New York, NY – Month, Day, 2010 – Information Builders, an independent leader in business intelligence (BI) solutions, today reiterated that it has partnered with Systech Solutions, Inc. to strengthen the ability to help customers extend their overall BI and Analytics capabilities on the Information Builders platform.

The partnership will allow small-to-medium and mid-market businesses (SMB) in the West, Southwest and Mid west regions gain a competitive edge while getting the most value out of IT investments.

“Over the last few years, we have seen significant shifts in the expectations of end users and their relationship with enterprise software,” said Gerald Cohen, CEO, Information Builders. “We provide an integrated solution that allows customers a completely integrated solution for gaining timely and trusted information to achieve positive business outcomes.  Systech Solutions, Inc. allows the use of unified business intelligence to help companies address their biggest challenges, and make use of business opportunities.

The best-of-breed combination of Information Builders software and Systech’s expertise in custom solutions for the media and entertainment, CPG & retail, gaming, hospitality, and financial services is expected to make a powerful offering in the SMB market.

Working with Systech will not only help provide millions of Information Builders users around the world an ideal BI fit for unique business models, but will also help leverage Systech’s offshore development center for cost effective and speedy implementations.

As an Information Builders’ partner, Systech will be the go-to partner in offering consulting and implementation teams. Information Builders will train and certify technical and sales staff at Systech and provide ongoing technical support to ensure an ideal customer experience. In addition, the two companies will engage in targeted marketing activities to drive greater awareness of Information Builders in Systech’s core markets.

About Information Builders

Information Builders’ award-winning combination of business intelligence and enterprise integration software has been providing innovative solutions to more than 16,000 customers for the past 35 years. WebFOCUS is the world’s most widely utilized business intelligence platform. It provides the security, scalability, and flexibility needed at every level of global extended enterprises. Its simplicity helps create executive, analytical, and operational applications that reach dozens to millions of users. Information Builders’ iWay Software suite provides state of the art, multi-purpose, pre-built integration components that address all SOA, application, data and information management requirements. Its integration adapters have been adopted by the leading software platform providers. Information Builders also offers solutions in the performance management, business activity monitoring, and enterprise search markets. The company’s comprehensive enterprise product offerings give Information Builders’ customers the ability to grow and innovate according to their needs.
Information Builders’ customers include most of the Fortune 100 and U.S. federal government agencies. Headquartered in New York City with 90 offices worldwide, the company employs 1,350 people and has more than 250 business partners.

About Systech Solutions, Inc.

Systech Solutions, Inc. a leading Business Intelligence Services provider, delivering complete and custom solutions/implementations. Systech leverages the power of data and information to eliminate sources of inefficiency in your business process, reducing time and increasing revenue.

Founded in 1993, Los Angeles-based Systech Solutions has grown internationally with bases in the United States and in India. This incredible growth story has resulted in Systech being named one of the Fastest Growing Companies in America for two consecutive years by Inc. Magazine. To offer its clients cost-effective solutions, Systech established an Offshore Technology Center as well as Systech Academy in Chennai, India – specializing in Data Warehousing, Data Integration and Business Intelligence.

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

Wall Street steps up analytics spending

Over 90% of Wall Street firms expect to increase spending on analytics over the next year, with risk and compliance the areas most likely to see greater investment, according to a survey from IBM and Sifma.

The poll of nearly 250 business and IT Wall Street professionals shows firms are increasing their focus on systemic risk strategies as they prepare to meet the government’s increased transparency demands.

Of all regulatory activities, systemic risk was chosen by 55% of respondents to be the largest driver of IT investments. Building on that trend, risk analytics for compliance was ranked as the top analytics investment opportunity, at 37%, beating out categories such as analytics for client segmentation, on 21% and external fraud, 13%.

IBM says concerns about the economy are beginning to wane as for the first time since the 2008 financial collapse, prompting firms to revisit the use of IT to promote organisational sustainability.

Key priorities include innovating processes around trading, portfolio management and risk management but, surprisingly, client relationship management ranked last out of 17 categories with backing from only two per cent. Almost half of respondents expect 20% to 30% of their technology budget to be allocated for ‘transformational initiatives’ in 2010 and 2011.

Meanwhile, 90% of participants expect to outsource one or more of their processes this year with compliance reporting and analytics for risk the most likely fields.

Despite the positive technology investment outlook, Wall Street professionals cite lack of IT staff and high implementation costs as the biggest inhibitors for technology implementation, consistent with findings for last year. To overcome some of these challenges, the industry is showing a larger appetite for disruptive technologies such as cloud computing – 61% – to force business model change.

