2011 Business Intelligence Buyer’s Guide: BI€¦ · SaaS BI Tools: Better Decision Making for...

2011 Business Intelligence Buyer’s Guide:

Technology Evaluation Centers

BIfor

Everyone

Business Intelligence: A Buyer’s Guide

RIT FOR MANUFACTURING EXECUTIVES

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Business Intelligence: A Buyer’s GuideBy Jorge García, Research Analyst, Technology Evaluation Centers

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Thought LeadershipSaaS BI Tools: Better Decision Making for the Rest of Us

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TEC Special ReportThe Role of Business Intelligence in Content Strategies

Vendor Directory

Table of Contents

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Business Intelligence: A Buyer’s Guide

This buyer guide is intended for business owners, managers, decision makers, and anyone

interested in learning about the deployment of business intelligence (BI) systems across

large enterprises as well as small to medium businesses (SMBs). It presents a comprehensive

view of the wide spectrum of BI software solutions currently available and investigates

how they match different types of organizations according to size and need.

The guide addresses software solutions in three major groupings:

• BI for large enterprises

• BI for SMBs

• Software-as-a-service (SaaS) BI offerings

Given this classification, the guide covers a wide range of BI solutions for almost all

organizations, and anyone interested in a BI system should be able to identify a potential

suitable solution. Each section contains specific information to help organizations research

and analyze BI solutions, and make decisions about which BI software is a good fit for them.

Large, Medium, or Small?To help understand what this guide covers, some parameters must be established for

defining large, medium, and small businesses. An organization can be defined according

to economic, geographical, and local characteristics. However, for the purpose of this

guide, only total revenues and the number of employees will be considered as defining

parameters:

• Large enterprises have more than 500 employees and over $250 million (USD) in

revenues.

• Smalltomediumbusinesses have 1 to 500 employees and revenues of up to $250

million (USD).

By Jorge García, Research Analyst, Technology Evaluation Centers

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IT in Large EnterprisesAlmost all large organizations demonstrate some of the following characteristics:

• They have specific in-house information technology (IT) department staff, with clearly defined functions

and roles. This gives them the organizational maturity to have internal BI staff in place.

• They rely on pre-existing technology frameworks that enable them to prepare for large-scale BI system

deployments, in terms of technical and human resources.

• Their executives rely heavily on information gathered via a variety of sources that generate large and

complex volumes of data, all of which needs to be analyzed using specific software tools (such as corporate

BI solutions).

• They can rely on extensive budgets to meet corporate software needs and can afford to deploy state-of-

the-art solutions.

IT in SMBsWhen it comes to SMBs, the story is rather different. Many SMBs show some of the following features:

• They have a very small in-house IT staff, or none at all. In general, they count on only a few people to carry

out all IT-related functions, from hardware maintenance to software and network services.

• They rely on a set of limited technology frameworks to deploy software solutions. In many cases, IT staff

must develop applications from scratch or adapt existing applications.

• As with large enterprises, SMB executives rely heavily on information gathered from complex but varied

sources that can generate large and complex volumes of data, all of which needs to be analyzed using

specific software tools (BI solutions).

• SMB budgets are tight and limited. Every software system resource needs to be selected with care to

comply with all the organization’s requirements.

SaaS BI: The New AlternativeThe SaaS BI space is gaining increased coverage and users around the globe. Despite some initial fear and

doubt among the buyer community, SaaS BI vendors and services are on the rise, and some traditional on-

premise vendors are launching SaaS versions of their BI solutions. SaaS BI software solutions will undoubtedly

be the next big trend in the coming years, as they add new value for organizations with specific budget,

human resource, and technical constraints, while providing access to BI analysis and reporting tools—and

negating the hardware and IT personnel costs of a traditional BI system deployment.

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BI for Large EnterprisesBecause of the nature of BI, which traditionally involved the incorporation of expensive high-end software

technology, BI software systems were first deployed in large enterprises. To encompass the complete BI life cycle

process, it was necessary to have strong budgets, as well as the means and justification for taking financial risks

in order to gain a competitive advantage. To achieve this competitive advantage, many large companies were

eager for software tools that would enable them to improve their decision-making process. Some software

companies responded to this need by accelerating the evolution of classical decision support systems to

provide sophisticated analysis tools with high-end software technology. Naturally, the high cost of these types

of tools limited their accessibility to large-scale companies (also, the technical requirements for this technology

could be met by big corporations only).

In the last four or five years, economic factors as well as the exponential growth of data volumes generated by

organizations have forced the development of very sophisticated BI applications, and also expanded the kind

of tools a classical BI system normally uses. The BI space is still growing and maturing, and large corporations are

still demanding new solutions for new enterprise needs.

BI for SMBsWith recent economic conditions and the information boom, many smaller companies have found themselves

requiring analysis tools that enable them to improve their business monitoring and performance improvement

strategies. BI solution innovation has cascaded down from large companies to provide adapted and specific

services to companies with a need for advanced analytic software tools but with very limited budgets. Recent

BI tools have improved the BI life cycle to help organizations of every size and shape to improve analysis, data

management, and data visualization tools.

Is BI Really for Everyone?

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The State of the Market

The Growing Interest in BIIt was in the late 1970s when the first decision support systems—predecessors of modern BI applications—

arrived in the corporate world. In those days, only certain very large companies could afford these kinds of

applications to help their executives with the business decision process. Nowadays, BI solutions play a major

role in almost every organization, with many companies needing to analyze vast amounts of data to generate

valuable information to gain insight into the organization and make the best possible decisions.

In addition to huge companies requiring the analysis of enormous amounts of data, smaller companies are

generating more and more operational information. Economic conditions have forced these smaller companies

to find ways to increase productivity and improve business performance—traditional operational tools being

simply not sophisticated or powerful enough to get the job done. Nowadays, many SMBs use specific tools to

analyze and process these greater amounts of data and come up with the best possible business decisions.

Over the last few years, Technology Evaluation Centers (TEC) has seen a steady increase in the interest in BI

software—not only from large companies, but also from SMBs trying to address their data management needs

and decision support processes. The number of overall BI software selection projects in TEC’s Evaluation Centers

*Data in figures 1 to 3, 6 to 8, 10, and 11 is derived from TEC’s Evaluation Centers. Data values reflect the number of software selection

projects in TEC’s Evaluation Centers. For figure 3, data values reflect user responses.

Figure1.BIsoftwareselectionprojects(2005to2010)*

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has increased in a linear fashion over the last five years, with a slight decline from 2009 to 2010. This indicates

a stabilization in the demand for BI solutions, and for business software in general. However, we could expect

a slower but steady growth in the near future (see figure 1). This trend is seen in all subsequent figures as well.

This growth trend is not exclusive to large enterprises; many smaller companies are looking for tools to gain

organizational insight and improve productivity and performance. Indeed, SMB interest in BI has grown at an

extremely steep rate over the same period (see figure 2).

Moreover, interest in BI and business performance management tools over the last five years has been

increasing at a steadier rate as compared to other business software tools, such as enterprise resource

planning (ERP) systems and human resource management (HRM) systems (see figure 3).

Figure2.InterestinBI:largeenterprises(LEs)versusSMBs

Figure3.InterestinBIsolutionscomparedtootherbusinesssoftware

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Despite the respectable position of BI solutions in comparison to other classes of business software, BI system

adoption is still in a growth phase, for the following reasons:

• The SMB market space is adopting this kind of business software solution to improve overall operations

and decision-making processes.

• Large enterprises are still looking to improve analytical and decision-making processes due to the

information explosion that is resulting from more complex business models and corporate mergers and

acquisitions.

• Regulatory and compliance pressures are pushing companies to improve their reporting and analytical

standards to comply with new and more rigorous regulations. This has generated the need for BI solutions

that incorporate specific functionality to comply with distinct governmental and industry regulations.

• Some industries require specialized functionality to accommodate specific complex business processes. This

phenomenon is pushing BI software vendors to create specific industry vertical functionality for BI systems.

The BI Life Cycle: Classical versus Modern BI TasksBI solutions were originally conceived as tools for information analysis and decision support, with historical data

as a source. Extensive sets of historical data were processed, analyzed, and delivered to the user via visualization

tools such as reports or dashboards. The traditional BI approach resembles a batch process in which information

follows a sequential process from source to target. In general terms, this BI life cycle approach is a composite of

the components shown in figure 4.

Figure4.ClassicalBIlifecycleprocess

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Data Sources The classical BI life cycle process collects data directly from the point where it’s generated. Data can be

originated from many types of systems and applications, including relational databases, business software such

as ERP or customer relationship management (CRM) applications, plain text files, or office application files such

as spreadsheets.

Data Integration Process The data is moved or copied from its source location to a data warehouse or data mart. During this process,

which is called data integration, some subtasks take place:

• A data quality process ensures that the information remains consistent, accurate, and “clean”— i.e., there is

a process to avoid/correct/detect problems within the data that is being moved to the data warehouse.

• A data transformation modifies the structure of the data to satisfy the conditions imposed by the design of

the data warehouse, and to ensure the consistency of all information.

• The load process allocates the information into an information repository (such as a data warehouse or

data mart).

Data Warehouse/Data Mart ComponentThe data warehouse or data mart is an information repository that is used for analysis purposes. What this

means is that the data warehouse has a specific structural design that enables the analysis of large volumes of

data in a shorter period of time than with a traditional relational database system. Common relational database

systems are designed using a “relational model,” in which data elements are grouped and stored to facilitate the

registration of transactions. Relational databases are used for operational purposes; they are not intended for

extensive data analysis, but rather are used for registering and performing operations with specific quantities

of information. A data warehouse, on the other hand, is designed in such a way as to enable the exploration and

analysis of large volumes of data.

Analysis and Data Visualization Process Once the information is in the data warehouse, the analysis process can begin; that is, the data is transformed

into valuable information for the user.

The BI life cycle process ends when the information is presented in a form that enables an improved decision-

making process.

At first, this appears to be a fairly simple process, as each task follows a straightforward sequence. However, at

each stage a complete set of tasks must be performed in order to proceed to the next stage of the BI life cycle.

This is one of the reasons why many vendors offer solutions to perform specific parts of the overall BI life cycle

process.

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You should consider such a solution if your organization already has part of a BI solution, or if you need to

improve any part of the general BI process. In fact, many organizations have completed their BI solutions with

a mixture of software from different vendors. Another effect of this application diversity is that many so-called

point solutions have features intended to complement and integrate with other BI applications to comprise a

complete BI solution.

For example, the vendors listed in table 1 offer solutions dealing with a specific stage of the process.

Over the last 10 years, the BI life cycle process has changed significantly in terms of shape and performance.

The drivers for these changes include the augmented data volumes generated by all organizations, the increase

in complexity of business models and business operations, the availability of computing resources due to

technology improvements, and universally difficult economic conditions.

Since the beginning of the decade, many companies have been elaborating progressively more complex

business models. Mergers and acquisitions increased, and the volume of data being generated exploded.

The increase in data volumes and the speed with which this data must be delivered forced traditional BI

applications to apply different solutions not only to augment their ability to manage such volumes, but also to

modify the traditional way of performing the data integration process. What was originally based on a batch

set of processes for moving, transforming, and cleansing thousands of records on a monthly, weekly, or even

daily basis transformed into a cycle that moves smaller quantities of data, but with an important increase in

frequency—two, four, or eight times a day, or every hour, or even more frequently. This gave the BI life cycle

process a new dimension, as it now aimed to deliver data almost at the moment it is generated—that’s to say,

at an operational pace.

Such “near real-time” solutions essentially enabled organizations to leverage their BI systems to increase data-

refreshing periods. More recently, some organizations have applied technologies to enable data collection in

actual real time. The number and types of data sources had been growing and becoming more diverse, and

modern organizations are reading data from sources such as social media content and unstructured text.

This diverse set of sources is obliging organizations and software vendors to manage information arriving at

different rates of speed, and coordinating these efforts can be a challenge. Besides all this, the data visualization

phase has also increased the options available to users.

DataIntegration DataVisualization

DataFlux (Data Management Studio) Corda Technologies (CenterView)

Informatica (PowerCenter) Dundas (Dundas Dashboard)

Information Builders (iWay) Universal Mind (Spatial Key)

Talend (Open Studio) VisualCalc (analysis software)

Pervasive Software (Data Integrator)

Table1.Vendorsofferingsolutionsfordataintegrationanddatavisualizationtasks

http://www.dataflux.com/home.aspx?lang=en-us

http://www.corda.com/index.php

http://www.informatica.com/Pages/index.aspx

http://www.dundas.com/

http://www.informationbuilders.com/

http://www.spatialkey.com/

http://www.talend.com/index.php

http://www.visualcalc.com/

http://www.pervasiveintegration.com/Pages/home.aspx

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Dashboards and scorecards now comprise only part of the available tools. Interactivity between BI tools and

office applications is increasing and extending BI functionality, and mobile technologies are taking their own

place in the equation, with BI providers now capable of distributing BI information to mobile devices. All these

trends in the data visualization phase are enabling more people within the organization to become BI software

consumers or users. Even customers can now be part of the BI solution. Figure 5 depicts a modern BI life cycle

model.

Figure5.ModernBIlifecycleprocess

For the modern BI life cycle process, the classical BI life cycle has been enriched with alternative technologies

and improved methodologies and software tools to provide solutions for a wider number of business areas

beyond those linked to financial issues. Modern BI applications can also provide specific vertical functionality

for industries such as health care and retail, among others.

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The Information DilemmaTraditionally, data warehouse technologies have played a major role in the BI life cycle process. The reason is

quite simple: data warehouses are the repositories where all information resides. A data warehouse management

system comprises the storage, management tools, and data that when combined can deliver a large set of

information for analytical purposes.

Among the core functionalities in a BI project, data warehousing is increasingly being regarded as a basic

consideration for corporate BI solutions (see figure 6).

Figure6.Interestindatawarehousefunctionalitiesandtools

Since about 2005, software vendors have been modifying the shape of classical data warehouses; in some cases

the changes were minimal, but others included important design modifications. These modifications are due to

the need for data warehousing to deliver data in a timely and accurate manner to be able to proceed through

the rest of the BI lifecycle process. Some of these issues are:

• Dataexplosion

The amount of data generated from operational sources has caused data warehouse systems to evolve in

such a way that they not only store greater amounts of data, but also exploit this data in a fast and reliable

manner.

• Lackofhumanandtechnicalresources

Many companies don’t have sufficiently technically skilled human resources to successfully deploy a

data warehouse project. Also, some of them don’t have the software and hardware tools to deploy a data

warehouse system.

• Dataqualityissues

When information grows in volume and the sources of information multiply, it becomes more difficult for

the BI life cycle system and for the IT staff to ensure that data quality issues are addressed accurately.

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• Budgetconstraints

Many companies cannot shoulder the expense of acquiring high-end data warehouse technology. In many

cases, economic conditions represent an important limitation to a company’s ability to handle big amounts

of data generated from different operational sources.

Some software providers are trying to address these and other issues to improve the performance of data

warehouses and at the same time lower the cost of data warehouse implementations. Traditional data

warehouses used to sit on top of common relational database management systems (RDBMSs). Because of the

nature of this type of database, with many high-end technologies needed, data warehouse systems come with

a high total cost of ownership (TCO). Nowadays, many software vendors are designing data warehouse systems

using very different approaches and technologies from traditional relational databases, working to provide

a powerful data warehouse but with reduced costs. Some data warehouse products are designed using very

unique software engineering designs, but some general types of solutions can be easily identified:

• Datawarehouseappliances

Data warehouse appliances combine a set of software applications and hardware devices specifically

designed and assembled for the deployment, operation, and maintenance of a data warehouse system. The

system design takes advantage of the combination of hardware and software features for mass storage to

achieve high performance. Data warehouse appliances can reduce direct software and hardware costs as

well as operational costs by simplifying all administration and tasks. Many of the modern data warehouse

appliances take advantage of high-end hardware technologies such as parallel processing and task

distribution.

• Analyticaldatabases

Analytical databases are designed to improve the speed of analysis of increased amounts of data. Analytical

databases take advantage of different design features, such as column- or index-oriented storage, data

compression, and distributed and parallel computing, among others.

• In-memorydatabases

The innovative technology of in-memory databases enables users to work on a database that resides

completely in memory. This optimizes database analysis because as all data resides in local memory, no

data search takes place. This technology could reshape data warehouse design in the years to come.

These trends in the data warehouse space are making it easier for all kinds of organizations, from small to large

companies, to acquire a data warehouse or data management solution for analytical purposes. Also, software

vendors are expanding their licensing and deployment options for data warehouse technologies and making

them more flexible. Table 2 shows some of the software providers for these types of data warehouse solutions.

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BI Gets Real ( Time): An Operational BI BriefingOne of the most important developments of the modern BI life cycle is inarguably the ability to collect data

directly from the source. This is in distinction to the traditional BI life cycle process, which involved collecting,

analyzing, and presenting results based on historical data. Once analyzed, this data was converted into

information that C-level executives and decision makers needed to support decision-making processes. This

information touched only the upper levels of the organization, and typically did not flow down to the lower

levels. This information was used principally to support long-term decisions.

Technologies such as data federation, enterprise information integration (EII) systems, and business activity

monitoring (BAM) have enabled different sets of solutions to be applied according to particular organizational

needs.

Many companies can now analyze information that is valuable beyond a historical perspective. They can

collect information that comes directly from the source, and thus measure the behavior of many aspects of the

business almost instantly—and with a short-term perspective in mind. It’s now possible not only to know how

business is performing, but also to collect information that is useful only if used in a timely manner (for example,

information generated from social media, stock markets, and other media).

This expansion in scope makes it possible to involve a wider number of users with BI tools, from C-level

executives to users at the operational level. To sum up, here are some of the benefits that operational BI brings

to the table:

• BI solutions can target a greater audience within the organization.

• BI solutions can be used not only to analyze and support decisions, but also to measure performance, react

to changing circumstances, and indicate the appropriate measures to take.

• BI solutions can adjust to information that is moving at different speeds within the organization. Information

now flows through the BI life cycle to get from source to target at the “right time” for the user. This process

is no longer based on speed, but on “time to value.”

• BI solutions can now support transactional environments. However, adequate support does presuppose

high availability.

DataWarehouseAppliances AnalyticalDatabases In-memoryDatabases

Netezza Kognitio QlikTech

Dataupia Vertica Microsoft (PowerPivot)

Aster Data Illuminate

Teradata Infobright

Table2.Vendorsofferingdatawarehousesolutions

http://www.netezza.com/

http://www.kognitio.com/

http://www.qlikview.com/

http://www.dataupia.com/

http://www.vertica.com/

http://www.powerpivot.com/

http://www.asterdata.com/

http://www.illuminateinc.com/en/index.php

http://www.teradata.com/t/

http://www.infobright.com/

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Transforming Data into Information The basic idea behind the first BI solutions was to improve decision support systems by automating more tasks,

and to provide decision makers with a more accurate version of the “truth.” This paradigm has not changed, but

two major components of it have evolved. Firstly, the complexity involved in the decision-making process has

increased dramatically; and secondly, because of the integration of major technology software applications for

handling data and processes, BI applications can help address a wider scope of problems. They can now support

three levels of the decision-making process:

• Strategicdecisions define the corporate future in the long term, and are normally made by the executive

team. These types of decisions were addressed by the classical BI life cycle process, and involve analyzing

large amounts of historical data. They answer the “What?” questions.

• Tacticaldecisions establish the initiatives that must be followed in order to accomplish strategic goals.

They must be handled with care due to their connection between the strategic vision and day-to-day

operations. They answer the “How?” questions with respect to strategic goals. In general, they involve

limited amounts of data, in near real time or actual real time.

• Operationaldecisions relate to the day-to-day operation of an organization. They involve defining specific

tasks to perform and operate. These decisions usually involve processes and procedures.

The incorporation of operational BI capabilities into the overall set of BI tasks enables modern BI suites to expand

their reach to other areas such as business process management and business performance management.

