida Health. “It’s a very different paradigm for reporting now with Oracle BI Suite EE. It was a very quick process in terms of building the Flu Monitoring Dashboard, getting new users up and running, educating them on what the metrics are, and showing them how to access the dashboard.”

This BI Insight news item contains information from a recent press release by the company mentioned.

Systech offers a number of innovative solutions based on Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition. Partnering with Oracle, Systech continues to help companies manage customer, workforce and financial information.

View Systech Solutions as a leader in the implementation of Oracle based Business Intelligence solutions

http://www.systechusa.com/oracle-bi/

Systech’s Healthcare Analytics solution helps integrate patient data across the enterprise and makes it available at the point-of-service to help providers improve customer service, reduce medical errors, improve productivity and enable patient-centric processes – the prerequisite for improving the care delivery process.

View various applications and benefits of Healthcare Analytics developed at Systech.

http://www.systechusa.com/healthcare-analytics/

Sunny Delight Leverages Trade Promotion Management to Strengthen Customer Profitability

Consumer Goods (CG) manufacturers rely heavily on trade funds to proactively shape demand, influence retailers and to collaborate on marketing programs that help drive consumer behavior. While the average shopper may not be aware of it, virtually every product placement, price reduction, and end cap has been funded by the manufacturer. For the average CG manufacturer, trade spending ranks second only to the cost of goods on the balance sheet and regardless of the recent recession trade spending has not decreased in most companies.

As a result, most consumer goods companies have implemented trade promotion management (TPM) solutions with the idea of improving trade spend, automating antiquated spreadsheets or creating a better planning and forecasting process. For Sunny Delight Beverages Co. (Sunny D), a leading producer of juice-based drinks in North America and Western Europe , it was all about customer profitability.

A Sunny New Direction

After spinning off from CG giant Proctor & Gamble, Sunny D suddenly found themselves a small fish in a big pond. As a new small-to-medium-sized business (SMB), it was imperative that Sunny D not only implement new technologies, but rather use them in a way that could exploit their position as a smaller CG manufacturer and help them to better compete with their much larger competitors.

The first step in the process for Sunny D was to integrate its TPM system with its broker’s network. In order to make this happen as quickly and as seamlessly as possible, Sunny D knew they needed to adopt the right trade promotion management solution – one that would tie into the broker network while improving synergies between TradeLync and Sunny D’s financial system. Sunny D also realized, like many other CG companies, that Excel spreadsheets were not the optimum way to communicate trade promotion and/or sales and reporting activities between the Company and its broker, Acosta. Consequently, and on the recommendation of Acosta who already uses MEI for trade promotion management, Sunny D began an intensive look at this TPM solution.

Customer Profitability Will Quench Your Thirst

After a fast implementation, Sunny D’s order management and ERP systems were feeding data to the new TPM application. However, they soon began to realize that there was a lot more to trade promotion management than improving and tracking overall trade spend, so they quickly shifted their overarching goal to improving customer profitability. If they could map revenue, trade promotions, cost of goods sold, logistics and any other variable customer-related costs to finance, they could also improve the overall efficiency and revenue of the Company. To do so, this model would require them to extend the use of the TPM solution throughout all of finance, product supply and logistics.

“By gaining small wins with the MEI trade system and then multiplying those wins on an enterprise-wide level, we could really drive change across the company,” commented Chris Miller, Sales Finance Manager. “We knew that combining various data and customer touch points would allow us to identify spend by customer and see how effective we are at driving specific financial contributions at the customer level.”

Managing cash is always a priority for SMBs and Sunny D is no exception. They needed to be specific when it came to incremental trade and be able to analyze which programs could be more profitable to the business. Miller stated, “When allocating incremental trade funding, we can analyze the data to determine the appropriate investment. We recently analyzed two very similar customers with slightly different profitability to determine why there was a delta. Using the MEI TPM suite across internal groups, we identified the difference in profitability was due to logistics; not necessarily in shipping costs, but in ‘lumper’ fees and late fees. After some discussions, the customer now picks up their orders saving both Sunny D and the customer a significant amount of budget. Being able to see trade spend and revenue per customer enabled the groups to perform an accurate analysis of the situation. This resulted in a win for Sunny D and the customer.”

The TPM solution helped in other ways too. For example, the Company sells to the Military though government approved distributors; consequently, they wouldn’t normally be able to track the end customer’s profitability. By leveraging the functionality of the MEI TPM solution, Sunny D is able to drill down and see how the distributors are loading their data, which – in turn – enables Miller to gain valuable insight into how the end user is buying the Company’s products.

Sunny D also uses the TPM solution to help analyze a company after an acquisition. During its recent acquisition of Veryfine, some of the product lines were considered unprofitable. However, using the MEI system, Sunny D was able to analyze the “spend per pack size” data and determine that trade spend was a lot more efficient than they initially realized. “The ability to see the details enables us to act faster to market conditions and make the best choices for the Company.”

Sunny D’s sales force is also using the TPM application. In fact, Miller stated they use contribution to maximize the efficient use of their customer’s trade funding by analyzing top-line revenue down to cost of goods sold. ”Our goal is to make our funds work as hard as possible to grow revenue for Sunny D and our retail partners.”

Since the implementation, Sunny D has seen a higher level of efficiencies across the board, and has enlisted the help of various departments to help strengthen profits. In fact, the trade promotion management application has already helped the company exceed initial goals for the implementation. Although Sunny D concentrates on customer profitability, they also reap the more standard rewards from trade promotion management technology including simplified budgeting, planning, accruals and volume- and spend forecasting. But it’s the smaller business mentality that Miller claims is the crux behind the Company’s successful use of its TPM technology. By fully utilizing all of the functionality of its TPM suite, Sunny D has successfully managed its business through a detailed view of customer profitability and by continuing to create wholesome beverages that meet the needs of their target audiences.

This BI Insight news item contains information from a recent press release by the company mentioned.

Systech provides cutting edge Cost Reduction and Profit Improvement solutions for Retail and CPG companies. Systech enables companies in uncovering hidden profit opportunities and in creating profitable revenue growth; quickly and easily.

View various applications and benefits of Profit Analytics developed at Systech.

http://www.systechusa.com/profit-analytics/

Systech Solutions’ CFO nominated for best CFO Awards in San Fernando Valley’s Business Journal

Ashish Parikh, Chief Financial Officer for Systech Solutions Inc. was nominated for the best CFO Award in San Fernando Valley Business Journal.

San Fernando Valley Business Journal recognized the region’s financial professionals for their outstanding performance as company’s financial stewards. This annual event also recognized the importance of financial executives in the region who positively impact the business community.

Click to see Ashish’s profile.

Systech Solutions Inc. was twice awarded the fastest growing company in the region by San Fernando Valley Business Journal previously in 2001 and 2006.

Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising Selects Talend and Smart i to Enhance Business Intelligence Capabilities

Talend today announced that the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising(FIDM), a private college dedicated to educating students for careers in fashion, graphics, interior design and entertainment industries, has chosen the

Smart i Appliance-powered by Talend Integration Suite’s Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) tool-to boost its business intelligence (BI) capabilities. The Smart i Appliance, collaboration between Talend, Key Information Systems, Systech Solutions and IBM, is a plug-and-play BI appliance based on IBM’s System I (AS/400) platform. Under the terms of the agreement, FIDM uses Talend’s transformation components-such as mapping, normalizing, sorting and aggregating-to cleanse, transform and load data into a new data warehouse.

