BI Insight

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

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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

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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 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.”