Business Performance Management: BI with a Strategy BI software providers are now incorporating many business performance management features to expand

the reach of BI solutions and create a more proactive BI environment capable of measuring and planning,

and suggesting corrective action if necessary. Business performance management tools can help construct a

management methodology framework that (added to a BI technical and software infrastructure) can deliver not

only organizational insights based on historical data, but also a measure of how an organization is performing

against its goals. This integration between BI and performance management tools transforms the BI cycle from

a passive data information factory into a proactive solution provider. Business performance management tools

and BI applications are complementary, and the software industry is currently closing the gap (see figure 7)

between tools that reflect the state of an organization and those that measure against goals and can help

formulate a proactive strategy; it’s clear that business performance management tools are extremely important

to the BI life cycle.

Metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) can be created as part of a planning strategy to measure financial

and process performance and to provide the necessary means to forecast specific key indicators. As a set of

techniques, performance management tools can improve an organization’s overall business performance, and

enable the incorporation of a framework to achieve performance management goals; balanced scorecards,

six sigma, and other types of methodologies can be applied to align the operational-tactical-strategic trio

according to overall goals.

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In the BI life cycle, business performance management systems generally occur within the following contexts:

• integrated with strictly operational tools (e.g., BAM systems)

• as part of an enterprise BI system

• integrated with operational systems such as ERP, CRM, or supply chain management (SCM) systems to

measure the performance of vertical business indicators

Some complete BI suites are now offering operational tools and business performance management capabilities

to complete the overall functionality core of operational BI and business performance management. Also, some

major business software providers are developing or acquiring vertical functionality to position their products

in specific niches where BI is extremely important, as in retail, health care, financials, and other industries.

Some of the benefits of integrating business performance management capabilities into the overall BI life cycle

infrastructure are as follows:

• Keep dashboards and scorecards up to date with the use of native operational BI capabilities.

• Encourage the use of collaboration tools to improve performance, communication, analysis, and response

based on the ability to measure processes against specific goals.

• Identify and predict operational problems faster, and take corrective or preventive actions.

• Encourage improvements to risk management strategies.

• Encourage better alignment to corporate goals at all organizational levels.

Many technologies continue to be embedded into the BI life cycle core infrastructure. BI tools are far from being

at peak maturity, and you should expect them to include many new technologies in the not-so-distant future.

Figure7.InterestinbusinessperformancemanagementversussomecoreBIfunctionalities

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Trends and Challenges in the BI SpaceAs was mentioned earlier, BI applications and the general BI life cycle process are still maturing, with new

software and hardware technology being incorporated into core BI functionality. Here are some BI trends to

watch for in the near future:

• Mobility

The incorporation of mobile technologies into the BI mainstream will increase in upcoming years. Many

vendors are incorporating compatibility with several mobile providers and specific applications and

interfaces to provide BI analysis information via mobile devices.

• Socialmedia

The data explosion has already arrived, but BI will be incorporating functionality to analyze structured and

unstructured data coming from diverse social media sources. This trend is growing constantly due to the

potential benefits in areas such as customer care and marketing, as well as product lifecycle management

strategies.

• Complexeventprocessing

Complex event systems are being incorporated with BI functionality and vice versa to enforce the data

movement from the operational source right through BI applications.

• In-memoryanalytics

The software technology behind in-memory analytics is attracting hype and attention; it may be the key

to reshaping the way we see and use data warehouses and BI applications in general. Analyzing millions of

records in milliseconds or even faster will push BI life cycle processes to new limits.

• Columnardatabases

Columnar databases could mark the end of relational databases in the BI space; with its innovative

architecture, columnar databases are a potential means of resolving the data volume problem.

• SaaSBI

SaaS applications are still growing and evolving, but nowadays there are a fair number of SaaS BI offerings

on the market. This software delivery model is a viable option for many SMBs, and may have some potential

for large enterprises.

• VerticalizationofBIfunctionality

BI providers are working hard to gain specific industry markets that use BI tools intensively. Many large

software vendors are incorporating functionality specifically created for industries such as construction,

health care, financials, retail, etc.

Because of the analytical nature of the BI life cycle, the form BI solutions take is closely related to the way in

which business evolves. Indeed, BI solutions are subject to continuous evolution at the same evolutionary pace

of business models and information requirements. This of course triggers challenges that the BI life cycle has

to address in order to remain current and maintain its ability to generate revenue for an organization. Here are

some of the challenges facing organizations with respect to BI deployment:

• to maintain a methodology for activity and task standardization, as well as a methodology to manage the

division of work

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• to maintain BI systems that are trustworthy from the user perspective

• to maintain the ability to solve time-to-delivery problems

• to assess and measure the business value of BI solutions

• to maintain and encourage the iterative nature of the development and deployment of a BI solution

• to maintain and encourage a risk management strategy for data management (data quality, metadata

management) and the impact this can have on an organization

• to maintain an accurate strategy with respect to BI life cycle development

Naturally, every BI deployment has its own particular set of issues, risks, and problems, and there are as yet no

iron-clad rules for deploying and ensuring the success of a BI system. However, by applying a formal strategy for

assessing all phases of a BI deployment project, it is possible to ensure incorporation of the necessary tools for

BI-assisted decision-making at the organizational level.

Social BISince the World Wide Web became publically available in 1991, social interaction has changed dramatically. This

new era in social communication has seen the progressive incorporation of new communication media into the

Web. In addition to e-mail, the Internet is being crowded with newer tools to enable individual and collective

communication between people all over the world. Web mail, blogs, and instant messaging services have all

enjoyed popularity. Now, many services—such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter—enable data communication

through distinct types of interaction between users; this is what we call “social media.”

BI and Social Media: The Structure of Unstructured AnalysisAlong the social media evolutionary path, companies and institutions realized that these channels are

producing vast amounts of valuable data that come directly from the source: customers (potential or existing),

users, or even employees or associates of the company. The value of social media data resides in the fact that

it reflects the sentiment of any given user with respect to a subject—easily a product, service, or brand. Social

media data can be collected and analyzed to assess the intangible aspects of an organization, like popularity,

market presence, and so on.

Recently, some companies have been working to provide tools not only for social interaction and collaboration,

but also for analysis of the information generated. The goal of these types of applications—called “social media

analytics” or “social Web analytics”—is to collect and interpret social media content.

BI and Social Media Analytics: The Best of Both WorldsCurrently, many software vendors are bringing social media analytics capabilities to organizations. The social

media analytics space is divided between independent vendors offering specific solutions to address this niche

and traditional software vendors (mainly BI vendors) that started adding social media analytics capabilities

to a core set of BI functionality features. Having social media analytics capabilities can bring some specific

advantages to an organization. Some of the major advantages are as follows:

http://www.facebook.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/secure/login

http://twitter.com/

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• Expansion of data sources

New BI tools not only analyze data coming from an organization’s Web site, but can also acquire data

from external social media sources. The analysis has expanded beyond the reach of direct feedback to

information that is generated beyond the purview of the organization. Organizations are able to “hear”

what is happening outside their boundaries.

• Analysis of both unstructured and structured data

In addition to analyzing information coming from traditional table, row, or field structures, organizations

can now tap into data in different formats, such as plain text, quizzes, and so on.

Many of the vendors in the social media analytics space offer their services on demand. Many organizations

can avoid the costs involved in the acquisition of an on-premise application but still leverage the capabilities to

measure their product and company presence in the social media space.

New social media tools will continue to emerge while others disappear. Social media analytics applications

are still in an early stage of maturation, and their adoption will likely expand throughout the corporate world

in the coming years. Without a doubt, this class of tools will represent a core consideration in the decision-

making process for almost all big (and even small to medium) companies looking to develop their marketing

and publishing campaigns.

Public BI: BI in the Public SectorDespite the noise surrounding the deployment of BI applications in the private sector, and extensive

commentary on BI business performance management applications evolving to become a basic part of every

large company’s stack of applications, public sector organizations remain more interested in the development

of BI solutions that comply with their own sets of unique conditions. This is especially true of those organizations

that handle large amounts of data and rely on this data to support important decision-making processes.

Figure8.PublicsectorinterestinBIapplications

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Over the last couple of years, government institutions have increased their interest in having BI applications to

support their data management processes (see figure 8).

BI tools may be used in both the private and public sectors. In both cases they can be used to support a decision-

making process and/or to measure and manage an organization’s performance. By collecting, analyzing, and

presenting data during the BI life cycle, BI applications transform this data into information to be used according

to organizational needs. Data has to be moved within the organization in a manner that offers “time to value,”

which may vary according to the nature of the information; it’s important that information be delivered in good

time, but it’s more important that it be delivered at the right time.

At this point, BI tools are used in similar ways in both the private and public sectors. The differences lie mainly

in their specific interests and outcomes. While BI in the private sector deals with measuring sales, marketing,

operations, and so on, BI in the public sector is dedicated to measuring service performance, goal achievement,

and budget. While private sector businesses analyze information with an eye to augmenting profits, analysis in

the public sector looks at social accomplishments and whether or not a project is on budget. So, it’s only natural

that general purpose BI applications do not meet all the specific needs of the public sector.

A BI solution for the public sector warrants some particular considerations; for example:

• transparency of information and process

• compliance with regulations and visibility of operations

• observance of budget constraints

• tracking of institutional goals and accomplishment of these goals

• service levels and public access to information

In addition to these considerations and core BI functionality, a BI solution for the public sector may have the

following requirements:

• compliance with public administration regulation standards for operation and security

• specific features to audit data management operations (storage, movement, and transformation)

• strong support for self-service functionality in order to provide broad access to BI tools for internal (within

the public organization) and external (general public) users

Deploying a BI solution for the public sector is not equivalent to deploying a BI solution for large private

organizations; radical differences exist in terms of regulation compliance needs, operational modes, and, of

course, the organizations’ strategic goals. The success of a BI solution deployment in the public sector may

rely on ensuring that each data consumer has access to the required information in the way it’s needed and

ensuring that all processes occur with transparency, compliance, and accuracy.

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According to the document “How Large Enterprises Approach IT Infrastructure Consolidation” from Forrester

Research, the two main motivators for data center consolidation in large enterprises are to improve operational

efficiency and to reduce complexity. These two goals are partially achieved by consolidating strategy and

operations, but BI and business performance management tools have a role to play in this consolidation.

Major companies are trying to consolidate information from across all business areas by improving the way

information is gathered, processed, and analyzed. For this purpose, BI tools are being reshaped to accomplish

more tasks and to be proactive in the way they use and manage information for large organizations. Important

BI software vendors are working hard to increase the set of functions that BI tools can perform, to cover more

of the data management area: data integration, data warehousing, business performance management, data

analysis, and data visualization. BI solutions are including even more high-end software tools, such as master

data management (MDM), and specific collaboration tools, such as issue tracking systems, messaging systems,

and others.

The BI growth phenomenon has triggered two main methods for developing BI solutions and achieving both IT

consolidation and analysis services at all levels of the organization: Some large organizations go for a complete

and unique set of solutions from a so-called mega vendor, while others go for a mix of tools provided from

different vendors to achieve a best-of-breed set of tools that combine to make a complete BI solution. Taking

these two approaches under consideration, the complete BI life cycle process can be fulfilled by a BI suite

specifically designed for large organizations, or by a comprehensive set of tools to complete the set of all BI

functionalities. In both cases, a complete BI solution consists of the following functional elements:

• a data management process that accounts for recompilation, storage, and movement

• an information delivery process to show, in different media, the results of analysis

• a data analysis procedure to support the decision-making process

• a business performance management functionality set to measure corporate performance

• an MDM and data governance functionality to handle all data assets of an organization

• a collaboration tool to enable the sharing of ideas and to manage interactive team work

• a set of BI functionality vertically oriented to cover specific industries such as health care, banking, etc.

The Big BI: BI for Large Enterprises

http://www.forrester.com/rb/Research/how_large_enterprises_approach_it_infrastructure_consolidation/q/id/43825/t/2

http://www.forrester.com/rb/research

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The incorporation of more functionality into the BI life cycle process has also been influenced by some specific

challenges that the BI space in large organizations has to deal with. Some of these challenges are:

• to address the data explosion

• to provide BI deliverables to a broader audience within the organization

• to reinforce and encourage its main decision support function

• to expand the BI analysis framework not only internally across the organization, but externally to all

information coming from outside the organization

The BI space is continuously growing and evolving, and both corporate users and industry analysts hold

many expectations for its future. In addition to constantly striving to improve performance and revenue,

large enterprises will always need to adapt to business challenges coming from new industry conditions and

regulations.

BI for Large Enterprises: Functionality MatrixThe following matrix contains a list of existing BI vendors on the market with solutions specifically designed for

large enterprises. The matrix covers a core set of functionality features considered essential for a corporate BI

product. In addition to a small set of technical criteria, the matrix consists of the following main areas:

• Information delivery

• Data analysis

• Data management

• Business performance management (BPM) functionality

• Extended BI functionality

In order to reflect a comprehensive set of functionality features, each of these sections has a subset of criteria

to assess capabilities in more detail.

The following ratings are based on vendor claims for solution functionality. The system fully supports (Full),

partially supports (Partial), or does not support (None) the functionality, or the functionality may be supported

through an additional product (With additional product). Other features are either available (Yes) or not

available (No).

Note that these ratings are intended as a guide only. To determine which solution best meets your organization’s

requirements, you can conduct a comprehensive evaluation and comparison analysis in TEC’s Business

Intelligence Evaluation Center.

http://bi.technologyevaluation.com/


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Company Actuate BoardInternational

IBM

Product BIRT iServer Enterprise

Board ToolKit Cognos 10 Business Intelligence

Region Global EuropeNorth AmericaAustralia

Global

Multiplatform Yes Yes Yes

Localization Yes Yes Yes

Technical support Yes Yes Yes

Training Yes Yes Yes

Audit trail management No Yes Yes

Security management Yes Yes Yes

Central administration Yes Yes Yes

Info

rmat

ion

Del

iver

y

Analysis and reporting Full Full Full

Dashboarding Full Full Full

Mobile BI capabilities With additional product None Full

Advanced data search With additional product Full Full

BI software gadgets (e.g., Oracle BI beans) Yes No Yes

Advanced reporting Full Full Full

Microsoft Office integration With additional product Full Full

Geospatial capabilities With additional product Full Full

Dat

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sis Standard analytics Full Full Full

Advanced analytics With additional product Full Full

In-memory analytics Full None Full

Web and social analytics None None With additional product

OLAP services Full Full Full

Dat

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t Data warehousing None None With additional product

Enterprise data integration Full Partial With additional product

Data quality With additional product Partial With additional product

Metadata management Full Partial With additional product

Data mining None None With additional product

Operational BI capabilities Full None Full

BPM

Fun

ctio

nalit

y

Metrics and KPIs With additional product Full Full

Scorecards With additional product Full Full

Planning None Full With additional product

Strategy management None Full Full

Budgeting None Full With additional product

Financial consolidation None Full With additional product

Risk and performance management None Full With additional product

Forecasting With additional product Full With additional product

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Func

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Portal integration Yes Yes Yes

Master data management None None With additional product

Data governance None None Partial

Industry vertical functionality No Yes Yes

Third-party application integration Yes No Yes

Collaboration tools Yes No Yes

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Company InformationBuilders

Microsoft MicroStrategy

Product WebFOCUS Office 2010, SharePoint Server 2010, SQL Server 2008 R2

MicroStrategy 9

Region Global Global Global

Multiplatform Yes Yes Yes




Audit trail management Yes Yes Yes


Central administration Yes Yes Yes

Info

rmat

ion

Del

iver

y

Analysis and reporting Full Full Full


Mobile BI capabilities Full With additional product Full

Advanced data search Full Full None

BI software gadgets (e.g., Oracle BI beans) No No No


Microsoft Office integration Full Full With additional product

Geospatial capabilities Full Full Full

Dat

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Advanced analytics Full Full Full

In-memory analysis Full Full Full

Web and social analytics None With additional product Full


Dat

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emen

t Data warehousing With additional product Full None

Enterprise data integration Full Full None

Data quality Full Full None

Metadata management Full Full Partial

Data mining Full Full Full

Operational BI capabilities Full Full None

BPM

Fun

ctio

nalit

y

Metrics and KPIs Full Full Full

Scorecards Full Full None

Planning With additional product None None

Strategy management With additional product None None

Budgeting With additional product None None

Financial consolidation With additional product None None

Risk and performance management Full None None

Forecasting Full With additional product Full

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nded

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Func

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Master data management Full Full None

Data governance Full With additional product None

Industry vertical functionality Yes Yes Yes

Third-party application integration Yes Yes Yes

Collaboration tools No Yes With additional product

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Company Oracle QlikTech SAP

Product Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition Plus

QlikView SAP BusinessObjects BI solutions, EIM solutions, EPM solutions

Region Global Global Global

Multiplatform Yes No, Windows Yes




Audit trail management Yes Yes Yes


Central administration Yes Yes With additional product

Info

rmat

ion

Del

iver

y

Analysis and reporting Full With additional product Full


Mobile BI capabilities With additional product Full Yes

Advanced data search With additional product Full Full

BI software gadgets (e.g., Oracle BI beans) No Yes Yes


Microsoft Office integration Full Full Full

Geospatial capabilities None Full With additional product

Dat

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Advanced analytics Full Full Full

In-memory analytics With additional product Full With additional product

Web and social analytics Partial with additional product Full With additional product


Dat

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t Data warehousing With additional product None With additional product

Enterprise data integration With additional product None With additional product

Data quality With additional product None With additional product

Metadata management With additional product None With additional product

Data mining With additional product None Full

Operational BI capabilities With additional product Full With additional product

BPM

Fun

ctio

nalit

y

Metrics and KPIs With additional product Full With additional product

Scorecards With additional product Full With additional product

Planning With additional product Full With additional product

Strategy management With additional product Full With additional product

Budgeting With additional product Full With additional product

Financial consolidation With additional product Full With additional product

Risk and performance management With additional product Full With additional product

Forecasting Full Full With additional product

Exte

nded

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Func

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Master data management With additional product None With additional product

Data governance With additional product None With additional product

Industry vertical functionality Yes Yes Yes

Third-party application integration Yes Yes Yes

Collaboration tools With additional product Yes Yes

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Company SASInstitute TIBCOSoftwareInc

Product SAS Enterprise BI Server

TIBCO Spotfire Analytics platform

Region Global Global

Multiplatform Yes Yes

Localization Yes Yes

Technical support Yes Yes

Training Yes Yes

Audit trail management Yes Yes

Security management Yes Yes

Central administration Yes Yes

Info

rmat

ion

Del

iver

y

Analysis and reporting Full Full

Dashboarding Full Full

Mobile BI capabilities Full None

Advanced data search Full None

BI software gadgets (e.g., Oracle BI beans) With additional product No

Advanced reporting Full Full

Microsoft Office integration Full With additional product

Geospatial capabilities None Full

Dat

a A

naly

sis Standard analytics Full Full

Advanced analytics Full Full

In-memory analytics None None

Web and social analytics With additional product None

OLAP services Full Full

Dat

a M

anag

emen

t Data warehousing Full None

Enterprise data integration With additional product None

Data quality With additional product None

Metadata management Full Partial

Data mining With additional product Full

Operational BI capabilities With additional product Partial

BPM

Fun

ctio

nalit

y

Metrics and KPIs With additional product Full

Scorecards With additional product None

Planning With additional product None

Strategy management With additional product None

Budgeting With additional product None

Financial consolidation With additional product None

Risk and performance management With additional product None

Forecasting With additional product Full

Exte

nded

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Func

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lity

Portal integration Yes Yes

Master data management With additional product None

Data governance None None

Industry vertical functionality Yes Yes

Third-party application integration No Yes

Collaboration tools Yes With additional product

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ActuateActuate founded and continues to co-lead the Eclipse BIRT (Business Intelligence and

Reporting Tools) open source project. Actuate has over 4,500 customers globally in a diverse

range of business areas, including financial services and the public sector. Founded in 1993,

Actuate is headquartered in San Mateo, California, with offices worldwide.