“FIDM executives need to access up-to-date, reliable data from our systems to be able to make key business decisions,” said Roxanne Reynolds-Lair, chief information officer, FIDM. “Talend’s tool within the Smart i Appliance expedited our ETL processing, making it two to three times faster than before. This is a huge benefit for us, and it enables our team to retrieve accurate, timely reports that make a significant business impact.” FIDM’s previous ETL tool often experienced failed data transitions, proving it to be unreliable, leaving the organization’s CFO with day-old data and manual calculations. In addition, the support for the solution was lacking due to the vendor’s overseas location. When FIDM needed to expand its BI reporting functionality and make data processes more efficient, it turned to the Smart i Appliance, which includes Talend’s ETL tool running native on the IBM i. FIDM uses Talend to extract and load data as well as integrate all Talend jobs and control the overall data process flow. With Talend, FIDM’s BI reports are available much earlier, without any manual interface. In turn, updated information gathered through the system provides executives with accurate and timely reports, enabling them to make better informed business decisions.

“We are very excited to work with FIDM on its Smart i project. It truly leverages the benefits of Talend Integration Suite-an open, user-friendly solution that can make data processes more efficient for the leading fashion institution,” said Vincent Pineau, Talend’s vice president and general manager, Americas. “Organizations such as FIDM need consistent information in order to make strategic decisions. This is another example of how companies across any vertical industry can benefit from a scalable, cost-effective and enterprise-class data integration platform such as Talend.”

For implementation of the Smart i Appliance, FIDM relies on Systech Solutions, a business intelligence solutions provider and Talend partner. Systech, one of the leading U.S. professional services firms delivering customer-focused business intelligence solutions, entered a strategic partnership within the Talend

Alliance Program in early 2008. As a part of the agreement, Systech leverages Talend’s software to help develop and implement robust solutions for clients with extensive data integration needs.

Click learn more about Smart i

How Mobile Devices Change BI

The marriage of business intelligence to smartphones, mobile Internet devices (MIDs), netbooks, and other devices smaller than laptops will enable the industry to play an even greater role in how organizations handle their data. At the same time, however, mobilization of BI in general (and on small form factor devices in particular) raises key challenges and even forces a rethinking of precisely what BI is.

Mobilization to small devices changes BI in two ways: Sending large volumes of BI data to and from the field suggests that a broader range of employees are using BI, and these road warriors almost certainly have different job descriptions and responsibilities than the traditional “stationary” consumers of BI.

Although the democratization of BI benefits the enterprise, there is a contradictory reality in how this actually gets done. BI is data-intensive, but the mobile environment, even in the age of 3G and 4G networks, is based on scarce resources. Mobile networks pass data more slowly than corporate LANs. The spigot sporadically is turned off entirely. Even more significantly, smartphones, MIDs, and related devices have tiny screens. Throw in lower processing power and less memory than desktops and a world of challenges – and vendor opportunities – are born.

The importance of the trend even goes beyond the mobilization itself. Mobile devices serve as a conduit through which BI, in a general sense, more completely permeates the enterprise. “Research I conducted shows that companies both large and small are looking for ways to deliver BI and analytical functionality to more functions in their organizations and more roles in each function,” says Mike Lock, a research analyst for BI at the Aberdeen Group.

Santiago Becerra, the chairman of MeLLmo Inc., says that adjustments are necessary on three fronts: The user interface (i.e., the screen and how the user interacts with it), the backend infrastructure, and the connectivity between the two. MeLLmo offers a family of applications that bring BI to Apple’s iPhone.

The three are interrelated. For instance, data must be organized at the backend and sent in a manner that is optimal for devices’ limited horsepower, storage, and small display. This involves changes to every leg of the stool. Ways must be found to trim the transmission to the salient data. Because connectivity is not guaranteed, the system must be able to store necessary data and allow field forces to work offline and accomplish goals even in the absence of connectivity. New and creative ways must be found to display data and let users interact with it.

Mobile BI systems also must integrate with traditional functions found in mobile environments. For instance, the system must be designed to alert end users of updates through a variety of multimedia tools. In addition, mobilized employees are likely to be more action oriented and be dealing with issues that require immediate attention from different members inside and outside the organization, many of whom likely will be mobilized as well. Thus, there is a nascent tie between mobile BI and mobile unified communications.

Becerra says that the emphasis on action means that operational data that now often bypasses the BI platform must be routed through it. “In addition to delivering information, organizations are going to have to expand the system and create an interface for more operational BI for the rest of the organization,” he says. “This is a blurring a little bit of the traditional line between what is considered BI and what is reporting. Most of the information in companies ironically doesn’t flow through the BI system. The distribution of those reports typically is done in simple formats like .pdfs and Excel.”

Clearly, truly mobilizing BI involves far more fundamental changes than putting a new front-end on existing platforms. However, a complete change-out of existing systems – a “rip and replace” scenario – isn’t likely for those firms with substantial platforms in place. Conversely, it is important that companies just getting serious about BI plan their infrastructures with mobility in mind.

The bottom line is that the advent of small mobile devices is an important step in the evolution of BI, and incremental changes must be made to accommodate the new approach. “We are entering a whole new world,” Becerra says.

Healthcare Providers Expect IT to Improve Patient Care-Not Just Business, CompTIA Survey Finds

Healthcare providers realize that new technologies have to be adopted to improve their business, but the medical benefits of technology also are clearly in their sights, according to CompTIA’s Healthcare IT Market: Insights and Opportunities study.

The CompTIA study finds that 59 percent of healthcare providers are somewhat to very excited about the prospect of telemedicine and 79 percent are interested in portable tablet PCs for point-of-patient care. The survey, which was fielded during September 2009, included healthcare providers and IT firms that offer IT services to healthcare providers.

According to the study, three in four (74 percent) IT firms believe their healthcare clients are eager to incorporate new technologies into their practices and two in three (67 percent) believe that better care for patients is a major factor in their healthcare clients’ decision to adopt new technologies.

“As business owners, it comes as no surprise that healthcare providers are interested in the time savings and improved efficiencies offered by advanced IT,” said Tim Herbert, vice president of research, CompTIA. “However, among the study’s more significant findings is that both the healthcare and healthcare IT industries expect emerging technologies, such as electronic medical records, to better serve patients.”

Of the healthcare providers currently using electronic medical records (EMR) 82 percent cite better patient care as a major factor in their decision to adopt the technology. The other top factor, saving time/improving efficiency, rates almost identically at 83 percent. Fifty-seven percent of the healthcare providers using EMR say that compliance with regulations is a major factor in their adoption decision, 40 percent are motivated by cost savings and 37 percent are trying to keep pace with their competition.

CompTIA’s Healthcare IT Market: Insights and Opportunities study was conducted in two phases. Part one was conducted among a sample of 200 IT firms that do business in the healthcare market. Part two was conducted among a sample of 300 healthcare providers, including doctors, dentists, office managers and other healthcare practice staff. Both studies were fielded during September 2009. The full report will be available at no cost to CompTIA members. Go to the member area of CompTIA.org or contact research@comptia.org for more details.

