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

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

Kaleida Health Monitors Flu Cases with Oracle

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

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

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

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

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

Kaleida Health’s Flu Monitoring Dashboard highlights:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sunny Delight Leverages Trade Promotion Management to Strengthen Customer Profitability

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

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

A Sunny New Direction

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

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

Customer Profitability Will Quench Your Thirst

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.”

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.