Board InternationalFounded in 1994 and based in Lugano, Switzerland, Board International is committed to

integrating the best of two worlds: the technical benefits of a BI tool and the data analysis power

of traditional business performance management software. Board International provides a

toolkit that combines BI and business performance management in a single solution, allowing

rapid creation and deployment of BI and business performance management applications.

IBMIBM and Cognos represent a solid fusion between a long-term leader in the IT space and a

leader in the BI market. Cognos gave IBM the BI empowerment to become one of the leaders

in the data management space. Cognos 10 BI is its cutting-edge tool for the BI market.

Information BuildersWith more than 12,000 customers and 60 offices around the world, Information Builders

delivers a complete enterprise BI suite, as well as comprehensive business-to-business,

business process automation, and enterprise information management solutions to global

customers. Its WebFOCUS and iWay solutions, well known to provide a reliable set of BI and

integration tools, are widely distributed among a wide range of organizations. Information

Builders also has a solid reputation for outstanding customer service.

MicrosoftSharePoint Server represents the core of Microsoft’s wide BI offering. The Redmond,

Washington–based company relies on its Sharepoint Server solution to bring BI functionality

to any type of organization. Along with other Microsoft software applications such as SQL

Server and Office, Microsoft is able to provide an entire set of BI tools for corporate users.

MicroStrategyFounded in 1989 and based in McLean, Virginia, MicroStrategy is a unique survivor of mergers

and acquisitions, which has allowed the company to develop and evolve its BI solution to

the point where it can compete on the enterprise market. MicroStrategy’s long experience

with its BI solution means that it contains best-of-breed technology. The company also has

the expertise to deliver customer service levels in accordance with the expectations of the

corporate market.

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OracleOracle is one of the biggest software companies in the world. It provides business software

solutions for almost any type of organization and business area. Oracle is committed to

acquiring and developing a diverse set of solutions to expand its reach across a greater

number of industries and software markets. Its set of BI software solutions provides a strong

BI suite for the corporate business market.

QlikTechQliktech is a pioneer of the in-memory analysis space. The company was founded in Lund,

Sweden, in 1993. QlikTech has explored and exploited a new way to analyze data. QlikView

is one of the most popular BI products for midsize companies, and it is expanding rapidly to

larger companies.

SAPThe SAP–Business Objects partnership is able to offer a complete set of BI tools enriched

with an additional set of capabilities. Business Objects is widely recognized for providing

powerful BI tools for a wide range of customers all over the world. SAP BusinessObjects

delivers a complete BI suite for enterprise deployments that require high-quality, reliable data

management analysis.

SAS InstituteSAS develops high-quality solutions to provide companies with the information to make

better decisions and improve their performance and productivity. With more than 30 years

of experience in the data information space, SAS has a reliable set of BI tools to bring to the

market and is a strong competitor in the enterprise BI field.

TIBCO Software IncTIBCO, headquartered in Palo Alto, California, has a wide range of business software solutions.

TIBCO offers the TIBCO Spotfire Analytics platform, a robust BI application for large-scale

companies. Spotfire Analytics platform is enriched by a full set of tools that enable Spotfire to

complete the BI requirements of any company.

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Data is growing in both amount and complexity for businesses of all types and sizes around the globe. In order

to transform data into useful information for the decision-making process, many SMBs are finding it necessary

to complete their maturity process. Having acquired an operational data management solution such as an ERP,

CRM, or financial system, they now need massive data management systems to help them analyze all the data

generated by those systems. Many SMBs are ready to handle data processes that can enable them to measure

their performance and improve their entire operational process. Currently, many SMBs need specific BI tools to

address their data management needs. According to TEC’s data, SMBs are strongly involved in and committed

to finding the right BI solution for their needs (see figure 2 on page 8).

In searching for a BI solution, SMBs must find the optimal balance between the lowest possible cost and the

fullest possible set of BI core functionality. Because of the increasing interest from SMBs in BI solutions, both

traditional and new software vendors have been targeting the SMB space and releasing BI products designed

specifically for SMBs. All of the BI offerings for the SMB market are trying to improve the decision support

process for SMBs by offering strong analytical capabilities, while considering technical and budget limitations.

BI applications for the SMB market must meet the following set of requirements:

• lower TCO

• easy administration

• reduced hardware and technical requirements

• strong core set of analytic capabilities

• basic data management capabilities

• a simplified and, as much as possible, automated data integration and administration process

• integration with Microsoft Office applications (commonly with Excel)

Also, many of the BI applications designed for SMBs include a subset of functionality features adapted from

corporate BI solutions for the SMB market. Among the most important of these functionality features are:

• a complete set of reporting and analysis capabilities

• dashboarding capabilities

• OLAP services

• basic data integration features

• advanced data search

BI for SMBs

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The challenges that software providers must overcome to deliver solutions satisfying all the BI needs for each

industry are considerable, no matter the size of the enterprise. Many software vendors have managed to create

BI suites with features that suit the general needs of most SMBs across several industries.

BI for SMBs: Functionality MatrixThe following matrix contains a list of existing BI vendors with solutions specifically designed for SMBs. The

matrix considers a core set of functionality features for an SMB BI product.

The following ratings are based on vendor claims for solution functionality. The system fully supports (Full),

partially supports (Partial), or does not support (None) the functionality, or the functionality may be supported


available (No).






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Company IBM InetSoft Jaspersoft LogiXML Oracle

Product Cognos Express Style Intelligence

Jaspersoft Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition

Logi 10 Platform Oracle Business Intelligence Standard Edition One

Region Global North America North AmericaEuropeAsiaAfrica

North AmericaEurope

Global

Multiplatform No, Windows Yes No Yes Yes

Localization Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

Support Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

Training Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

Audit trail management Yes Yes Yes No No

Security management Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

Central administration Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

Analysis and reporting Full Full Full Full Full

Self-service reporting Full Full Full Full Full

Ad hoc queries Full Full Full Full Full

Dashboarding Full Full Full Full Full

Information mashups Partial Full Full None None

Mobile capabilities None Partial None Partial None

BI software gadgets (e.g., Oracle BI beans)

No No Yes Yes No

Advanced data search None None None None None

Microsoft Office integration Full Partial With additional product

Partial With additional product

Geospatial capabilities Full Full Full Full None

Standard analytics Full Full Full Full Full

Predictive analytics None Partial None None None

OLAP services Full Full Full Full With additional product

In-memory analytics Full Partial Full Full None

Embedded/basic data integration

Full Full Full Partial Full

Basic metadata management

Full Partial Full Partial Full

Metrics and KPIs Full Full Full Full Full

Planning and budgeting Full Partial None None With additional product

Forecasting Full Partial None None With additional product

Portal integration Yes Yes Yes Yes No

Industry vertical functionality

No No No No No

Third-party application integration

Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

Collaboration tools No Yes No No No

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Company PanoramaSoftware

Pentaho QlikTech SAP TableauSoftware

Product NovaView Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition

QlikView SAP BusinessObjects Edge Business Intelligence

Tableau Desktop, Tableau Public, Tableau Reader, Tableau Server

Region North AmericaEuropeMiddle East

North AmericaEurope

Global Global Global

Multiplatform No, Windows Yes No, Windows No, Windows No, Windows

Localization Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes


Training Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

Audit trail management No Yes Yes Yes Yes

Security management Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes


Analysis and reporting Full Full With additional product

Full Full

Self-service reporting Full Full With additional product

Full Full

Ad hoc queries Full Full With additional product

Full Full


Information mashups None Partial Full Full Full

Mobile capabilities None Full Full Full Partial

BI software gadgets (e.g., Oracle BI beans)

No Yes Yes Yes Yes

Advanced data search None Full Full Full Full

Microsoft Office integration Full Partial Full Full Full

Geospatial capabilities Full Full Full Full Full


Predictive analytics None Full Partial None Partial

OLAP services Full Full Full Full Full

In-memory analytics None Partial Full None Partial

Embedded/basic data integration

Full Full Full With additional product

Full

Basic metadata management

None Full Full With additional product

Partial


Planning and budgeting None Partial Full Full None

Forecasting None Full Full Full Partial

Portal integration Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes


No Yes Yes No No


Yes Yes Yes No Yes

Collaboration tools Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

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IBMIBM and Cognos represent a solid fusion between a long-term IT leader and a leader in the

BI market. Cognos gave IBM the BI empowerment to become one of the leaders in the data

management space. Cognos Express is a BI tool designed especially for the midsize market.

InetSoftInetSoft developed a BI solution that’s a good fit for the midsize market. Since 1996, InetSoft has

been providing BI software that can deliver the kind of information that SMBs need.

JaspersoftStarted in 2001 as an open source reporting product named JasperReports, Jaspersoft now

provides a complete set of BI tools for organizations that want to take advantage of open

source software. Jaspersoft has been breaking down the wall in recent years to become a

serious competitor in the BI landscape.

LogiXMLFounded in 2000 and based in McLean, Virginia, LogiXML develops XML-based software. With

the LogiXML platform, an XML-based BI solution, organizations can embed LogiXML reports

and charts with ease into almost any Web-based platform. LogiXML delivers a BI solution that

comprises an interesting set of tools for midsize companies.

OracleOracle is one of the biggest software companies in the world. It provides business software

solutions for almost any type of organization and business area. Oracle is committed to

acquiring and developing a diverse set of solutions to expand its reach across a greater

number of industries and software markets. Its set of BI software solutions provides a strong

BI suite for SMBs around the world.

Panorama SoftwareHaving a strong partnership with Microsoft, Panorama Software delivers a strong set of BI tools

that can be deployed in Windows environments. Panorama delivers powerful BI tools since

1993 and is a leader in BI solutions in Windows environments. Panorama Software can bring

powerful BI tools to empower basic and experienced users with information management

abilities.

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PentahoFounded by BI industry veterans, this commercial, open source BI provider offers a BI suite

that has a vast set of BI tools for reporting, dashboarding, OLAP analysis, and data integration

services. Pentaho is one of the world’s most deployed open source BI solutions. The company

also has a wide number of partnerships.

QlikTechQlikTech is a pioneer of the in-memory analysis space. The company was founded in Lund,

Sweden, in 1993. QlikTech has explored and exploited a new way to analyze data. QlikView

is one of the most popular BI products for midsize companies, and it is expanding rapidly to

larger companies.

SAPThe SAP–Business Objects partnership is able to offer a complete set of BI tools enriched

with an additional set of capabilities. Business Objects is widely recognized for providing

powerful BI tools for a wide range of customers all over the world. SAP BusinessObjects

delivers a complete BI suite for enterprise deployments that require high-quality, reliable data

management analysis.

Tableau SoftwareTableau originated in 1997 and has its roots in a group of people from Stanford University.

With their expertise in business and science, Tableau developed a series of products producing

high-quality visualizations of data for the United States Department of Defense. Since then,

Tableau has developed Tableau Server to deliver a BI tool with high-quality visual standards

and query performance. Creator of the VizQL language, Tableau has proven itself as a serious

competitor in the BI space.

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SaaS will perhaps be one the most important trends in IT and business software history. SaaS applications are

one of the main offerings of a cloud computing infrastructure, and SaaS is reshaping the way everyone works

with business applications.

During the last couple of years, there has been an increase in the number of software vendors launching SaaS

versions of their traditional business software applications. Currently, many software vendors strongly believe

that having a SaaS delivery model as part of their software offerings will have an important effect on their

business in terms of revenue in the medium and long term. Other software vendors are starting out as native

SaaS-based solution providers.

What Is SaaS Anyway?In February 2001, The Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA) published an article called “Software as

a Service: Strategic Background. “ The term “software as a service (SaaS)” was coined to describe a model in which

an application is deployed on a central server and accessed remotely using a network such as an intranet or the

Internet. In this delivery model, for users to access the application, users must connect to a remote computer,

which is generally accessed based on a subscription or rent schema (see figure 9).

SaaS BI

Figure9.GeneralSaaSapplicationmodel

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From a customer perspective, the benefits of having a SaaS business application in place are inducing many

organizations to move from an on-premise solution to a SaaS solution provider. Some of the most important

benefits include:

• Users have access to their business applications with the use of only a “thin client”—a Web browser such as

Internet Explorer or Firefox. There is no need to install an application on the user machine.

• All software maintenance is done by the service provider. The service provider guarantees application

maintenance, updates, and support.

• The service offering is flexible, based on number of users, consumption, or other factors.

The advantages of the SaaS delivery model over traditional, on-premise applications have important effects

on the way software vendors are developing their new business software versions, especially in some

application areas such as CRM and BI systems, in which SaaS versions are increasingly being added to the

vendor’s software list.

On the other hand, vendors that are starting out as native SaaS software developers have a competitive

advantage because of their focus on SaaS versus the more diffuse experience of on-premise software vendors.

While native SaaS application providers have the specialized knowledge of developing and deploying their

SaaS tools as well as marketing them, they may lack experience in terms of support and services that big

software vendors commonly have.

SaaS in the BI WorldSaaS applications might be on the right path to being the next technology breakthrough. ERP system providers are

adopting SaaS as an alternative to their traditional on-premise application offers; CRM and sales force automation

(SFA) systems are expanding their reach with SaaS products, some of which, like Salesforce.com and NetSuite, are

quite well known. In terms of BI applications, the SaaS segment is growing slowly but steadily, with SaaS solutions

coming from both traditional and native SaaS software vendors in significant numbers (see figure 10).

Figure10.PlatformsusedforBIsolutions

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The Benefits of SaaS BI Despite SaaS BI applications being in the early stages of their development, they can provide important benefits

to an organization planning to follow the SaaS path. Some of the main benefits of SaaS are as follows:

• shorter implementation cycles

• flexible licensing and pricing models

• smooth scalability

• lower TCO than on-premise applications

Because of these benefits, especially the lower TCO and shortened implementation cycle, SaaS BI tools have a

particular appeal for the SMB market. SMBs can readily afford to acquire these types of solutions quickly and

on a small budget, but SaaS can also make it easier for large enterprises to rapidly incorporate BI solutions for

specific business areas into their business application stack. Interest in SaaS BI solutions is steadily growing (see

figure 11). With the many benefits that SaaS can bring to various types of organizations, this growth can be

expected to continue in the coming years.

Figure11.DemandforplatformtypesforBIsolutions

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And the ChallengesAs interest in BI SaaS applications is continuously growing, SaaS technology faces several challenges before

it can achieve the necessary maturity for mainstream adoption. Some of these challenges are particularly

relevant to the BI space due to the vital nature of the information that BI systems deal with. Some of the biggest

challenges to address are:

• security, to ensure that data storage location, infrastructure (hardware and software), and human resources

will not compromise data

• service-level agreements (SLAs), to ensure the reliability of the services provided by a SaaS application

• elasticity, to ensure SaaS application scalability to meet new requirements

• integration, to provide the necessary integration with alternative computing models and systems

SaaS BI applications can bring several benefits to organizations in terms of cost, ease of deployment and

operation, and low TCO. SaaS BI applications still have to grow to a phase in which they can offer the flexibility

and functionality power of traditional on-premise solutions, and of course, they will have to face these challenges

and others in order to achieve the necessary elements for their generalized adoption.

SaaS BI: Functionality MatrixThe following matrix contains a list of BI vendors with solutions specifically designed as SaaS applications. The

matrix considers a core set of functionality features for a SaaS BI product.

The ratings are based on vendor claims for solution functionality. The system fully supports (Full), partially

supports (Partial), or does not support (None) the functionality, or the functionality may be supported


available (No).






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Company AdaptivePlanning

Birst Bitam Cloud9 GoodData

Product Adaptive Planning

Birst 4 KPI Online Cloud9 Analyst Suite

GoodData

Region North AmericaEurope

North America North America North AmericaEurope

North America

Localization Yes Yes Yes No No


Training Yes Yes No Yes Yes

Service-level agreement

Yes Yes No No No

Secu

rity

and

Con

trol

Audit trail management Yes No No No No

SOX compliance No No No No No

SAS 70 Type II compliance

Yes Yes No No No

Application-level security

Full Full None None None

Data-level security Full Full None None None

Data encryption Full Full None None None

Central administration Yes Yes Yes No No

Gen

eral

Func

tiona

lity



Data mashups None None None None None

Advanced data search Full None None None None

Alerts and exceptions Full Full Full None None

What-if analysis Full Partial None None None

Microsoft Office integration

None Partial Full None None

Geospatial capabilities None Full Full None None

Standard analytics Full Full Full None Full

Predictive analytics None Full None None None

OLAP services Full Full None None None

Data warehousing tools None Full None None None

Disparate data source integration

Full Full Full Full Full

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Planning and budgeting

Full None Full With additional product

None

Cost management Full None None With additional product

None

Strategy and performance

Full None None With additional product

None

Portal integration No Yes No No No


No Yes No Yes No


Yes Yes No No No

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Company NetSuite Oco PivotLink SAP WeAreCloud

Product SuiteAnalytics Oco Business Analytics Solutions

PivotLink BI Platform

SAP BusinessObjects BI OnDemand

Bime

Region North AmericaEuropeAsia

North AmericaEurope

North America Global Europe

Localization Yes No No No Yes, French/English

Support Yes Yes No Yes Yes

Training Yes No No No Yes

Service-level agreement

Yes Yes No No No

Secu

rity

and

Con

trol

Audit trail management Yes No No No No

SOX compliance No No No No No

SAS 70 Type II compliance

Yes Yes Yes No No

Application-level security

None Full Full Full Full

Data-level security None Full None Full Full

Data encryption Full Full None None Full


Gen

eral

Func

tiona

lity



Data mashups None None None Full None

Advanced data search None None None Full None

Alerts and exceptions Full Full Full Full Full

What-if analysis Full None None Full Partial

Microsoft Office integration

None None None None None

Geospatial capabilities None Full None Full Full


Predictive analytics Full None None None None

OLAP services Full None Full None Full

Data warehousing tools None Full None None None

Disparate data source integration

Full Full Full Full Full

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Pe

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man

ce


Planning and budgeting

With additional product

None None None None

Cost management None Full None None None

Strategy and performance

None Full None None None

Portal integration No Yes No No No


No Yes Yes No No


Yes Yes No Yes No

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Adaptive PlanningAdaptive Planning delivers an on-demand BI tool with business performance features. The

company was founded in 2003 and is based in Mountain View, California.

BirstBirst was founded in 2004 by veterans of the BI industry and is based in San Francisco,

California. Birst specializes in BI software.

BitamKPI Online is an on-demand BI and business performance application based on the on-

premise solutions of its parent company, Bitam.

Cloud9From Redwood City, California, Cloud9 Analytics is a SaaS-based company that provides

various BI solutions for different markets and industries. Cloud9 Analyst Suite is its core BI

application.

GoodDataGoodData is a BI provider headquartered in San Francisco, California, and engineered in the

Czech Republic.

NetSuiteNetSuite is a cloud-based company that offers different types of on-demand solutions.

SuiteAnalytics is its BI offering. NetSuite is based in San Mateo, California.

OcoOco stands as one of the first SaaS BI providers in the market. The company is based in

Waltham, Massachusetts.

PivotLinkPivotLink applies an innovative approach to developing BI solutions. The company is based

in San Francisco, California.

SAPBusiness Objects is widely recognized for providing powerful BI tools for a wide range of

customers all over the world. BI OnDemand offers the BI functionality of traditional SAP

BusinessObjects products, now on the cloud.

We Are CloudWe Are Cloud, from Montpellier, France, produces Bime, a BI solution focused on ease of use

but with powerful features. We Are Cloud give users a neat BI solution with easy start-up.

