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Volume 28 Best practices in Business intelligence and data warehousing from leading solution proViders and experts

enterprise business intelligenceIN

POWERFUL CASE STUDIES AnD LESSOnS LEARnED FOCUSInG On:

Dashboards, Scorecards, and VisualizationEnterprise Business IntelligenceOpen Source Business IntelligenceSoftware-as-a-Service

FEATURES

The End of Enterprise Software: Open Source Finds an OpeningWayne Eckerson, TDWI ResearchThe “faster, better, cheaper” mantra in today’s economy has led to an explosion in open source BI tools.

PAGE 2

BI or Bust Study Highlights Best Practices for a Tough EconomyJames E. Powell

PAGE 4

Text Analytics to the RescueStephen Swoyer

PAGE 5

TDWI RESEARCH ExCERPT

Analytical Tools for Business AnalystsPAGE 25

TDWI BEST PRACTICES AWARDS 2009

PAGE 29

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president RichZbylut

director of research WayneEckerson

director, online products & marketing MelissaParrish

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editorial director DenelleHanlon

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VolumE 28

Letter from the Editorial Director

This new edition of What Works in Enterprise Business Intelligence offers a fresh, topically focused collection of customer success stories and expert perspectives. We’re proud to offer this resource to enhance your understanding of the tools, tech-nologies, and methods that are central to enterprise business intelligence today. We’ve arranged these case studies and lessons from the experts into specific categories to guide you through the articles: dashboards, scorecards, and visualization; enterprise business intelligence; open source business intelligence; and software-as-a-service.

Here’s what you will find inside:

CASE STUDIESWhat Works case studies are meant to present snapshots of the most innovative BI and DW implementations in the industry today. The case studies included in this volume demonstrate the power of enterprise business intelligence technologies and solutions for industries ranging from restaurants to the YMCA.

LESSONS FROM THE EXPERTSIncluded in this issue of What Works are articles from leading experts in the services, software, and hardware vendor communities. These lessons provide perspectives about enterprise business intelligence best practices and trends.

FEATURE ARTICLESIn “The End of Enterprise Software: Open Source Finds an Opening,” Wayne Eckerson, director of TDWI Research, details why interest in open source BI tools skyrocketed as the economy plummeted. Eckerson writes that there will be an inexorable rise in the adoption of open source technologies due to their significant cost savings over estab-lished BI vendors.

This issue of What Works also features articles from TDWI’s bimonthly e-newsletter, BI This Week. In “BI or Bust Study Highlights Best Practices for a Tough Economy,” James E. Powell details Aberdeen Group’s latest survey, and “Text Analytics to the Rescue” by Stephen Swoyer offers a rundown of the 2009 edition of “Text Analytics: User Perspectives on Solutions and Providers.”

TDWI RESEARCH There’s more from TDWI Research. What Works includes an excerpt from TDWI’s recent Best Practices Report, Beyond Reporting: Delivering Insights with Next-Generation Analytics, by Wayne Eckerson.

BEST PRACTICES AWARDS 2009This section features summaries of the winning solutions of TDWI’s annual contest, which recognizes organizations for developing and implementing world-class business intelligence and data warehousing solutions.

We hope you enjoy this collection of case studies, best practices, and expert insight focused on enterprise business intelligence. We look forward to your comments. If there is anything we can do to make this publication more valuable to you, please let us know. And please join me in thanking the companies that have shared their stories and successes, their technology insights, and the lessons they have learned.

Denelle Hanlon Editorial Director, What Works in Enterprise Business IntelligenceTDWI [email protected]

enterprise business intelligenceIN

http://www.tdwi.org

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http://www.magreprints.com/QuickQuote.asp

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WHAT WORKS in enterprise business intelligence Volume 28 1

CASE STUDIES AnD LESSOnS FROm THE ExPERTS

6 Enterprise Business Intelligence Defined

Da s h b oa r D s , s c o r e c a r D s , a n D V i s ua l i z at i o n

7 BI on the Fly

8 BI by Any Other Name

e n t e r p r i s e b u s i n e s s i n t e l l i g e n c e

9 Enterprise BI Beyond the Enterprise: Customer-Facing Business Intelligence

11 Adopting an Enterprise BI Standard to Share Information on Students, Admissions, and Enrollment

12 Fostering Departmental BI While Working Toward an Integrated Enterprise BI Environment

13 Qualcomm Speeds Time to Business Answers

14 Mobile BI Gets Interactive

15 Delivering Value of Half a Billion Dollars Annually

17 NetworkIP Dials Up Blazingly Fast Call Detail Analysis

18 Six Ways to Transform the Economics of Data Warehousing

o p e n s o u r c e b u s i n e s s i n t e l l i g e n c e

19 Monolith Serves SaaS BI to the Quick-Serve Restaurant Industry

20 BI in the Cloud: Getting Started

21 The Swiss Colony Harnesses Web Data for BI

22 Streamlining Selection and Budgeting for BI Success

s o f t wa r e - a s - a - s e r V i c e

2 3 Metro Atlanta YMCA Better Aligns Its Mission, Member Programs, and Marketing Activities with On-Demand Business Intelligence