Companies Maximize ERP by Integrating BI, Aberdeen Report Finds

The need to trim costs in these uncertain economic times is, in part, driving the adoption of enterprise resource planning (ERP) strategies. From managing financials and human resources to capital and inventory, ERP’s value has been tied to standardized business processes as well as information centralization.

The problem: ERP collects a mountain of data that often goes unanalyzed. To get the most from ERP, a new study from Aberdeen Group suggests integrating business intelligence into ERP deployments. As the report notes, “ERP investments can be increased dramatically through analysis of the consolidated data captured within and around the ERP system.”

Aberdeen’s study of 990 people looked at how companies achieved best-in-class performance by combining ERP and BI efforts. David Hatch and Cindy Jutras, co-authors of the Aberdeen study, used five key performance criteria to identify Best-in-Class companies value derived from combining ERP and BI. Such companies enjoyed:

• Operating costs reduced by 17 percent
• Administrative costs dropped by18 percent
• Staff reduction (12 full-time employee positions were eliminated or employees were deployed elsewhere)
• Closing monthly financials in less time (reduced to 3.7 days)

In contrast, for example, Industry Average companies cut operating costs by just 7 percent; Laggards actually saw their operating costs increase by 2 percent.

The analysts note how “Over the past three years, Aberdeen has watched as the need to reduce costs bubbled to the top as the primary business driver behind ERP strategies. Together with growth and customer service, these three [drivers] have dominated the pressures driving ERP implementation strategies.” ERP, they point out, “is often viewed as a necessary infrastructure.”

To bring “order to the potential chaos, perhaps the most significant of the extensions to ERP is business intelligence (BI). Think of it as a layer on top of or embedded within ERP and other applications which wind up being giant repositories of data.”

Hatch and Jutras warn enterprises not to think of BI and ERP as separate initiatives. In fact, ERP and BI projects have similar goals: “The top requirement of a BI deployment … coincides with the need to extract additional value from the relevant business data which is inherent to an ERP implementation. Improving the speed of access to this data is the key to transparency, visibility, and informed decision-making.”

What were the secrets of Best-in-Class companies in achieving their exceptional results? The report notes that to reduce costs and provide transparency through speed of access to business data, best-in-class companies “provide visibility across functions and departments pervasively across the enterprise, standardize business processes, and streamline and accelerate business processes.” Best-in-Class enterprises:

• Provide decision-makers the ability to drill down from summary data to transactions that form the fiscal and operational audit trail; 67 percent of Best-in-Class companies provide drill-down into fiscal and operational audit trails versus just 38% for Laggards
• Offer real-time visibility of all processes from quote to cash
• Use ROI estimates to justify ERP projects; ROI is designed to measure business value and measurement doesn’t stop after they have been achieved.
• Integrate business intelligence with other enterprise applications
• Provide self-service BI capabilities to stakeholders (so users are able to work with BI systems with a minimum of IT help)

“Companies that implement ERP solutions have two basic options when it comes to integrating BI capabilities”, states Hatch. “Our research has found that top performing companies are embedding BI within ERP solutions rather than deploying BI applications as separate implementations that ’sit on top’ of ERP systems.” Additional behaviors contribute to how Best-in-Class enterprises distinguish themselves. For example, they were more likely to standardize implementation of ERP across a potentially distributed enterprise (68 percent versus just 46 percent for Laggards). Best-in-Class companies have learned to maximize their use of ERP by using features familiar to them from their BI systems; they are more likely to use their ERP system to notify users in real time of exceptions occur (53 percent compared to just 33 percent of Average companies).

Based on its study, Aberdeen says its analysis of “Best-in-Class companies shows that a combination of capabilities are necessary to derive the most value from integrating and deploying BI within an ERP environment.”

The behavior of Best-in-Class companies is clearly paying off. Such companies “are achieving 100 percent (or greater) ROI faster than their peers, reaching this milestone on average within the first six months as opposed to timeframes that start at a year and go well beyond two years for Average and Laggard companies.”

The study advises all companies to take “an integrated approach to ERP and BI. Whether BI tools are currently embedded within your ERP solution, tightly integrated, bolted on after-the-fact, or non-existent, don’t treat ERP and BI as separate projects. Take the approach of using BI as a means to extract enhanced value from data within ERP (as well as other enterprise applications).”

Hatch and Jutras point out that “ERP can transform data into information but BI tools are required to complete the transformation from information to intelligence.”

Systech Solutions launches Digital Media Analytics

Systech Solutions launches Industry specific Digital Media Analytics that leverages Systech’s experience and expertise in the Digital Media Industry. The analytical platform for this solution is built upon customer’s BI environment and provides ever-changing data about a website’s traffic patterns, revenue, conversion rate and other user trends and provides in-depth analytics such as:

• Customer Segmentation
• Customer Attitudinal Analysis
• Ad Revenue Analysis
• Marketing Campaign Scorecard
• Promotion Response Analysis
• Customer Loyalty & Attrition
• Customer Lifetime Value Analysis
• Click stream Analysis
• Conversion Funnels
• Risk Management

Arun Gollapudi, CEO, Systech Solutions, Inc. explains, “Since the start of 2007, people who spent time online have increased 9 times. Are all their actions utilized and optimized by the organizations? How do we leverage Digital Media Analytics to make better business decisions and drive value? Systech’s R&D groups and client engagements have given us excellent test bed to explore deep analytics for each of the business models employed by websites today. These results were distilled to formulate Systech’s Digital Media Solutions.”

This new venture will provide strategic, in-depth custom analysis for a spectrum of businesses in Digital Media such as User Generated Media, Social media, Search Marketing, Online Advertising, Mobile Web, Widgets, E-mail, Online Video Websites, Web 2.0, E-Commerce and Online Banking.

IBM to Acquire SPSS Inc. to Provide Clients Predictive Analytics Capabilities

IBM and SPSS Inc. have entered into a definitive merger agreement for IBM to acquire SPSS, a publicly-held company headquartered in Chicago. This acquisition is expected to further expand IBM’s Information on Demand (IOD) software portfolio and business analytics capabilities, including the range of offerings available through IBM’s recently-announced Business Analytics and Optimization Consulting organization and network of Analytics Solution Centers. The acquisition is also expected to strengthen IBM’s Information Agenda initiative, which helps companies turn information into a strategic asset. As companies attempt to control costs and use resources more wisely, IDC estimates that the worldwide market for business analytics software will swell to $25 billion this year, growing 4% over 2008.

IBM is expanding its focus on business analytics technology and services to meet growing client needs to cut costs, reduce risk, and increase profitability through predictive analytics capabilities, which include advanced data capture, data mining and statistical analysis. These capabilities help organizations analyze trends and patterns found in historical and current data to drive new forms of competitive advantage by predicting potential future outcomes and optimizing all elements of their businesses, including product and service offerings for customers.