Casebook

Case Study

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QUICK FACTS

Company• Name: Marcus & Millichap Real Estate Investment

Services

• Location: Encino, California, USA

• Industry: Professional services—investment real estate

brokerage

• Products and services: Real estate investment sales,

financing, research, and advisory services

• Revenue: $21 billion (USD)

• Number of employees: 1,800

• Web site: www.marcusmillichap.com

Challenges and Opportunities • Facilitate faster and better decision making

• Provide agents and clients the market trend data they

need to make fully informed decisions

• More effectively pair qualified buyers with sales agents

to speed up the sales process

Objectives• Use standard reports that incorporate all relevant

information needed for decision making

• Create reports that give visibility to key performance

indicators

• Gain deeper insight into real estate data

SAP® Solutions and ServicesSAP® BusinessObjects™ Edge Business Intelligence software,

version with data integration

Why SAP• Ease of integration with existing SAP software

• Ability to aggregate and analyze data using core

transaction reporting

• Support for gathering critical information efficiently

Benefits• Lower total cost of ownership by leveraging existing

technology

• More competitive edge due to faster access to trend

data

• Ease of use in generating accurate reports for clients

• Increased employee productivity

Existing Environment• Crystal Reports® software

• SAP ERP application

SAP Customer Success Story

Marcus & Millichap Sharpens Reporting with

SAP® BusinessObjects™ Solution Portfolio

http://www.marcusmillichap.com/

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A Need for Deep Insight

Focused on assisting its clients in creating and preserving their wealth, Marcus & Millichap

leverages technology to make sense of market data, match properties with prequalified

investors, and share the most current information regarding commercial real estate and

capital markets with its agents and clients. The company requires deep insight into real estate

data to enhance its ability to pair qualified buyers and sellers quickly.

However, a cumbersome and unintuitive development process resulted in lengthy report

turnarounds and limited the type of information the company could produce. When

aggregating data, the company looks at numerous market indicators including transaction

velocity, a variety of proprietary metrics, and changes in capitalization rates by region,

property type, and price point. Access to market trends and exclusive metrics enables

the company to price its products better and maximize the return on investment (ROI)

of properties that clients want to sell, and it helps ensure that clients are targeting the

right markets and product types, based on their investment needs and criteria. With its old

reporting system, the aggregation process took hours or days—if it was done at all—and

the company was challenged to generate the reports its sales managers needed to make

accurate and rapid decisions.

“It’s difficult for us not only to aggregate data but also to analyze and efficiently distribute

results to our managers and agents,” says Marty Louie, vice president of finance at Marcus

& Millichap. “To remain competitive, we have to be able to go through tens of thousands

of transactions. We need to compile and make sense of all this data and identify forward-

looking trends, so that our investment professionals can provide clients with an unparalleled

perspective on the investment real estate market locally, regionally, and nationally.”

With SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI, we can provide our management, agents, and clients with data

to assess current market conditions. We enable clients to accelerate and improve decision-making

processes, ultimately maximizing return on investment.

Marty Louie, Vice President of Finance,

Marcus & Millichap Real Estate Investment Services

““

Encino, California–based Marcus & Millichap Real Estate Investment Services specializes in

investment real estate brokerage, providing real estate investment sales, financing, research,

and advisory services. With over 70 offices across the United States and more than 1,300

sales agents and 500 employees, Marcus & Millichap closed an estimated $21 billion (USD) of

investment transactions for private and institutional investors in 2007.

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Economic fluctuations make some investors skittish, driving the need for a savvy and well-

informed sales force. Louie says, “The key to our success is for our sales force to communicate

to our clients that there are still investment opportunities and capital available. We have to be

able to take all the data that we have and find these pockets of opportunities for our clients.”

To support information sharing and on point reporting and analysis for its sales management

team, Marcus & Millichap turned to a business intelligence (BI) solution.

Selecting a Business Intelligence Product for the Mid-market

Marcus & Millichap was already using Crystal Reports® software to create a range of reports

for its sales management team. Additionally, the company uses components from the SAP®

ERP application for real estate accounting, accounts payable, and other core transactions—

all data that feeds business intelligence.

Louie says, “We’ve used Crystal Reports for a lot of reporting already, so all of our IT

developers were familiar with it.” After evaluating competitive BI products, Marcus &

Millichap selected the SAP BusinessObjects™ Edge Business Intelligence software, version

with data integration, geared specifically for the mid-market. “There are several specific and

unique features available in the SAP BusinessObjects portfolio that led to our selection of a

BI solution,” says Louie. “For example, we are a spreadsheet-intensive company—our entire

management team is very Excel oriented. When I saw SAP BusinessObjects Live Office

software for the first time, and how easy it is for sales managers to have a report they can

update at any time with live data, that sold me on the product.”

Along with ease of use, another factor in choosing SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI software

was speed of reporting. “We cannot afford to wait days or weeks for a new report that may

or may not be accurate,” says Louie. “Our agents and clients turn to us for guidance, so we

have to aggregate data and look for trends for them. The ability to create reports on the fly

and the ease of use for the end user are the main reasons we adopted SAP BusinessObjects

Edge BI software.”

Marcus & Millichap employees benefit from the integration of the BI software with their

existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) and reporting applications. “The end user can

gather all financial data from the SAP data warehouse through SAP BusinessObjects Edge

BI,” says Louie. “SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI is a great solution for gathering information

and generating transactions. The software takes all that data and makes sense of it for the

end user. Its ease of use allows us to create dashboards and reports in a matter of days

versus months using our previous BI solution. In terms of navigating, it is more intuitive,

which increases our users’ acceptance rate.”

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The Right Information Is Indispensable to Success

In the process of its initial deployment of SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI, with a rollout to 100

sales managers and executives, Marcus & Millichap looks forward to giving sales agents

visibility into numerous key performance indicators. “With SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI,

sales managers can view critical reports, such as the sales pipeline, so they can assist their

agents in understanding and managing their businesses. Our focus is to give our agents as

much transparency to their businesses as possible, down to the transaction level, in order for

them to succeed as investment real estate professionals,” says Louie.

The company can efficiently distribute current market information to its agents. Louie says,

“The name of the game in brokerage is information—the type and quality of information that

you give to your clients will help them more efficiently deploy their assets and maximize their

returns. By implementing SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI, we can aggregate the data quickly

and efficiently distribute it to all of our agents and management team.”

Marcus & Millichap already sees the software as indispensable to its success. “Without SAP

BusinessObjects Edge BI, we would not be able to provide our agents and their clients with

timely and accurate data on market trends,” says Louie. “We’re at a critical point in our business

cycle—so it’s even more important that we generate and analyze data in a timely manner

and be able to communicate our findings so our clientele can maximize their wealth. Our BI

solution is essential to accomplishing that.”

Business intelligence will also help clients get through the rough spots of the real estate

market. “The real estate market had been on an upward cycle for many, many years,”

explains Louie. “We knew that with any cycle there was going to be a downturn, but we

didn’t know exactly when it would be. So we needed to invest in a solution that would give

us foresight to help minimize the effects of the downturn. Clients and agents are more

demanding in the type of information they want, how fast they want it, and how it looks.

Now that we have SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI in- house, we are positioned to give them

the information they need.”

The name of the game in brokerage is information—the type and quality of information that you

give to your clients will help them more efficiently deploy their assets and maximize their returns.

By implementing SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI, we can aggregate the data quickly and efficiently

distribute it to all of our agents and management team.



““

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SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI adds value, in enabling us to go through that data and give guidance

to our clients. We can provide real estate trend data to our clients in a more timely manner.



““

The Road Ahead

With SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI, Marcus & Millichap anticipates better client satisfaction.

“Our mission is that we are going to be the best at providing real estate services to our

clients and agents, which includes providing timely and accurate data to allow them to make

informed decisions, which will ultimately lead to maximizing their investment returns on

commercial real estate,” says Louie. “That’s where SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI adds value,

in enabling us to go through that data and give guidance to our clients. We can provide real

estate trend data to our clients in a more timely manner.”

Faster access to real estate trend data gives Marcus & Millichap an edge on the competition.

Says Louie, “SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI changes how quickly we’re going to access the

information, and it gives us more visibility to what we call trip wires, or forward -looking

indicators. We can react faster than our competitors to market movements.”

As a midsize company, Marcus & Millichap appreciates the mid-market focus of the software.

“SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI works really well for a company of our size,” says Louie. “We are

a mid-market company, but we don’t see ourselves that way. We have the same issues as a

Fortune 500 company—actually, our challenges are greater because of the limited amount

of human resources that we have available to analyze the effects of regional and national

market influences compared to those available in larger companies. To that end, we are

looking for software that is going to be as dynamic as we are, so we can change it to suit our

needs for the day. That is why SAP BusinessObjects Edge BI is excellent.” Louie also anticipates

greater internal efficiency for the finance team: “We probably will save two full- time people

with the efficiencies that we’re going to gain. For a department our size, that is a lot of freed-

up resources.”

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©2009 by SAP AG.

All rights reserved. SAP, R/3, SAP NetWeaver, Duet, PartnerEdge, ByDesign, SAP Business ByDesign, and

other SAP products and services mentioned herein as well as their respective logos are trademarks or

registered trademarks of SAP AG in Germany and other countries.

Business Objects and the Business Objects logo, BusinessObjects, Crystal Reports, Crystal Decisions, Web

Intelligence, Xcelsius, and other Business Objects products and services mentioned herein as well as their

respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of Business Objects S.A. in the United States

and in other countries. Business Objects is an SAP company.

All other product and service names mentioned are the trademarks of their respective companies. Data

contained in this document serves informational purposes only. National product specifications may

vary.

These materials are subject to change without notice. These materials are provided by SAP AG and its

affiliated companies (“SAP Group”) for informational purposes only, without representation or warranty

of any kind, and SAP Group shall not be liable for errors or omissions with respect to the materials. The

only warranties for SAP Group products and services are those that are set forth in the express warranty

statements accompanying such products and services, if any. Nothing herein should be construed as

constituting an additional warranty.

http://www.sap.com/index.epx

Case Study

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QUICK FACTS

Company• Name: Aquent

• Headquarters: Boston, Massachusetts, USA

• Industry: Professional services—staffing

• Products and services: Staffing of marketing positions

worldwide

• Web site: www.aquent.com

Challenges and Opportunities • Increase visibility into the business

• Improve corporate agility by giving managers flexibility

and fast turnaround in reporting

Objectives• Consolidate worldwide operational data into a single

data mart

• Create a true marketing database with easy access to

all valuable data

• Enable ad hoc reporting without using information

technology (IT) resources each time

• Save time in report generation

• Allow reports to be saved for reuse

SAP® Solutions and Services• SAP® BusinessObjects™ XI solutions

• SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence® software

• SAP BusinessObjects Desktop Intelligence™ software

• SAP BusinessObjects Data Integrator software

Implementation Highlights • Reviewed and modified data definitions through

collaboration between business, finance, and IT staff

along with SAP consultants

• Scrubbed report definitions to reflect changed data

elements

• Managed the user change effort effectively to

accustom business users to new report style and

delivery method

Why SAP • Flexible, powerful access to data

• Comprehensive reporting functionality

• Leading-edge business intelligence tools

Benefits • Gained high-level perspective for financial analysts

and executives

• Gained the ability to drill down into report data

• Reduced the average time to produce a mailing list

from 20 hours to 1

• Enabled more precisely targeted marketing campaigns

• Freed up development resources from distracting

reporting requests

SAP Customer Success Story

Aquent Uses SAP® BusinessObjects™ Software Tools

to Deliver Talent

http://www.aquent.com/

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Founded in 1986 by friends residing in a Harvard dorm, Aquent is today the world’s largest

marketing staffing firm. The company helps Fortune 500 marketing organizations find the

people they need, on both a contract and direct-hire basis, and helps marketing professionals

find the rewarding engagements they want. Aquent represents talent in virtually every

marketing discipline, from brand managers and copywriters to data analysts, Web designers,

and search-engine optimization experts. Throughout its history, the company has made more

than half a million matches between its clients and the talent they are looking for.

The reporting environment at Aquent is complex, involving staffing levels and requirements,

results by region, time entry and billing, headcount utilization, pay rates, gross profit, and

much more. Some reports end on calendar dates, others on fiscal dates. Different roles

within the staffing organization are reported on differently. Diverse payroll schemes are also

reflected, depending on the preference of individual clients and marketing professionals.

Unlike most companies in this sector, Aquent provides benefits for its talent, so it requires

additional reporting to establish eligibility.

Although Aquent offers a broad range of ancillary services—including project management,

translation and localization, and healthcare consulting—staffing is its bread-and-butter

business. So when Aquent migrated its custom-built enterprise resource planning (ERP) staffing

system to a Web-based model, it needed a modern reporting solution that would complement

the newly enhanced infrastructure. Aquent looked to the SAP® BusinessObjects™ portfolio

of solutions for the answer, including SAP BusinessObjects XI solutions, SAP BusinessObjects

Web Intelligence® software, and SAP BusinessObjects Desktop Intelligence™ software.

The SAP BusinessObjects portfolio is a platform we can build on—it will essentially serve as a

foundation for Aquent to become a truly global company moving forward.

Larry Bolick, Chief Information Officer, Aquent

““

Time Consuming and Frustrating

According to business intelligence (BI) systems engineer Jeff Payton, the previous reporting

environment left much to be desired. “It had limited ad hoc capabilities,” he says. “For unusual

reports, you had to submit a set report to the development team. They would figure out how

to compile the code and query the database and then prepare the report for you. It was a

time-consuming and frustrating process, and you sometimes ended up with a report that

wasn’t exactly what you wanted after all.”

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Marketing director Jenny Norwood had her own problems with the legacy system. “There

was a ton of information in the database—including mail and e-mail addresses and whether

people had opted in or out of our mailing campaigns—but it really wasn’t a marketing

database,” she says. “Pulling contact information was a multiday struggle. Worse, I couldn’t

save the reports I created, so I’d have to start all over the next time I needed to create one. It

used to take me the better part of a business week to compile a mailing list. And because the

number of lines I was working with in the old system was so big, I would often have to run it

overnight, so it wouldn’t slow down everybody else’s work.”

A Single Data Mart

The first step was to get operational data from around the world into a single data mart.

Aquent pulls data from a database in Sydney that covers its Asia-Pacific operations, one in

London for Europe, and a third in Boston for the North American market. The databases are

replicated to shadow databases in Boston and then extracted out to the data mart in a nightly

batch cycle using SAP BusinessObjects Data Integrator software. SAP BusinessObjects XI runs

on this data mart.

The new system is getting plenty of attention. Says Payton, “The introduction of SAP

BusinessObjects software has given people that look in their eye like, ‘Ooh, we can do that?

Well then, can we do this?’ I’m starting to get more requests for things that people didn’t

know they could do before. It’s a very exciting situation to be in.” Payton notes that business

users can manipulate data and look at reports from new perspectives. “SAP BusinessObjects

software makes it possible to assemble virtually any object in the universe into an ad hoc

report and run it on the fly, so you get exactly what you want—immediately,” he says.

It’s a big help to the development team too. “We have been able to cut them loose to do what

they do best, rather than being distracted by the reporting requests and operational needs of

the company,” says Payton. “We’ve been able to take that off their plate.”

New Query Capabilities

Aquent’s consolidated data and leading-edge BI system has delivered significant benefits.

“Using SAP Business Objects solutions, we can run individual reports for Asia Pacific, Europe,

or North America, or we can run a single report with common criteria,” says Payton. “Our

financial analysts can look at revenue across the board to gain a high-level perspective. And

because the underlying data is contained within the report, they can easily drill down to see

what portion of the revenue came from which market and how each area is performing in

relation to the others.”

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Payton also points to a report, prepared for the president of the North America staffing

business unit, that tracks full-time employees placed within Aquent’s client base. “Some of

the reporting the president wanted to do was impossible with the legacy query tool,” he

says. “With SAP BusinessObjects software tools, we were able to create the report and even

automate it. Now the numbers are waiting for her every morning.”

Marketing director Norwood has also seen clear benefits. “By doing some analysis, we

discovered that clients who order marketing managers from us tend to be in management

positions themselves,” she says. “With SAP BusinessObjects software, I can pull a report of

all marketing directors and managers in the system in order to specifically market to them

about hiring marketing project managers. This helps us segment the messaging to our hiring

audiences much better, reducing waste in our mailing campaigns.”

Norwood’s mailing lists are under control too. “My average report, even a complicated one,

takes less than five minutes to run in SAP BusinessObjects software, and there’s minimal

cleaning required when it gets to Microsoft Excel,” she says. “It has literally gone from about

20 hours to maybe 1 hour. It’s been a huge benefit to me.”

A Fundamental Transformation

For Aquent CIO Larry Bolick, SAP BusinessObjects solutions represent the key to a fundamental

transformation. “Today Aquent is managed as a multinational company,” he says. “Folks in

France manage their piece of the puzzle, they report up to London, and London reports up to

Boston. I believe that when the company is ready, SAP Business Objects software will help us

think of Aquent as a global company with fewer national and organizational boundaries—

because we’ll be able to report across all of those boundaries.

“We have very flexible access to global data today, and that was a difficult problem for Aquent

in the past,” concludes Bolick. “We’re starting to extract information from this mass of data

that we just couldn’t extract before. We are on the cusp of doing things we could not do

before. From the transformation perspective, it’s our ability to really understand the data

better and in different ways than we could in the past. The SAP BusinessObjects portfolio is

a platform we can build on—it will essentially serve as a foundation for Aquent to become a

truly global company moving forward.”

We have been able to cut [the development team] loose to do what they do best, rather than being

distracted by the reporting requests and operational needs of the company. We’ve been able to take

that off their plate.

Jeff Payton, BI Systems Engineer, Aquent

““

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©2009 by SAP AG.

All rights reserved. SAP, R/3, SAP NetWeaver, Duet, PartnerEdge, ByDesign, SAP Business ByDesign, and

other SAP products and services mentioned herein as well as their respective logos are trademarks or

registered trademarks of SAP AG in Germany and other countries.

Business Objects and the Business Objects logo, BusinessObjects, Crystal Reports, Crystal Decisions, Web

Intelligence, Xcelsius, and other Business Objects products and services mentioned herein as well as their

respective logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of Business Objects S.A. in the United States

and in other countries. Business Objects is an SAP company.

All other product and service names mentioned are the trademarks of their respective companies. Data

contained in this document serves informational purposes only. National product specifications may vary.

These materials are subject to change without notice. These materials are provided by SAP AG and its

affiliated companies (“SAP Group”) for informational purposes only, without representation or warranty

of any kind, and SAP Group shall not be liable for errors or omissions with respect to the materials. The

only warranties for SAP Group products and services are those that are set forth in the express warranty

statements accompanying such products and services, if any. Nothing herein should be construed as

constituting an additional warranty.



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Campbell Soup Company is a global manufacturer and marketer of high-quality simple meals.

Over the last several years, Campbell has successfully rolled out a transformation strategy

designed to step up new product innovations and customer focus. The company’s North

American manufacturing group now produces approximately 850 products representing

4,500 stock keeping units (SKUs).

The Challenge

Align Demand Forecasting and Supply Chain Planning with a More Dynamic Business ModelWhen sales growth of the familiar Campbell’s brand slowed several years ago, the company

acted to transform and again grow its business. The company expanded its product lines

and accelerated product rollouts. “On the operations side of the business, that meant

we needed to manage a significant increase in new products and many more SKUs,” said

Michael Mastroianni, vice president of North American Planning, Reliability and Operations

at Campbell. Mastroianni, who oversees demand and supply planning and overall operations

support for the North American manufacturing group, recognized that the company’s

existing reporting systems and processes were inadequate for the new business model. The

company launched an initiative to put a new sales and operations planning (S&OP) process in

place, with a stronger emphasis on forecasting and inventory management.

The Solution

QlikView Analytical Reporting for Inventory ManagementMastroianni realized that Campbell’s systems could yield tremendous information about

the company’s supply chain and customer behaviors—but the information was trapped.

QlikView provided the means to access and analyze the information, and thereby better

manage inventory and costs. In addition to the needed functionality, QlikView’s ease of use,

QlikView Customer Success Story

Campbell Soup

Sales and Operations Planning Transformation

Case Study

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quick implementation, and relatively inexpensive costs offered tremendous business value.

