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 »

Vitria, a software provider of operational intelligence solutions recently released version 4 of its Operational Intelligence suite, which includes several enhancements of its existing capabilities but, more importantly, offers new capabilities for real-time analytics for big data, enabling the analysis of continuous flows of large amounts of data. Read the rest of this entry »

Rocket Software has just announced that its business intelligence (BI) product CorVu NG is now fully compatible with its U2 product series, UniData and UniVerse. With CorVu NG, U2 databases users will gain the additional features and functions available under Rocket’s CorVu product suite—an important enhancement for those users in need of stronger key performance indicator (KPI) tracking as well as tactical performance visualizations. Read the rest of this entry »

Unlike traditional business intelligence (BI) solutions, which aim to analyze historical data with a focus on strategic decision-making support, operational intelligence solutions are designed to bring users support in the analysis and visibility of their business operations. Operational intelligence solutions are becoming key components of an organization’s set of tools for data analysis and decision support. So what are the specific benefits and general features of these types of applications? And how can they benefit your organization?

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Measuring programming progress by lines of code is
like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.
—Bill Gates

Business metrics—the quantifiable measurements by which a company’s performance is gauged—are part of the broad area of business intelligence (BI) or business analytics (BA). Read the rest of this entry »

The 2011 holiday shopping season seems to have arrived a bit sooner for SAP, who forked out US$3.4 billion for SuccessFactors during the first weekend of December 2011 (see SAP’s official press release). Another curiosity of the acquisition is that it took place on Saturday, which hasn’t prevented bloggers and twitterers from swiftly contributing with their off-the-cuff opinions.

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Part 1 of this series introduced Saba Software, a public provider of the Saba People Cloud, which constitutes a new class of business-critical software that combines enterprise learning management, talent management, and social and real-time collaboration technologies. My post first described the vendor’s slew of industry rewards and accolades at the recent 2011 Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston and related events.

Then, the post discussed the need for the “People Cloud” that transforms people-driven enterprises and analyzed a number of social software use case scenarios. The blog post ended with a description of Saba’s current state of affairs. Part 2 analyzed the individual modules of the Saba People Cloud Applications.

This final part will analyze the underlying product architecture that enables the rich functionality of the Saba People Cloud Applications described in Part 2.

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Part 1 of this series introduced Saba Software, a public provider of what it calls “People Cloud,” which constitutes a new class of business-critical software that combines enterprise learning, talent management, and collaboration technologies. The post first described the vendor’s slew of industry rewards and accolades at the recent 2011 Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston and related events.

Then, I discussed the need for the “People Cloud” that transforms people-driven enterprises and analyzed a number of social software use case scenarios. My post ended with a description of Saba’s current state of affairs: 700 employees, 1,600 customers, and 23 million users worldwide (its solutions have been deployed in 195 countries in 30 languages). Read the rest of this entry »

The 2011 Enterprise 2.0 conference’s expo floor in Boston in late June featured many of the “usual suspects,” such as Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Adobe, SuccessFactors, Jive Software, SocialText, OpenText, Yammer, and Cisco Systems, to name only a few well-established providers (in addition to the plethora of innovative startup companies that one could encounter there). There were also some notable absentees, such as SAP (StreamWork), salesforce.com (Chatter), and Atlassian (Jira).

But my attention was drawn to one vendor that has not been discussed as much as it deserves: Saba Software.

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Part 1 of this series introduced SuccessFactors, a public provider of software as a service (SaaS) talent management solutions. The article first analyzed the vendor’s evolution from its traditional People Performance realm to the seemingly more opportune Business Execution (BizX) province.

Then the article talked about SuccessFactors’ diverse product editions (tailored to satisfy companies of all sizes) and detailed the two core modules of the SuccessFactors BizX suite of applications: Performance Management and Goal Management. These two modules serve as the foundation for the BizX application suite, since visibility into employee performance and organizational goals form the necessary basis for other talent management activities.

Part 2 then analyzed additional BizX modules (i.e., recruiting, learning & development, compensation, and succession planning), some nice-to-have capabilities, and the most recent developments, such as the 2010 tuck-in acquisitions of Inform, CubeTree, and YouCalc. 

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Part 1 of this series introduced SuccessFactors, a public provider of software as a service (SaaS) talent management solutions. My post first analyzed the vendor’s evolution from its traditional People Performance realm to the seemingly more opportune Business Execution (BizX) province.

Then, I talked about SuccessFactors’ multiple product editions to satisfy companies of all size and detailed the two core modules of the SuccessFactors BizX suite of applications: Performance Management and Goal Management. These core modules serve as the foundation for the BizX application suite, as visibility into employee performance and organizational goals are the necessary basis for other activities, such as recruiting, learning & development, compensation, and succession planning. 

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In addition to the Giants’ Major League Baseball (MLB) World Series 2010 victory, San Francisco has been even more famous for its software powerhouses, spearheaded by mighty and ever-acquisitive Oracle and the cloud computing trailblazer salesforce.com. Another company from the same metro area that has lately had admiration and accolades lavished upon it is SuccessFactors, a player in the software as a service (SaaS) talent management market.

In fact, a number of SuccessFactors employees are former Oracle and salesforce.com alumni, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see some trickles of employees going in other direction too. In any case, SuccessFactors was founded in 2001 by Lars Dalgaard, who previously held various general management positions at Unilever, a global packaged consumer and industrial goods company, in the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark. In November 2007, the company went public on the NASDAQ Global Market under the stock symbol SFSF. 

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Recently, I had the pleasure of speaking with the folks at BIS as part of TEC’s Certification process. For BIS, the value-add of TEC Certification was clear—and all they had to do was complete a detailed questionnaire/request for information (RFI) and demonstrate certain solution-specific features and functions that I outlined for them in a demo script. I sat down for the three-hour session with Kivanç Sahin, from BIS’s Sales and Marketing Department and Dilek Eksi’s, BIS’S Senior Business Analyst. The following are my thoughts about BIS and the ProStaff solution. Read the rest of this entry »

Being a human resources (HR) and customer relationship management (CRM) analyst is definitely a privilege. I get to follow the trends from these two different business areas, which (incidentally) have many things in common: employees are a company’s internal customers, recruiting is campaign management for the workforce, privacy data about customers and employees is equally sensitive, etc. Read the rest of this entry »

The current economic environment cries out for sustainable technology standards to be established at the core of information governance. The profound losses in the financial markets were the result of weak governance, failing risk management, and little regard for the consequences. The time has come to define and implement the methods needed to identify and manage risks, ensure oversight, and enforce corporate policies and procedures to exploit extensible business reporting language (XBRL). This extremely challenging economic climate is stimulating the demand to leverage the expanding taxonomy for financial reporting purposes to meet the challenges of operational risk and compliance management as part of the natural evolution of XBRL.

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