Oracle Buys GoldenGate Software

Adds Leading Real-Time Data Integration Solution to Create Comprehensive Heterogeneous Data Integration Platform

Oracle has agreed to acquire GoldenGate Software, Inc., a leading provider of real-time data integration solutions enabling superior IT performance and enterprise decision making. The addition of technology from GoldenGate extends Oracle’s capabilities with a heterogeneous real-time data integration solution and adds functionality to maintain uptime of business-critical applications during migrations and upgrades. The combination of GoldenGate and Oracle is expected to create a comprehensive heterogeneous data integration platform. Customers are expected to benefit from enhanced real-time data movement, replication and synchronization across heterogeneous systems enabling improved business intelligence, while providing high availability of business-critical applications. The transaction is subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals and is expected to close later this year.

Until the deal closes, each company will continue to operate independently. Financial details of the transaction were not disclosed. “The need to improve operating performance in a global 24×7 environment has led to the need for data integration to support real-time and high availability capabilities,” said Hasan Rizvi, senior vice president Oracle Fusion Middleware Product Development. “With the addition of GoldenGate, Oracle expects to help our customers achieve better performance through improved business intelligence and business continuity with real-time information.”

“Oracle and GoldenGate share a common vision to bring a comprehensive data integration solution to customers,” said Ali Kutay, GoldenGate Software, Inc. President & CEO. “Our partnership spans more than 10 years and now our joint vision can help companies make better decisions based on more timely, accurate information across multiple systems.”

Business Intelligence comes to the Kindle

Business Intelligence provider MicroStrategy announced that it will provide its business reports and dashboards on Amazon’s Kindle DX reader. While many thought the Kindle was just about reading novels, think again.

For those of you who don’t know anything about the Kindle, it’s a simple platform for downloading and reading books provided by Amazon. However, with applications like this beginning to appear, it’s now becoming a viable platform as well.

This makes sense for the business intelligence world since the ease-of-use of the Kindle, its built-in 3G connectivity, as well as its easy-to-read screen, makes it perfect for the executive on-the-go who needs business intelligence data delivered anywhere. The company already has an iPhone app to allow mobile access to reports and the dashboard, in case you were wondering.

What’s significant about this application, and others like it that will soon appear, is the marriage of the mobile world with business intelligence which has been a long time in coming. Indeed, this could mean a resurgence of interest in business intelligence as a tool that has much more power in a phone or a Kindle, than it does on a laptop screen.

Core to the issues with business intelligence has been ease-of-use and accessibility. Thus use of mobile platforms addresses those issues. Watch out for many more business intelligence applications to appear on mobile devices in the very near future.

RoamBi Brings Business Intelligence to the iPhone

Mobile BI solution combines iPhone App, SaaS and on-premise offerings. System integrates with SAP BusinessObjects and Salesforce.com.

With its large screen and simple navigation, the iPhone is well suited to delivering charts, graphs and other types of data visualizations. It’s no surprise, then, that several leading business intelligence (BI) software vendors – including Oracle, SAP BusinessObjects and Information Builders – have added the iPhone to their mobile device support lists. The problem, Santiago Becerra contends, is that many of these solutions attempt to shrink reports designed for desktops onto tiny screens.

“The shrink-to-fit approach results in a lot of scrolling up and down, left and right, and shrinking and zooming to try to find the right information,” says Becerra, chairman and co-founder of MeLLmo, which provides the new RoamBi mobile BI system, announced May 19. Combining an iPhone app, a SaaS-based publishing site and an on-premise edition for enterprise deployments, RoamBi is said to offer superior visualization and navigation on the iPhone and an easy way to convert existing reports for mobile delivery.

“Instead of trying to read reports from left to right and top to bottom, as if you’re trying to read a spreadsheet through a straw, RoamBi converts a flat, static report into an interactive mini-analytic application for the iPhone,” Becerra says.

The RoamBi iPhone application, which is available as a free download from the iPhone app store, provides tables, pie charts and other views formatted specifically for the iPhone. By visiting the RoamBi Publisher at www.roambi.com, users can upload Excel spreadsheets, HTML tables, CSV files and Salesforce.com reports and select the styles of visualizations desired. The basic publishing options are free, but MeLLmo says premium SaaS-based services, such as third-party content/development partner offerings, will be launched later this year.

RoamBi Enterprise edition delivers the mobile solution as on-premise software that includes a Web/Flex-based RoamBi Designer and a RoamBi Server. The product currently supports secure, role-specific publishing of data from SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence and SAP BusinessObjects Crystal Reports as well as Microsoft Excel files. RoamBi Enterprise costs $10,000 per server plus $100 per user.

MeLLmo put a lot of emphasis on simplifying report development, so the Designer is said to read and interpret data and metadata and re-create existing reports automatically.

“If the system required users to re-create thousands of reports, it wouldn’t work. So a key goal was to protect investments in existing BI systems,” Becerra explains.

For now, there’s a limit to the specific investments that RoamBi can protect in that it only supports SAP BusinessObjects and Salesforce.com as data sources (beyond standard file formats). Becerra declined to detail what other BI systems the company might support and when those integrations might become available. The company also declined to spell out when RoamBi might support other smartphone platforms such as the RIM BlackBerry.

If Becerra’s track record is any indication, RoamBi is destined for growth. The executive was a co-founder of both Infommersion, which was sold along with its Xcelsius application to BusinessObjects, and Graphical Information, which was sold along with its Balanced Scorecard product to Oracle.

In-Memory BI Upgrades Point to Mainstream User Adoption

Both the TIBCO Spotfire 3.0 upgrade and SAP BusinessObjects Explorer release take first-generation in-memory products to a broader base of users.

New integrations, new scalability options and new data visualization options promise to bring TIBCO Spotfire 3.0 to a broader base of potential business intelligence consumers. Announced and released May 18, the 3.0 launch marks the latest in a series of major upgrades since Spotfire’s acquisition by TIBCO nearly two years ago. And like last week’s SAP BusinessObjects Explorer release, the upgrade represents the maturation of a once-nichey in-memory product into a mainstream BI offering.

In contrast to conventional BI tools, which query data on disk, in-memory products load data into random access memory (RAM) so users can quickly query and interact with information without extensive IT performance tuning and data preparation. Spotfire was introduced in the late 1990s as a visual data exploration tool used almost entirely by pharmaceutical and life sciences researchers. As has been the case for other in-memory products, Spotfire’s power and breadth of appeal have increased with the advent of multi-core, multi-threaded and 64-bit server technologies. Since its acquisition by TIBCO in May 2007, Spotfire has been enhanced with operational and predictive analytics, real-time data integrations and data mining capabilities.

The TIBCO Spotfire 3.0 upgrades announced today include prebuilt data integrations to SAP BW, SAP R/3, Salesforce.com, Siebel eBusiness Applications and Oracle E-Business Suite, in addition to a new Web services integration option. These connectors not only make it easier to integrate popular data sources, they also open up new data access and analysis options.

“Until recently we’ve been limited to accessing data from relational data sources and file-based locations,” admits TIBCO Spotfire product marketing manager Tim Wormus. “With 3.0 we’re expanding to full enterprise connectivity, and you can also model the data so you can connect multiple sources to build a federated data warehouse or analytics layer.” With Spotfire’s caching support, Wormus says you can pull data from production systems and let users query against the caching layer rather than mission-critical production systems.