“With QlikView, we can leverage the data in our management systems to understand the

financial implications of supply chain decisions,” explained Mastroianni. QlikView reporting

on data from the company’s demand planning system enables the monitoring of daily

demand signals. QlikView features virtually unlimited querying, instant reporting speed with

massive data sets, and easy-to-interpret graphical data.

The Results

More Time to Be StrategicCampbell now operates with true state-of-the-art planning tools for controlling inventory

costs, mix, stock levels, and distribution in a dynamic demand-driven supply network.

QlikView took Campbell into a new world of operational efficiency, with far-reaching

effects throughout the entire supply chain. “QlikView’s virtually unlimited querying, instant

reporting speed with massive data sets, and easy-to-interpret graphical data presentation

helped Campbell to improve productivity, predict financial performance, and monitor our

supply chain,” said Mastroianni. Since the initial projects, Campbell has used QlikView to

automate several other analysis and reporting functions.

The new sales forecasting analysis reduces report generation times, standardizes reports for

the company’s S&OP meetings, and forecasts error analysis during monthly brand meetings.

The Inventory Management report now enables the company to quickly compare differences

between the current and prior month’s forecast. Such differentials reporting previously

required time-consuming processes of loading data into Excel spreadsheets and performing

a manual analysis.

The Schedule Compliance report tracks how well manufacturing plants meet commitments

to produce as scheduled. Since implementing the report, plant performance has experienced

an upswing.

QlikView’s virtually unlimited querying, instant reporting speed with massive data sets, and

easy-to-interpret graphical data presentation helped Campbell to improve productivity,

predict financial performance, and monitor our supply chain.Michael Mastroianni,

Vice President of North American Planning,

Reliability and Operations, Campbell Soup Company

““

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We didn’t anticipate the scope of efficiency gains possible with QlikView . . . It revolutionized

our ability to manage data throughout our supply chain.Michael Mastroianni,

Vice President of North American Planning,

Reliability and Operations, Campbell Soup Company

“ “

The Warehouse and Transportation Capacity report directs how to better align logistics

with forecasted sales. By capturing a snapshot of inventory in warehouses and in transit—

including day, location, inbound, and outbound—Campbell reduces transportation costs and

better matches warehouse staffing levels with need. “We are able to plan workforce needs

and manage carrier capacity around our seasonal spikes through the year,” said Mastroianni.

QlikView is also being used by Campbell to improve reporting from a long-range production

planning system used for risk management scenarios, such as how would production and/

or freight operations shift in the event of a workforce interruption or catastrophe involving

one of its plants. Usability and reporting with the planning system were cumbersome, with

a lot of data to pre-process. A menu-driven graphical application, built in QlikView, made it

easy to model hypothetical situations and compare differences in various scenarios, helping

planners to get more meaningful results faster.

QlikView is currently used by employees, including demand planners, plant production

schedulers, and finance and logistics personnel. Led by Mastroianni, the Campbell planning

and operations team has positioned the company’s new demand-driven supply chain

to support the successful transformation strategy. Along the way, QlikView replaced the

drudgery of many tasks with new and value-added job efficiencies. “The gains achieved

with our forecasting process and QlikView correlate to spending less time on tedious,

non-value added work,” said Sean Hanson, director of Demand Planning at Campbell.

“QlikView is contributing to higher job satisfaction by giving users the time to be more

productive and strategic.” Indeed, demand planners who once spent days dumping data

into Excel to produce pivot tables now have what they need in QlikView. Routine S&OP

meetings now run from standardized reports, which are much easier to generate and

interpret. “We didn’t anticipate the scope of efficiency gains possible with QlikView,” said

Mastroianni. “It revolutionized our ability to manage data throughout our supply chain. We

continue to find new ways to integrate, view, and use data that are tremendously better

than what we were doing before.”

http://www.qlikview.com/us

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Overview

Mayflex is a successful, privately owned distributor with a

respected name and a proven track record in partnering

installers and integrators. Since its formation in 1917,

Mayflex has become a leading distributor of cabling

infrastructure, networking, and physical security products.

Through dedication to customer service, by providing a

comprehensive and complementary product range, and

by remaining at the forefront of technical innovation,

Mayflex is committed to becoming the installer’s partner

of choice.

Challenge Mayflex needed to replace a complex spreadsheet system,

improve time-consuming budgeting and forecasting

processes, compare actuals against budgets at various

levels, and save time for end-users through automatic

system updates.

Why IBM? Mayflex chose IBM because they were impressed with

the IBM Cognos business intelligence (BI) solution’s ease

of use, along with its ability to align their budgeting

and profit and loss (P&L) with their distribution resource

management system. With IBM Cognos Express they could

see everything in one place.

IBM Customer Success Story

Fast Growing Company, Mayflex, Chooses IBM Cognos Express to

Deliver Essential Business Intelligence and Planning Capability

Solution The company is using IBM Cognos Express to produce

sales budgets and forecasts, and to consolidate balance

sheets, P&L, and cash flow statements.

Key Benefits The solution provides a single version of the truth, fast

time to value through quick implementation, ease of

use, and remote access to more accurate and detailed

information than before.

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Challenges Faced

As a successful, privately owned cabling infrastructure, networking, and physical security

products distributor, with a respected name and a proven track record in partnering installers

and integrators, Mayflex has experienced a period of rapid growth over the last few years.

During this period of growth Mayflex found that their spreadsheet system, used to budget

business activities, was becoming complex and unwieldy. Lyn Dolphin, financial controller

at Mayflex, comments, “Each time the company expanded, the spreadsheet system became

more unstable; we have remote users in the United Kingdom and in Dubai who were

beginning to lose confidence in the spreadsheets because the links kept breaking.”

Strategy Followed

Having decided to review the budgeting system Dolphin received a timely invitation from

Inca to attend a launch event for IBM® Cognos® Express. “We were aware of Inca’s partnership

with IBM and therefore did not need to speak to any other suppliers. Having discussed our

requirements with Inca we felt that IBM Cognos Express was right for Mayflex.”

Dolphin continues, “We chose the software based on the perceived ease of use and the time

that would be saved by the end users; also the system updates itself as all the data is linked

from the sales budget right through to the P&L, running alongside our Distribution Resource

Management integrated system, IBS Enterprise. We plan to bring in actuals to compare

against budgets at various levels. We had done this in the past but over several reports; with

IBM Cognos Express we can see everything in one place.”

Benefits Realized

IBM Cognos Express will provide Mayflex with a stable environment within which to budget

business activities. Due to the requirement of United Kingdom and international users

connecting remotely, the facility to use the Web for inputting and viewing data will prove

invaluable. “We are still implementing the software but our manager in Dubai is already

using the system for his sales budget,” comments Dolphin.

The implementation of IBM Cognos Express has been split into three phases; phase one

(sales forecasting and budgeting) and phase two (cost forecasting and budgeting) have now

completed. The third and final phase, company financial consolidations, began in mid March

2010. In the space of just three to four months Mayflex will have implemented a complete

budgeting and forecasting solution, enabling them to plan and analyze their business more

effectively.

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Dolphin concludes, “The service and help we have received in introducing IBM Cognos

Express into the business from Inca has been excellent. Our timescales are very short and Inca

have done everything they can to assist us in achieving our target.”

In the future Mayflex will consider the dedicated reporting element of IBM Cognos Express

to produce a fully integrated business intelligence and performance management solution.

Ian Stone, managing director of Inca, says, “We are delighted that Mayflex have chosen IBM

Cognos Express from Inca. Midsize organizations are focused on driving cost and improving

profit and efficiencies; the IBM Cognos Express solution provides them with the necessary

tools to achieve their goals.”

About IBM Business Analytics

IBM Business Analytics solutions deliver world-leading enterprise planning, consolidation and

BI software, support and services to help companies plan, understand and manage financial

and operational performance. IBM Business Analytics solutions bring together technology,

analytical applications, best practices, and a broad network of partners to give customers an

open, adaptive and complete performance solution. Over 23,000 customers in more than 135

countries around the world choose IBM Business Analytics solutions.

We chose the software based on the perceived ease of use and the time that would be saved by

the end users; also the system updates itself as all the data is linked from the sales budget right

through to the P&L, running alongside our Distribution Resource Management integrated system, IBS

Enterprise. We plan to bring in actuals to compare against budgets at various levels. We had done this

in the past but over several reports; with IBM Cognos Express we can see everything in one place.

Lyn Dolphin, Financial Controller, Mayflex

“

“

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© Copyright IBM Corporation 2010

IBM Canada Ltd.

3755 Riverside Drive

Ottawa, ON K1G 4K9

Canada

All Rights Reserved

IBM, the IBM logo, ibm.com, Cognos and TM1 are trademarks or registered trademarks of International

Business Machines Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both. If these and other IBM

trademarked terms are marked on their first occurrence in this information with a trademark symbol

(® or ™), these symbols indicate U.S. registered or common law trademarks owned by IBM at the time

this information was published. Such trademarks may also be registered or common law trademarks

in other countries. A current list of IBM trademarks is available on the Web at “Copyright and trademark

information” at ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml.

Other company, product and service names may be trademarks or service marks of others.

This case study is an example of how one customer uses IBM products. There is no guarantee of

comparable results.

References in this publication to IBM products or services do not imply that IBM intends to make them

available in all countries in which IBM operates.

Any reference in this information to non-IBM Web sites are provided for convenience only and do not in

any manner serve as an endorsement of those Web sites. The materials at those Web sites are not part of

the materials for this IBM product and use of those Web sites is at your own risk.

http://www.ibm.com/us/en/sandbox/ver1/\

Case Study

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Company Overview

Edmunds.com Inc. publishes Web sites that empower,

engage, and educate automotive consumers, enthusiasts,

and insiders. Edmunds.com, the premier online resource

for automotive information, launched in 1995 as the first

automotive information Web site. Its mobile site, accessible

from any smartphone, makes car pricing and other

research tools available for car shoppers at dealerships

and otherwise on the go. InsideLine.com is the most-

read automotive enthusiast Web site. AutoObserver.com

provides insightful automotive industry commentary and

analysis.

Constant Insight into Consumer Preferences and Marketing Effectiveness

Edmunds.com has worked with MicroStrategy to

produce a highly intuitive and visually appealing app on

consumer research and consumer shopping patterns.

The app leverages Edmunds.com’s existing “Report Card”

and “Cross-Shop” Web metric data and MicroStrategy

applications. The target audience for the app includes

auto manufacturer executives and decision makers, as

well as car dealers and Edmunds.com account directors.

MicroStrategy Customer Success Story

Using MicroStrategy Mobile to Perform Marketing and

Consumer Shopping Behavior Analysis

Thanks to MicroStrategy, Edmunds.com continues to set itself apart as the clear leader in providing

actionable analytics for our clients. With the rapid design and delivery of a mobile app, MicroStrategy

made our key Web metrics come alive with an intuitive and elegant iPad application.

Keith Reynolds, Director, Business Analysis, Edmunds.com

““

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Marketing and Consumer Shopping Behavior Analysis for iPad

ThekeybusinessquestionstheiPadappwillhelpthesebusinessusersanswerinclude:

• How has consumer shopping behavior changed over time in terms of Consideration,

Favorable Opinion, Purchase Intent, and Leads submissions?

• Who are the make, model, and segment leaders in the automotive marketplace, and how

are they performing versus their competitors?

• What is the propensity of a consumer to consider other models when searching for a

particular vehicle? For instance, if a consumer is looking for a Cadillac, are they most

likely to also consider a BMW, Chevrolet, or Audi?

Business users will be able to analyze “Report Card” and “Cross-Shop” dashboards and filter

the data by make, model, and segment, as well as analyze dealer market area information.

Using the Report Card tab, users can seamlessly transition through Edmunds.com’s key

Web metrics: Consideration, Favorable Opinion, Purchase Intent, and Leads. The ability to

analyze these consumer patterns and behaviors is a powerful tool for users to help optimize

marketing and advertising plans.

Why Mobile? Why Now?

Like many companies, Edmunds.com wants to make business intelligence (BI) as accessible,

portable, and intuitive as possible. This is particularly critical for executives who are always on

the go and need to be able to react quickly and make intelligent decisions based on the most

recent information.

Solomon Kang, director of client analytic services at Edmunds.com, explains, “As soon as the

iPad was introduced, our CEO quickly realized the potential of having Edmunds.com data

on it and challenged us to create something that was visually appealing, interactive, and

informative. In addition, we wanted to provide our account directors with a more effective way

to communicate the value of our data using a tool that would resonate well with clients on

many levels.”

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Kang continues, “There is clearly a need for a mobile BI strategy and we are excited about our

partnership with MicroStrategy as we continue to develop and refine the application.”

Keith Reynolds, director of business analysis at Edmunds.com, notes how pleased

Edmunds.com has been with MicroStrategy’s mobile BI solution:

“Thanks to MicroStrategy, Edmunds.com continues to set itself apart as the clear leader in

providing actionable analytics for our clients. With the rapid design and delivery of a mobile

app, MicroStrategy made our key Web metrics come alive with an intuitive and elegant iPad

application.”

http://www.microstrategy.com/

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Simple business decisions, each of which impacts a company’s performance and efficiency,

are made every day, at every level of an organization, by workers in every department.

But conventional business intelligence (BI) tools are often not available to most decision

makers and are typically designed for use only by trained business analysts. Software

as a service (SaaS)–based BI tools are designed to help the millions of people in non–

information technology (IT) lines of business (LOBs) who struggle every day with the

task of mining Microsoft Excel spreadsheets and other unstructured data sources when

performing everyday tasks such as making sales forecasts, planning for resource utilization,

or servicing customer accounts. Especially in this time of limited budgets and uncertain

futures, inexpensive, easy-to-deploy SaaS BI can help companies put easy-to-use data

mining and reporting tools for smart decision making into the hands of more employees

and uncover the real “geniuses” of decision making hidden in every department.

This technology spotlight focuses on the following contentions:

• SaaS-based analytics can help companies be more resourceful in volatile times and

provide a way to align the goals of the business unit and IT.

• SaaS-based BI tools can allow businesses to optimize how they access and apply business

intelligence to help them make good decisions.

• The core activities of BI (retrieving, aggregating, and presenting data) can be done

efficiently using SaaS solutions.

• New SaaS-based BI solutions offer a way to extend existing BI investments and can work

in concert with on-premises solutions.

Reading this paper should result in a better understanding of how SaaS-based BI in effect

democratizes information access and analysis by putting easy-to-use yet sophisticated

tools in the hands of each department’s “geniuses.”

SaaS BI Tools: Better Decision Making for the Rest of Us

Thought Leadership

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Definitions

Three elements require some definition for the purposes of our discussion:

• “Conventional software” refers to applications with a traditional perpetual license,

deployed onsite at a user firm (on premises).

• “Business analytics software” is part of a market that is divided into several segments and

subsegments, including BI; financial performance and strategy management; customer

relationship management (CRM) analytics; workforce analytics; supply chain analytics;

and advanced analytics, including data mining and statistics. The intent of these tools

is to aggregate data from various sources (typically “production” databases), mine data

for patterns and trends, and provide reports that are typically either diagnostic (of an

ongoing event or series of events that a business will want to be aware of, such as a

seasonal spike in sales of a certain item) or prescriptive (building “what if” scenarios for

planning, based on data on past trends).

• “Software as a service” is a model for software licensing and delivery where applications

built specifically for network delivery are hosted by providers and accessed by users

over the Internet. The price for SaaS applications is typically an “all-in” fee that rolls up

the application, software maintenance, and related support costs (infrastructure and

expenses associated with running, servicing, and provisioning the application) into a

monthly per-user subscription fee.

Current Situation and Benefits of SaaS Business Intelligence Tools

In October 2009, IDC surveyed more than 500 businesses to explore the impact of the

financial crisis on short-term planning (general spending plans and specific IT investment).

In general, the data supports a picture of a broad slowdown across IT sectors, with businesses

increasingly bearish about their short-term ability to invest, whether for stability, growth, or

cost savings down the road.

But there is a silver lining: The data also clearly supports the notion that this climate will

accelerate the growth prospects for the SaaS model and in general for services that provide

a near-term business benefit, either a business process improvement or a forecastable (hard)

cost savings. In general, SaaS services have benefited from the perception that they are

tactical pro tem fixes that allow for relatively easy expansion during hard times. As a result,

across most application segments, survey respondents signaled that they were interested

in SaaS delivery and were actively building projects around SaaS services. During the same

period, SaaS vendors reported a general increase in demand among existing customers.

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Demand for SaaS-Delivered Applications Indeed, in the same survey, business respondents with a high degree of understanding

about the value of SaaS-delivered applications gave a clear indication that they planned to

shift some IT workloads to SaaS delivery (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. Level of Business Commitment to SaaS Applications

Source: IDC’s SaaS and Cloud Services Survey, October 2009

This survey, which targeted respondents from firms with at least 500 employees, showed

that nearly 22% of U.S. firms were “fully committed” to SaaS and planned to build businesses

that were between 75% and 100% SaaS-based businesses during the next four years. About

22% of these firms saw themselves as late adopters or nonadopters, down from 24.6% in

the 2008 survey. When respondents were asked about net-new SaaS projects, 76% said they

would launch one to two new projects in the coming year, and 16% indicated that they planned

to launch three to four new projects in the next year. When respondents were asked about the

importance of SaaS to their businesses, the most common responses were:

• Reducedtotalcostofownership (no hardware/software to set up, very modest use

of IT resources)

• Faster“timetovalue”(that is, a shorter period between contract signing and putting

the application to use)

• Betterperformanceandavailability

All three factors have been cited in survey after survey as core reasons why SaaS-delivered

services provide immediate and impactful benefits.

Fully committed to SaaS (75–100% SaaS in next 4–5 years)Fairly committed to SaaS (50% SaaS in next 4–5 years) Cautiously adopting SaaS (25% SaaS in next 4–5 years) Late adopter or nonadopter of SaaS solutions at this time SaaS is definitely not part of our application strategy at this time

24.329.5

21.9

2.1

22.2

Q. What is your organization’s general strategy when considering SaaS

implementations?

n = 522

Note: The survey targeted respondents from firms with at least 500 employees.

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Growth of Data Analysis Tools The past five years have seen an explosion in the growth of BI tools used to analyze data

sets, identify trends and correlated data events, and support good business decisions.

But, in some cases, conventional BI solutions can be overly IT-centric and relatively expensive,

and many are underutilized. They are typically licensed and geared for use by dedicated

analysts who serve many business units across complex, multinational, and multibrand

organizations, and because of their expense and their ties to legacy data systems, they are

centered around IT and not around business functions, such as sales, human resources (HR),

marketing, and fulfillment. These LOBs are not only the providers of most of the production

data that is being analyzed by BI tools but also the primary users of the reports.

Therefore, for several reasons, while BI solutions undoubtedly provide tremendous value

in business operations and planning, conventionally deployed solutions sometimes have

inefficient architecture, high cost, inaccessibility, and complexity. Sometimes the problem

is simply that the right tools do not get into the hands of the LOB users whose work relies

on the analysis and reporting of BI.

But right-sized BI solutions, delivered via SaaS, are easy to use and easy to integrate with

solutions that are already serving these departmental users. These BI tools—and the

superset of business analytics products—can then be focused on new streams of data by

nonanalysts who have business domain specialties (such as sales executives) and who can

look for hidden trends to support a decision, correct a forecast, or improve the performance

of a product line.

Benefits of SaaS BI BI offerings delivered via the cloud provide tremendous additional benefits of scale and

efficiency, lower cost, and better consumption of cloud and local data sources, and they

are changing the way businesses license, deploy, and utilize BI to support decisions at their

companies. Some benefits of SaaS BI are as follows:

• Accessbymoreemployeestomoredata. Key beneficiaries of the trend toward SaaS

BI have been the millions of people in non-IT lines of business who struggle every

day with the task of mining Excel spreadsheets and other unstructured data sources

when performing everyday tasks such as making sales forecasts, planning for resource

utilization, or servicing customer accounts. Users of LOB applications produce the

production data that drives BI requirements, and the powerful BI reporting and

analysis capabilities are especially impactful in the hands of the users who created

the data, resulting in greater adoption and utilization. Every business can be more

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efficient by putting better reporting and analysis tools into the hands of the LOB and

departmental employees who are the subject matter experts in their domains. SaaS

BI can make their jobs easier by providing browser-based access to sophisticated but

easy-to-use data mining and reporting tools and uncovering the “geniuses” of decision

making hidden in every department.