Shanker Ramamurthy, GM, IBM Financial Services Sector, says: “Coming out of the largest financial crisis in modern day history, there has never been a more important time for firms to capitalise on technology investments to make sense of the data and gain a more sophisticated understanding of risks. The road to recovery is built on infusing intelligence across operations, streamlining costs and getting back to basics so that firms once again focus on innovation and growth.”

Tom Price, MD, Sifma, adds: “Having the right technology in place is more essential than ever in efforts to monitor risk across firms and ensure regulators can identify and address potential problems before they escalate.”

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

MicroStrategy to Initiate High Performance Testing on Netezza Data Warehouse Appliance

McLean, Va., June 21, 2010 – MicroStrategy® Incorporated (Nasdaq: MSTR), a leading worldwide provider of business intelligence (BI) software, and Netezza Corporation (NYSE: NZ), a global leader in data warehouse, analytic, and monitoring appliances, today announced the delivery of a state-of-the-art Netezza data warehouse appliance to MicroStrategy. MicroStrategy will conduct high-volume, high-scale tests on the Netezza appliance as part of its High Performance initiative launched earlier this year.
Netezza has provided a TwinFin data warehouse and analytics appliance with more than 100 terabytes of user data capacity to MicroStrategy’s High Performance and Scalability Lab. MicroStrategy’s Performance Engineering team will use the Netezza appliance to run hundreds of large-scale tests to research, identify, and resolve potential performance obstacles for customers.

MicroStrategy’s High Performance initiative includes the formation of its High Performance and Scalability Lab, the creation of a dedicated Performance Engineering team, and specific R&D efforts solely focused on providing MicroStrategy customers with the highest levels of performance for BI applications of all sizes. With its high performance initiative, MicroStrategy plans to deliver up to 10x faster BI applications, provide faster than 3-second response times for most predictable queries and analyses, and provide faster than 5-second response times for the majority of ad hoc queries.

The combination of MicroStrategy and Netezza enables joint customers to perform advanced analytics on large volumes of data with maximum performance. Approximately one-third of Netezza’s customers use MicroStrategy for their business intelligence requirements. Mutual customers of MicroStrategy and Netezza include: Ahold, AutoTrader.com, Burlington Coat Factory, Con-way Freight, LoanPerformance, Pacific Sunwear, Ryder System, and Thomas Cook.

“Netezza is delighted to provide MicroStrategy with the TwinFin data warehouse appliance, which is designed for rapid analysis of extremely high data volumes,” said Matt Rollender, Director of Strategic and Technology Partnerships at Netezza. “The complementary technologies of MicroStrategy and Netezza provide leading enterprises with the power to analyze expanding data warehouses and distribute actionable information to thousands of diverse users.”

“MicroStrategy and Netezza have a strong business and technology relationship focused on providing customers with high performance and scalability at a low total cost of ownership,” said Sanju Bansal, MicroStrategy’s COO. “The new TwinFin appliance from Netezza represents a significant addition to our High Performance and Scalability Lab and to our major initiative to deliver even greater enhancements in performance and scalability for our customers’ enterprise-wide BI deployments.”

About Netezza Corporation

Netezza Corporation (NYSE: NZ) is the global leader in data warehouse, analytic and monitoring appliances that dramatically simplify high-performance analytics across an extended enterprise. Netezza’s technology enables organizations to process enormous amounts of captured data at exceptional speed, providing a significant competitive and operational advantage in today’s data-intensive industries, including digital media, energy, financial services, government, health and life sciences, retail and telecommunications. Netezza is headquartered in Marlborough, Massachusetts and has offices in Northern Virginia, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Japan, Korea, Australia and Singapore.

About MicroStrategy

Founded in 1989, MicroStrategy is a global leader in business intelligence (BI) technology. MicroStrategy provides integrated reporting, analysis, and monitoring software that helps leading organizations worldwide make better business decisions every day. Companies choose MicroStrategy for its ease-of-use, sophisticated analytics, and superior data and user scalability.

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

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.

Background

Falken Tire is a brand of tires by Japanese Sumitomo Rubber Industries with branches across Asia, America and Europe. Their first tire was produced in 1983 and it wasn’t until two years later that they began exporting their tires outside Japan and entered the US market only in 1990.

As the organization grew, so did the need for accurate and immediate information. The company lacked an effective way to consolidate, manage and distribute business data. Data resided in many different sources and in different formats, limiting its ability to analyze and deliver it within a single platform. To evaluate performance in the market, Falken Tire compared their Sales data with the Market data. Falken Tire wanted to perform Market Share Analysis and also forecast demand. However, they were faced with complications involving multi-source data analysis.

These issues needed to be addressed by Systech Solutions, Inc.

Challenges

Diversity of sources:

The fundamental problem that Falken Tire faced was that their data was stored in different places. The Sales data was in the Operation System, Objective data was in a flat file and Market data was in an SQL database. It was not only time consuming to create a report but also not flexible to do further analysis.

