Industry News – May 2010
MicroStrategy Announces Beta Release of iPhone Apps Development Platform
MicroStrategy® Incorporated (Nasdaq: MSTR), a leading worldwide provider of business intelligence (BI) software, today announced that it will offer a mobile application platform for developing and deploying iPhone Apps.
MicroStrategy Mobile for iPhone offers a new way to develop and deploy iPhone Apps that is faster, easier, and more maintainable than using traditional Integrated Development Environments. MicroStrategy Mobile for iPhone offers the following benefits:
- Reduces the time to develop new iPhone Apps − MicroStrategy’s mobile app platform includes the infrastructure needed to support each new iPhone App, so application developers only need to focus on creating the user experience and not on the back-end infrastructure.
- Easy for non-developers to create professional iPhone − MicroStrategy’s iPhone applications do not require any coding. Using MicroStrategy’s mobile app platform, iPhone Apps are assembled in a point-and-click fashion. App creators can choose from an array of finely-designed, iPhone-optimized displays and controls.
- Easy for companies to rapidly deploy iPhone App updates − MicroStrategy’s mobile app platform uses an on-demand form of application deployment called “in-stream” deployment. As soon as new or updated applications are ready, they are instantly available to iPhone users directly from MicroStrategy’s mobile app platform.
“Utilizing platforms that can easily assemble applications on mobile computing environments like Apple iPhone is the wave of the future,” said Mark Smith, CEO and EVP Research, Ventana Research. “MicroStrategy’s release of its new platform and capabilities will not only help to deliver world-class BI to Apple iPhone, but also make the assembly and publishing of a broader set of information-class applications much simpler to accomplish.”
Mobile BI applications represent a new breed of business applications that are simple-to-use, highly focused, and available whenever and wherever business is conducted. Business people no longer need to delay decision-making due to a lack of information or delay executing a transaction simply because they are away from their desks. Mobile applications delivered through Smart phones such as the iPhone have the potential to revolutionize business processes across every industry.
For example, mobile BI applications can:
- Provide executives with real-time performance information 24 hours a day
- Enable claims adjusters to complete claims immediately on site
- Empower sales associates to offer discounts and cross-sell recommendations at the moment of the sale
- Provide regional managers the ability to manage their stores, restaurants, bank branches, and other retail outlets
- Deliver management information and guidance to franchise owners
- Give plant managers up-to-the-minute data on plant operations
- Allow inventory managers to reorder stock while managing the warehouse floor
- Provide health care professionals with immediate access to patient test results
“MicroStrategy’s new mobile app platform will allow us to develop the vast majority of our iPhone Apps without coding,” said Terry Adams, Senior Director at Herbalife. “MicroStrategy’s platform approach to mobile application development will allow us to develop a series of business apps for the iPhone quickly and with less effort than building them from scratch using the Apple SDK.”
“MicroStrategy’s many years of experience in providing scalable, enterprise-class platform technology enables us to deliver a mobile application platform that is both industrial-strength and highly flexible,” said Sanju Bansal, MicroStrategy COO. “Our new mobile app platform gives companies the flexibility to create a broad array of intuitive business applications that seamlessly access back-end databases and systems, and delivers the same high performance and ease of management and administration that is expected from MicroStrategy.”
MicroStrategy is currently accepting applications for inclusion in its MicroStrategy Mobile for iPhone beta program
This BI Insight news item contains information from a recent press release by the company mentioned.
Oracle Upgrades CRM, Enhances Enterprise Forecasting Abilities
At a time when Gartner predicts companies will become obsessed with measuring the ROI of IT investments, Oracle has just upgraded its cloud-based customer relationship management system (CRM) to include advanced business analytics and forecasting abilities to better measure and increase enterprise productivity.
The emphasis with this new version of its customer relationship management system is on making money, or maximizing the potential to make money. And while Oracle says the new features will enhance productive selling time, the real value is the ‘deep’ information about the enterprise and its partners that it provides.
Enhanced Enterprise Forecasting
That information can come from many sources and channels. However, the bottom line here is the ability for enterprises to not only make general forecasts about future enterprise performance, but to give in-depth analysis of what channels are performing well.
Although there are a number of other upgrades, it is the forecasting abilities have really taken a step forward. Release 17 is now able to take historical and current forecasts, put them together with real time information and make new forecasts of ideal-world scenarios, actual achievements and quota forecasts.
It also aims to pull all the information covering the productivity of teams and team members together including what each team member is contributing to revenues and who amongst enterprise partners are performing.
Digging deep, it analyzes current and future deal registrations, fund and sales pipelines and in doing so enables users to identify top-performing partners and how they will perform in the future.
User Enhancements
Behind all this are a number of new user enhancements that make the cloud-based Release 17 more user-friendly. The new interface has increased the amount of information that can be displayed with users able to customize it for size and easy navigation to specified information.
The interface acts as a head-up display. This is customizable by the user making lists easier to manage and presents all the information about partners or clients on a single screen through which users can mine as deep as they need for the information they require.
Data migration has also been enhanced with automated data loading and migration. On one hand is Oracle Data Loader On Demand, which enables users to move large quantities of information around Release 17, and on the other, Oracle Migration Tool On Demand can export and import configuration details from one Release 17 environment to another.
Other new usability features include:
- Automation of business process through workflows
- New HTML editor for email marketing tool
- Customizable client contact pages
Release 17 also comes with support for three additional languages including Portuguese and Norwegian on top of the 17 that it already supports. Oracle has also released an edition specifically for the life sciences.
This BI Insight news item contains information from a recent press release by the company mentioned.
Microsoft unveils SQL 2008 update, finally SQL 2008 R2 can support larger implementations
Microsoft has released to manufacturing Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2, the new version of its relational database management system software, the company announced Wednesday.
The software, a major update of the SQL Server 2008 code base, has been in development for almost two years. Thus far, the developer version of the software has been downloaded more than 300,000 times, according to the company.
The R2 version updates the SQL Server 2008 in a number of ways, said Mark Linton, director within Microsoft’s application platform group.
One notable feature is the scale. A single SQL Server 2008 instance can now be run on up to 256 logical processors. Previously, a SQL Server instance could only scale up to 64 logical processors. It will also run on as much as two terabytes of working memory. This will pave the way for more large scale, enterprise deployments, Linton said.
The software also has been updated to work better in Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualized environments. For instance, the virtualized instance of the software can be migrated from one server to another while continuing to run.
The software’s administration software has been updated as well. A new feature, called Utility Control Point, enables database administrators to manage the policies of entire farms of SQL Servers from a single console. “Through one control point, you can administrator your entire infrastructure through a standardized set of policies and tools,” Linton said.
The software also helps other Microsoft products in providing users with “self-service business intelligence,” Linton said. The software can provide live data for a new Microsoft Excel data analysis add-on call PowerPivot, which was designed to manipulate “millions of rows of data” quickly.
This BI Insight news item contains information from a recent press release by the company mentioned.