• Businessoptimizationforhardtimes. SaaS-based analytics can help companies be

more resourceful in volatile times by helping them identify cost savings, efficiencies,

and opportunities for process improvement they may have otherwise “missed in the

data.”

• Faster“timetovalue”foraquickerreturnoninvestment.Implementations of SaaS

BI solutions can be far faster and less expensive than implementations of conventional

solutions. Consider that building a traditional BI solution with a data warehouse

implementation, data normalization, and data marts for data staging by query systems

typically requires between 6 and18 months, sometimes longer. By contrast, SaaS BI

deployments typically require 2 to 4 months, and SaaS vendors cannot book revenue

until the implementation is complete—a situation in which both buyer and seller are

equally incented to decrease what some vendors call “time to value.”

• Broad reach across the firewall. Further, because SaaS applications are deployed

outside the firewall, users can easily share data, integrate from other data sources,

and combine data from corporate databases in different parts of the world, from

other internal business units, and also from suppliers and partners in any company’s

extended value chain. This is especially important for any firm with multiple sites in

different physical locations.

• Streamlinedarchitecture,withzeroinfrastructure. Unlike on-premises BI systems,

SaaS-based BI is hosted by a vendor. Users access the various modules (for example,

analysis, reporting) securely via any Web browser. From a systems architecture

standpoint, this method is optimal because it does not impose an ongoing computing

burden on back-office production systems, and because the application is hosted by

the SaaS provider, users do not need to maintain an onsite data warehouse. Users

conduct their secure sessions via a Web browser, so there is no client software to

install, and users are always assured of running the most recent, optimized version of

the application code because SaaS applications are not “rolled out” like conventional

applications; they are simply upgraded and optimized on an ongoing basis.

• Lowerimplementationcosts.A conventional on-premises BI deployment also often

requires a long-term professional services component to help build a physical data

warehouse, normalize production data from various sources, build frequently used

reports, and perform other tasks. But IDC has found that when a SaaS application is

being configured for first use, even for complex BI systems that are mapped to on-

premises productions systems (such as Oracle or SQL databases for marketing, sales,

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finance, and so forth), third-party integration and professional services firms are used

in only about 10% of these engagements, significantly lowering the cost.

• Lower ongoing costs. SaaS BI solution vendors charge a “subscription” fee, which

provides an “all-in” cost for the right to use the application service, maintenance

(upgrade path), and support. This subscription is typically based on the number of

users who will interact with the system (per seat), in addition to a support plan. Most

SaaS vendors bundle core support (connectivity, basic user-level support) into the

basic subscription and offer one or two tiers of support above the basic level, with

more stringent service levels, 24-7 support, training, and so forth. In general, for most

organizations, the cost to deploy a SaaS BI solution based on subscription licensing

will be far lower than the cost of buying a conventional on-premises solution.

• Abilitytotapoperatingexpense(opex)budgetsversuscapitalexpense(capex)

budgets. Because SaaS solutions are licenses as subscriptions, their license cost is a

monthly, predictable expense and does not require a one-time up-front payment for

licenses as conventional software. Further, the ongoing support costs to run associated

hardware, management, and integration tools and middleware and hire and train staff

members to support on-premises applications are substantial, and nonmaintenance

support costs are typically booked as capex. Because these budgets will be flat in

2010–2011, SaaS solutions give users a chance to get access to BI and analytics tools

much faster, using opex funds that might reside in their LOB budgets.

• Better alignment of business goals. Business units consuming IT resources

sometimes feel discordance between the technology they know they need to have

to produce good business outcomes and the tools their IT staff has the skills and

bandwidth to deploy. But IT is typically a cost center, and its priorities don’t always

align with LOB requirements. SaaS-delivered BI helps business units get business done

and helps align the goals of the business unit with its technology tools.

Trends in the Market for SaaS BI

• The overall increase in LOB and corporate executive influence over buying decisions

will drive more BI purchases, and business decision makers are showing growing

awareness about the potential benefits of BI technology. This trend signals the

beginning of a broader shift in decision-making power for BI technology purchases

from IT centered to business centered. IDC expects this trend to accelerate.

• According to the forecast published in Worldwide Business Analytics Software as

a Service 2009–2013 Forecast (IDC #221320), the business analytics SaaS market is

expected to expand as a segment of the overall market for business analytics. It will

contribute new revenue as well as replace some traditional purchases, resulting in a

slight revenue expansion of the total market in the next five years. Significant numbers

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of users will access analytics functionality through a SaaS model during this time

period, which will result in compelling case studies that further educate prospects and

drive interest in business analytics SaaS.

• SaaS applications in core business areas such as HR, CRM, supply chain, and

marketing frequently have some organic data analysis and reporting capability, but

analytic applications as part of BI typically provide deeper statistical analysis and a

more comprehensive set of reporting formats, and applications such as the SAP

BusinessObjects BI OnDemand solution are a natural complement to the core SaaS

applications, as opposed to being a generic and often not fully functional part of a

larger solution. For example, SaaS HR systems are ideal for maintaining employee

pay records, managing staffing and recruiting, and monitoring employee travel and

expense, but native BI tools are best suited to analyzing the vast pool of information

derived from these activities, identifying trends in the data, and understanding the real

messages behind the numbers. IDC expects customers to rely on a mix of both core and

native BI applications to produce the best business outcomes.

• Collaborative, embeddable, and easy-to-use interfaces will appeal to more buyers of

business analytics SaaS. The ability to document and share analysis processes and

easily present findings without the need for reformatting will be a necessity. The ability

to deliver highly targeted components of either information or analytic functionality

through a portal or composite application must be addressed. Programming interfaces

must be replaced with wizard-driven customization interfaces and more appealing

visuals applied to data. The language and terminology of business intelligence and

data warehousing preferred by the IT industry must be adapted for the business

analyst audience and must be presented in the context of business decision making.

• Products in the BI market segment and the analytics tools segment are predicted to

be strong sellers through 2010, but while the smaller advanced analytics segment

has greater potential, one factor limiting the market has been the lack of professional

analytical and statistical skills normally required to use conventional BI applications.

Easy-to-use applications such as SAP BusinessObjects BI OnDemand automate some

of the statistical analysis required to get the full benefit of data analysis and put it in

the hands of a group of decision makers with more “generalist” analytical skills.

Analytic and Reporting Tools from SAP

SAP BusinessObjects BI OnDemand enables LOB users without prior BI experience to access

data in spreadsheets or in on-demand or on-premises data sources; explore data; combine

data in a few clicks; create visualizations, charts, reports, and dashboards; and share or

distribute data quickly and securely on the Web among employees, customers, or partners.

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This kind of user-level capability to create what-if scenarios and model real-time reports—

not ones queued up and pulled only from relational databases run by the IT department—

has simply not been available before. The applications are run online, so there is no need to

purchase software, hardware, and maintenance—it’s all included in a monthly user fee. SAP

BusinessObjects BI OnDemand also provides advanced reporting features including ad hoc

reporting and analysis for maximizing the value of data.

SAP BusinessObjects BI OnDemand allows companies to maximize the value of their

data, closing the loop between business strategy and execution, no matter the size of the

company.

Challenges

• The recession has forced organizations to delay spending on many goods and services,

and organizations are delaying spending on new licenses for BI tools at a greater rate

than previously expected. It is now expected that uncertainty and cost control policies

will extend through 2010.

• Notwithstanding the powerful economic benefit and other advantages to sourcing

software as a service, the amount of worldwide software spending dedicated to

this mode of delivery is still less than 4% of all software spending. Buyers will need

to feel they are contracting with reputable firms that can survive tough financial

times, deliver service-level agreements at least equal to those they could guarantee

with on-premises IT resources, and continually refresh software to provide the latest

functionality, or users will not adopt SaaS as quickly as predicted.

Conclusion

IDC believes that SaaS delivery of BI applications will continue to be an important factor

in data analysis and successful decision making in the LOBs of companies. To the extent to

which SaaS-based BI and reporting products such as SAP BusinessObjects BI OnDemand

can continue to provide the business value and benefits customers are coming to expect

from SaaS-based BI, firms such as SAP will thrive.

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Conventional BI systems are designed to be used by business analysts who run data

analysis on behalf of decision makers. But putting these same tools in the hands of

LOB users democratizes the information and gives them the power to make impactful

business decisions at all levels of the organization. SaaS makes this possible by providing

a low-cost way to give Web-based access to significantly more users, using a streamlined

architecture. The result is better alignment of business goals between lines of business and

IT organizations, better decision-making power in the hands of users, and the discovery

that there can be geniuses in every branch, in every department, in every company, just

waiting for their chance to “run the numbers” with SaaS-based BI tools.

IDC Technology Spotlight. Adapted from Worldwide Business Analytics Software as a Service 2009–2013

Forecast by Brian McDonough, Robert P. Mahowald, and Dan Vesset, IDC #221320.

©2010 IDC


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Beginning last fall and continuing through 2011, SAP and its partners have been pushing

the boundaries of traditional business intelligence (BI) with a wave of new business

analytics solutions:

• SAP BusinessObjects BI and EIM 4.0, which bring together BI and enterprise information

management (EIM) technology in a way that has never been done before

• SAP BusinessObjects Event Insight, a new solution for the real-time processing and

monitoring of business events

• SAP BusinessObjects analytic applications, including 16 industry-specific scenarios

(with dozens more in the pipeline)

• SAP BusinessObjects Mobile, delivering business analytics and insight to any mobile

device, anywhere

• SAP BusinessObjects BI OnDemand, a hosted BI solution that’s easy to set up, easy to

integrate, and easy to use

• SAP High-Performance Analytic Appliance (SAP HANA) software, which makes real-

time BI Performance a reality

• SAP BusinessObjects enterprise performance management (EPM) and governance,

risk, and compliance (GRC) solutions, which drive organizational alignment and unify

GRC initiatives

These new products represent a true revolution in bringing together transactional and

enterprise data. They introduce technologies and capabilities that will change the way

companies think about and use BI—such that BI will change the way they do business.

SAPinsider asked SAP executive Vice President and General Manager Sanjay J. Poonen to

explain the market dynamics that are driving this revolution, and what’s in it for customers.

The Business Information Revolution: Best-run Businesses Innovate Better with SAP

SAP Special Report

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The world is in the midst of a BI revolution. BI has been evolving beyond the domain of

analysts who construct elaborate queries and reports based on weeks-old or even months-

old data. With dynamic dashboards, sizzling performance, and predictive capabilities, BI

has been spreading outside the realm of power users and, with almost viral speed, has

been landing on the desktops of executive management and department heads.

This is a revolution with its own manifesto, based on five very specific precepts:

• BI must be actionable.

• BI must be intuitive.

• BI must be collaborative.

• BI must be fast.

• BI must be accessible.

Actionable BI Driving Insight into Action BI must provide constructive insight based on the data collected in your transactional

system and then turn that insight into action. BI should be less about making people

more efficient in their business processes—that’s for your transactional system. Instead,

BI should be about making people more effective. For example, a transactional system

records what customers buy and how much they pay for it. But a BI system should tell users

which customers are more profitable than others, and then provide options for increasing

that profitability.

Intuitive BI Consumer-grade Usability Because companies have a wide range of skill sets among their workforces, BI should

also employ consumer-grade usability. The average person’s frame of reference regarding

accessing information today is now based on the Internet. When we use our browser at

home, we can easily—and instantly—access the information we need.

So why should it be that, when we get to the office, our abilities to locate information aren’t

as efficient or as effective as using a search engine? Consumer tools and processes have

become the gold standard. People expect a search-based experience like the one Google

provides. They want the breadth and depth of applications that they find in the Apple

App Store. They want it not just on their computers, but increasingly on mobile devices,

like iPads or BlackBerry smartphones, and they want it now. Users expect that business

applications will behave just like their consumer-grade applications.

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Collaborative BI Collaborative Decisions within and outside the Firewall Given the extended nature of today’s business networks, BI should enable collaboration

inside and outside of a company’s firewall and should be agnostic with any kind of data. Once

again, the consumer world is leading the business world here. People are collaborating more

than ever, with social networks and a wide range of networked applications. In business,

this has become critical. Our customers want to analyze their spend and collaborate with

suppliers in China, manufacturers in Eastern Europe, and developers in India. A BI system

cannot stop at the company firewall when so many business decisions need to involve

suppliers and customers.

Fast BI Real-time Insight BI should enable analytic decisions in any type of business process, within any industry,

and on any device—all in real time. Even a decade ago, no one imagined that the old adage

“time is money” would be measured in milliseconds. It is no longer sufficient to wait for a

business analyst to run a query and give you an answer tomorrow based on last week’s

data. Today’s companies want greater agility so they can make decisions based on today’s

information, now. They want to know, in real time, if a change in demand or supply could

have an impact on their inventory levels.

Accessible BI Any Time, Any Place, to Any Person BI should reach all people within the organization to inform, deliver contextual insight, and

transform the way that the organization makes decisions, ultimately driving remarkable

results. Whether the decision is tactical, operational, or strategic in nature, business data

needs to be delivered in a way individuals can consume it—on their mobile devices, over

the Web, and on their desktop.

Information Innovation Based on these precepts, BI users are demanding the business insight they need, in the

context they need it, via any medium they require, to help make the most-informed

business decisions possible. And the products supporting this revolution will be constantly

evolving because, at its heart, the BI revolution is all about information innovation.

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BI is not like ERP and business applications, which require a state of constancy. ERP and

other transaction-based systems are, by their very nature, supposed to do the same things

tomorrow that they do today. But the business analytics environment should be constantly

changing and evolving. If companies are still looking at the same report they were looking

at two years ago, that’s a sign that they’re not using their data to its best effect—to innovate.

The innovation cycle and the changes to information environments are typically much

faster and more flexible than in the standard business application. Companies can’t

innovate without information. At the same time, just collecting information by itself is

meaningless. Businesses must do something with it for it to be useful.

Lead the BI Revolution—with the Support of SAP and Partners The SAP BusinessObjects roadmap puts our products and those of our partners squarely

in front of this need for information innovation, with a product pipeline that not only has

anticipated this transformation of BI, but will, over the coming weeks and months, drive the

market and the acceptance of this approach. All of the new, recently announced products

speak to the requirements of the new BI.

Through collaboration with partners, our customers will have the depth and breadth of BI

tools needed to drive this revolution:

• We’ve relied heavily upon management consultants and system integrators because BI

is no longer about implementing technology; it’s about changing your business.

• Our software partners, with their deep knowledge in specific industries, have shared

their expertise to make our SAP BusinessObjects tools more relevant and meaningful.

• And without the support of our hardware partners, the ability to manage real-time BI

performance with SAP HANA would never have become a reality.

Only with software and hardware working in concert could SAP realize the gains in

performance that will enable our customers to conduct powerful analysis in real time with

today’s data.

If companies are still looking at the same report they were looking at two years ago, that’s a sign that

they’re not using their data to its best effect—to innovate. “ “

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To realize this information innovation and deliver on the five precepts of the new BI, SAP

and its partners will continue to release new tools and business processes that will provide

business intelligence how and when you want it. It will be available on-premise, on-demand,

or on-device. It will be seamless; the same product will work whether customers install

it themselves, use our on-demand platform, embed it in another application, or access it

through a mobile device. And it will be agnostic, integrating structured and unstructured

data from SAP or non-SAP sources.

ReproducedfromtheJan•Feb•Mar2011issueofSAPinsider with permission from its publisher,

WIS Publishing | sapinsider.wispubs.com


TEC Special Report

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The Role of Business Intelligence in Content Strategies

This special report from Technology Evaluation Centers (TEC) takes a look at the role that business intelligence

(BI) can play in extracting value from content sources to benefit business decision making. It also reveals some

of the tools and technologies that BI vendors are developing to analyze unstructured content, and examines the

ways businesses are applying these technologies to extract actionable insights from their content management

systems (CMSs) and from the Internet.

With so much business being transacted online, the amount of corporate content generated by—and about—

the average organization is staggering. Companies are relying on CMSs to handle enormous quantities of

information from a wide variety of sources. Hidden in this information is valuable data that, properly analyzed,

can provide key insights into what makes businesses run, and what can make them run better. The problem, of

course, is finding a way to analyze the data.

Extracting BI from Unstructured Data

BI, a branch of enterprise software focused on making sense of massive amounts of data, seems at first glance

to be a likely solution here. However, traditional BI solutions are designed to work with data that’s already

structured in ways that make analysis easy. They tend to work with structured data from, e.g., databases under

which the data has a very well-defined structure (fields, registers, tables, and so on). CMSs, in contrast, store

mostly unstructured data. Such data lacks a formal data model or structure, and requires much more complex

analysis techniques.

Now that demand for unstructured data analysis is on the rise, BI vendors are investing heavily in specialized

analytical tools and technologies. Some of these innovations are introduced here, with commentary on what

you should look for from the vendors that provide them.

BI and CMS: Closing the Gap

While traditional BI systems have been able to provide analysis derived from “cold numbers” such as total

revenue, total sales, etc., many business areas need to expand these capabilities in order to analyze complex

information based on more qualitative notions, such as brand positioning in the market, customer satisfaction,

or customer preferences.

TEC Special Report

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Also, many organizations have come to realize that valuable information is contained in unstructured documents

(as in plain text documents or spreadsheets), which has triggered the development of new types of analysis

tools. The aim of such tools is to enable analysis that uncovers meaning or “sentiment” within an organization’s

documents and other content. This type of data has traditionally been maintained within CMSs.

Beyond the natural evolutions of both BI and CMS applications, the way data is handled within an organization

has also contributed to closing the gap between CMSs and BI systems. Organizations promote better data

sharing between the two types of applications, and BI techniques are being applied to unstructured data,

such as

• semantic publishing frameworks and standards (e.g., the Resource Description Framework [RDF] and

extensible markup languages [XMLs]) that enable documents to be better documented and described, as

well as providing features for porting to different platforms;

• technologies such as sentiment analysis and text-mining techniques, which enable organizations to analyze

or measure the polarity of opinions regarding an object of study, or to uncover valuable information within

text content; and

• software development frameworks such as service-oriented architecture (SOA) to build more user-centric

applications, which promote collaboration and interoperability between different types of systems.

Another enabler of this collaborative BI/CMS evolution is the growth of the so-called social media space, which

has expanded the need for organizations to analyze the content coming from within the organization, as well

as, more particularly, the content generated from outside the organization.

Content Analysis and Its Relevance to the Organization

In the context of the analysis of massive amounts of complex data, many business areas require tools that

can help them interpret and extract valuable information for decision support purposes. There are several

advantages to using BI technologies for these purposes:

• They can expand analysis potential, not only in terms of data quantity, but also in terms of data quality.

• They enable easier searching within corporate information and content based on semantic properties (as

opposed to, e.g., keyword criteria alone).

• They expand analysis capabilities to a broader number of users by applying easier-to-operate interfaces

for data analysis.

• They create more unified frameworks for applying BI, in more instances or business units.

Information analysis based on sentiment or appreciation, and tools that help users create alternative ways to

gather information (such as data mashups, enterprise search strategies, and the development of models for text

and data mining) allow users to detect important patterns, such as customer behavior, possible fraud detection,

and more.

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Emerging BI Subcategories: Enterprise Information Systems and Content Intelligence

The merging of CMS and BI technologies is contributing to the development of a new space, in which we

encounter several types of applications that deal with content in various ways, from tools for text analysis to

semantic Web techniques. BI tools are rapidly being converted from systems devoted to strategic and tactical

decision support to applications that support operational areas in daily tasks, as well as helping a broader

number of users to search and discover data insights directly at the information source in other types of

enterprise software applications, e.g., customer relationship management (CRM) systems.