Tracking and forecasting:

Traditionally, Falken Tire could not track or forecast actual sales. Therefore, it was essential to configure a reporting tool to access information in the data mart with ease. They needed to get a deeper insight into their key sales performance to better forecast the market.

Solution

After studying the data from different sources, Systech came up with a model of how the information fit together. To enable this, the development team needed to understand the existing information and find the correlated pieces. Systech’s development team then created a common format for the data mart in a SQL Server 2005 database. Later, Informatica was decided on as the most appropriate ETL platform for this BI implementation at Falken Tire. The ETL platform was configured to support reporting and complex data analysis with maximum efficiency. It was also structured to provide enough flexibility to accommodate future trade volume and business growth.
Subsequently, MicroStrategy was configured to access information in the data mart to deliver customer friendly reports, templates and dashboards.

Result

Centralized data in BI data mart:

• Users could easily access the data. Also allowed them to compare Falken Tire sales with their competitor and do market analysis.
• The robust architecture of the new ETL platform provided flexibility and scalability.
• The new ETL process fetched data to reports based on real time which was impossible earlier.

 Empowered to report and analyze data to make improved decisions:

• The new and improved dashboard consisted of multiple parameters/metrics that helped track all Key Performance Indicators in Sales and Inventory.
• The dashboard enabled Falken Tire to view the performance of the company based on their objectives.
• It helped create a Daily Sales Report for the previous working day and also helped to view Sales by drilling down to the zip level of the state.
• The solution enabled business users to drill into the key trends to do an online analysis with just a click without coming back to the developer asking for a separate report.
• The reporting tool automated the comparative market share analysis of the Sales. This process which was a multi-step process earlier was now an automated process.
• They could report sales figures, forecast projection, estimate competitive sales and gauge the state of business.
• Based on the forecasting demand they could manage the inventory.

 The Systech team thus helped the end users view critical performance information in a matter of seconds and quickly make decisions that seek to optimize market share.

Global IT expenditure is expected to rise slightly this year for the first time since the onset of the global economic downturn, according to industry analyst Ovum. A survey of IT decision makers revealed that one third expect their budgets will increase in 2010. Despite this cautious optimism, there are signs that CIOs do not yet view IT as an engine for growth and that 2010 will mostly be a year of reckoning.

CIO attitudes towards IT spending vary by country and vertical industry, yet some important commonalities have emerged.

The rising sentiment that the global economy is starting to show signs of recovery is having a positive impact on planned IT budgets in 2010.
The perception gap between forecast and actual changes in IT expenditure has widened.
IT spending trends vary wildly by region, yet all vertical industries have suffered from lower IT spending compared to pre-recessionary levels.

The vast majority of enterprises will continue to experience flat (0%) budget growth in 2010.

Rhonda Ascierto, senior analyst at Ovum, said: “The survey data, while promising, does not translate into an IT spending recovery. “Realistically, the numbers more likely reflect the effect of previously deep budget cuts, during 2008 and the first half of 2009, which left many IT departments operating at ‘bare-bones’ capacity.”

Furthermore, the survey data shows that the proportion of CIOs that forecast slight decreases and significant increases in IT budgets remained unchanged last year.

Combined with the high percentage of respondents that will leave their IT budgets unchanged in 2010, which is rising slightly to 42%, it shows that many enterprises remain vulnerable and are uncertain about near-term business prospects.

The perception gap between forecast and actual changes in IT expenditure has widened

Decision makers are typically adept at forecasting IT spending trends: their predictions usually deviate 5% or less from actual IT budget expenditure.

However, Ovum’s survey shows that the perception gap between forecast and actual IT budget changes widened considerably last year, following the financial crisis of 2008.

“Clearly, the negative effects of the economic downturn were greater than expected and businesses were not prepared”, said Ms Ascierto.

“Many businesses made short-term cost savings by reducing their operational costs.

“The extent to which IT budgetary expectations were miscued in 2009 is likely to mar the collective psyche of IT decision makers today. The confidence of CIOs in their ability to predict IT spending with a reasonable level of accuracy has been splintered, if not shattered.

“Consequently, Ovum believes that 2010 will be a year of reckoning for IT expenditure.”

IT projects that are most likely to be readily green-lighted are those that do not require a forklift upgrade of existing IT systems and business processes, but rather those that make modifications within existing and proven boundaries in an incremental manner and in response to business changes.

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

Systech helps clients to look for Business Intelligence solutions depending upon where they are in a BI deployment lifecycle. They are fashioned to ensure solutions that provide a roadway to success.