Designed to support larger, enterprisewide deployments, the scalability features in the 3.0 release include load balancing and failover support as well as new deployment management and administrative controls. The Web-based configuration controls ease remote administration while the deployment management features simplify migration from development, test and production servers.

New analytics and visualizations introduced in TIBCO Spotfire 3.0 include treemaps, new scatterplots and error bars within bar and line charts that let you see the data behind the visualization. An added visualization toolkit is said to make it easier to build custom visualizations. “This extends our lead in our core competency of visually interactive, real-time analytics,” Wormus says.

The TIBCO Spotfire 3.0 release comes less than a week after SAP announced SAP BusinessObjects Explorer, a new product that blends the Internet-search-like Polestar query interface with the in-memory analysis capabilities of SAP’s Business Warehouse Accelerator (BWA) appliance. Introduced in 2006 as the Business Intelligence Accelerator, the BWA appliance is another in-memory product headed for mainstream use. The accelerated version of Explorer introduced last week is limited to accessing data in SAP BW, but a “second-wave” upgrade set to be introduced late this year or early next year is expected to access myriad data sources.

QlikTech QlikView and IBM Cognos TM1 (formerly Applix TM1) are two other venerable in-memory products. Several leading BI vendors have either recently added (MicroStrategy) or plan to add (Microsoft) in-memory analysis capabilities. Leading in-memory products and benefits were recently covered in “Insight at the Speed of Thought: Taking Advantage of In-Memory Analytics,” an in-depth report available as a free download (registration required) at the Intelligent Enterprise “Next-Era BI Tech Center.”

IBM ‘System S’ Promises New Era of Stream Processing

‘Perpetual analytics’ touted as the dynamic, real-time future of forward-looking analysis.

High-end analytics offer the power to predict, but those predictions may be based on warehouse-resident data that is hours, days or even weeks old. Although complex event processing technologies eliminate the data latency problem, they’re most often deployed in very limited, industry-specific applications. Addressing these shortcomings and hoping to usher in a new era of real-time stream computing, IBM today unveiled today System S, a new platform designed to handle instantaneous analysis of hundreds or even thousands of high-volume data streams.

“We started from scratch and looked at the mathematics of the analytics, the programming language and the way in which applications are structured,” says Nagui Halim, the chief scientist behind System S. “The difference with System S is that the analytics are much more advanced and the applications are much more sophisticated in terms of what you can look at and how you express the programs.”

To be marketed under the product name InfoSphere Streams, System S is designed to support forward-looking “perpetual analytics” based on analysis of up to 6 gigabytes per second or 21,600 gigabytes per hour – the equivalent of all the Web pages on the Internet. What’s more, these analyses are continuously refined and dynamically react as data sources and underlying trends change.

“As the applications are processing, they can change how they operate,” Halim explains. “For example, as streams of data appear or disappear, we can introduce compensating actions and do [data] source selection on the fly. You can also send feedback to earlier parts of an application so it can dynamically tune how it processes the data.”

In development at IBM Research since 2003, System S is said to be both scalable ” from laptops to exotic supercomputers – and broadly applicable to industries such as manufacturing, retail, transportation, finance, and security and surveillance. The sweet spot for deployments will be on commodity clustered servers in the 10- to 50-blade range. The immediate focus will be on many of the same applications targeted by CEP vendors, including trade surveillance, fraud detection, market making and program trading applications at financial institutions.

Among the early beta customers of System S is TD Securities, which is said to be using the technology to ingest more than 5 million bits of trading data per microsecond to make faster financial trading decisions. Uppsala University and the Swedish Institute of Space Physics, meanwhile, are using System S to predict “space weather” such as solar winds that can have an impact on communications, energy transmission over power lines, airline and space travel, and satellites.

System S frees mathematicians to employ sophisticated analytic techniques such as micro clustering or support-vector machine analysis without proprietary restrictions, Halim says. And to allay fears that an entirely new platform might discourage would-be developers, IBM is making System S trial code available at no cost, and it will also offer developer tools, adapters and software for testing applications. The new development language, called Spade, is easy to pick up quickly, Halim says.

“We’ve worked with clients to help them learn the language, and we’ve found that within two to four weeks they can become productive,” Halim says. We haven’t found it to be a big barrier to entry because it employs familiar ways to express how the information is handled.”

IBM also announced today that it will open an IBM European Stream Computing Center in Dublin, Ireland, to provide customer support, testing and research capabilities for prospective European customers.

Oracle Extends Business Intelligence Applications Portfolio

Project Analytics and Loyalty Analytics apps round out the ERP- and CRM-integrated portfolio. Oracle stresses fast deployment and ongoing support.

Since acquiring Siebel in early 2006, Oracle has steadily built on that vendor’s collection of Siebel Analytics applications. With today’s 7.9.6 release of what are now called Oracle Business Intelligence Applications, the portfolio gains two more analytics apps as well as additional integrations and upgrades. With each app providing predefined ETL adapters, data warehouse schemas, and dashboards and reports, the appeal for many customers is fast-track deployment and ongoing support.

“These applications give you the technologies you need to pull information from Oracle and non-Oracle sources, do federated queries and present information in the right context,” says John O’Rourke, a vice president of marketing at Oracle. “At least 80 percent of what the customer needs is predefined, and they can then customize the dashboards and add links and metrics. The benefit is not only faster deployment but also lower ongoing cost of ownership, because we’re supporting the applications and keeping them in sync with transaction systems.”

The two new BI Applications are Project Analytics and Loyalty Analytics. The first is designed to help companies control project costs and performance by tracking budgets, forecasts, cost, revenue, billing, profitability, agreements, funding and project performance. The application is integrated with the project-management capabilities in Oracle E-Business Suite and PeopleSoft Enterprise. Government agencies, engineering and construction companies, and professional-services organizations are among the target customers.

The Loyalty Analytics application helps companies measure the effectiveness of customer and partner programs administered within the Siebel Loyalty Management application. “The analytic app lets you extract information out of transactional apps, summarize in a high-level dashboard and then drill down to understand underlying causes behind the trends,” O’Rourke says. “It’s a timely release, in that many companies are trying to maintain existing customers and win new customers in light of the economy.”

Release 7.9.6 also brings enhancements to Oracle’s existing Human Resources Analytics and Oracle Procurement and Spend Analytics applications. The HR app gains dashboards for talent management, learning management, recruiting, leave and absenteeism; the Procurement app now offers a Spend Analyzer and new employee expense and enhanced procurement dashboards.

Oracle says more than 2,000 customers use its BI Applications. Rivals including SAP BusinessObjects, IBM Cognos and SAS also offer analytic apps, though each with different levels of depth, breadth and support.

IBM Cognos Blueprints, for instance, provide frameworks that help you apply BI to a certain content area, “but they are not supported,” says AMR Research Analyst John Hagerty. “They are not standard products, and you’re on your own in terms of extending them and keeping them in sync with applications.”

SAP BusinessObjects is starting to build out analytic applications as part of its Enterprise Performance Management Framework, and that list includes Spend Analytics and Supply Chain Performance apps. “SAP doesn’t have the same breadth of applications that Oracle offers at this point,” Hagerty says.