There are two major approaches to combining BI and content management: 1) the development of enterprise

information management systems that aim to cover all areas of organizational information management, and 2)

a more targeted approach called content intelligence, which combines CMS content management abilities with

a strong set of BI capabilities. This combination provides the power to analyze information coming from both

structured and unstructured data. Content analysis carried out by BI systems has several core functionalities:

• Semantic technologies

The goals of semantic technologies are to develop the standards, frameworks, and software that find

meaning in the information managed within an organization. Semantic technologies can be applied

to several different areas, but nowadays they play a major role in the decision support process, as they

provide analytics applications with valuable information for the BI life cycle process. At this stage, semantic

technologies enable the management of the unstructured data that deals with business interaction in all

business process layers (from transactional systems to employees and customer interaction). Semantic

technologies include tools for categorization, autorecognition of topics and concepts, and extraction of

data and its meaning.

• Enterprise search

Enterprise search tools are devoted to easing the search for particular content within an organization. In a

way, they are comparable to Web search processes: information is collected and integrated (possibly using

a crawler, as in a Web search), processed, and indexed. At this point, information is ready to be queried

and matched by or for users. An enterprise search system can collect information from a wide variety of

systems, particularly combinations of databases and CMSs.

• Analytics (text analytics/mining and Web analytics/mining)

One of the core features of the mix between content management and BI functionality is the possibility of

performing content analysis. This type of feature is expanding from traditional text analytics to the ability

to provide a statistical distribution of text elements such as words and phrases, and from traditional text-

mining techniques to the categorization of text elements, as well as the creation of models to find text

patterns over different types of content.

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Trends to Watch For

As in any space in the software industry, CMS and BI software systems are in a state of evolution, and many new

technologies are being adopted to enhance the capabilities of content intelligence systems. Significant trends

to watch for in upcoming years will be based on three major points: 1) data storage and exploitation, 2) social

media, and 3) collaboration.

1. Data storage and exploitation

Traditionally, BI-related processes have been carried out using information stored in relational databases.

This was fine for the analysis of information taken from traditional transactional systems, but turns out to

be quite challenging when it comes to the use of unstructured data. In recent years, a growing movement

toward the design and implementation of non-relational databases has led to the generation of products

for managing content-based information. Products such as the MarkLogic Server (an unstructured database

created specifically to manage unstructured information), as well as cloud databases such as Amazon’s

SimpleDB, can help companies simplify some of the processes involved in traditional BI solutions. This can

ease the process of data integration from disparate sources, as well as providing a unique information

repository, capabilities for digital content storage, and powerful metadata management capabilities.

Other options include “NoSQL” providers such as CouchDB and MongoDB, which are databases specifically

designed for content-based information. Despite some challenges for NoSQL databases, such as their lack

of atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability (ACID) and ad hoc query capabilities, some providers will

certainly evolve to the point where they can provide reliable services for BI/CMS fusion.

2. Social media data and analysis

More and more organizations are incorporating social media strategies to reinforce their brand and

marketing positioning, and to improve social industry relations. This strategy implies the collection of large

sets of unstructured data for analysis. The massive corporate intrusion on the social media space will help

drive improved analytic applications for content (which in the mid-term will be transferred to in-house BI

solutions). Thus, although tools for sentiment analysis and text mining are in the early stages of productive

usage, they will be forced to rapidly evolve and expand in power and versatility.

3. Integrated collaboration

As with other types of enterprise software applications, content intelligence systems will continue to trend

toward the incorporation of more collaboration capabilities. This enhancement will lead to more user-

centric systems that can deliver services to a wider number of users (i.e., beyond the C-level executives who

were the traditional audience for BI applications). The result is a virtuous circle where the ability to manage

and analyze unstructured data is reflected by the need to address a wider audience (the proposition being

that more business areas need to be involved in the organization’s analytical processes). At the same time,

due to the variety of users involved in the analytical process, content intelligence solutions will need to

be designed in a way that centers on the user, by providing elements for facilitating search, localization,

analysis, and user sharing/collaboration.

http://www.marklogic.com/products/marklogic-server.html

http://aws.amazon.com/simpledb/

http://couchdb.apache.org/

http://www.mongodb.org/

Vendor Directory

Vendor Directory

Product Headquarters Toll-freeInternational-access

E-mailWeb site

Business Activity Monitoring

CareLogistics Real-Time Performance Analytics

Georgia, USA 1-800-930-0870 [email protected] www.carelogistics.com

SL Real-Time Visibility RTView California, USA 1-800-548-6881 +1 415-927-8400

[email protected] www.sl.com

SL Real-Time Visibility RTView for TIBCO California, USA 1-800-548-6881 +1 415-927-8400


SL Real-Time Visibility RTView for APM/OC Monitor

California, USA 1-800-548-6881 +1 415-927-8400


Business Intelligence

AgileGraph AgileGraph Texas, USA www.agilegraph.com/contact.asp www.agilegraph.com

Aginity Customer Facing Analytics

Illinois, USA 1-888-821-1201 [email protected] www.aginity.com

Altosoft InsightBI Pennsylvania, USA

+1 484-427 2800

[email protected] www.altosoft.com

AnyChart AnyChart Washington, USA

1-888-845-1211 +1 206-984-1843

[email protected] www.anychart.com

AnyChart AnyMap Washington, USA

1-888-845-1211 +1 206-984-1843


AnyChart AnyGantt Washington, USA

1-888-845-1211 +1 206-984-1843


Arcplan Arcplan Enterprise Philadelphia, USA

+1 610-902-0688

[email protected] www.arcplan.com

Balanced Insight Balanced Insight Consensus

Ohio, USA +1 513-322-1646

[email protected] www.balancedinsight.com

BI-Cycle KPI Management Tool Georgia, USA www.bi-cycle.com/maintenance_consultant/index.htm www.bi-cycle.com

BI-Cycle RCM Analysis Tool Georgia, USA www.bi-cycle.com/maintenance_consultant/index.htm www.bi-cycle.com

Bitam Artus Virginia, USA 1-888-820-7776 [email protected] www.bitam.com

Board International Board Management Intelligence Toolkit

Massachusetts, USA

+1 781-290-4800

[email protected] www.board.com

Business Intelligence Systems Solutions

BIS² Suite Amsterdam, The Netherlands

+31 20 34200 28

[email protected] www.bis2.net

Centrifuge BI 2.0 Virginia, USA +1 571-830-1300

[email protected] www.centrifugesystems.com

ComponentOne Studio Enterprise Pennsylvania, USA

1-800-858-2739 +1 412-681-4343

[email protected] www.componentone.com

Vendor Directory

Vendor

www.bi-cycle.com/maintenance_consultant/index.htm





E-mailWeb site

ComponentOne Studio for Sharepoint Pennsylvania, USA

1-800-858-2739 +1 412-681-4344

[email protected] www.componentone.com

Connotate Agent Community New Jersey, USA +1 732-296-8844

www.connotate.com/contact_us.aspx www.connotate.com

Corda Corda Builder Utah, USA 1-800-968-3240 +1 801-805-9400

www.corda.com/contact-corda.php www.corda.com

DataMentors PinPoint Florida, USA +1 813-960-7800

[email protected] www.datamentors.com

DataSelf DataSelf BI California, USA +1 408-351-3560

[email protected] www.dataself.com

Dimensional Insight The Diver Solution 6.2 Massachusetts, USA

+1 781-229-9111

[email protected] www.dimins.com

Distributive Management

DataDrill Portal 1-800-779-6306 [email protected] www.distributive.com

dMine Business Intelligence

dMine Dashboards [email protected] www.dminebi.com

DSP Panel Performance Canvas Stockholm, Sweden

+46 8 669 03 40

[email protected] www.dspanel.com

Dundas Dundas Dashboard Ontario, Canada 1-800-463-1492 +1 416-467-5100

[email protected] www.dundas.com

ElegantJ BI Business Intelligence Suite

Gujarat, India +91 79-66527011

[email protected] www.elegantjbi.com

Eshbel Priority Rosh Haayin, Israel

+972 3-9251000 www.eshbel.com

eThority eThority Enterprise Edition

South Carolina, USA

1-800-846-9200 [email protected] www.ethority.com

Exact Exact Business Analytics

Delft, The Netherlands

+31 15 262 4323

[email protected] www.exact.com

Fractal Edge Fractal Intelligence UK +44 20 7084 7494

[email protected] www.fractaledge.com

Fractal Edge Fractal Server UK +44 20 7084 7494

[email protected] www.fractaledge.com

FusionCharts FusionCharts Kolkata, India www.fusioncharts.com/contact www.fusioncharts.com

HumanIT InfoZoom Bonn, Germany +49 228 90954-0

[email protected] www.infozoom.com

IBM IBM Cognos 10 BI New York, USA 1-800-426-4968 +1 914-499-1900

www.ibm.com

IBM IBM Cognos Express New York, USA 1-800-426-4968 +1 914-499-1900

www.ibm.com

iDashboards iDashboards Enterprise Edition

Michigan, USA 1-888-359-0500 +1 248-528-7160

[email protected] www.idashboards.com

Vendor Directory

Vendor


E-mailWeb site

IDV Solutions Visual Fusion Michigan, USA 1-888-201-7282 +1 517-853-3755

www.idvsolutions.com/contactus www.idvsolutions.com

Inca AV DASHboard Surrey, UK +44 1784 270 860

[email protected] www.incasoftware.co.uk

InetSoft Technology Style Intelligence New Jersey, USA 1-888-216-2353 +1 732-424-0400

[email protected] www.inetsoft.com

InfoCaptor InfoCaptor Pennsylvania, USA

+1 412-532-6273

[email protected] www.infocaptor.com

Information Builders WebFOCUS New York, USA +1 212-736-4433

[email protected] www.informationbuilders.com

InsFocus InsFocus BI Petach-Tikva, Israel

+972-3-9233766

[email protected] www.insfocus.com

Integrated Services Inc.

SQL Rx Texas, USA +1 214-526-7680

[email protected] www.isi85.com

Intellicus Intellicus California, USA +1 408-213-3314

[email protected] www.intellicus.com

iOLAP Executive Dashboard, Reporting/OLAP Tools

Texas, USA +1 214-618-5000

[email protected] www.iolap.com

Jaspersoft Jaspersoft BI Suite California, USA 1-877-600-5767 +1 415-348-2398

[email protected] www.jaspersoft.com

Jedox Palo Suite Freiburg, Germany

+49 761 15147-0

[email protected] www.jedox.com

Juice Analytics JuiceKit Virginia, USA +1 571-482-7760

[email protected] www.juicekit.org

Kalido Kalido KONA Massachusetts, USA

+1 781-202-3200

http://info.kalido.com/contactus.html www.kalido.com

Klipfolio Klipfolio Dashboard Ontario, Canada 1-877-233-6149 +1 613-233-6149

[email protected] www.klipfolio.com

Kognitio BI for Leisure Bracknell, UK +44 1344 300770

[email protected] www.kognitio.com

Kognitio BI for Retail Bracknell, UK +44 1344 300770


KXEN KXEN Analytic Framework

California, USA +1 415-904-4160

[email protected] www.kxen.com

LogiXML Logi Info Virginia, USA 1-888-564-4965 +1 703-752-9700

[email protected] www.logixml.com

Lyzasoft Lyza Colorado, USA +1 303-825-1040

www.lyzasoft.com

MAIA Intelligence 1Key Agile BI Suite New Mumbai, India

+91 22-66888999

www.maia-intelligence.com/contact.htm www.maia-intelligence.com

Marketing NPV Dashboard Platform New Jersey, USA +1 609-688-0606

www.marketingnpv.com/contact-us www.marketingnpv.com/dashboard-platform

Vendor Directory

Vendor

www.marketingnpv.com/dashboard -platform

www.marketingnpv.com/dashboard -platform


E-mailWeb site

Microsoft Microsoft BI (Sharepoint Server, SQL Server, etc.)

Washington, USA

1-800-642-7676 +1 425-882-8080

www.support.microsoft.com/contactus/emailcontact.aspx?scid=sw;en;1539&ws=corpinfo&ws=support&ws=mscom www.microsoft.com

MicroStrategy MicroStrategy 9 Virginia, USA 1-888-537-8135 +1 703-848-8600

[email protected] www.microstrategy.com

Netezza (an IBM company)

Netezza Spatial Massachusetts, USA

1-877-638-3992 +1 508-382-8200

www.netezza.com/company/contact_form.aspx www.netezza.com

Neubrain Neubrain CPM Solutions

Maryland, USA +1 301-296-4477

[email protected] www.neubrain.com/performance.html

Nevron Nevron .NET Vision Delaware, USA 1-888-201-6088 [email protected] www.nevron.com

Nevron Nevron SSRS Vision Delaware, USA 1-888-201-6088 [email protected] www.nevron.com

Nevron Nevron SharePoint Vision

Delaware, USA 1-888-201-6088 [email protected] www.nevron.com

Oracle Hyperion Enterprise California, USA 1-800-392-2999 +1 650-506-7000

[email protected] www.oracle.com

Oracle Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition Plus

California, USA 1-800-392-2999 +1 650-506-7000


Oracle Oracle BI Suite Standard Edition

California, USA 1-800-392-2999 +1 650-506-7000


Panopticon Panopticon EX New York, USA +1 646-912-8444

[email protected] www.panopticon.com

Panopticon Panopticon Intelligence Suite

New York, USA +1 646-912-8444

[email protected] www.panopticon.com

Panorama Software Panorama NovaView Ontario, Canada 1-877-709-5858 +1 416-545-0990

[email protected] www.panorama.com

Panorama Software Panorama NovaView Ontario, Canada 1-877-709-5858 +1 416-545-0990

[email protected] www.panorama.com

Pentaho Pentaho BI Suite Florida, USA 1-866-660-7555 +1 407-812-6736

www.pentaho.com/contact www.pentaho.com

Phocas Phocas 5 Oxford, UK +44 1865 481 420

[email protected] www.phocas.biz

Prelytis LiveDashBoard Paris, France +33 1 44 10 41 80

[email protected] www.prelytis.com

ProfitMetrics Dashboard Solutions Texas, USA +1 713-667-5570

[email protected] www.profitmetrics.com

PureShare PureShare ActiveMetrics

Ontario, Canada 1-877-467-9377 +1 613-236-1644

[email protected] www.pureshare.com

QlikTech International QlikView Pennsylvania, USA

1-888-828-9768 [email protected] www.qliktech.com

Vendor Directory

Vendor

www.support.microsoft.com/contactus/emailcontact.aspx?scid=sw;en;1539&ws=corpinfo&ws=support&ws=mscom



www.netezza.com/company/contact_form.aspx

www.netezza.com/company/contact_form.aspx


E-mailWeb site

QPR Software QPR ScoreCard Helsinki, Finland +358 290 001 150

[email protected] www.qpr.com

Quadbase Systems ExpressChart, ExpressDashboard, ExpressReport


[email protected] www.quadbase.com

Ramco Systems Ramco DecisionWorks New Jersey, USA 1-800-472-6261 +1 609-620-4800

[email protected] www.ramco.com

Raymark Xpert-Series Quebec, Canada 1-800-346-7296 +1 514-737-0941

[email protected] www.raymark.com

Relational Solutions POSmart, BlueSky Analytics, BlueSky Forecasting

Ohio, USA +1 440-899-3296

www.relationalsolutions.com

Revolution Analytics Revolution R Enterprise

California, USA 1-855-438-7386 +1 650-646-9545

http://info.revolutionanalytics.com/contact-us-form.html www.revolutionanalytics.com

SAP SAP BusinessObjects Edge Business Intelligence

Pennsylvania, USA

1-800-872-1727 +1 610-661-1000

www.sap.com/usa/contactsap/index.epx?pmelayer=true&kNtBzmUK9zU=1 www.sap.com/solutions/sapbusinessobjects

SAP SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise

Pennsylvania, USA

1-800-872-1727 +1 610-661-1000


SAP SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise Information Management Solutions

Pennsylvania, USA

1-800-872-1727 +1 610-661-1000


SAS Institute SAS Enterprise BI Server

North Carolina, USA

1-800-727-0025 +1 919-677-8000

www.sas.com/apps/forms/index.jsp?id=gendetail www.sas.com

SAS Institute SAS Enterprise BI North Carolina, USA

1-800-727-0025 +1 919-677-8000


SpagoWorld SpagoBI Padua, Italy +39 049 8283411

[email protected] www.spagoworld.org

SpatialKey SpatialKey Massachusetts, USA

1-866-429-2481 www.spatialkey.com/contactcf/general.cfm www.spatialkey.com

Stottler Henke Associates

DataMontage California, USA +1 650-931-2700

[email protected] www.stottlerhenke.com

Strategy Companion Analyzer California, USA 1-800-905-6792 +1 714-460-8398

[email protected] www.strategycompanion.com

Swift Reporting Swift Reporting Enterprise Edition

Ontario, Canada 1-877-794-3877 +1 416-479-028

[email protected] www.swiftreporting.com

Vendor Directory

Vendor

www.sap.com/usa/contactsap/index.epx?pmelayer=true&kNtBzmUK9zU=1






www.sas.com/apps/forms/index.jsp?id=gendetail





E-mailWeb site

Swiss Information Group

Swing Dashboard Geneva, Switzerland

+41 22 979 35 45

[email protected] www.swissinfogroup.com

Syncfusion Essential Studio Enterprise Edition

North Carolina, USA

1-888-936-8638 +1 919-481-1974

[email protected] www.syncfusion.com

Tableau Software Tableau Server Washington, USA

+1 206-633-3400

[email protected] www.tableausoftware.com

TARGIT TARGIT BI Suite Hjørring, Denmark

+45 96 23 19 00

[email protected] www.targit.com

Telerik Telerik Reporting Sofia, Bulgaria 1-888-365-2779 +359 2-8099850

[email protected] www.telerik.com

TIBCO Software Inc TIBCO Spotfire Analytics platform

California, USA 1-800-420-8450+1 650-846-1000

[email protected]

TOTVS S/A Business Intelligence São Paulo, Brazil +55 11 3981-7126

www.totvs.com

Vecta Vecta Sales Intelligence

Sheffield, UK +44 114 262 2032

[email protected] www.vecta.net

Visibility Visibility Reporting and Analytics

Massachusetts, USA

+1 978-269-6500

[email protected] www.visibility.com

Visual Mining NetCharts Performance Dashboards

Maryland, USA 1-800-308-0731 +1 301-795-2200

[email protected] www.visualmining.com

VisualCalc VisualCalc Analysis Software


www.visualcalc.com/contactme.htm www.visualcalc.com

WorldBI suXess Istanbul, Turkey +90 212 285 4785

www.worldbi.biz/contact.asp www.worldbi.biz

XLCubed XLCubed Excel Edition Maidenhead, UK +44 1628 763 222

[email protected] www.xlcubed.com

XLCubed XLCubed Web Edition Maidenhead, UK +44 1628 763 222


XLCubed MicroCharts for Excel Maidenhead, UK +44 1628 763 222


XMLA Consulting Report Portal Florida, USA 1-800-860-0112 +1 813-866-3483

[email protected] www.reportportal.com

Yellowfin Yellowfin Melbourne, Australia

1-877-643-0227 +61 3 9090 0455 www.yellowfin.com.au

Zap Technology Zap Business Intelligence

Brisbane, Australia

+61 7 3211 8450

www.zaptechnology.com/contact/contact.asp www.zaptechnology.com

Business Performance Management

ActiveStrategy ActiveStrategy Enterprise


http://info.activestrategy.com/contact-activestrategy.html www.activestrategy.com

Vendor Directory

Vendor

www.zaptechnology.com/contact/contact.asp

www.zaptechnology.com/contact/contact.asp

http://info.activestrategy.com/contact-activestrategy.html



E-mailWeb site

Actuate BIRT Performance Management

California, USA 1-800-914-2259 +1 650-645-3000

[email protected] www.actuate.com

Actuate BIRT Product Suite California, USA 1-800-914-2259 +1 650-645-3000


Adaptive Planning Adaptive Planning California, USA 1-800-303-6346 +1 650-528-7500