View Systech’s services that span across collaborative methodologies, knowledge transfer and technical services.

http://systechusa.com/services-and-products/

Oracle Announces Enterprise Healthcare Analytics to Improve the Quality of Patient Care

Oracle recently introduced an enterprise healthcare analytics solution that helps providers create a detailed, holistic and integrated view of their enterprise. The solution integrates data from electronic medical records, clinical departmental systems, patient accounting, ERP, research, and other source systems to help providers rapidly and cost effectively unlock value from their clinical and operational data. Oracle’s enterprise healthcare analytics solution provides a foundation upon which providers can use pre-built business intelligence, analytic, data mining, and performance management applications from Oracle and its partners. Oracle Healthcare Data Warehouse Foundation is a comprehensive, detailed data model specifically engineered for provider enterprise data warehousing that includes an expanding list of more than 1,000 entities and 12,000 attributes spanning the clinical, financial, operational, and research domains. The Oracle Healthcare Data Warehouse Foundation is designed for ease of use for analytic application developers and can be easily extended to accommodate a provider’s unique environment.
Oracle Operating Room Analytics is an analytic and performance management application that gives surgical services directors and surgical, anesthesia, and nursing leaders an enterprise view of operating room efficiency. This includes analysis of the case volumes, utilization rates, turnover times, as well as more than 200 pre-built operational efficiency measures, all of which can be easily customized and extended as new metrics are created.

An ecosystem of healthcare partners is already emerging that is expected to provide analytic applications built on Oracle’s enterprise healthcare analytics foundation. This includes:

• Anthem Healthcare Intelligence for revenue cycle, service line, cost allocation, and productivity
• Outcome Sciences for quality reporting and patient registries
• Quantros for quality reporting, accreditation & compliance, and safety and risk management
• VigiLanz for infection control, pharmacovigilance and practice guidance
• Oracle’s Rapidly Expanding Suite of Business Intelligence Solutions Offers Healthcare Providers Key Benefits

A product approach — maturing healthcare sector moving away from customized, one-off solutions to more cost effective packaged options

Provider-specific data model — stable foundation for enterprise data warehouse allows providers to benefit from third-party data integration tools and analytic applications that help reduce time-to-value and overall cost

Optimized for ease of use — intuitive, well documented model lowers the cost, time and risk associated with custom development

Greater flexibility — model is able to accommodate customization if needed to meet providers’ individual needs

“Data aggregation infrastructure capabilities as outlined by Oracle are pivotal to advancing access to actionable knowledge for improving patient safety, quality of care, compliance and for furthering ARRA goals for meaningful use of data in these domains,” said Sanjaya Kumar, M.D., President and CEO, Quantros. “We see the relationship with Oracle and its new enterprise healthcare analytics infrastructure as key for rapidly integrating and empowering healthcare providers with the decision support tools and clinical business intelligence analytics required to identify, enact and continuously monitor the impact of interventions.”

“Once considered a luxury that few hospitals could afford, real-time patient safety monitoring is making it possible to detect adverse events, optimize outcomes and automatically send warning alerts to clinicians as they occur,” said David Goldsteen, M.D., Chairman & CEO, VigiLanz. “We expect Oracle’s new enterprise healthcare analytics to play a significant role in helping us further our mission to empower clinicians with timely information that helps optimize patient 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/

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/

MicroStrategy’s Free Reporting Package Provides Access to SAP BW 2010

MicroStrategy Incorporated a leading worldwide provider of business intelligence (BI) software, recently announced that its free reporting software package, MicroStrategy Reporting Suite, provides seamless access to SAP Business Information Warehouse (SAP BW) data. SAP BW is an online analytical processing system and data warehouse.

MicroStrategy Reporting Suite enables users to develop operational and analytical reports from SAP BW data and non-SAP data from an integrated BI interface. With MicroStrategy Reporting Suite, business users and IT professionals can quickly access SAP BW data to perform statistical and advanced analyses, run performance scorecards, and drill to investigate details, all from the same tool. MicroStrategy Reporting Suite extends SAP BW data analysis to more users, with its full-featured, intuitive interface and easy-to-use reports.

“MicroStrategy 9 brings to the table a range of methods to integrate with SAP, from supporting robust reporting, analytics, dashboards, and applications that access SAP BW to integrating BI into SAP Enterprise Portal,” said Mark Smith, CEO and EVP of Research, Ventana Research. “MicroStrategy enables the rapid integration and use of existing SAP BW InfoCubes and associated business queries that the user organization might have spent significant time to develop.”

