2011 Business Intelligence Buyer S Guide Bi For Everyone

Technology Evaluation Centers
2011 Business Intelligence Buyers Guide:
BI
for
Everyone
Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide
IT FOR MANUFACTURING EXECUTIVES
Table of Contents

By Jorge Garca, Research Analyst, Technology Evaluation Centers
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SAP Customer Success Story

Marcus & Millichap Sharpens Reporting with SAP BusinessObjects Solution Portfolio
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Aquent Uses SAP BusinessObjects Software Tools to Deliver Talent
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QlikView Customer Success Story
Campbell Soup Sales and Operations Planning Transformation
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IBM Customer Success Story
Fast Growing Company, Mayflex, Chooses IBM Cognos Express to Deliver Essential Business Intelligence and Planning Capability
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MicroStrategy Customer Success Story

Using MicroStrategy Mobile to Perform Marketing and Consumer Shopping Behavior Analysis
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Thought Leadership
SaaS BI Tools: Better Decision Making for the Rest of Us
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SAP Special Report
The Business Information Revolution: Best-run Businesses Innovate Better with SAP
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TEC Special Report
The Role of Business Intelligence in Content Strategies
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Vendor Directory

By Jorge Garca, Research Analyst, Technology Evaluation Centers 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 Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide 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. Small to medium businesses have 1 to 500 employees and revenues of up to $250 million (USD).
IT in Large Enterprises
Almost 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-ofthe-art solutions.
IT in SMBs
When 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 organizations requirements.
SaaS BI: The New Alternative

The 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 onpremise vendors are launching SaaS versions of their BI solutions. SaaS BI software solutions will undoubtedly Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide 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 toolsand negating the hardware and IT personnel costs of a traditional BI system deployment.
Is BI Really for Everyone?

BI for Large Enterprises
Because 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 SMBs
With 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 Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide management, and data visualization tools.
The State of the Market

The Growing Interest in BI
It was in the late 1970s when the first decision support systemspredecessors 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 performancetraditional 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 softwarenot 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 TECs Evaluation Centers
Figure 1. BI software selection projects (2005 to 2010)*

*Data in figures 1 to 3, 6 to 8, 10, and 11 is derived from TECs Evaluation Centers. Data values reflect the number of software selection projects in TECs Evaluation Centers. For figure 3, data values reflect user responses.
Figure 2. Interest in BI: large enterprises (LEs) versus SMBs 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).
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Figure 3. Interest in BI solutions compared to other business software
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 Tasks

BI 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.
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Figure 4. Classical BI life cycle process
Data Sources
The classical BI life cycle process collects data directly from the point where its 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 Component

The 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. Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide The BI life cycle process ends when the information is presented in a form that enables an improved decisionmaking 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. Data Integration DataFlux (Data Management Studio) Informatica (PowerCenter) Information Builders (iWay) Talend (Open Studio) Pervasive Software (Data Integrator) Table 1. Vendors offering solutions for data integration and data visualization tasks Data Visualization Corda Technologies (CenterView) Dundas (Dundas Dashboard) Universal Mind (Spatial Key) VisualCalc (analysis software)
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 frequencytwo, 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 generatedthats to say, at an operational pace. Such near real-time solutions essentially enabled organizations to leverage their BI systems to increase datarefreshing 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. Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide
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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.
Figure 5. Modern BI life cycle process
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 Dilemma

Traditionally, 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).
Figure 6. Interest in data warehouse functionalities and tools
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: Data explosion Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide 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. Lack of human and technical resources Many companies dont have sufficiently technically skilled human resources to successfully deploy a data warehouse project. Also, some of them dont have the software and hardware tools to deploy a data warehouse system. Data quality issues 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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Budget constraints Many companies cannot shoulder the expense of acquiring high-end data warehouse technology. In many cases, economic conditions represent an important limitation to a companys 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: Data warehouse appliances 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. Analytical databases 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-memory databases The innovative technology of in-memory databases enables users to work on a database that resides Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide 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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Data Warehouse Appliances Netezza Dataupia Aster Data Teradata
Analytical Databases Kognitio Vertica Illuminate Infobright
In-memory Databases QlikTech Microsoft (PowerPivot)
Table 2. Vendors offering data warehouse solutions
BI Gets Real ( Time): An Operational BI Briefing

One 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 instantlyand with a short-term perspective in mind. Its 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: Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide 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.
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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: Strategic decisions 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. Tactical decisions 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. Operational decisions 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 Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide 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; its 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 organizations 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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Figure 7. Interest in business performance management versus some core BI functionalities
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. Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide 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.
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Trends and Challenges in the BI Space

As 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. Social media 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. Complex event processing 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-memory analytics 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. Columnar databases 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. SaaS BI 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. Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide Verticalization of BI functionality 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 BI
Since 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 servicessuch as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitterenable data communication through distinct types of interaction between users; this is what we call social media.
BI and Social Media: The Structure of Unstructured Analysis

Along 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 subjecteasily 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. Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide 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 applicationscalled social media analytics or social Web analyticsis to collect and interpret social media content.
BI and Social Media Analytics: The Best of Both Worlds

Currently, 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:
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Expansion of data sources New BI tools not only analyze data coming from an organizations 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 decisionmaking 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 Sector

Despite 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 companys 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.
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Figure 8. Public sector interest in BI applications
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 decisionmaking process and/or to measure and manage an organizations 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; its important that information be delivered in good time, but its 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, its 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) Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide 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 its needed and ensuring that all processes occur with transparency, compliance, and accuracy.
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The Big BI: BI for Large Enterprises

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: Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide 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.
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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 Matrix

The 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 Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide 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 organizations requirements, you can conduct a comprehensive evaluation and comparison analysis in TECs Business Intelligence Evaluation Center.
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Company
Product Region
Actuate
BIRT iServer Enterprise Global
Board International
Board ToolKit Europe North America Australia
Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Full Full None Full No Full Full Full Full Full None None Full None Partial Partial Partial None None Full Full Full Full Full Full Full Full Yes None None Yes No No
IBM
Cognos 10 Business Intelligence Global
Multiplatform Localization Technical support Training Audit trail management Security management Central administration Analysis and reporting
Yes Yes Yes Yes No Yes Yes Full Full With additional product With additional product Yes Full With additional product With additional product Full With additional product Full None Full None Full With additional product Full None Full With additional product With additional product None None None None None With additional product Yes None None No Yes Yes
Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Full Full Full Full Yes Full Full Full Full Full Full With additional product Full With additional product With additional product With additional product With additional product With additional product Full Full Full With additional product Full With additional product With additional product With additional product With additional product Yes With additional product Partial Yes Yes Yes
Information Delivery Data Analysis Data Management

Dashboarding Mobile BI capabilities Advanced data search BI software gadgets (e.g., Oracle BI beans) Advanced reporting Microsoft Office integration Geospatial capabilities Standard analytics Advanced analytics In-memory analytics Web and social analytics OLAP services Data warehousing Enterprise data integration Data quality Metadata management Data mining Operational BI capabilities Metrics and KPIs Scorecards Planning Strategy management Budgeting Financial consolidation Risk and performance management Forecasting Portal integration
Extended BI Functionality
BPM Functionality
Master data management Data governance Industry vertical functionality Third-party application integration Collaboration tools
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Company
Product
Information Builders
WebFOCUS
Microsoft
MicroStrategy
Office 2010, SharePoint MicroStrategy 9 Server 2010, SQL Server 2008 R2 Global
Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Full Full With additional product Full No Full Full Full Full Full Full With additional product Full Full Full Full Full Full Full Full Full None None None None None With additional product Yes Full With additional product Yes Yes Yes
Region
Global
Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Full Full Full Full Full Full Full Full Full Full None Full With additional product Full Full Full Full Full Full Full With additional product With additional product With additional product With additional product Full Full Yes Full Full Yes Yes No
Global
Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Full Full Full None No Full With additional product Full Full Full Full Full Full None None None Partial Full None Full None None None None None None Full Yes None None Yes Yes With additional product Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide
Information Delivery Data Analysis Data Management BPM Functionality Extended BI Functionality
Dashboarding Mobile BI capabilities Advanced data search Advanced reporting Microsoft Office integration Geospatial capabilities Standard analytics Advanced analytics In-memory analysis Web and social analytics OLAP services Data warehousing Enterprise data integration Data quality Metadata management Data mining Operational BI capabilities Metrics and KPIs Scorecards Planning Strategy management Budgeting Financial consolidation Risk and performance management Forecasting Portal integration Master data management Data governance Industry vertical functionality Third-party application integration Collaboration tools
BI software gadgets (e.g., Oracle BI beans) No
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Company
Product
Oracle
Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition Plus Global
QlikTech
QlikView
SAP
SAP BusinessObjects BI solutions, EIM solutions, EPM solutions Global
Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes With additional product Full Full Yes Full Yes Full Full With additional product Full Full With additional product With additional product Full With additional product With additional product With additional product With additional product Full With additional product With additional product With additional product With additional product With additional product With additional product With additional product With additional product With additional product Yes With additional product With additional product Yes Yes Yes
Region
Global
No, Windows Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes With additional product Full Full Full Yes Full Full Full Full Full Full Full Full None None None None None Full Full Full Full Full Full Full Full Full Yes None None Yes Yes Yes
Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Full Full With additional product With additional product No Full Full None Full Full With additional product Partial with additional product Full With additional product With additional product With additional product With additional product With additional product With additional product With additional product With additional product With additional product With additional product With additional product With additional product With additional product Full Yes With additional product With additional product Yes Yes With additional product
Information Delivery Data Analysis Data Management