SAS, in contrast, offers a range of “very deep and rich analytic applications in specific, industry-driven content areas,” Hagerty explains. Examples include drug discovery, warranty management and environmental impact management, and the apps offer ongoing support.

Meanwhile, observes Hagerty, “What Oracle is doing is more of a broad-brush approach, addressing the main content areas that ERP and CRM systems address.”

Integration with Oracle transactional applications is, indeed, a core appeal of the BI Apps. The 7.9.6 release includes a new integration between the Oracle Financial Analytics app and JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Financial Management. The release also updates existing integrations with Oracle E-Business Suite (11i10 and R12), PeopleSoft Enterprise 8.9 and 9.0, and Siebel CRM 8.0 and 8.1.1.

Adoption of the BI Apps has been highest among Oracle’s Siebel and Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition customers, so there’s room for growth across the rest of the application portfolio. “These applications can pull information from legacy apps and even SAP,” Hagerty says. “But practically speaking, the real value is very much geared to extending the Oracle suite of assets.”

Systechusa.com gets a facelift!

Systech is pleased to announce the launch of a new and improved website, http://www.systechusa.com/. We’ve spent months designing our corporate website so that we could become more of a resource to you, to our current and prospective clients and partners! Our intent is to keep this an active process of updating our portal constantly.

Our upgraded Web site is easy to navigate and easier than ever to find through search engines because of the way our information is presented and Systech’s search engine optimization capabilities.

The all new http://www.systechusa.com/ is filled with exciting new content that we believe and hope you will find it user-friendly and informative. So… what are you waiting for? Check it out!

Pi and Netezza Webinar: The Power of Item Profitability Analytics

April 2009 Pi Solutions and Netezza jointly sponsored a free web seminar focused on how true item-level profitability analytics could enable Retail and CPG companies to optimize revenues for the business by understanding and assessing their profits at the most granular level.

Ernie Levenson, VP of Operations at VTech, was the key speaker at this event. Ernie discussed how VTech used profitability analytics to improve their business. Ernie shared his insights on how to successfully implement and leverage these solutions. Pi Solutions provided a brief overview of their Pi Profit Analytics™ application, built to run on the Netezza platform. And, Netezza talked about its market-leading family of data warehouse appliances.

This webinar focused on how item-level profitability enables a company to:

• Make profitable decisions on product pricing, substitution and mix
• Manage customer relationships and make fact based decisions on pricing and discounting, order size, delivery arrangements and supply chain efficiencies
• Replace lowest price suppliers with lowest TCO suppliers
• Highlight new opportunities in the business and provide financial justifications for decisions
• Improve product development by providing product and merchandising managers information to optimize costs and maximize functionality

“The power of Item Profitability Analytics webinar” showcases how VTech was able to turn an unprofitable division to profitable one using profit analysis. It highlights how to leverage Pi Profit Analytics software and Netezza appliance to build the next generation profitability solution quickly and easily. The information in the webinar can be used by any company in increasing their own bottom line profitability through true profitability analysis. I would highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in improving their company’s profitability,” said Keshav Kuthiala, Vice President of Marketing Pi Solutions.

This event is recorded and is available on demand: The Power of Item Profitability Analytics

Oracle Buys Sun Microsystems

Apr 2009 Sun Microsystems and Oracle Corporation recently announced they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Oracle will acquire Sun common stock for $9.50 per share in cash. The transaction is valued at approximately $7.4 billion, or $5.6 billion net of Sun’s cash and debt.

“We expect this acquisition to be accretive to Oracle’s earnings by at least 15 cents on a non-GAAP basis in the first full year after closing. We estimate that the acquired business will contribute over $1.5 billion to Oracle’s non-GAAP operating profit in the first year, increasing to over $2 billion in the second year. This would make the Sun acquisition more profitable in per share contribution in the first year than we had planned for the acquisitions of BEA, PeopleSoft and Siebel combined,” said Oracle President Safra Catz.

“The acquisition of Sun transforms the IT industry, combining best-in-class enterprise software and mission-critical computing systems,” said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. “Oracle will be the only company that can engineer an integrated system – applications to disk – where all the pieces fit and work together so customers do not have to do it themselves. Our customers benefit as their systems integration costs go down while system performance, reliability and security go up.”

There are substantial long-term strategic customer advantages to Oracle owning two key Sun software assets: Java and Solaris. Java is one of the computer industry’s best-known brands and most widely deployed technologies, and it is the most important software Oracle has ever acquired. Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle’s fastest growing business, is built on top of Sun’s Java language and software. Oracle can now ensure continued innovation and investment in Java technology for the benefit of customers and the Java community.

The Sun Solaris operating system is the leading platform for the Oracle database, Oracle’s largest business, and has been for a long time. With the acquisition of Sun, Oracle can optimize the Oracle database for some of the unique, high-end features of Solaris. Oracle is as committed as ever to Linux and other open platforms and will continue to support and enhance our strong industry partnerships.

Teradata and SAP Expand Partnership

Apr. 2009 Teradata Corporation, a company solely focused on data warehousing and enterprise analytics, and SAP AG, a provider of business software, recently announced at Teradata Universe a new agreement to provide SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse (SAP NetWeaver BW) on the Teradata database. Customers have asked for accelerated, unified access to detailed enterprise data for improved business visibility. To address this need, the partnership will deliver a seamlessly integrated and scalable solution that lowers total cost of ownership and consolidates data on one database platform.

Companies around the globe use both Teradata and SAP products. Today, these customers have various databases for their data warehouses, and use different business intelligence (BI) tools to analyze that data. Most have at least one SAP NetWeaver BW data warehouse. As a result of the new agreement, customers will benefit from an integrated end-to-end offering, including everything from data warehouse infrastructure and management to BI tools. The consolidation of all data on one database platform will support joint SAP-Teradata customers’ efforts to standardize and rationalize their IT investments while lowering their total cost of ownership.

“For companies like ours that leverage massive amounts of information with Teradata and SAP, the promise of tighter integration and closer collaboration is significant,” said Joe Zakutney, Vice President, Global Applications, The Hershey Company. “Most companies realize that centralized data warehousing is the best approach for BI and analytics, and SAP software running on Teradata is exactly the kind of combination we foresee as a technology advantage in the years ahead.”

Will Business Intelligence Software Move to Appliances?

SAP-Teradata alliance, IBM’s plans and Oracle-Sun deal all point to BI bundles on top of data warehouse appliances.

An alliance announced this week between SAP and Teradata goes beyond integration of SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse and the Teradata database. That first part is good news for joint customers who are getting by with customized integrations of the two data warehouse environments. But the alliance also points to what is likely to be a growing trend in data warehousing and business intelligence: the bundling of BI software onto data warehouse appliances.

Looking beyond support for the Teradata database, which will happen with the next release of SAP BW, the two vendors are “exploring many other opportunities to more closely integrate,” says Miles Stephenson, Teradata’s vice president of alliances. “We wouldn’t preclude some sort of a bundle… and we’ve actually looked at several of the packages that SAP BusinessObjects has put together as industry solutions.”