With MicroStrategy Reporting Suite for SAP BW, business users are able to:

• Visualize data using graphs and performance scorecards
• Create rankings and time-based comparisons
• Perform a complete range of business calculations and build advanced analytics against SAP BW data
• Schedule reports to run to a personalized history list
• View detailed information in tabular grid reports or visualize simple grid-and-graph dashboards in a single click
• Run MDX queries against SAP BW without writing any code or scripts
  Run and personalize their own reports and analyses against SAP and non-SAP data

“We considered many BI products and found that MicroStrategy’s platform easily integrated with our SAP BW system,” said Luis Sanches, Controller, Grupo Media Capital. Roberto Costa, Director of Control Management of Grupo Media Capital, added, “The MicroStrategy platform has streamlined the management of business information for us, improving data comprehension and providing immediate access to information by month, product, and/or business unit, with a simple click of the mouse.”

“We’re currently using MicroStrategy for reporting and analysis of our sales and marketing data stored in SAP BW, and we plan to expand to supply chain monitoring and financial analysis next,” said Santiago Allande, Director of Systems and Processes, FAMIQ. “MicroStrategy’s native connections to SAP BW and flexibility to connect to a relational model, combined with the positive experience our end users have with MicroStrategy, makes this an excellent solution for us.”

MicroStrategy Reporting Suite is available via a free download and the license is perpetual, providing Web-based reporting of SAP BW data for up to 100 users at no charge. Free online training, free online support, and other free resources help to ensure rapid development and deployment.

“MicroStrategy’s BI platform is certified under the SAP Powered by NetWeaver program, which helps customers leverage their existing investments in SAP to build successful business intelligence applications,” said Sanju Bansal, MicroStrategy COO. “MicroStrategy Reporting Suite provides a user-friendly interface for business users to quickly uncover actionable insights from SAP BW data.”

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

Systech has been weaving MicroStrategy’s award winning BI platform into its proven methodology for creating sophisticated Business Intelligence environments since 1998.

View Systech’s MicroStrategy Technology Practice

http://www.systechusa.com/microstrategy/

Background

In this case study we describe how a leading specialty retailer achieved a greater insight into Key performance and Sales metrics through Systech’s MicroStrategy implementation. The MicroStrategy implementation supported business users to analyze sales and inventory to identify key trends and opportunities.

To accommodate their expanding business the client sought a platform to support complex data analysis that is user friendly. Formerly they depended on time consuming and less efficient POS System.

After evaluating several Business Intelligence vendors, they chose Systech Solutions Inc. to meet their needs for identifying the key trends and making informed decisions. Systech Solutions, Inc. was assigned to design an Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) for them in this regard.

Challenges

The client required a detailed access into a variety of business data to allow the business community to analyze their data in greater depth. To offer a simplified and integrated solution for a profitable growth Systech had to address certain challenges.

• To track trends and identify opportunities. Since the data was spread across disparate systems it was a laborious process.
• To manage overwhelming amounts of data from various sources—and turning it into reliable business intelligence that enabled better business outcomes.
• To effectively design EDW for consolidated reporting both from in-house applications, JDA and PeopleSoft.
• To configure and implement a scalable tool to query the EDW and to create reports.
• To build a system that would distribute reports with in a 24 hour window every month.
• To provide a platform that could keep up with constantly evolving user requirements.

Solution

Systech Solutions fashioned a business intelligence environment that comprised of a Netezza data warehousing infrastructure, a DataStage ETL environment and a MicroStrategy reporting environment.

The Systech team successfully achieved the extraction, transformation and loading of the source data into a data mart schema through an ETL process. The team made sure that the information was accurate, consistent, and optimally organized for complex analysis. The EDW was effectively designed for consolidated reporting from in-house applications, JDA and PeopleSoft. Since the source data was stored in individual schemas, the transformation strategy included consolidation of information which was common to all source systems. A user-friendly OLAP data model was successfully created to store pre-aggregated data for fast ad-hoc query performance.

MicroStrategy reporting tool was configured to query the EDW and to create reports. The Systech team developed dashboards that included scorecards to allow any type of key performance indicators (KPIs) to be rolled up into a score for a particular application area, overall IT performance, or anywhere in-between. More than 32 to 40 reports were run apart from the templates during the course of the project.

The sales data (KPI’s) was analyzed to:

• Anticipate the sales margin
• Analyze the SKU to aggregate (or roll-up) metrics into single overall “score” for IT and the inventory data
• Visualize store and warehouse inventory
• Calculate profitability evaluation ratio that analyzes the firm’s ability to turn inventory into cash above the cost of the inventory
• Study purchase orders and transfers

Result

The MicroStrategy implementation by Systech team provided the client a greater insight into Key performance and Sales metrics.
Systech developed an easy to use BI application to support their data from the users. The data warehouse was architected to support production reporting.
Multiple areas of their business used the data to manage inventory, identify sales opportunity, recognize key performers and review products.
Systech made it possible to provide customizable user experience and provide executive summary reports, analyze sales promotion and study products sales.
Systech created a robust architecture and a flexible platform. This architecture combined right level of access with required functionality and resulted in a positive user experience.