Dashboarding Mobile BI capabilities Advanced data search BI software gadgets (e.g., Oracle BI beans) Advanced reporting Microsoft Office integration Geospatial capabilities Standard analytics Advanced analytics In-memory analytics Web and social analytics OLAP services Data warehousing Enterprise data integration Data quality Metadata management Data mining Operational BI capabilities Metrics and KPIs Scorecards Planning Strategy management Budgeting Financial consolidation Risk and performance management Forecasting Portal integration
Extended BI Functionality
BPM Functionality
Master data management Data governance Industry vertical functionality Third-party application integration Collaboration tools
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Company
Product Region
SAS Institute
SAS Enterprise BI Server Global
Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Full Full Full Full Full Full None Full Full None With additional product Full Full With additional product With additional product Full With additional product With additional product With additional product With additional product With additional product With additional product With additional product With additional product With additional product With additional product Yes With additional product None Yes No Yes
TIBCO Software Inc

TIBCO Spotfire Analytics platform Global
Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Full Full None None No Full With additional product Full Full Full None None Full None None None Partial Full Partial Full None None None None None None Full Yes None None Yes Yes With additional product Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide
Information Delivery Data Analysis Data Management BPM Functionality Extended BI Functionality
Dashboarding Mobile BI capabilities Advanced data search Advanced reporting Microsoft Office integration Geospatial capabilities Standard analytics Advanced analytics In-memory analytics Web and social analytics OLAP services Data warehousing Enterprise data integration Data quality Metadata management Data mining Operational BI capabilities Metrics and KPIs Scorecards Planning Strategy management Budgeting Financial consolidation Risk and performance management Forecasting Portal integration Master data management Data governance Industry vertical functionality Third-party application integration Collaboration tools
BI software gadgets (e.g., Oracle BI beans) With additional product
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Actuate
Actuate 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 International
Founded 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.
IBM
IBM 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 Builders
With 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.
Microsoft
SharePoint Server represents the core of Microsofts wide BI offering. The Redmond, Washingtonbased company relies on its Sharepoint Server solution to bring BI functionality Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide 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.
MicroStrategy
Founded 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. MicroStrategys 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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Oracle
Oracle 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.
QlikTech
Qliktech 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.
SAP
The SAPBusiness 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 Institute
SAS 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 Inc

TIBCO, 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. Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide
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BI for SMBs
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 TECs 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: Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide 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
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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 Matrix

The 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 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 organizations requirements, you can conduct a comprehensive evaluation and comparison analysis in TECs Business Intelligence Evaluation Center.
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Company
Product
IBM
InetSoft
Jaspersoft
LogiXML
Oracle
Oracle Business Intelligence Standard Edition One Global
Cognos Express Style Intelligence
Jaspersoft Logi 10 Platform Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition North America Europe Asia Africa
No Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Full Full Full Full Full None Yes None With additional product Full Full None Full Full Full Full Full None None Yes No Yes No
Region
Global
North America
North America Europe
Multiplatform Localization Support Training Audit trail management Security management Central administration Analysis and reporting Self-service reporting Ad hoc queries Dashboarding Information mashups Mobile capabilities BI software gadgets (e.g., Oracle BI beans) Advanced data search
No, Windows Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Full Full Full Full Partial None No None
Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Full Full Full Full Full Partial No None Partial Full Full Partial Full Partial Full Partial Full Partial Partial Yes No Yes Yes
Yes Yes Yes Yes No Yes Yes Full Full Full Full None Partial Yes None Partial Full Full None Full Full Partial Partial Full None None Yes No Yes No
Yes Yes Yes Yes No Yes Yes Full Full Full Full None None No None With additional product None Full None With additional product None Full Full Full With additional product With additional product No No Yes No
Microsoft Office integration Full Geospatial capabilities Standard analytics Predictive analytics OLAP services In-memory analytics Embedded/basic data integration Basic metadata management Metrics and KPIs Planning and budgeting Forecasting Portal integration Industry vertical functionality Third-party application integration Collaboration tools Full Full None Full Full Full Full Full Full Full Yes No Yes No
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Company
Product
Panorama Software
NovaView
Pentaho
Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition
QlikTech
QlikView
SAP
SAP BusinessObjects Edge Business Intelligence Global
Tableau Software
Tableau Desktop, Tableau Public, Tableau Reader, Tableau Server Global
Region
North America North America Europe Europe Middle East

No, Windows Yes Yes Yes No Yes Yes Full Full Full Full None None No None Full Full Full None Full None Full None Full None None Yes No Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Full Full Full Full Partial Full Yes Full Partial Full Full Full Full Partial Full Full Full Partial Full Yes Yes Yes Yes
Global
Multiplatform Localization Support Training Audit trail management Security management Central administration Analysis and reporting Self-service reporting Ad hoc queries Dashboarding Information mashups Mobile capabilities BI software gadgets (e.g., Oracle BI beans) Advanced data search Microsoft Office integration Geospatial capabilities Standard analytics Predictive analytics OLAP services In-memory analytics Embedded/basic data integration Basic metadata management Metrics and KPIs Planning and budgeting Forecasting Portal integration Industry vertical functionality Third-party application integration Collaboration tools
No, Windows Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes With additional product With additional product With additional product Full Full Full Yes Full Full Full Full Partial Full Full Full Full Full Full Full Yes Yes Yes Yes
No, Windows Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Full Full Full Full Full Full Yes Full Full Full Full None Full None With additional product With additional product Full Full Full Yes No No Yes
No, Windows Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Full Full Full Full Full Partial Yes Full Full Full Full Partial Full Partial Full Partial Full None Partial Yes No Yes Yes Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide
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IBM
IBM 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.
InetSoft
InetSoft developed a BI solution thats 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.
Jaspersoft
Started 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.
LogiXML
Founded 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.
Oracle
Oracle 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 Software
Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide Having 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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Pentaho
Founded 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 worlds most deployed open source BI solutions. The company also has a wide number of partnerships.
QlikTech
QlikTech 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.
SAP
The SAPBusiness 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 Software
Tableau 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 BI
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).
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Figure 9. General SaaS application model
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 clienta 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 vendors 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 World

SaaS 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).
Figure 10. Platforms used for BI solutions
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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.
Figure 11. Demand for platform types for BI solutions
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And the Challenges

As 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 Matrix

The 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 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 organizations requirements, you can conduct a comprehensive evaluation and comparison analysis in TECs Business Intelligence Evaluation Center. Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide
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Company
Product Region
Localization Support Training Service-level agreement
Adaptive Planning
Adaptive Planning
Birst
Birst 4
Bitam
KPI Online North America
Yes Yes No No No No No None None None Yes Full Full None None Full None Full Full Full None None None Full Full Full None None No No No
Cloud9
Cloud9 Analyst Suite North America Europe
No Yes Yes No No No No None None None No Full Full None None None None None None None None None None Full Full With additional product With additional product With additional product No Yes No
GoodData
GoodData North America
No Yes Yes No No No No None None None No Full Full None None None None None None Full None None None Full Full None None None No No No
North America North America Europe

Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes No No Yes Full Full Full Yes Full Full None None Full Partial Partial Full Full Full Full Full Full Full None None None Yes Yes Yes
Audit trail management Yes
Security and Control
SOX compliance SAS 70 Type II compliance Application-level security Data-level security Data encryption Central administration Analysis and reporting Dashboarding Data mashups Advanced data search Alerts and exceptions
No Yes Full Full Full Yes Full Full None Full Full Full None None Full None Full Full Full Full Full Full No No Yes
General Functionality
What-if analysis Microsoft Office integration Geospatial capabilities Standard analytics Predictive analytics OLAP services Disparate data source integration Metrics and KPIs
Data warehousing tools None
Business Performance
Planning and budgeting Cost management Strategy and performance Portal integration Industry vertical functionality Third-party application integration
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Company
Product
NetSuite
SuiteAnalytics
Oco
Oco Business Analytics Solutions
PivotLink
PivotLink BI Platform
SAP
SAP BusinessObjects BI OnDemand
We Are Cloud
Bime
Region
North America North America North America Global Europe Europe Asia
Localization Support Training Service-level agreement Yes Yes Yes Yes No Yes No Yes No No Yes Full Full Full Yes Full Full None None Full None None Full Full None None Full Full Full None Full Full Yes Yes Yes No No No No No No Yes Full None None Yes Full Full None None Full None None None Full None Full None Full Full None None None No Yes No No Yes No No No No No Full Full None Yes Full Full Full Full Full Full None Full Full None None None Full Full None None None No No Yes
Europe
Yes, French/English Yes Yes No No No No Full Full Full Yes Full Full None None Full Partial None Full Full None Full None Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide Full Full None None None No No No
Audit trail management Yes
Security and Control
SOX compliance SAS 70 Type II compliance Application-level security Data-level security Data encryption Central administration Analysis and reporting Dashboarding Data mashups Advanced data search Alerts and exceptions
No Yes None None Full Yes Full Full None None Full Full None None Full Full Full Full Full With additional product None None No No Yes
General Functionality Business Performance
What-if analysis Microsoft Office integration Geospatial capabilities Standard analytics Predictive analytics OLAP services Disparate data source integration Metrics and KPIs Planning and budgeting Cost management Strategy and performance Portal integration Industry vertical functionality Third-party application integration
Data warehousing tools None
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Adaptive Planning
Adaptive Planning delivers an on-demand BI tool with business performance features. The company was founded in 2003 and is based in Mountain View, California.
Birst
Birst was founded in 2004 by veterans of the BI industry and is based in San Francisco, California. Birst specializes in BI software.
Bitam
KPI Online is an on-demand BI and business performance application based on the onpremise solutions of its parent company, Bitam.
Cloud9
From 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.
GoodData
GoodData is a BI provider headquartered in San Francisco, California, and engineered in the Czech Republic.
NetSuite
NetSuite 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.
Oco
Oco stands as one of the first SaaS BI providers in the market. The company is based in Waltham, Massachusetts.
PivotLink
PivotLink applies an innovative approach to developing BI solutions. The company is based in San Francisco, California.
SAP
Business 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 Cloud
We 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.
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Casebook
Case Study

Marcus & Millichap Sharpens Reporting with SAP BusinessObjects Solution Portfolio
QUICK FACTS
Company
Name: Marcus & Millichap Real Estate Investment Services Location: Encino, California, USA Industry: Professional servicesinvestment 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
SAP Solutions and Services

SAP 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
Challenges and Opportunities

Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide 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
Existing Environment 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 Crystal Reports software SAP ERP application
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Encino, Californiabased 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.
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
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 daysif it was done at alland the company was challenged to generate the reports its sales managers needed to make accurate and rapid decisions. Its 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 forwardlooking trends, so that our investment professionals can provide clients with an unparalleled perspective on the investment real estate market locally, regionally, and nationally. Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide
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Economic fluctuations make some investors skittish, driving the need for a savvy and wellinformed 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 onpoint 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, Weve 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 companyour 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 Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide 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 informationthe 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.Were at a critical point in our business cycleso its 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 didnt 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. Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide
The name of the game in brokerage is informationthe 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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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. Thats 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 were 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.
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.
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 dont see ourselves that way. We have the same issues as a Fortune 500 companyactually, 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 Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide 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 were going to gain. For a department our size, that is a lot of freedup 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.
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Case Study

Aquent Uses SAP BusinessObjects Software Tools to Deliver Talent
QUICK FACTS
Company
Name: Aquent Headquarters: Boston, Massachusetts, USA Industry: Professional servicesstaffing Products and services: Staffing of marketing positions worldwide Web site: www.aquent.com 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
Challenges and Opportunities

Increase visibility into the business Improve corporate agility by giving managers flexibility and fast turnaround in reporting
Objectives
Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide 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
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 Solutions and Services

SAP BusinessObjects XI solutions SAP BusinessObjects Web Intelligence software
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Founded in 1986 by friends residing in a Harvard dorm, Aquent is today the worlds 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 servicesincluding project management, translation and localization, and healthcare consultingstaffing 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 onit 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 wasnt 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 databaseincluding mail and e-mail addresses and whether people had opted in or out of our mailing campaignsbut it really wasnt a marketing database, she says. Pulling contact information was a multiday struggle. Worse, I couldnt save the reports I created, so Id 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 wouldnt slow down everybody elses 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? Im starting to get more requests for things that people didnt know they could do before. Its 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 wantimmediately, he says. Its 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. Weve been able to take that off their plate. Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide
New Query Capabilities

Aquents 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 Aquents 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. Norwoods 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 theres minimal cleaning required when it gets to Microsoft Excel, she says. It has literally gone from about 20 hours to maybe 1 hour. Its 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 well 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. Were starting to extract information from this mass of data that we just couldnt extract before. We are on the cusp of doing things we could not do before. From the transformation perspective, its 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 onit will essentially serve as a foundation for Aquent to become a truly global company moving forward. Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide
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. Weve 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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Case Study
QlikView Customer Success Story Campbell Soup Sales and Operations Planning Transformation
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 companys 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 Model
When sales growth of the familiar Campbells 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 companys existing reporting systems and processes were inadequate for the new business model. The Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide 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 Management
Mastroianni realized that Campbells systems could yield tremendous information about the companys supply chain and customer behaviorsbut 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, QlikViews ease of use,
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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 companys 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 Strategic
Campbell 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. QlikViews 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 companys 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 months 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. Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide
QlikViews 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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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 outboundCampbell 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 companys 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 didnt 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. Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide
We didnt 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
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Case Study
IBM Customer Success Story

Fast Growing Company, Mayflex, Chooses IBM Cognos Express to Deliver Essential Business Intelligence and Planning Capability
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 installers partner of choice.
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.
Challenge
Mayflex needed to replace a complex spreadsheet system, improve time-consuming budgeting and forecasting Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide 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) solutions 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.
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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 Incas 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. Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide
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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.
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
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 Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide countries around the world choose IBM Business Analytics solutions.
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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.
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Case Study
MicroStrategy Customer Success Story

Using MicroStrategy Mobile to Perform Marketing and Consumer Shopping Behavior Analysis
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 mostread automotive enthusiast Web site. AutoObserver.com provides insightful automotive industry commentary and analysis. 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.coms 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.
Constant Insight into Consumer Preferences and Marketing Effectiveness
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

The key business questions the iPad app will help these business users answer include: 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.coms 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 Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide 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 MicroStrategys 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.
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Thought Leadership
SaaS BI Tools: Better Decision Making for the Rest of Us

Simple business decisions, each of which impacts a companys 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. Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide 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 departments geniuses.
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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 Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide 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).
Q. What is your organizations general strategy when considering SaaS
2.1 21.9 22.2
implementations? n = 522 Note: The survey targeted respondents from firms with at least 500 employees.
29.5
24.3
Fully committed to SaaS (75100% SaaS in next 45 years) Fairly committed to SaaS (50% SaaS in next 45 years) Cautiously adopting SaaS (25% SaaS in next 45 years) Late adopter or nonadopter of SaaS solutions at this time SaaS is denitely not part of our application strategy at this time
Figure 1. Level of Business Commitment to SaaS Applications Source: IDCs 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: Reduced total cost of ownership (no hardware/software to set up, very modest use of IT resources) Faster time to value (that is, a shorter period between contract signing and putting the application to use) Better performance and availability Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide
All three factors have been cited in survey after survey as core reasons why SaaS-delivered services provide immediate and impactful benefits.
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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 toolsand the superset of business analytics productscan 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 Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide companies. Some benefits of SaaS BI are as follows:
Access by more employees to more data. 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. Business optimization for hard times. 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 time to value for a quicker return on investment. 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 completea 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 companys extended value chain. This is especially important for any firm with multiple sites in different physical locations. Streamlined architecture, with zero infrastructure. 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. Lower implementation costs. 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 onpremises productions systems (such as Oracle or SQL databases for marketing, sales, Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide
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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. Ability to tap operating expense (opex) budgets versus capital expense (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 20102011, 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 dont 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

Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide 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 20092013 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. Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide
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 maintenanceits 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 Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide 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 20092013 Forecast by Brian McDonough, Robert P. Mahowald, and Dan Vesset, IDC #221320. 2010 IDC
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SAP Special Report
The Business Information Revolution: Best-run Businesses Innovate Better with SAP
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 thats easy to set up, easy to integrate, and easy to use SAP High-Performance Analytic Appliance (SAP HANA) software, which makes realtime 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 Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide enterprise data. They introduce technologies and capabilities that will change the way companies think about and use BIsuch 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 whats in it for customers.
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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 monthsold 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 processesthats 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 persons frame of reference regarding accessing information today is now based on the Internet. When we use our browser at home, we can easilyand instantlyaccess the information we need. So why should it be that, when we get to the office, our abilities to locate information arent 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. Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide
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Collaborative BI Collaborative Decisions within and outside the Firewall

Given the extended nature of todays business networks, BI should enable collaboration inside and outside of a companys 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 deviceall 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 weeks data. Todays companies want greater agility so they can make decisions based on todays 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 Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide needs to be delivered in a way individuals can consume iton 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, thats a sign that theyre not using their data to its best effectto innovate. The innovation cycle and the changes to information environments are typically much faster and more flexible than in the standard business application. Companies cant 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 Revolutionwith 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: Weve relied heavily upon management consultants and system integrators because BI is no longer about implementing technology; its 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 todays data. Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide
If companies are still looking at the same report they were looking at two years ago, thats a sign that theyre not using their data to its best effectto 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.
Reproduced from the Jan Feb Mar 2011 issue of SAPinsider with permission from its publisher, WIS Publishing | sapinsider.wispubs.com
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TEC Special Report
TEC Special Report
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 byand 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 thats 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. Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide
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.
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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 organizations 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: Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide 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 textmining techniques to the categorization of text elements, as well as the creation of models to find text patterns over different types of content. Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide
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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 Amazons 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. Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide 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 usercentric 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 organizations 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.
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Vendor
Business Activity Monitoring
CareLogistics SL Real-Time Visibility SL Real-Time Visibility SL Real-Time Visibility Real-Time Performance Analytics RTView RTView for TIBCO RTView for APM/OC Monitor AgileGraph Customer Facing Analytics InsightBI AnyChart AnyMap AnyGantt Arcplan Enterprise Balanced Insight Consensus KPI Management Tool Georgia, USA California, USA California, USA California, USA
Toll-free International-access
1-800-930-0870 1-800-548-6881 +1 415-927-8400 1-800-548-6881 +1 415-927-8400 1-800-548-6881 +1 415-927-8400
E-mail Web site

info@carelogistics.com www.carelogistics.com info@sl.com www.sl.com info@sl.com www.sl.com info@sl.com www.sl.com www.agilegraph.com/contact.asp www.agilegraph.com
Business Intelligence
AgileGraph Aginity Altosoft AnyChart AnyChart AnyChart Arcplan Balanced Insight BI-Cycle Texas, USA Illinois, USA Pennsylvania, USA Washington, USA Washington, USA Washington, USA Philadelphia, USA Ohio, USA +1 513-322-1646 Georgia, USA 1-888-821-1201
info@aginity.com www.aginity.com info@altosoft.com www.altosoft.com sales@anychart.com www.anychart.com sales@anychart.com www.anychart.com sales@anychart.com www.anychart.com sales@arcplan.com www.arcplan.com info@balancedinsight.com www.balancedinsight.com www.bi-cycle.com/maintenance _consultant/index.htm www.bi-cycle.com www.bi-cycle.com/maintenance _consultant/index.htm www.bi-cycle.com
+1 484-427 2800 1-888-845-1211 +1 206-984-1843 1-888-845-1211 +1 206-984-1843 1-888-845-1211 +1 206-984-1843 +1 610-902-0688
BI-Cycle
RCM Analysis Tool
Georgia, USA
Bitam Board International Business Intelligence Systems Solutions Centrifuge ComponentOne
Artus Board Management Intelligence Toolkit BIS Suite BI 2.0 Studio Enterprise
Virginia, USA Massachusetts, USA Amsterdam, The Netherlands Virginia, USA
1-888-820-7776
sales@bitam.com www.bitam.com info@board.com www.board.com sales@bis2.net www.bis2.net info@centrifugesystems.com www.centrifugesystems.com sales@componentone.com www.componentone.com
+1 781-290-4800 +31 20 34200 28 +1 571-830-1300
Pennsylvania, USA
1-800-858-2739 +1 412-681-4343
Vendor Directory
Product
Headquarters
Pennsylvania, USA New Jersey, USA
Vendor
ComponentOne Connotate Corda DataMentors DataSelf Dimensional Insight Distributive Management dMine Business Intelligence DSP Panel Dundas ElegantJ BI Eshbel eThority Exact Fractal Edge Fractal Edge FusionCharts HumanIT IBM IBM iDashboards Studio for Sharepoint Agent Community Corda Builder PinPoint DataSelf BI The Diver Solution 6.2 DataDrill Portal dMine Dashboards Performance Canvas Dundas Dashboard Business Intelligence Suite Priority eThority Enterprise Edition Exact Business Analytics Fractal Intelligence Fractal Server FusionCharts InfoZoom IBM Cognos 10 BI IBM Cognos Express iDashboards Enterprise Edition Stockholm, Sweden Ontario, Canada Gujarat, India
1-800-858-2739 +1 412-681-4344 +1 732-296-8844
E-mail Web site

sales@componentone.com www.componentone.com www.connotate.com/contact_us.aspx www.connotate.com www.corda.com/contact-corda.php www.corda.com lbedgood@datamentors.com www.datamentors.com info@dataself.com www.dataself.com info@dimins.com www.dimins.com info@distributive.com www.distributive.com sales@dminebi.com www.dminebi.com
Utah, USA Florida, USA
1-800-968-3240 +1 801-805-9400 +1 813-960-7800
California, USA +1 408-351-3560 Massachusetts, USA +1 781-229-9111 1-800-779-6306
+46 8 669 03 40 1-800-463-1492 +1 416-467-5100 +91 79-66527011
info@dspanel.com www.dspanel.com sales@dundas.com www.dundas.com sales@elegantjbi.com www.elegantjbi.com www.eshbel.com sales@ethority.com www.ethority.com sales.usw@exact.com www.exact.com contact@fractaledge.com www.fractaledge.com contact@fractaledge.com www.fractaledge.com www.fusioncharts.com/contact www.fusioncharts.com
Rosh Haayin, Israel South Carolina, USA Delft, The Netherlands UK
+972 3-9251000 1-800-846-9200
+31 15 262 4323 +44 20 7084 7494
UK +44 20 7084 7494 Kolkata, India Bonn, Germany +49 228 90954-0 New York, USA New York, USA Michigan, USA 1-800-426-4968 +1 914-499-1900 1-800-426-4968 +1 914-499-1900 1-888-359-0500 +1 248-528-7160
info@humanit.de www.infozoom.com www.ibm.com www.ibm.com info1@idashboards.com www.idashboards.com
Vendor Directory
Product
Headquarters
Michigan, USA Surrey, UK
Vendor
IDV Solutions Inca InetSoft Technology InfoCaptor Information Builders InsFocus Integrated Services Inc. Intellicus iOLAP Jaspersoft Jedox Juice Analytics Kalido Klipfolio Kognitio Kognitio KXEN LogiXML Lyzasoft MAIA Intelligence Marketing NPV Visual Fusion AV DASHboard Style Intelligence InfoCaptor WebFOCUS InsFocus BI SQL Rx Intellicus Executive Dashboard, Reporting/OLAP Tools Jaspersoft BI Suite Palo Suite JuiceKit Kalido KONA Klipfolio Dashboard BI for Leisure BI for Retail KXEN Analytic Framework Logi Info Lyza 1Key Agile BI Suite Dashboard Platform
1-888-201-7282 +1 517-853-3755 +44 1784 270 860
E-mail Web site