From SAP’s perspective, working with Teradata makes good sense. Nearly half of SAP’s top 100 customers run Teradata. What’s more, BusinessObjects was the number-one BI tool running on top of Teradata even before the BI vendor’s acquisition by SAP. As for the possibility of a joint appliance with bundled BI software, “Teradata obviously has a lot of strength in the appliance space, and it was one of the very first appliance vendors,” comments Tim Lang, vice president of product management at SAP BusinessObjects. “SAP isn’t new to appliances either, as we’ve had our Business Warehouse Accelerator technology for a number of years.”

In fact, SAP and Teradata may be responding in part to IBM. IBM has let it be known, and in an interview with Intelligent Enterprise in early March it acknowledged, that it will make its BI and information integration software available as modules. These modules will run –preconfigured and preinstalled — on top of the InfoSphere Balanced Warehouse appliances.

“Customers will be able to say, ‘I want this E-Class Balanced Warehouse on a pSeries server, and I also want the IBM Cognos module, the InfoSphere Information Server module and maybe the Optim data retention module as well,” says Bill O’Connell, IBM’s data warehousing CTO. “The appliance would be shipped to the customer data-load ready, with everything installed and configured, further expediting time to value for our customers.”

So it’s apparent that data warehouse appliances are likely to give way to complete data warehouse and BI appliances. But with its pending deal to acquire Sun Microsystems, Oracle is talking about taking one-stop shopping for hardware and software to even greater extremes, adding in applications as well as information infrastructure.

The trend goes beyond data warehousing and BI. It’s about prefab data centers, ready to plug in and go with minimal systems integration and the promise of faster, lower cost deployment.

MicroStrategy Introduces MicroStrategy 9

MicroStrategy Incorporated introduced MicroStrategy 9 at its annual user conference in Las Vegas. MicroStrategy 9, the company’s most significant release in nearly a decade, is expected to be generally available in the first quarter of 2009 and will include significant new products and enhancements to its BI software platform.

“Organizations have a mix of enterprise-grade and departmental BI applications. Enterprise BI applications continue to advance in data scale, user scale, and analytical requirements and MicroStrategy 9 includes new, advanced features to improve the performance, scale, and efficiency of large-scale enterprise BI applications,” said Sanju Bansal, MicroStrategy’s COO. “In addition, MicroStrategy 9 also includes innovative features to enable the rapid development of departmental BI applications by business users rather than IT professionals. To support consolidation and standardization, MicroStrategy 9 eases the migration of departmental BI application data and metadata into a unified, enterprise BI environment.”

As BI systems grow to thousands of users and hundreds of terabytes of data, maintaining fast query performance can be a tremendous challenge. MicroStrategy 9 includes new adaptive caching technology called In-memory ROLAP and improvements in SQL generation to enhance query performance.

MicroStrategy 9 introduces a major new architectural component called “In-memory ROLAP” to dramatically improve query performance. In-memory ROLAP takes advantage of the large addressable memory now available on 64-bit Unix, Linux, and Windows computer servers, and provides a performance-optimized middle-tier database that can respond directly to data requests from reports, dashboards, and OLAP analyses. Since the new middle-tier database is stored in computer memory, it avoids disk access delays. In-memory ROLAP can serve the data needed for the most complex and time-consuming queries, dramatically improving the average query response times. In-memory ROLAP can also offload work from database servers, freeing up database capacity and allowing enterprises potentially to delay purchasing additional database capacity.

MicroStrategy 9 introduces SQL generation algorithm optimizations for handling sophisticated analyses involving complex metrics. The new optimization algorithm can reduce the number of SQL passes by 66% and reduce database query time by as much as 75%. This new capability works transparently with reports, dashboards, and analyses, providing an immediate performance improvement to many existing MicroStrategy applications.

Successful BI systems often experience dramatic growth in user populations. It is increasingly common for a single enterprise BI installation to support thousands and even tens of thousands of business users.

MicroStrategy 9 includes significant architectural components and features that allow it to efficiently support the specific needs of smaller-scale BI systems for departments and workgroups.

Healthcare Providers Building a Smarter Healthcare System with IBM

IBM recently announced several hospitals and healthcare providers that are collaborating with IBM to help build a smarter healthcare system for ensuring patient safety, improving efficiency and reducing medical errors through electronic medical records (EMR).

Reducing healthcare costs and improving patient care through innovative systems for handling patient records is a major priority in The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, calling for $19 billion in grants and incentives for practices to invest in health IT. IBM is helping more than 1,000 hospitals worldwide integrate and access new intelligence, making EMR become smarter with open technology. The healthcare systems are built on IBM open technology for integrating and managing medical data, as well as business intelligence tools for gaining new insight. The technology can also be used for medical personnel that can now have instant access to pertinent information to respond more quickly to patient requirements.

“Now is an important time for industry leaders to step up and contribute to healthcare reform and transformation. To accelerate achievement of such goals, IBM is teaming with our many business partners, alliances and key clients to drive the creation of integrated delivery systems, including electronic medical records, that help the worldwide healthcare system become more interconnected, instrumented and intelligent,” said Dan Pelino, general manager, IBM Healthcare & Life Sciences Industry. “In this regard, the enablement of EMRs as envisioned by the Obama Administration will help to link diagnosis, drug discovery and healthcare delivery systems to insurers, employers, communities and patients themselves.”

The recently announced healthcare providers collaborating with IBM include:

• Memorial Hermann Hospital System
• Capella Healthcare
• Trillium Health Centre
• Vanderbilt University Medical Center

Oracle BI Upgrade Focuses On Public Sector

The new functionality within Oracle BI Applications 7.9.5.1 provides public sector agencies with more operational details for better funds management and spending controls.

Oracle has added new capabilities for public sector agencies in the financial analytics component of the vendor’s business intelligence suite.

The new functionality is within Oracle BI Applications 7.9.5.1, which was introduced Monday. The features provide public sector agencies with more operational details for better funds management and spending controls.

In addition, the upgrade is better able to detect exceptions through improved monitoring of budget spending, and offers more real-time information to support trend analysis and decision-making on issues.

To make deployment of the software easier, Oracle has added pre-built integration with the financial module of version 11.5.10 of the company’s suite of business applications, called E-Business Suite. In addition, there are extensions to the Oracle BI Applications data warehouse schema and metadata layer to support public sector content.

The vendor has also added extraction, transformation and load maps to pull data from the Oracle Financials module of the E-Business Suite, and had included pre-built dashboards and reports for the public sector.

“Oracle BI Applications can be deployed quickly to enable public sector agencies to achieve rapid return on investment,” Paul Rodwick, VP of product management for Oracle, said in a statement.

Besides government agencies, Oracle BI applications are available for a variety of business operations, including sales, customer service, marketing, financials, supply chain, human resources and order management, procurement and spend. Specialized industry analytics are also available.

Oracle’s latest release followed less than a week after the introduction of an upgrade of the Hyperion Strategic Finance Fusion, a financial modeling application that helps executives understand the financial impact of alternative corporate strategies.

Edition R11 includes integration with Oracle Crystal Ball, a spreadsheet-based application for predictive modeling, forecasting and Monte Carlo simulation. “Oracle Hyperion Strategic Finance R11 allows analysts to improve their forecasts by using Crystal Ball’s simulation capabilities in their financial models and better understand the risk factors impacting their business,” Bill Guilmart, Oracle VP of product management, said in a statement.