MicroStrategy’s 13th annual user conference 2010 kicked off with a bang at Las Vegas this year. MicroStrategy World has always presented us a great opportunity to spend time with our customers and partners to catch up and plan for the upcoming year, and this year was no different! There was record attendance of more than 1,500 customers and partners attending, signifying the beginning of what is looking to be a very strong year for BI.

Systech has been a regular at the MicroStrategy World for the past several years. This year we were a silver sponsor for the event. We were delighted to be on the exhibit floor along with our partner Pi Solutions to present our success strategies and experiences using BI to enhance business performance. Some of the exciting new attractions on this year’s Systech exhibit floor featured unique presentations and demonstrations highlighting “Discover the power of Analytics” solutions for various industries. Not only was our solution well received by our client base but was extremely well received by the audience who were exposed to Systech’s BI for the first time. At the event, we got a chance to re-connect with Systech alumni and it was gratifying to see them cheering and celebrating our success. Krish Lakshmi Narayan, summarized the sentiment when he said that it was great to see Systech’s growth in BI and the level of participation at the conference. Several Alumni also brought their entire team over to our booth and introduced Systech as the company which trained them of their BI expertise.

Adhering to their tradition, MicroStrategy world started off with a dashing performance – this year by Gwen Stefani (Or maybe a look alike…hey you never know in Las Vegas!)! The general session generated tons of energy and excitement – it included Sanju Bansal’s welcome, Mike Saylor’s keynote on Mobile Intelligence, Mark LaRow’s keynote on the Micro Strategy Technology Strategy, and Micro strategy customer panel.

The highlight was definitely the keynote from Mike Saylor, CEO, MicroStrategy. Mike declared in his keynote, “We are on the verge of a new era that will result in a new class of applications that will change the way we think about our business.” Saylor made the most compelling speech of why mobile may revolutionize BI. Saylor said, “Computing is entering its fifth generation in which desktop Internet applications are giving way to a new generation of Mobile Internet applications. In the Mobile Internet age, applications which were mildly successful when used at one’s desk suddenly become incredibly effective and valuable when consumed on the go, anywhere and anytime business is being conducted. A Mobile information access will likely eclipse desktop information access in the near future. This heightened level of usage, combined with the richness of the mobile interface, will change the way information is consumed and MicroStrategy intends to be at the forefront of this wave. MicroStrategy 9 is designed to outperform competitive BI architectures, and is well-suited to provide intelligence in the age of the Mobile Internet. Our goal is to enable our customers to deliver Mobile Intelligence ahead of their competition to their employees, their suppliers, and their customers.”

Mark LaRow’s keynote focused on the strategy and the launch of MicroStrategy 9 release 2. MicroStrategy boasted its in-memory solution last year in MicroStrategy 9. With MicroStrategy 9 Release 2, they have improved its cache load times, query processing times, and memory consumption. VP of Marketing Mark LaRow claimed that cubes consume 70% less memory in the latest release, making an already scalable solution more so. With the upgrade to 64-bit BI, empowered business people to conduct analysis quicker, leverage more BI functionality, and to create their own reports without IT help.

The event featured more than 100 educational sessions, and an update on MicroStrategy’s latest technology advances. MicroStrategy outlined their technology advancements and strategy to emphasize the important impact of advancements: speed of thought performance, mobile intelligence, enabling an information gateway, rapid time to value, lower cost of ownership, making BI pervasive and the future with predictive analytics and next generation user interfaces through navigation and visualization.

At the conference, MicroStrategy recognized companies for achieving outstanding business performance with their MicroStrategy-based business intelligence applications. These companies were recognized because of the way their dashboards and dashboard technology enhanced the way the business decisions were made. The winners from this year were AmerisourceBergen for extranet deployment, Con-way Freight for advanced analytics, Yahoo for data analytics, Lowes for user scalability, Ross Stores for enterprise deployment and Brian Fox from Citi for individual excellence in business intelligence.

AmerisourceBergen was recognized in the Extranet Deployment category for its InSite system. The InSite system supports AmerisourceBergen’s community pharmacy clients across the U.S. with powerful dashboards and scorecards that provide rich analytics and tailored information. The extranet allows pharmacy owners to quickly identify suspect claims that may contribute to profit leakage, and uncover opportunities to expand their business and reduce unnecessary costs. AmerisourceBergen is one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical services companies, with operations primarily in the United States and Canada. Chuck Reed, from ABDC acknowledged the Systech team for its integral role in the project at the award ceremony, thus recognizing Systech’s contribution in skill and resources for the project.