www.idvsolutions.com/contactus www.idvsolutions.com info@incasoftware.co.uk www.incasoftware.co.uk info@inetsoft.com www.inetsoft.com contact@infocaptor.com www.infocaptor.com askinfo@ibi.com www.informationbuilders.com info@insfocus.com www.insfocus.com sales@isi85.com www.isi85.com sales@intellicus.com www.intellicus.com sales@iolap.com www.iolap.com sales@jaspersoft.com www.jaspersoft.com info@jedox.com www.jedox.com info@juiceanalytics.com www.juicekit.org http://info.kalido.com/contactus.html www.kalido.com info@klipfolio.com www.klipfolio.com info@kognitio.com www.kognitio.com info@kognitio.com www.kognitio.com sales-us@kxen.com www.kxen.com info@logixml.com www.logixml.com www.lyzasoft.com www.maia-intelligence.com/contact.htm www.maia-intelligence.com www.marketingnpv.com/contact-us www.marketingnpv.com/dashboard -platform
New Jersey, USA Pennsylvania, USA New York, USA
1-888-216-2353 +1 732-424-0400 +1 412-532-6273 +1 212-736-4433
Petach-Tikva, Israel Texas, USA
+972-3-9233766 +1 214-526-7680
California, USA +1 408-213-3314 Texas, USA +1 214-618-5000 California, USA Freiburg, Germany Virginia, USA +1 571-482-7760 Massachusetts, USA Ontario, Canada Bracknell, UK +44 1344 300770 Bracknell, UK +44 1344 300770 California, USA +1 415-904-4160 Virginia, USA Colorado, USA +1 303-825-1040 New Mumbai, India New Jersey, USA +1 609-688-0606 +91 22-66888999 1-888-564-4965 +1 703-752-9700 +1 781-202-3200 1-877-233-6149 +1 613-233-6149 1-877-600-5767 +1 415-348-2398 +49 761 15147-0
Vendor Directory
Product
Headquarters
Washington, USA
Vendor
Microsoft Microsoft BI (Sharepoint Server, SQL Server, etc.) MicroStrategy 9 Netezza Spatial
1-800-642-7676 +1 425-882-8080
E-mail Web site

www.support.microsoft.com/contactus/ emailcontact.aspx?scid=sw;en;1539&ws= corpinfo&ws=support&ws=mscom www.microsoft.com info@microstrategy.com www.microstrategy.com www.netezza.com/company/contact_ form.aspx www.netezza.com inquiries@neubrain.com www.neubrain.com/performance.html sales@nevron.com www.nevron.com sales@nevron.com www.nevron.com sales@nevron.com www.nevron.com oraclesales_us@oracle.com www.oracle.com oraclesales_us@oracle.com www.oracle.com oraclesales_us@oracle.com www.oracle.com info@panopticon.com www.panopticon.com info@panopticon.com www.panopticon.com info@panorama.com www.panorama.com support@panorama.com www.panorama.com www.pentaho.com/contact www.pentaho.com info@phocas.biz www.phocas.biz contact@prelytis.fr www.prelytis.com info@profitmetrics.com www.profitmetrics.com info@pureshare.com www.pureshare.com infous@qliktech.com www.qliktech.com
MicroStrategy Netezza (an IBM company) Neubrain Nevron Nevron Nevron Oracle Oracle Oracle Panopticon Panopticon Panorama Software Panorama Software Pentaho Phocas Prelytis ProfitMetrics PureShare QlikTech International
Virginia, USA Massachusetts, USA Maryland, USA
1-888-537-8135 +1 703-848-8600 1-877-638-3992 +1 508-382-8200
Neubrain CPM Solutions Nevron .NET Vision Nevron SSRS Vision Nevron SharePoint Vision Hyperion Enterprise Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition Plus Oracle BI Suite Standard Edition Panopticon EX Panopticon Intelligence Suite Panorama NovaView Panorama NovaView Pentaho BI Suite Phocas 5 LiveDashBoard Dashboard Solutions PureShare ActiveMetrics QlikView
+1 301-296-4477 Delaware, USA Delaware, USA Delaware, USA California, USA California, USA California, USA New York, USA +1 646-912-8444 New York, USA +1 646-912-8444 Ontario, Canada Ontario, Canada Florida, USA Oxford, UK +44 1865 481 420 Paris, France +33 1 44 10 41 80 Texas, USA +1 713-667-5570 Ontario, Canada Pennsylvania, USA 1-877-467-9377 +1 613-236-1644 1-888-828-9768 1-877-709-5858 +1 416-545-0990 1-877-709-5858 +1 416-545-0990 1-866-660-7555 +1 407-812-6736 1-888-201-6088 1-888-201-6088 1-888-201-6088 1-800-392-2999 +1 650-506-7000 1-800-392-2999 +1 650-506-7000 1-800-392-2999 +1 650-506-7000
Vendor Directory
Product
Headquarters
Helsinki, Finland
Vendor
QPR Software Quadbase Systems QPR ScoreCard ExpressChart, ExpressDashboard, ExpressReport Ramco DecisionWorks Xpert-Series POSmart, BlueSky Analytics, BlueSky Forecasting Revolution R Enterprise SAP BusinessObjects Edge Business Intelligence SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise
+358 290 001 150
E-mail Web site

customercare@qpr.com www.qpr.com sales@quadbase.com www.quadbase.com info@rsc.ramco.com www.ramco.com info@raymark.com www.raymark.com www.relationalsolutions.com http://info.revolutionanalytics.com/ contact-us-form.html www.revolutionanalytics.com www.sap.com/usa/contactsap/index .epx?pmelayer=true&kNtBzmUK9zU=1 www.sap.com/solutions/ sapbusinessobjects www.sap.com/usa/contactsap/index .epx?pmelayer=true&kNtBzmUK9zU=1 www.sap.com/solutions/ sapbusinessobjects www.sap.com/usa/contactsap/index .epx?pmelayer=true&kNtBzmUK9zU=1 www.sap.com/solutions/ sapbusinessobjects www.sas.com/apps/forms/index .jsp?id=gendetail www.sas.com www.sas.com/apps/forms/index .jsp?id=gendetail www.sas.com info@eng.it www.spagoworld.org www.spatialkey.com/contactcf/general.cfm www.spatialkey.com stottler@stottlerhenke.com www.stottlerhenke.com sales@strategycompanion.com www.strategycompanion.com info@swiftreporting.com www.swiftreporting.com
California, USA +1 408-982-0835 New Jersey, USA Quebec, Canada Ohio, USA +1 440-899-3296 California, USA 1-855-438-7386 +1 650-646-9545 1-800-872-1727 +1 610-661-1000 1-800-472-6261 +1 609-620-4800 1-800-346-7296 +1 514-737-0941
Ramco Systems Raymark Relational Solutions
Revolution Analytics
SAP
Pennsylvania, USA
SAP
Pennsylvania, USA
1-800-872-1727 +1 610-661-1000
SAP
Pennsylvania, SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise Information USA Management Solutions SAS Enterprise BI Server SAS Enterprise BI North Carolina, USA North Carolina, USA Padua, Italy
1-800-872-1727 +1 610-661-1000
SAS Institute
1-800-727-0025 +1 919-677-8000 1-800-727-0025 +1 919-677-8000
SAS Institute
SpagoWorld SpatialKey Stottler Henke Associates Strategy Companion Swift Reporting
SpagoBI SpatialKey DataMontage Analyzer Swift Reporting Enterprise Edition
+39 049 8283411 Massachusetts, USA California, USA +1 650-931-2700 California, USA Ontario, Canada 1-800-905-6792 +1 714-460-8398 1-877-794-3877 +1 416-479-028 1-866-429-2481
Vendor Directory
Product
Headquarters
Geneva, Switzerland North Carolina, USA Washington, USA Hjrring, Denmark Sofia, Bulgaria California, USA So Paulo, Brazil
Vendor
Swiss Information Group Syncfusion Tableau Software TARGIT Telerik TIBCO Software Inc TOTVS S/A Vecta Visibility Visual Mining Swing Dashboard Essential Studio Enterprise Edition Tableau Server TARGIT BI Suite Telerik Reporting TIBCO Spotfire Analytics platform Business Intelligence Vecta Sales Intelligence Visibility Reporting and Analytics NetCharts Performance Dashboards VisualCalc Analysis Software suXess XLCubed Excel Edition XLCubed Web Edition MicroCharts for Excel Report Portal Yellowfin Zap Business Intelligence
+41 22 979 35 45 1-888-936-8638 +1 919-481-1974 +1 206-633-3400 +45 96 23 19 00 1-888-365-2779 +359 2-8099850 1-800-420-8450 +1 650-846-1000 +55 11 3981-7126
E-mail Web site

