The first part of this report takes a close look at the expansion of PROS, Inc., a leading provider of prescriptive pricing and revenue management software, first into the business-to-business (B2B) arena, and then into big data apps for sales and marketing. In this second part, we (TEC) speak to Andres Reiner, president, chief executive officer (CEO), and director of PROS, about some of the issues we discussed in the first part and about PROS’ current state of affairs. Read the rest of this entry »

Demand Management Inc. has been very busy as of late, with a recent flurry of new products and features. In a series of press releases, Demand Management has recently announced the availability of the Demand Solutions platform as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering; configurable workflows that provide alerts for exceptions and escalations; a new predictive lead time capability; and new industry-specific business intelligence capabilities. With more press releases in the past five weeks than in all of 2012, TEC decided we should check in with Demand Management’s president, Bill Harrison, to find out what this is all about. Read the rest of this entry »

We are pleased to announce that IBM Cognos BI, one of the leaders in the business intelligence (BI) space, is now part of TEC’s certified BI applications family of products, and is available for evaluation online in TEC’s Business Intelligence and Data Management Evaluation Center. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this month, TIBCO announced the launch of its new Integration Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) called TIBCO Cloud Bus. The new subscription-based integration platform will enable users to undergo extensive and complex integration projects, and migrate applications and workload to the cloud, at, as TIBCO states, lower costs and with drastically lesser deployment times.

According to TIBCO, the Cloud Bus enables users to have the freedom to start their projects within minutes and only pay for what they consume, while at the same time having the freedom to choose and move across cloud infrastructure offered by partners that meet TIBCO’s and its customers’ needs and demands. Read the rest of this entry »

The Israeli software provider InsFocus Systems, producer of Insfocus Plus, a business intelligence (BI) solution targeted at the insurance industry, has recently released version 2.0 of its BI application, which includes several enhancements, with special emphasis on the Web. Read the rest of this entry »

Sporting a brand new stock symbol (NYSE: DATA), Tableau Software, the Seattle-based analytics and visualization software provider announced the pricing of its initial public offering of its 8.2 million Class A shares. At a public price of $31 per share, 5 million shares are being offered by Tableau Software and 3.2 million shares are being offered by other selling stockholders. Acting as lead joint book-running managers for the offering are Goldman, Sachs & Co and Morgan Stanley & CO, with other important financial organizations also involved. Read the rest of this entry »

SAP is undergoing a makeover with some structural changes to certain segments of its extensive software portfolio. Just before its annual SAPPHIRE conference, SAP re-baptized its Visual Intelligence product as SAP Lumira, its new data analytics offering. Read the rest of this entry »

The “little” SAP Business One solution is an unsung hero of sorts at SAP. Indeed, more than 38,000 customers worldwide in nearly 30 languages and over 630 partners are often ignored as less newsworthy by market observers. The business management solution for small businesses (with 10–20 users, on average) can be deployed on premises or in the cloud, and is accessible via mobile devices.

During the SAPPHIRENOW 2013 conference, SAP announced the general availability of the 9.0 version of the SAP Business One running on Microsoft SQL Server (which is the product’s original database). With more than 50 new features, the latest version offers enhanced capabilities for warehouse management, infrastructure, and inventory management, as well as improved systems performance.

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What do you get when you mix the efforts of TIBCO, a provider of analytics and event-processing software, and Teradata, a provider of enterprise data warehouse and analytics solutions? You get a big data platform that can capture and simultaneously analyze historical and real-time data generated through real-time event streams. From now on, TIBCO Spotfire event analytics will be an important component of the Teradata Unified Data Architecture (UDA).

The combined technologies will provide many other interesting new features and capabilities: Read the rest of this entry »

IBM has introduced a new appliance designed to help organizations to communicate with millions of mobile devices and sensors around the world. The new offering is called IBM MessageSight and will be able to communicate with and gather information from devices varying from mobile phones and tablets to automobiles to house appliances. Read the rest of this entry »

California software giant Oracle is releasing a new version of its Hyperion Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) suite. According to Oracle, version 11.1.2.3 will incorporate important updates and enhancements to its user experience and administration features, reinforcing better integration with enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications. Read the rest of this entry »

Modern organizations know that they need more than visualization. Modern visualization should enable users to collect accurate, coherent, related and relevant data all within an effective visual frame.

VisionWaves is a software provider that has developed tools of this sort aiming to help users visualize and understand what is happening and how it relates to important business areas, thereby achieving a comprehensive view of their business. Beyond monitoring their organization from a data perspective, VisionWaves’ complete business cockpit enables users to connect the dots between data, processes, and people. Read the rest of this entry »

At the recently held Inforum 2013 conference, many ears pricked up at the announcement of Infor Sky Vault, a big data initiative that leverages Infor’s ION middleware, micro-vertical expertise, and visually appealing dashboards developed by Infor ION business intelligence (BI) experts and designed by Hook & Loop, Infor’s recently incubated Manhattan-based in-house design agency. Infor Sky Vault is planned to launch in the second half of 2013 with predefined content for sales finance, and production. Additional functional areas and industries will be added in subsequent iterations.

Read the rest of this entry »

SAS 9.4 is the new version of SAS Business Analytics platform that will be released in June. As the foundation for all SAS analytics products, the SAS Business Analytics platform has been improved to offer a set of features that accommodate requirements demanded by customers and new industry standards.

The platform is cloud enabled, and supports both private and public clouds. There are also several feature improvements in the following areas: Read the rest of this entry »