MicroStrategy World 2010 was a jam packed event filled with learning and networking! We had a chance to personally experience MicroStrategy, examine the new product technology, collaborate with customers and review their progress. On the whole it was clearly evident that we would be seeing a seismic shift in the way business is conducted. And most of all it was exciting and rewarding to connect with everybody in Systech’s BI/DW ecosystem – our client base, our partners and our alumni friends!

Here’s to a productive 2010!

Vaishnavi Gollapudi
The Editor, BI Insight

Systech has been weaving MicroStrategy’s award winning BI platform into its proven methodology for creating sophisticated Business Intelligence environments since 1998.

View Systech’s MicroStrategy Technology Practice
http://www.systechusa.com/microstrategy/

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.

Systech has developed a unique approach that combines its in-depth knowledge of customers’ business processes with expertise in BI solutions to create an analytical solution for Category Management for CPG & Retail.

Arun Gollapudi, CEO, Systech Solutions, Inc. explains, “Many CPG and Retail businesses are becoming victims of fluctuating dynamics in industry. Margin pressures are increasing and product lifecycles are shorter in a downturn. Systech has initiated a solution that would positively impact CPG and Retail businesses by collaboratively targeting profitable product and customer segments. We are confident this solution will provide advanced analytics to our clients at a competitive cost .”

The solution deals with the key applications of Category Management such as:

• Assortment Planning
• Inventory Management
• Price Management
• Supply Market Analysis
• Market Comparison
• Vendor Management
• SKU Rationalization
• Planogramming
• Visual Merchandising
• Monitor key metrics, analytics and scorecards

Systech’s application for Category Management would provide customers a solution to strategically manage categories and gain an insight to unlock additional saving.

Talend Launches Talend Integration Suite RTx

Talend, the recognized market leader in open source data integration software, recently announced the availability of Talend Integration Suite RTx, a new real-time data integration platform for enterprise application integration needs.

Based on Talend’s award winning, enterprise-grade data integration platform – Talend Integration Suite – the new solution allows IT organizations to accelerate the velocity of data across IT systems. With up-to-the-minute data, customers receive a higher level of data consistency across applications, providing more accurate decision making capabilities.

RTx provides organizations with benefits in many areas. For example, with RTx, companies can save time and money by developing and maintaining data integration processes in a fraction of the time and cost it takes with proprietary technologies. For online merchants, RTx provides the information necessary to make promotional offers on-the-fly, based on user behavior, resulting in more targeted offers with better response rates. RTx also improves customer service by synchronizing and maintaining data from multiple sources so that all stakeholders within an organization can access accurate information.

“The fast pace of business today means companies can’t rely on day-old or even hours-old data, and the speed at which IT delivers this data can be the difference between good and bad service, between a happy customer and a lost customer,” said Mark Madsen, president and founder of Third Nature, a technology research firm. “Integration today is mostly performed by hand-coded data movement processes developed by application programmers. Continued reliance on batch data movement and hand-coded integration is a recipe for failure. Companies that want to excel today need a real-time data integration infrastructure and progressive IT organizations are using data integration tools that combine real-time data movement with transformation and quality rules – without the laborious programming effort.”

MicroStrategy Incorporated Announces a Free Reporting Software Package

MicroStrategy Incorporated, a provider worldwide provider of business intelligence (BI) software, recently announced a free reporting software package for departmental BI applications. MicroStrategy Reporting Suite enables companies to use MicroStrategy’s integrated BI platform to develop and deploy premium, Web–based reporting applications, at no cost.

With this compelling new reporting package, MicroStrategy has eliminated cost and time impediments for departments and workgroups to initiate new reporting applications. Business users can simply visit the MicroStrategy Reporting Suite Web site, download the free software, and begin building their reporting applications, all in the same day.

MicroStrategy’s easy–to–use reporting software enables business users to quickly create the reports they need to gain critical insights into business data and make timely, analytically-based decisions. Users can view data in detailed tabular grid reports, graph data to analyze information quickly, drill-down to investigate root causes, make ad hoc queries, manage business performance with arithmetic and statistical metrics, and export data to Excel and PDF. When reporting requirements expand, companies can purchase licenses for more advanced report presentation,

Cindi Howson, Founder, BIScorecard: “Given the product capabilities, migration path, and support, it seems like a deal too good to be true… The appealing aspect [of the MicroStrategy Reporting Suite free offering] is that it provides customers with an easy entree into BI, without that entree being a total throw away. If customers later want to add dashboards or multi-source, for example, they don’t have to start over or migrate to a new product as is often the case with many departmental BI tools.”

SAS Institute highlights benefits BI could bring to education

Johannesburg, South Africa (24 Mar. 2009) – Education can benefit dramatically from advanced analytics and business intelligence (BI) tools, which will provide them with better student data management as well as predictive modelling for understanding future educational demands.