info@swissinfogroup.com www.swissinfogroup.com info@syncfusion.com www.syncfusion.com info@tableausoftware.com www.tableausoftware.com info@targit.com www.targit.com sales@telerik.com www.telerik.com mds@tibco.com www.tibco.com www.totvs.com jayneh@vecta.net www.vecta.net sales@visibility.com www.visibility.com sales@visualmining.com www.visualmining.com www.visualcalc.com/contactme.htm www.visualcalc.com www.worldbi.biz/contact.asp www.worldbi.biz xlsales@xlcubed.com www.xlcubed.com xlsales@xlcubed.com www.xlcubed.com xlsales@xlcubed.com www.xlcubed.com info@reportportal.com www.reportportal.com www.yellowfin.com.au www.zaptechnology.com/contact /contact.asp www.zaptechnology.com http://info.activestrategy.com/contact -activestrategy.html www.activestrategy.com
Sheffield, UK +44 114 262 2032 Massachusetts, USA Maryland, USA +1 978-269-6500 1-800-308-0731 +1 301-795-2200
VisualCalc WorldBI XLCubed XLCubed XLCubed XMLA Consulting Yellowfin Zap Technology
California, USA +1 916-939-2020 Istanbul, Turkey +90 212 285 4785 Maidenhead, UK +44 1628 763 222 Maidenhead, UK +44 1628 763 222 Maidenhead, UK +44 1628 763 222 Florida, USA Melbourne, Australia Brisbane, Australia 1-800-860-0112 +1 813-866-3483 1-877-643-0227 +61 3 9090 0455 +61 7 3211 8450
Business Performance Management

ActiveStrategy ActiveStrategy Enterprise California, USA +1 484-690-0700
Vendor Directory
Product
Headquarters
California, USA California, USA California, USA
Vendor
Actuate Actuate Adaptive Planning ASG Software Solutions Bitam Board International Centrifuge Clarity Systems (an IBM company) Corporater BIRT Performance Management BIRT Product Suite Adaptive Planning
1-800-914-2259 +1 650-645-3000 1-800-914-2259 +1 650-645-3000 1-800-303-6346 +1 650-528-7500 1-800-932-5536 +1 239-435-2200 1-888-820-7776
E-mail Web site

info@actuate.com www.actuate.com info@actuate.com www.actuate.com info@adaptiveplanning.com www.adaptiveplanning.com info@asg.com www.asg.com sales@bitam.com www.bitam.com info@board.com www.board.com info@centrifugesystems.com www.centrifugesystems.com info@claritysystems.com www.claritysystems.com www.corporater.com/en/company /inquiry.html www.corporater.com info@covalentsoftware.com www.covalentsoftware.com info@dspanel.com www.dspanel.com sales@elegantjbi.com www.elegantjbi.com epicweb@epicor.com www.epicor.com www.exie.com/Exie.com/Contact_Exie.html www.exie.com info@hardmetrics.com www.hardmetrics.com info@hostanalytics.com www.hostanalytics.com www.ibm.com www.ibm.com sales@infor.com www.infor.com askinfo@ibi.com www.informationbuilders.com
Performance Florida, USA Management Solutions Artus Board Management Intelligence Toolkit Performance Management Clarity 7 Corporater EPM Suite Virginia, USA Massachusetts, USA Virginia, USA
+1 781-290-4800 +1 571-830-1300
Ontario, Canada +1 416-250-5500 Massachusetts, USA Somerset, UK +44 1823 32 32 39 Stockholm, Sweden Gujarat, India +91 79-66527011 1-800-999-6995 +1 949-585-4000 +46 8 669 03 40 1-800-670-8942
Covalent DSPanel ElegantJ BI Epicor
Covalent Performance Management Suite Performance Canvas Planning Business Intelligence Suite
California, USA Epicor Enterprise Performance Management Solutions Performance Management Suites On-Demand Analytics Oslo, Norway
Exie HardMetrics Host Analytics IBM IBM Infor Information Builders
+47 23 00 96 90 +1 215-297-9738
Performance Management Suite IBM Cognos 10 Planning IBM Cognos TM1 Infor PM 10 Performance Management Framework
California, USA New York, USA New York, USA Georgia, USA New York, USA
1-866-391-4678 +1 650-249-7100 1-800-426-4968 +1 914-499-1900 1-800-426-4968 +1 914-499-1900 1-800-260-2640 +1 678-319-8000 +1 212-736-4433
Vendor Directory
Product
Headquarters
California, USA
Vendor
KCI Computing Klipfolio Lawson Control Klipfolio Dashboard Lawson S3 Enterprise Performance Management Longview 7 MicroStrategy 9 Neubrain CPM Solutions
+1 310-921-6222
E-mail Web site

info@kcicorp.com www.kcicorp.com info@klipfolio.com www.klipfolio.com www.lawson.com/wcw.nsf/pub/ contactus www.lawson.com www.longview.com/company/contact-us www.longview.com info@microstrategy.com www.microstrategy.com inquiries@neubrain.com www.neubrain.com/performance.html www.nimsoft.com/company/contact .php#01 www.nimsoft.com oraclesales_us@oracle.com www.oracle.com pst@managepro.com www.managepro.com prodacapo@prodacapo.com www.prodacapo.com slawson@prophix.com www.prophix.com info@pureshare.com www.pureshare.com www.qpr.com/contact-forms/contact -sales.htm www.qpr.com www.iexecutivedashboard.com/contact/ contact_form.asp www.iexecutivedashboard.com info@riverlogic.com www.riverlogic.com www.rocketsoftware.com/about/contact www.rocketsoftware.com www.sap.com/usa/index .epx?kNtBzmUK9zU=1 www.sap.com/solutions/ sapbusinessobjects
Ontario, Canada US
1-877-233-6149 +1 613-233-6149 1-800-477-1357
Longview Solutions MicroStrategy Neubrain Nimsoft
Ontario, Canada +1 905-940-1510 Virginia, USA Maryland, USA +1 301-296-4477 1-877-752-6468 +1 408-796-3400 1-800-392-2999 +1 650-506-7000 1-877-487-3001 1-888-537-8135 +1 703-848-8600
Service Delivery Portal, California, USA SLA Reports, Unified Reporter Hyperion Enterprise ManagePro Corporate Performance Management Suite Performance Management Software PureShare ActiveMetrics QPR ScoreCard, QPR FactView Executive Dashboard California, USA California, USA Danderyd, Sweden Ontario, Canada
Oracle Performance Solution Technologies Prodacapo
+46 8 622 25 00 1-800-387-5915 +1 905-279-8711 1-877-467-9377 +1 613-236-1644 +358 290 001 150
Prophix
PureShare QPR Software
Ontario, Canada Helsinki, Finland
Qualitech Solutions
North Carolina, USA Texas, USA Massachusetts, USA Pennsylvania, USA
+1 704-944-6040 1-866-326-0171 +1 214-393-4650 +1 617-614-4321 1-800-872-1727 +1 610-661-1000
River Logic Rocket Software SAP
Enterprise Optimizer CorVu SAP BusinessObjects Financial Consolidation
Vendor Directory
Product
Headquarters
Pennsylvania, USA
Vendor
SAP SAP BusinessObjects Financial Information Management SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation SAP BusinessObjects Profitability and Cost Management SAP BusinessObjects Spend Performance Management SAP BusinessObjects Strategy Management
1-800-872-1727 +1 610-661-1000
E-mail Web site

