Software vendor Apprenda started by helping organizations solve an important issue: moving on-premise applications to the cloud and converting them into software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications. With its product SaaSGrid, Apprenda can help organizations do this with less technical effort, by applying a middleware technology that enables them to avoid significant complications.

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As I’m writing this post, more software vendors are launching their mobile business intelligence (BI) solutions. So I’ve decided to hurry up and start talking about the vendors that are shaping the mobile BI space.

In this installment of BI Hits the Road (see Part 1 and Part 2) I will describe some of the features of two specific mobile BI solutions offered by a couple of vendors: Roambi from MeLLmo and Visual KPI from Transpara. Read the rest of this entry »

Have you ever wondered how credit card companies are capable of detecting purchases that a particular card holder did not make? Do these companies make use of advanced analytics to detect fraudulent purchasing behaviors or do they simply detect these actions by pure luck? A recent incident with my credit card prompted me to investigate further. Here’s what happened. Read the rest of this entry »

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Many business applications are going mobile. And BI is no exception. Many BI software vendors are launching new versions that support mobile features, while others are launching special BI applications specifically for mobile devices. Read the rest of this entry »

From March 21 to 24, 2011, Technology Evaluation Centers (TEC) will be at info360 in Washington, D.C. I will be teaming up with a panel of experts to discuss business intelligence (BI) and its role in analyzing unstructured data. Join us on March 23 for the TEC session—What Do I Get Out of BI?: The Role of Business Intelligence in Your Content Strategy.

You can register at the info360 Web site. For those of you who can’t be there in person, you can still participate by leaving a comment here: Do you have any specific questions for our experts?

I have the honor of presenting our session panelists: Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a long time (in this business, anyway) since the very first business intelligence (BI) solutions turned up, enabling big organizations to perform data analysis, generating reports with primitive dashboards for company execs. Since then, the BI space has become agile, operational, self-service, social, and even reactive.

When I started to prepare a BI buyer guide, I had to reconsider why any individual or organization would want to acquire, change, or upgrade a BI solution.

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On March 23, I have the opportunity to lead a seminar at the info360 conference in Washington, D.C., on the use of business intelligence (BI) applications and technologies to analyze unstructured data. In preparing for this seminar, I came across an article written by Bill Gates back in 1996 entitled “Content is King.” And although the theme of that article is different from the approach of this post, both highlight the importance of various types of content for organizations. Read the rest of this entry »

In my previous blog post BI Hits the Road, I briefly discussed the new adoption of mobile business intelligence (BI) offerings and featured some important vendors in this space. Here I’ll continue the discussion into mobile BI space expansion, and cover of some of the features, considerations, and challenges in the utilization of mobile BI solutions. Read the rest of this entry »

It takes a lot of commitment, preparation, and time to fully embrace a successful enterprise data strategy. Managing data within a corporation has reached an all-new level of importance. Data is being collected from extremely diverse sources and fully dissected; as the subject of increasingly complex processes, data quality must be maintained. In addition, data management and manipulation must comply with several types of regulations. Read the rest of this entry »

On January 11, 2011, Jaspersoft launched a new version of its business intelligence (BI) suite named Jaspersoft 4, and just a couple of weeks later, on January 25, the open source BI provider launched a new set of software tools that provides support for a wider variety of data sources in the “Big Data” space. This is a clear sign that BI applications will come to address a wider number of data sources and expand the reach as well as the size of the information that BI systems can handle. Read the rest of this entry »

On January 11, 2011, Jaspersoft launched a new version of its BI suite named Jaspersoft 4. The open source software provider will be promoting its new business intelligence (BI) suite designed to provide users with self-service BI features via its Web Application user interface (UI). Built on open Web standards, Jaspersoft 4 is a complete Web application, and it’s ready to be deployed on premise as well as under Software-as- a-Service (SaaS) environments. Read the rest of this entry »

Although information analysis continues to be vital for insights into a company’s health and future, the traditional data warehouse structure may already be past its best-before date, due to major and radical transformations in the market.

It may just be a matter of “Evolve or Die”. . . Read the rest of this entry »

A note last week from Bradenton.com announced the availability of SAP High-Performance Analytic Appliance (HANA), as well as it’s the release of SAP BusinessObjects Strategic Workforce Planning Application as the first application to take advantage of SAP HANA. Read the rest of this entry »

Last Friday, Yellowfin launched version 5.1 of its BI product, reinforcing core product functionality (e.g., improving metadata management) as well as expanding functionality related to new technology trends such as social media and mobile technologies. With this release, the Australian company intends to reinforce its position in the BI market and provide its customers with improved BI features.

In a press release, Yellowfin’s CEO Glen Rabie mentioned that

Yellowfin 5.1 provides a crucial bridge between insight and action. It assists all end-users, including the executive team, to make the best possible use of the information gleaned from data analysis by providing a platform to discuss potential actions to be taken in response to that data analysis …

Looks like signals are clear for BI software vendors as to which technology trends will be important to address and cover during the coming year: mobile BI technologies will be emerging, and social media functionality for BI purposes will continue to be a strong tendency. Will Yellowfin’s next step be to head to the cloud?

I welcome your thoughts—leave a comment below, and I’ll respond as soon as I can.

Recently, Google launched a beta version of Cloud connect for Microsoft Office. The service will provide synchronization between Google Docs and Microsoft Office documents. What this means is that users will be able to sync documents automatically from Office to Google Docs, and access the doc from anywhere by clicking a URL. Read the rest of this entry »