Other new integration features allow for automated sourcing from systems like general ledgers, budgeting and consolidations. The capabilities make it possible to drill back to the source system, providing an audit trail.

The Hyperion Strategic Finance Fusion application is part of the Oracle Enterprise Performance Management system.

Talend and Systech come together to present “Talend Open Studio Discovery Roadshow”

Systech Solutions Inc. hosted “Talend Open Studio discovery show”, a training session in Los Angeles at their Head Office in Glendale on Tuesday, January 27th 2009. Talend clients along with few of the consultants from Systech attended this training. During the 3 hours the trainees received a complimentary training on Talend Open Studio. The technical training session demonstrated how to use Talend’s technology and provided hands on training on Talend. The Talend Representatives were Jonathan Andry and Scott Ruby. This is a part of Systech’s commitment to build strong partnerships. Systech is a platinum partner of Talend. The Talend Roadshow is a series of free technical workshops which are taking place in a number of cities in the US.

eHarmony and Netezza get matched for business analytics

Netezza Corporation (NYSE Arca: NZ), the global leader in data warehouse and analytic appliances, today announced that eHarmony has deployed Netezza as its enterprise data warehouse to analyze large volumes of member data to better understand how its customers interact with its site. The Company chose Netezza for its scalability, low cost of ownership, proven track record with online businesses and fast time to value on key business intelligence (BI) initiatives.

eHarmony needed a data warehouse environment that could scale as its business and user base expand quickly, both domestically and internationally. Its previous system had trouble keeping pace with the Company’s rapidly growing volumes of data. With Netezza, eHarmony can extract and analyze user data much faster, more easily, and more economically than before.

“Sophisticated online organizations like eHarmony are increasingly leveraging terabyte-scale data analysis to maximize user engagement and create competitive advantage,” said Brad Terrell, vice president of digital media at Netezza. “By marrying user behavior and demographic data with additional outcomes, experience and third-party data, eHarmony gains a strategic advantage that will provide them with unprecedented web analytics flexibility and insight.”

The Netezza data warehouse appliance is built specifically to analyze terabytes of detailed data significantly faster than existing data warehouse options, at a much lower total cost of ownership. It stores, filters and processes terabytes of records within a single unit, analyzing only the relevant information for each query. Netezza has placed the CPU power next to the data, allowing its appliances to speed through processes that would occupy most data warehouse systems for hours, or even days, thereby enabling dramatic increases in productivity across organizations like eHarmony.

Netezza Corporation has been positioned by Gartner, Inc. in the Leaders’ quadrant in the 2008 Data Warehouse Database Management Systems Magic Quadrant report released on December 23, 2008 and authored by Donald Feinberg and Mark A. Beyer. Netezza was also awarded the Editor’s Choice Award by the InformationWeek Business Technology Network’s Intelligent Enterprise and one of Netezza’s customers, Ross Stores, was honored as part of the InfoWorld 100 for its joint data warehouse solution with Netezza and MicroStrategy.

Talend Secures $12 Million in Funding to Fuel Continued Worldwide Growth and Momentum

Talend, the first provider of open source data integration software, today announced it has secured $12 million in Series C financing to help fuel further worldwide growth and company expansion. The funding round is being led by Balderton Capital, an early investor in MySQL, and existing investor AGF Private Equity bringing Talend’s total funding to more than $20 million.

Balderton General Partner Bernard Liautaud, the founder, CEO and Chairman of Business Objects for 18 years up until its eventual sale to SAP for $6.7 billion, will join Talend’s board of directors.

During 2008, Talend moved from being a disruptive innovator to an open source data integration leader. The popularity of Talend Open Studio, the Company’s flagship open source data integration solution, has risen sharply since its introduction more than two years ago with more than 3.3 million lifetime downloads. In the past twelve months alone, Talend’s paying customer base increased by more than 300 percent, steadily taking market share away from proprietary data integration tools such as Informatica PowerCenter or IBM WebSphere DataStage, and confirming the suitability and scalability of its solutions for enterprise projects of large and well-known companies.

Leveraging the additional funding, Talend will expand global operations into key markets in the Americas, EMEA and Asia-Pacific, targeting large enterprises and partners that are looking at cost-effective alternatives to proprietary integration suites in a time of shrinking budgets and slimming services margins. The company will accelerate its growth, reinforcing its position as a key player in a market still dominated by a handful of proprietary vendors. Talend will also unveil new products in 2009 to help solve emerging integration requirements stemming from merger and acquisition activity as struggling companies are acquired.

“Over the past 12 months we have seen hundreds of new customers and dozens of new partners embrace our open source data integration and data quality technologies as the foundation for enterprise projects,” said Fabrice Bonan, COO and co-founder of Talend. “The open source model is a unique driver of innovation, enabling Talend to rely on a fast-expanding and vibrant community to accelerate its development cycles. The additional funding will allow us to expand our development teams, broaden the functional coverage of our technologies and provide more advanced products and features to our community and customers.”

Jaspersoft and Hyperic Provide First Systems Intelligence Platform for Business-Level Analysis

Jaspersoft, provider of the world’s most widely used business intelligence (BI) software, today announced that JasperServer Professional Edition is being embedded in the new Hyperic Operations IQ.

Hyperic Operations IQ, announced today, provides advanced business intelligence for IT and web operations teams using Jaspersoft’s BI software. This partnership, for the first time, provides a business user view into critical application performance metrics and service levels.

Jaspersoft and Hyperic, the leading provider of web application performance monitoring software for the datacenter and the cloud, have worked closely together since 2007 when Hyperic originally delivered integrated reporting capabilities in Hyperic HQ using the Community Edition of Jaspersoft’s JasperReports embeddable reporting product.

Today’s news represents the natural evolution of Jaspersoft’s strategic partnerships with the technology industry’s leading companies. The deeper functionality available in Jaspersoft’s Professional Edition enables companies like Hyperic to deliver yet another level of analysis to their customers.

“Hyperic’s advanced web application performance monitoring capabilities demand simple but powerful analysis functionality that can only be achieved with the customization and ease-of-use available in the professional version of our server-based, BI software,” said Brian Gentile, CEO of Jaspersoft. “Extending our partnership beyond our original collaboration – to a commercial relationship that provides Hyperic’s customers with access to the full suite of Jaspersoft’s BI software – will help meet the new demands of today’s besieged CIO.”

“Our choice to use Jaspersoft for Hyperic Operations IQ was an easy one. Jaspersoft’s BI software is used by millions of organizations worldwide. This is a proven technology with a loyal following that delivers the depth of visibility and analytics capabilities that our customers require,” said Javier Soltero, CEO of Hyperic.

Hyperic Operations IQ uses JasperServer Pro to provide customers with advanced reporting and analysis infrastructure instead of a limited handful of reports. The JasperServer Pro architecture allows Hyperic to customize and replace functionality as needed, and to create a new data source. These important features bring a new level of data integration and security to Hyperic’s solution. Furthermore, the new Systems Intelligence Platform brings customization and automation to business executives through easy-to-navigate dashboard integration and ad-hoc report creation using Web 2.0 tools available from Jaspersoft.