www.sap.com/usa/index .epx?kNtBzmUK9zU=1 www.sap.com/solutions/ sapbusinessobjects www.sap.com/usa/index .epx?kNtBzmUK9zU=1 www.sap.com/solutions/ sapbusinessobjects www.sap.com/usa/index .epx?kNtBzmUK9zU=1 www.sap.com/solutions/ sapbusinessobjects www.sap.com/usa/index .epx?kNtBzmUK9zU=1 www.sap.com/solutions/ sapbusinessobjects www.sap.com/usa/index .epx?kNtBzmUK9zU=1 www.sap.com/solutions/ sapbusinessobjects www.sap.com/usa/index .epx?kNtBzmUK9zU=1 www.sap.com/solutions/ sapbusinessobjects www.sap.com/usa/index .epx?kNtBzmUK9zU=1 www.sap.com/solutions/ sapbusinessobjects www.sas.com/apps/forms/index .jsp?id=gendetail www.sas.com info@silvon.com www.silvon.com info@swiftreporting.com www.swiftreporting.com info@tagetik.com www.tagetik.com info@whitestein.com www.whitestein.com office@winterheller.com www.winterheller.com info@aginity.com www.aginity.com
SAP
Pennsylvania, USA
1-800-872-1727 +1 610-661-1000
SAP
Pennsylvania, USA
1-800-872-1727 +1 610-661-1000
SAP
Pennsylvania, USA
1-800-872-1727 +1 610-661-1000
SAP
Pennsylvania, USA
1-800-872-1727 +1 610-661-1000
SAP
SAP BusinessObjects Supply Chain Performance Management SAP BusinessObjects XBRL Publishing
Pennsylvania, USA
1-800-872-1727 +1 610-661-1000
SAP
Pennsylvania, USA
1-800-872-1727 +1 610-661-1000
SAS
SAS for Performance Management Stratum Swift Reporting Data Analysis Tagetik 3.0
North Carolina, USA Illinois, USA Ontario, Canada Lucca, Italy
1-800-727-0025 +1 919-677-8000 1-800-874-5866 +1 630-655-3313 1-877-794-3877 +1 416-479-0289 +39 0583 96811
Silvon Software Swift Reporting Tagetik Corporate Whitestein Technologies Winterheller Software
Living Systems Process Cham, Suite Switzerland Winterheller Enterprise ETL Solutions Graz, Austria
+41 44-256-5000 +43 316 8010-0
Data Management
Aginity Illinois, USA 1-888-821-1201
Vendor Directory
Product
Headquarters
Virginia, USA
Vendor
Clarabridge Composite Software DataFlux (a SAS company) DataMentors Datanomic Dataupia FICO Infobright Informatica Clarabrige Composite Information Server Data Management Studio DataFuse Director Version 8 Dataupia Satori Server FICO Xpress 7 Infobright Enterprise Edition Informatica PowerCenter Data Integration Tools Microsoft PowerPivot
+1 571-299-1800
E-mail Web site

www.clarabridge.com/contactus.aspx www.clarabridge.com info@compositesw.com www.compositesw.com www.dataflux.com/contact/contact-us.aspx www.dataflux.com lbedgood@datamentors.com www.datamentors.com www.datanomic.com/contact www.datanomic.com info@dataupia.com www.dataupia.com www.fico.com/en/pages/contact.aspx www.fico.com info@infobright.com www.infobright.com http://vip.informatica.com /?elqpurlpage=483 www.informatica.com sales@iolap.com www.iolap.com www.support.microsoft.com/contactus/ emailcontact.aspx?scid=sw;en;1539&ws=c orpinfo&ws=support&ws=mscom www.microsoft.com info@pervasivedataintegration.com www.pervasiveintegration.com info@syncsort.com www.syncsort.com info@talend.com www.talend.com info@1010data.com www.1010data.com info@aginity.com www.aginity.com www.algebraixdata.com/about-us/ contact-us www.algebraixdata.com www.asterdata.com/contact_us/index.php www.asterdata.com
California, USA +1 650-227-8200 North Carolina, USA Florida, USA +1 813-960-7800 Cambridge, UK +44 1223 228 450 Massachusetts, USA Minnesota, USA +1 612-758 5200 Ontario, Canada California, USA
1-877-596-2483 x225 +1 416-596-2483 x225
1-877-846-3589 +1 919-447-3000
1-866-748-3282 +1 617-301-8400
1-800-653-3871 +1 650-385-5000
iOLAP Microsoft
Texas, USA +1 214-618-5000 Washington, USA 1-800-642-7676 +1 425-882-8080
Pervasive Software Syncsort Talend
Pervasive Data Integrator QPR ScoreCard, QPR FactView Talend Data Management 1010data Data Factory Algebraix Data A2DB
Texas, USA New Jersey, USA
1-888-926-5969 +1 512-231-6000 +1 201-930-9700
California, USA +1 650-396-7738 New York, USA +1 212-405-1010 Illinois, USA Texas, USA +1 512-651-5834 1-888-821-1201
Data Warehousing
1010data Aginity Algebraix Data
Aster Data
Aster Data nCluster
California, USA
1-888-278-3732 +1 650-232-4400
Vendor Directory
Product
Headquarters
Vendor
BI-Cycle Plant Information Data Georgia, USA Mart BIReady Greenplum Database Greenplum Database Single-Node Edition IBM DB2 Universal Database Data Warehouse Edition Informix Dynamic Server for Data Warehouse Illuminate Kalido Dynamic Information Warehouse WX2 eXtremeDB Netezza Skimmer
E-mail Web site

www.bi-cycle.com/maintenance_ consultant/index.htm www.bi-cycle.com info@biready.com www.biready.com www.greenplum.com/about-us/contact-us www.greenplum.com www.greenplum.com/about-us/contact-us www.greenplum.com www.ibm.com
BIReady EMC Greenplum EMC Greenplum IBM
Langbroekerdijk, 1-888-868-5663 The Netherlands +31 343 563851 California, USA +1 650-286-8012 California, USA +1 650-286-8012 New York, USA 1-800-426-4968 +1 914-499-1900 1-800-426-4968 +1 914-499-1900
IBM
New York, USA
www.ibm.com contactus@illuminateinc.com www.illuminateinc.com http://info.kalido.com/contactus.html www.kalido.com info@kognitio.com www.kognitio.com info@mcobject.com www.mcobject.com www.netezza.com/company/contact_ form.aspx www.netezza.com www.netezza.com/company/contact_ form.aspx www.netezza.com www.netezza.com/company/contact_ form.aspx www.netezza.com info@panoratio.com www.panoratio.com info@paraccel.com www.paraccel.com http://response.sybase.com/forms/sybase contactme?mc=financialservices100305c www.sybase.com www.teradata.com/t/contact-us www.teradata.com
Illuminate Kalido
Barcelona, Spain +34 934 573 401 Massachusetts, USA Bracknell, UK +44 1344 300770 Washington, USA Massachusetts, USA Massachusetts, USA Massachusetts, USA California, USA +1 408-504-5016 California, USA California, USA 1-866-903-0335 1-800-792-2735 +1 925-236-5000 1-866-548-8348 +1 937-242-4030 +1 781-202-3200
Kognitio McObject Netezza (an IBM company) Netezza (an IBM company) Netezza (an IBM company) Panoratio ParAccel Sybase
+1 425-888-8505 1-877-638-3992 +1 508-382-8200 1-877-638-3992 +1 508-382-8200 1-877-638-3992 +1 508-382-8200
Netezza TwinFin
Netezza Spatial
PANOsight ParAccel Analytic Database Sybase IQ
Teradata
Teradata Active Enterprise Data Warehouse
Ohio, USA
Vendor Directory
Product
Headquarters
Ohio, USA Ohio, USA Ohio, USA
Vendor
Teradata Teradata Teradata Teradata Teradata Teradata Data Mart Appliance Teradata Data Warehouse Appliance Teradata Database
1-866-548-8348 +1 937-242-4030 1-866-548-8348 +1 937-242-4030 1-866-548-8348 +1 937-242-4030 1-866-548-8348 +1 937-242-4030 1-866-548-8348 +1 937-242-4030 1-866-548-8348 +1 937-242-4030 +1 978-600-1000 +1 847-871-0379
E-mail Web site