This is the view of Kevin Kemp, head of sales for the commercial division at SAS Institute South Africa, who highlighted the benefits of implementing a BI platform in a tertiary education environment, while speaking at the recent ITS Conference, in Johannesburg.

The conference, hosted by ITS at Emperors’ Palace, brought together users, administrators and financial managers from the education sector and focused on the use of software solutions and technology in the future of education. ITS is a software company with a legacy of more than 20 years’ experience in administration software development for the education sector.

“Implementing a BI solution in an academic environment needs to start with a strong base infrastructure, laying the foundation with data integration and then building intelligent storage and business intelligence on top of that platform,” says Kemp.

“Business intelligence in tertiary education can bring benefits embedded in student data management, HR and fee management, optimising the capacity of universities, trimming costs to make more money available for upgrades, increasing profits, improved marketing approaches and student retention, and could improve student support systems as well as online learning facilities.

“Universities handle incredible amounts of data, and being able to access that data in real-time, analyse reports, discover patterns and provide student support where it is needed, would increase student retention and smooth the running of the university.”

SAS Institute has already made a significant contribution towards education institutions, with a number of local success stories, including Walter Sisulu University, North West University and Unisa.

“Education is experiencing massive transformation, and holds the key to the future, to resolving the skills shortage and driving economic growth in South Africa. Technology and education need to be intertwined to take South African learners and education institutions into the future.

“In 2006, the education minister of Singapore used the slogan: ‘Thinking schools, learning nation’ in his annual address to the country. This is an approach that South Africa could seriously benefit from should it be adopted by our education system. By having technologically advanced places of learning, that run optimally like ‘thinking schools’, students will benefit from improved learning, educators can teach better and a nation can grow,” ends Kemp.

Background

Falken Tire is a brand of tires by Japanese Sumitomo Rubber Industries with branches across Asia, America and Europe. Their first tire was produced in 1983 and it wasn’t until two years later that they began exporting their tires outside Japan and entered the US market only in 1990.

As the organization grew, so did the need for accurate and immediate information. The company lacked an effective way to consolidate, manage and distribute business data. Data resided in many different sources and in different formats, limiting its ability to analyze and deliver it within a single platform. To evaluate performance in the market, Falken Tire compared their Sales data with the Market data. Falken Tire wanted to perform Market Share Analysis and also forecast demand. However, they were faced with complications involving multi-source data analysis.

These issues needed to be addressed by Systech Solutions, Inc.

Challenges

Diversity of sources:

The fundamental problem that Falken Tire faced was that their data was stored in different places. The Sales data was in the Operation System, Objective data was in a flat file and Market data was in an SQL database. It was not only time consuming to create a report but also not flexible to do further analysis.

Tracking and forecasting:

Traditionally, Falken Tire could not track or forecast actual sales. Therefore, it was essential to configure a reporting tool to access information in the data mart with ease. They needed to get a deeper insight into their key sales performance to better forecast the market.

Solution

After studying the data from different sources, Systech came up with a model of how the information fit together. To enable this, the development team needed to understand the existing information and find the correlated pieces. Systech’s development team then created a common format for the data mart in a SQL Server 2005 database. Later, Informatica was decided on as the most appropriate ETL platform for this BI implementation at Falken Tire. The ETL platform was configured to support reporting and complex data analysis with maximum efficiency. It was also structured to provide enough flexibility to accommodate future trade volume and business growth.
Subsequently, MicroStrategy was configured to access information in the data mart to deliver customer friendly reports, templates and dashboards.

Result

Centralized data in BI data mart:

• Users could easily access the data. Also allowed them to compare Falken Tire sales with their competitor and do market analysis.
• The robust architecture of the new ETL platform provided flexibility and scalability.
• The new ETL process fetched data to reports based on real time which was impossible earlier.

Empowered to report and analyze data to make improved decisions:

• The new and improved dashboard consisted of multiple parameters/metrics that helped track all Key Performance Indicators in Sales and Inventory.
• The dashboard enabled Falken Tire to view the performance of the company based on their objectives.
• It helped create a Daily Sales Report for the previous working day and also helped to view Sales by drilling down to the zip level of the state.
• The solution enabled business users to drill into the key trends to do an online analysis with just a click without coming back to the developer asking for a separate report.
• The reporting tool automated the comparative market share analysis of the Sales. This process which was a multi-step process earlier was now an automated process.
• They could report sales figures, forecast projection, estimate competitive sales and gauge the state of business.
• Based on the forecasting demand they could manage the inventory.

The Systech team thus helped the end users view critical performance information in a matter of seconds and quickly make decisions that seek to optimize market share.

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.