[email protected] www.adaptiveplanning.com

ASG Software Solutions

Performance Management Solutions

Florida, USA 1-800-932-5536 +1 239-435-2200

[email protected] www.asg.com

Bitam Artus Virginia, USA 1-888-820-7776 [email protected] www.bitam.com

Board International Board Management Intelligence Toolkit

Massachusetts, USA

+1 781-290-4800

[email protected] www.board.com

Centrifuge Performance Management

Virginia, USA +1 571-830-1300

[email protected] www.centrifugesystems.com

Clarity Systems (an IBM company)

Clarity 7 Ontario, Canada +1 416-250-5500

[email protected] www.claritysystems.com

Corporater Corporater EPM Suite Massachusetts, USA

1-800-670-8942 www.corporater.com/en/company/inquiry.html www.corporater.com

Covalent Covalent Performance Management Suite

Somerset, UK +44 1823 32 32 39

[email protected] www.covalentsoftware.com

DSPanel Performance Canvas Planning

Stockholm, Sweden

+46 8 669 03 40

[email protected] www.dspanel.com

ElegantJ BI Business Intelligence Suite

Gujarat, India +91 79-66527011

[email protected] www.elegantjbi.com

Epicor Epicor Enterprise Performance Management Solutions

California, USA 1-800-999-6995 +1 949-585-4000

[email protected] www.epicor.com

Exie Performance Management Suites

Oslo, Norway +47 23 00 96 90

www.exie.com/Exie.com/Contact_Exie.html www.exie.com

HardMetrics On-Demand Analytics +1 215-297-9738

[email protected] www.hardmetrics.com

Host Analytics Performance Management Suite

California, USA 1-866-391-4678 +1 650-249-7100

[email protected] www.hostanalytics.com

IBM IBM Cognos 10 Planning

New York, USA 1-800-426-4968 +1 914-499-1900

www.ibm.com

IBM IBM Cognos TM1 New York, USA 1-800-426-4968 +1 914-499-1900

www.ibm.com

Infor Infor PM 10 Georgia, USA 1-800-260-2640 +1 678-319-8000

[email protected] www.infor.com

Information Builders Performance Management Framework

New York, USA +1 212-736-4433

[email protected] www.informationbuilders.com

Vendor Directory

Vendor

www.corporater.com/en/company/inquiry.html

www.corporater.com/en/company/inquiry.html


E-mailWeb site

KCI Computing Control California, USA +1 310-921-6222

[email protected] www.kcicorp.com

Klipfolio Klipfolio Dashboard Ontario, Canada 1-877-233-6149 +1 613-233-6149

[email protected] www.klipfolio.com

Lawson Lawson S3 Enterprise Performance Management

US 1-800-477-1357 www.lawson.com/wcw.nsf/pub/contactus www.lawson.com

Longview Solutions Longview 7 Ontario, Canada +1 905-940-1510

www.longview.com/company/contact-us www.longview.com

MicroStrategy MicroStrategy 9 Virginia, USA 1-888-537-8135 +1 703-848-8600

[email protected] www.microstrategy.com

Neubrain Neubrain CPM Solutions

Maryland, USA +1 301-296-4477

[email protected] www.neubrain.com/performance.html

Nimsoft Service Delivery Portal, SLA Reports, Unified Reporter

California, USA 1-877-752-6468 +1 408-796-3400

www.nimsoft.com/company/contact.php#01 www.nimsoft.com

Oracle Hyperion Enterprise California, USA 1-800-392-2999 +1 650-506-7000


Performance Solution Technologies

ManagePro California, USA 1-877-487-3001 [email protected] www.managepro.com

Prodacapo Corporate Performance Management Suite

Danderyd, Sweden

+46 8 622 25 00

[email protected] www.prodacapo.com

Prophix Performance Management Software

Ontario, Canada 1-800-387-5915 +1 905-279-8711

[email protected] www.prophix.com

PureShare PureShare ActiveMetrics

Ontario, Canada 1-877-467-9377 +1 613-236-1644

[email protected] www.pureshare.com

QPR Software QPR ScoreCard, QPR FactView

Helsinki, Finland +358 290 001 150

www.qpr.com/contact-forms/contact-sales.htm www.qpr.com

Qualitech Solutions Executive Dashboard North Carolina, USA

+1 704-944-6040

www.iexecutivedashboard.com/contact/contact_form.asp www.iexecutivedashboard.com

River Logic Enterprise Optimizer Texas, USA 1-866-326-0171 +1 214-393-4650

[email protected] www.riverlogic.com

Rocket Software CorVu Massachusetts, USA +1 617-614-4321

www.rocketsoftware.com/about/contact www.rocketsoftware.com

SAP SAP BusinessObjects Financial Consolidation

Pennsylvania, USA

1-800-872-1727 +1 610-661-1000

www.sap.com/usa/index.epx?kNtBzmUK9zU=1 www.sap.com/solutions/sapbusinessobjects

Vendor Directory

Vendor

www.nimsoft.com/company/contact .php#01

www.nimsoft.com/company/contact .php#01

www.qpr.com/contact-forms/contact-sales.htm

www.qpr.com/contact-forms/contact-sales.htm

www.sap.com/usa/index.epx?kNtBzmUK9zU=1



E-mailWeb site

SAP SAP BusinessObjects Financial Information Management

Pennsylvania, USA

1-800-872-1727 +1 610-661-1000


SAP SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation

Pennsylvania, USA

1-800-872-1727 +1 610-661-1000


SAP SAP BusinessObjects Profitability and Cost Management

Pennsylvania, USA

1-800-872-1727 +1 610-661-1000


SAP SAP BusinessObjects Spend Performance Management

Pennsylvania, USA

1-800-872-1727 +1 610-661-1000


SAP SAP BusinessObjects Strategy Management

Pennsylvania, USA

1-800-872-1727 +1 610-661-1000


SAP SAP BusinessObjects Supply Chain Performance Management

Pennsylvania, USA

1-800-872-1727 +1 610-661-1000


SAP SAP BusinessObjects XBRL Publishing

Pennsylvania, USA

1-800-872-1727 +1 610-661-1000


SAS SAS for Performance Management

North Carolina, USA

1-800-727-0025 +1 919-677-8000


Silvon Software Stratum Illinois, USA 1-800-874-5866 +1 630-655-3313

[email protected] www.silvon.com

Swift Reporting Swift Reporting Data Analysis

Ontario, Canada 1-877-794-3877 +1 416-479-0289

[email protected] www.swiftreporting.com

Tagetik Corporate Tagetik 3.0 Lucca, Italy +39 0583 96811

[email protected] www.tagetik.com

Whitestein Technologies

Living Systems Process Suite

Cham, Switzerland

+41 44-256-5000

[email protected] www.whitestein.com

Winterheller Software Winterheller Enterprise

Graz, Austria +43 316 8010-0

[email protected] www.winterheller.com

Data Management

Aginity ETL Solutions Illinois, USA 1-888-821-1201 [email protected] www.aginity.com

Vendor Directory

Vendor


















E-mailWeb site

Clarabridge Clarabrige Virginia, USA +1 571-299-1800

www.clarabridge.com/contactus.aspx www.clarabridge.com

Composite Software Composite Information Server


[email protected] www.compositesw.com

DataFlux (a SAS company)

Data Management Studio

North Carolina, USA

1-877-846-3589 +1 919-447-3000

www.dataflux.com/contact/contact-us.aspx www.dataflux.com

DataMentors DataFuse Florida, USA +1 813-960-7800

[email protected] www.datamentors.com

Datanomic Director Version 8 Cambridge, UK +44 1223 228 450

www.datanomic.com/contact www.datanomic.com

Dataupia Dataupia Satori Server Massachusetts, USA

1-866-748-3282 +1 617-301-8400

[email protected] www.dataupia.com

FICO FICO Xpress 7 Minnesota, USA +1 612-758 5200

www.fico.com/en/pages/contact.aspx www.fico.com

Infobright Infobright Enterprise Edition

Ontario, Canada 1-877-596-2483 x225 +1 416-596-2483 x225

[email protected] www.infobright.com

Informatica Informatica PowerCenter

California, USA 1-800-653-3871 +1 650-385-5000

http://vip.informatica.com/?elqpurlpage=483 www.informatica.com

iOLAP Data Integration Tools Texas, USA +1 214-618-5000

[email protected] www.iolap.com

Microsoft Microsoft PowerPivot Washington, USA

1-800-642-7676 +1 425-882-8080

www.support.microsoft.com/contactus/emailcontact.aspx?scid=sw;en;1539&ws=corpinfo&ws=support&ws=mscom www.microsoft.com

Pervasive Software Pervasive Data Integrator

Texas, USA 1-888-926-5969 +1 512-231-6000

[email protected] www.pervasiveintegration.com

Syncsort QPR ScoreCard, QPR FactView

New Jersey, USA +1 201-930-9700

[email protected] www.syncsort.com

Talend Talend Data Management


[email protected] www.talend.com

Data Warehousing

1010data 1010data New York, USA +1 212-405-1010

[email protected] www.1010data.com

Aginity Data Factory Illinois, USA 1-888-821-1201 [email protected] www.aginity.com

Algebraix Data Algebraix Data A2DB Texas, USA +1 512-651-5834

www.algebraixdata.com/about-us/contact-us www.algebraixdata.com

Aster Data Aster Data nCluster California, USA 1-888-278-3732 +1 650-232-4400

www.asterdata.com/contact_us/index.php www.asterdata.com

Vendor Directory

Vendor

http://vip.informatica.com /?elqpurlpage=483

http://vip.informatica.com /?elqpurlpage=483





E-mailWeb site

BI-Cycle Plant Information Data Mart

Georgia, USA www.bi-cycle.com/maintenance_consultant/index.htm www.bi-cycle.com

BIReady BIReady Langbroekerdijk, The Netherlands

1-888-868-5663 +31 343 563851

[email protected] www.biready.com

EMC Greenplum Greenplum Database California, USA +1 650-286-8012

www.greenplum.com/about-us/contact-us www.greenplum.com

EMC Greenplum Greenplum Database Single-Node Edition



IBM IBM DB2 Universal Database Data Warehouse Edition

New York, USA 1-800-426-4968 +1 914-499-1900

www.ibm.com

IBM Informix Dynamic Server for Data Warehouse

New York, USA 1-800-426-4968 +1 914-499-1900 www.ibm.com

Illuminate Illuminate Barcelona, Spain +34 934 573 401

[email protected] www.illuminateinc.com

Kalido Kalido Dynamic Information Warehouse

Massachusetts, USA

+1 781-202-3200

http://info.kalido.com/contactus.html www.kalido.com

Kognitio WX2 Bracknell, UK +44 1344 300770


McObject eXtremeDB Washington, USA

+1 425-888-8505

[email protected] www.mcobject.com


Netezza Skimmer Massachusetts, USA

1-877-638-3992 +1 508-382-8200



Netezza TwinFin Massachusetts, USA

1-877-638-3992 +1 508-382-8200



Netezza Spatial Massachusetts, USA

1-877-638-3992 +1 508-382-8200


Panoratio PANOsight California, USA +1 408-504-5016

[email protected] www.panoratio.com

ParAccel ParAccel Analytic Database

California, USA 1-866-903-0335 [email protected] www.paraccel.com

Sybase Sybase IQ California, USA 1-800-792-2735 +1 925-236-5000

http://response.sybase.com/forms/sybasecontactme?mc=financialservices100305c www.sybase.com

Teradata Teradata Active Enterprise Data Warehouse

Ohio, USA 1-866-548-8348 +1 937-242-4030

www.teradata.com/t/contact-us www.teradata.com

Vendor Directory

Vendor


E-mailWeb site

Teradata Teradata Data Mart Appliance

Ohio, USA 1-866-548-8348 +1 937-242-4030


Teradata Teradata Data Warehouse Appliance

Ohio, USA 1-866-548-8348 +1 937-242-4030


Teradata Teradata Database Ohio, USA 1-866-548-8348 +1 937-242-4030


Teradata Teradata Extreme Data Appliance

Ohio, USA 1-866-548-8348 +1 937-242-4030


Teradata Teradata Extreme Performance Appliance

Ohio, USA 1-866-548-8348 +1 937-242-4030


Teradata Teradata Purpose-Built Platform Pricing

Ohio, USA 1-866-548-8348 +1 937-242-4030


Vertica Vertica Analytic Database

Massachusetts, USA

+1 978-600-1000

[email protected] www.vertica.com

XtremeData dbX Illinois, USA +1 847-871-0379

www.xtremedata.com/contact www.xtremedata.com

Outsourcing

BrightPoint Consulting Dashboard, Data Visualization, Flex Architecture


[email protected] www.brightpointinc.com

ClaraView BI Solution Services Virginia, USA +1 703-269-1500

[email protected] www.claraview.com

Consilium BI Consulting Services Rotterdam, The Netherlands

www.consilium.nl/contact/tabid/64/default.aspx www.consilium.nl

eVerge Group Oracle BI Deployments Texas, USA 1-888-548-1973 +1 972-608-1803

[email protected] www.evergegroup.com

Intelligent Solutions Colorado, USA +1 303-444-2411

[email protected] www.intelsols.com

Kerberos BI Consulting Mendoza, Argentina

+54 261 434-0205

[email protected] www.kerberosconsultores.com

RMSource Frontend North Carolina, USA

1-877-319-3051 [email protected] www.rmsource.com

Support Analytics ProSourcing Maryland, USA +1 804-201-8256

[email protected] www.supportanalytics.com

The BMA Group Consulting Services Chatswood, Australia

+61 2 9884 8499

[email protected] www.bma.com.au

Software as a Service

ActiveStrategy ActiveStrategy Enterprise On-Demand


http://info.activestrategy.com/contact-activestrategy.html www.activestrategy.com

Vendor Directory

Vendor




E-mailWeb site

Actuate BIRT OnPerformance California, USA 1-800-914-2259 +1 650-645-3000


Adaptive Planning Adaptive Planning (On-Demand)

California, USA 1-800-303-6346 +1 650-528-7500

[email protected] www.adaptiveplanning.com

Aginity Data Factory Illinois, USA 1-888-821-1201 [email protected] www.aginity.com

Altosoft Insight On-Demand Pennsylvania, USA

+1 484-427 2801

[email protected] www.altosoft.com

Binocle Binocle Pennsylvania, USA +1 484-887-1630

www.binoclebi.com/index.php?p=22 www.binoclebi.com

Birst Birst California, USA 1-866-940-1496 +1 415-644-5400

[email protected] www.birst.com

Bitam KPI Online Virginia, USA 1-888-820-7776 [email protected] http://kpionline.bitam.com

Cloud9 Cloud9 Analytics California, USA +1 650-561-7855

[email protected] www.cloud9analytics.com

Cloudscale Cloudscale Enterprise California, USA +1 650-206-2240

www.cloudscale.com/index.php/contact www.cloudscale.com

Cloudscale Cloudcel California, USA +1 650-206-2240

www.cloudscale.com/index.php/contact www.cloudscale.com

Direction Software Go Live Illinois, USA +1 312-924-3755

[email protected] www.directionsoftware.com

EMC Greenplum Greenplum Chorus California, USA +1 650-286-8012


GoodData GoodData California, USA +1 415 200-0186

[email protected] www.gooddata.com

IDV Solutions Visual Fusion SaaS Michigan, USA 1-888-201-7282 +1 517-853-3755

www.idvsolutions.com/contactus www.idvsolutions.com

Infocentricity Xeno California, USA +1 415-493-2090

[email protected] www.infocentricity.com

iPartners Balanced Scorecard Georgia, USA 1-888-618-8360 +1 678-710-0600

www.ipartners.net/info_request.asp www.ipartners.net

iTradeNetwork Supply Chain Management and Intelligence

+1 925-660-1100

www.itradenetwork.com/html/contactus.htm www.itradenetwork.com

Jedox Palo Suite SaaS Freiburg, Germany

+49 761 15147-0

[email protected] www.jedox.com

K2 Analytics EPM Maestro Suite www.k2analytics.com/contactus.html www.k2analytics.com

Kognitio WX2 (DaaS) Bracknell, UK +44 1344 300770


Lityx LityxIQ Intelligent Analytics Suite

Pennsylvania, USA

1-888-548-9947 [email protected] www.lityxiq.com

Vendor Directory

Vendor


E-mailWeb site

Metricus Metricus Enterprise SaaS

Rotterdam, The Netherlands

+31 10 71 10260

[email protected] www.metricus.com

NetSuite SuiteAnalytics California, USA 1-800-638-7847 +1 650-627-1000

[email protected] www.netsuite.com

Oco Oco On-Demand Business Intelligence

Massachusetts, USA

1-800-691-8880 +1 781-810-2100

[email protected] www.oco-inc.com

OnDemandIQ OnDemandIQ Virginia, USA 1-866-396-7712 [email protected] www.ondemandiq.com

PivotLink PivotLink California, USA 1-866-625-9884 [email protected] www.pivotlink.com

QMD Accountworks Insight North Carolina, USA

+1 828-877-2775

[email protected] www.qmduser.com

SAP SAP BusinessObjects BI OnDemand

Germany 1-888-342-5727 +49 6227 7-47474

www.ondemand.com/contact www.ondemand.com/businessintelligence

SuccessFactors SuccessFactors Business Execution Software Suite

California, USA 1-800-809-9920 www.successfactors.com/company/contact www.successfactors.com

We Are Cloud Bime Montpellier, France

+33 4 67 41 60 64

[email protected] http://businessintelligence.me

Social Media Analytics

Radian6 Radian6 Dashboards New Brunswick, Canada

1-888-672-3426 +1 506-452-9039

[email protected] www.radian6.com

Radian6 Radian6 Engagement Console

New Brunswick, Canada

1-888-672-3426 +1 506-452-9039

[email protected] www.radian6.com

Sentiment Metrics Sentiment Metrics Farnborough, UK +44 845 658 9945

[email protected] www.sentimentmetrics.com

Sysomos Sysomos MAP Ontario, Canada 1-866-483-3338 [email protected] www.sysomos.com

Sysomos Heartbeat Ontario, Canada 1-866-483-3338 [email protected] www.sysomos.com

Sysomos Audience Ontario, Canada 1-866-483-3338 [email protected] www.sysomos.com

Vendor Directory

Vendor

Technology Evaluation Centers (TEC) helps private- and

public-sector organizations choose the best enterprise

software solutions for their unique business needs-quickly,

impartially, and cost-effectively. TEC’s online Evaluation

Centers, containing IT research and extensive knowledge

bases that catalog vendors’ support for thousands of

enterprise software features and functions, are the leading

resource for IT decision makers around the world. By

combining that information with a proven methodology,

unique Web-based software selection platforms, and years

of software selection expertise, TEC delivers an unmatched

range of online software evaluation and selection services

that bridge the gap between enterprise decision makers

and the vendor/value-added reseller (VAR) community.

Technology Evaluation Centers Inc.740 St. Maurice, 4th FloorMontreal, QuebecCanada, H3C 1L5

Phone: +1 514-954-3665, ext. 254Toll-free: 1-800-496-1303Fax: +1 514-954-9739E-mail: [email protected] site: www.technologyevaluation.com

The information included herein reflects the latest research conducted by TEC’s analysts. Said information may have changed at the time of publication and does not constitute representations on behalf of present vendors for, without limitations, functionality, upgrades, delivery, or development. The reader should not rely solely on the information herein for software selection related decisions. TEC makes no guarantees with respect to the accuracy of said information.

TEC, TEC Advisor, and ERGO are trademarks of Technology Evaluation Centers Inc. All other company and product names may be trademarks of their respective owners.© Technology Evaluation Centers Inc. All rights reserved.

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2011 Business Intelligence Buyer’s Guide: BI€¦ · SaaS BI Tools: Better Decision Making for...

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