www.teradata.com/t/contact-us www.teradata.com www.teradata.com/t/contact-us www.teradata.com www.teradata.com/t/contact-us www.teradata.com www.teradata.com/t/contact-us www.teradata.com www.teradata.com/t/contact-us www.teradata.com www.teradata.com/t/contact-us www.teradata.com info@vertica.com www.vertica.com www.xtremedata.com/contact www.xtremedata.com info@brightpointinc.com www.brightpointinc.com info@claraview.com www.claraview.com www.consilium.nl/contact/tabid/64/ default.aspx www.consilium.nl
Teradata Extreme Data Ohio, USA Appliance Teradata Extreme Performance Appliance Ohio, USA
Teradata Vertica XtremeData
Teradata Purpose-Built Ohio, USA Platform Pricing Vertica Analytic Database dbX Massachusetts, USA Illinois, USA
Outsourcing
BrightPoint Consulting Dashboard, Data Visualization, Flex Architecture ClaraView Consilium BI Solution Services BI Consulting Services California, USA +1 760-634-7657 Virginia, USA +1 703-269-1500 Rotterdam, The Netherlands 1-888-548-1973 +1 972-608-1803 +1 303-444-2411 Kerberos RMSource Support Analytics The BMA Group BI Consulting Frontend ProSourcing Consulting Services Mendoza, Argentina North Carolina, USA Maryland, USA +1 804-201-8256 Chatswood, Australia California, USA +1 484-690-0700 +61 2 9884 8499 +54 261 434-0205 1-877-319-3051
eVerge Group Intelligent Solutions
Oracle BI Deployments Texas, USA Colorado, USA
sales@evergegroup.com www.evergegroup.com moreinfo@intelsols.com www.intelsols.com info@kerberosconsultores.com www.kerberosconsultores.com learnmoreaboutus@rmsource.com www.rmsource.com info@supportanalytics.com www.supportanalytics.com info@bma.com.au www.bma.com.au http://info.activestrategy.com/contact -activestrategy.html www.activestrategy.com
Software as a Service
ActiveStrategy ActiveStrategy Enterprise OnDemand
Vendor Directory
Product
Headquarters
California, USA California, USA Illinois, USA Pennsylvania, USA Pennsylvania, USA California, USA Virginia, USA California, USA
Vendor
Actuate Adaptive Planning Aginity Altosoft Binocle Birst Bitam Cloud9 Cloudscale Cloudscale Direction Software EMC Greenplum GoodData IDV Solutions Infocentricity iPartners iTradeNetwork BIRT OnPerformance Adaptive Planning (On-Demand) Data Factory Insight On-Demand Binocle Birst KPI Online Cloud9 Analytics Cloudscale Enterprise Cloudcel Go Live Greenplum Chorus GoodData Visual Fusion SaaS Xeno Balanced Scorecard Supply Chain Management and Intelligence Palo Suite SaaS EPM Maestro Suite WX2 (DaaS) LityxIQ Intelligent Analytics Suite Bracknell, UK Freiburg, Germany
1-800-914-2259 +1 650-645-3000 1-800-303-6346 +1 650-528-7500 1-888-821-1201
E-mail Web site

info@actuate.com www.actuate.com info@adaptiveplanning.com www.adaptiveplanning.com info@aginity.com www.aginity.com info@altosoft.com www.altosoft.com www.binoclebi.com/index.php?p=22 www.binoclebi.com info@birst.com www.birst.com sales@kpionline.com http://kpionline.bitam.com info@cloud9analytics.com www.cloud9analytics.com www.cloudscale.com/index.php/contact www.cloudscale.com www.cloudscale.com/index.php/contact www.cloudscale.com grow@directionsoftware.com www.directionsoftware.com www.greenplum.com/about-us/contact-us www.greenplum.com info@gooddata.com www.gooddata.com www.idvsolutions.com/contactus www.idvsolutions.com support@infocentricity.com www.infocentricity.com www.ipartners.net/info_request.asp www.ipartners.net www.itradenetwork.com/html/contactus.htm www.itradenetwork.com info@jedox.com www.jedox.com www.k2analytics.com/contactus.html www.k2analytics.com
+1 484-427 2801 +1 484-887-1630 1-866-940-1496 +1 415-644-5400 1-888-820-7776
+1 650-561-7855 California, USA +1 650-206-2240 California, USA +1 650-206-2240 Illinois, USA +1 312-924-3755 California, USA +1 650-286-8012 California, USA +1 415 200-0186 Michigan, USA California, USA +1 415-493-2090 Georgia, USA 1-888-618-8360 +1 678-710-0600 +1 925-660-1100 1-888-201-7282 +1 517-853-3755
Jedox K2 Analytics Kognitio Lityx
+49 761 15147-0
+44 1344 300770 Pennsylvania, USA 1-888-548-9947
info@kognitio.com www.kognitio.com info@lityx.com www.lityxiq.com
Vendor Directory
Product
Headquarters
Rotterdam, The Netherlands California, USA Massachusetts, USA Virginia, USA California, USA North Carolina, USA Germany
Vendor
Metricus NetSuite Oco OnDemandIQ PivotLink QMD Accountworks SAP Metricus Enterprise SaaS SuiteAnalytics Oco On-Demand Business Intelligence OnDemandIQ PivotLink Insight SAP BusinessObjects BI OnDemand SuccessFactors Business Execution Software Suite Bime
+31 10 71 10260 1-800-638-7847 +1 650-627-1000 1-800-691-8880 +1 781-810-2100 1-866-396-7712 1-866-625-9884
E-mail Web site

info@metricus.com www.metricus.com info@netsuite.com www.netsuite.com sales-info@oco-inc.com www.oco-inc.com info@ondemandiq.com www.ondemandiq.com info@pivotlink.com www.pivotlink.com sales@qmduser.com www.qmduser.com www.ondemand.com/contact www.ondemand.com/ businessintelligence www.successfactors.com/company/contact www.successfactors.com contact@wearecloud.com http://businessintelligence.me support@radian6.com www.radian6.com support@radian6.com www.radian6.com info@sentimentmetrics.com www.sentimentmetrics.com contact@sysomos.com www.sysomos.com contact@sysomos.com www.sysomos.com contact@sysomos.com www.sysomos.com
+1 828-877-2775 1-888-342-5727 +49 6227 7-47474 1-800-809-9920
SuccessFactors
California, USA
We Are Cloud
Montpellier, France New Brunswick, Canada New Brunswick, Canada Farnborough, UK
+33 4 67 41 60 64 1-888-672-3426 +1 506-452-9039 1-888-672-3426 +1 506-452-9039 +44 845 658 9945
Social Media Analytics

Radian6 Radian6 Sentiment Metrics Sysomos Sysomos Sysomos Radian6 Dashboards Radian6 Engagement Console Sentiment Metrics Sysomos MAP Heartbeat Audience
Ontario, Canada Ontario, Canada Ontario, Canada
1-866-483-3338 1-866-483-3338 1-866-483-3338
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. TECs 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 Floor Montreal, Quebec Canada, H3C 1L5
Phone: +1 514-954-3665, ext. 254 Toll-free: 1-800-496-1303 Fax: +1 514-954-9739 E-mail: buyersguide@technologyevaluation.com Web site: www.technologyevaluation.com
The information included herein reflects the latest research conducted by TECs 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. BIWEB150211

2011 Business Intelligence Buyer S Guide Bi For Everyone

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2011 Business Intelligence Buyer S Guide Bi For Everyone

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Technology Evaluation Centers

2011 Business Intelligence Buyers Guide:

Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide

IT FOR MANUFACTURING EXECUTIVES

Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide

SAP Customer Success Story

SAP Customer Success Story

Aquent Uses SAP BusinessObjects Software Tools to Deliver Talent

QlikView Customer Success Story

Campbell Soup Sales and Operations Planning Transformation

IBM Customer Success Story

MicroStrategy Customer Success Story

SaaS BI Tools: Better Decision Making for the Rest of Us

SAP Special Report

TEC Special Report

The Role of Business Intelligence in Content Strategies

Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide

Large, Medium, or Small?

SaaS BI: The New Alternative

Is BI Really for Everyone?

The State of the Market

Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide

Figure 1. BI software selection projects (2005 to 2010)*

Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide

The BI Life Cycle: Classical versus Modern BI Tasks

Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide

Data Integration Process

Data Warehouse/Data Mart Component

Analysis and Data Visualization Process

Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide

Figure 5. Modern BI life cycle process

The Information Dilemma

Figure 6. Interest in data warehouse functionalities and tools

Data Warehouse Appliances Netezza Dataupia Aster Data Teradata

Analytical Databases Kognitio Vertica Illuminate Infobright

In-memory Databases QlikTech Microsoft (PowerPivot)

Table 2. Vendors offering data warehouse solutions

BI Gets Real ( Time): An Operational BI Briefing

Transforming Data into Information

Business Performance Management: BI with a Strategy

Figure 7. Interest in business performance management versus some core BI functionalities

Trends and Challenges in the BI Space

BI and Social Media: The Structure of Unstructured Analysis

BI and Social Media Analytics: The Best of Both Worlds

Public BI: BI in the Public Sector

Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide

Figure 8. Public sector interest in BI applications

The Big BI: BI for Large Enterprises

BI for Large Enterprises: Functionality Matrix

Information Delivery Data Analysis Data Management

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

Information Delivery Data Analysis Data Management

TIBCO Software Inc

BI software gadgets (e.g., Oracle BI beans) With additional product

TIBCO Software Inc

BI for SMBs: Functionality Matrix

Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide

Cognos Express Style Intelligence

North America Europe

Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide

North America North America Europe Europe Middle East

Business Intelligence: A Buyers Guide