24 Why On-Demand BI?

TDWI RESEARCH: BEST PRACTICES REPORT ExCERPT

25 Analytical Tools for Business Analysts

mORE InFORmATIOn

29 Best Practices Awards

33 Solution Providers

38 About TDWI

39 TDWI Partner Members

FEATURES

2 The End of Enterprise Software: Open Source Finds an Opening

Wayne Eckerson, Director, TDWI Research

The “faster, better, cheaper” mantra in

today’s economy has led to an explosion

in open source BI tools.

4 BI or Bust Study Highlights Best Practices for a Tough Economy

James E. Powell

5 Text Analytics to the RescueStephen Swoyer

Table of Contents

2 WHAT WORKS in enterprise business intelligence Volume 28

“Oracle recently reported it delivered 51 percent margins for the quarter, yet I hear from countless senior executives that they can no longer afford their current software maintenance contracts and are looking for options.” Gentile said these executives often report that maintenance costs consume up to 80 percent of their IT budget.

As prices rise, IT executives are scrutinizing exactly what they are getting for their money. Many lament the “feature bloat” of enter-prise software. “When I was a BI director,” said Madsen, “we used

“The enterprise software market is breaking down,” proclaimed mark madsen at a recent meeting of TDWI’s Boston Chapter.1

“And this opens the door for open source software.”

Madsen said the business model for enterprise software vendors has switched from selling licenses to selling maintenance and sup-port. Maintenance fees now comprise 45 percent of revenues and a lion’s share of profitability. This is largely because the software market has matured and consolidated, leaving customers hostage to a few big companies, Madsen said.

Eager to echo this theme, Brian Gentile, CEO of open source BI vendor Jaspersoft, said the software market is ripe for disruption:

1 Visit the TDWI Boston Chapter page and download slides from the event here: http://www.tdwi.org/education/Chapters/display.aspx?id=8304

BY WAYNE ECkERSONDirector, TDWI Research

The End of Enterprise Software: Open Source Finds An Opening

f e at u r e

http://www.tdwi.org/education/Chapters/display.aspx?id=8304


f e at u r e

less than 40 percent of the features in our BI tools. And while open source products may not have all the bells and whistles, they pass the ‘good enough’ test.”

will interest translate into sales? Not surprisingly, interest in open source BI tools has skyrocketed as the economy plummeted. Many BI teams are looking for ways to reduce costs while still delivering value. Speaking from the audience, Doug Newton, a data warehousing manager at The Math-works and a coordinator for TDWI’s Boston Chapter, said that open source software makes it really easy to “kick the tires” before com-mitting to a purchase. He told the audience he downloaded open source software from Infobright, among others, and liked what he saw, although his company has yet to start using open source tools.

Evidently, Newton is not alone. Gentile says Jaspersoft averages 250,000 downloads per month for its free community edition and has had 9 million downloads since its inception six years ago.

“Most aren’t paying us anything… yet,” said Gentile. Infobright, an open source columnar database vendor that also presented at the event, has had more than 10,000 downloads, a number that should jump as more people hear about the company.

To date, there has been more tire kicking than usage, but many experts (including myself) predict this will gradually change. The TDWI Boston Chapter surveyed its users and found that 55 percent had yet to deploy open source software. Among those that have implemented open source BI tools, 35 percent have deployed MySQL, 20 percent Pentaho, 10 percent Jaspersoft, 6 percent BIRT, and 6 percent Talend. Their primary reason for deploying open source BI tools is cost (75 percent), followed by quick deployment (30 percent) and unhappiness with incumbent BI tools (14 percent).

free isn’t for everyoneNot all lookers are hooked, though. Open source isn’t for everyone.

“Just because it’s free doesn’t mean it’s right for you,” Madsen said. It’s important to evaluate open source tools like any other BI tool.

“Missing features,” “lack of scalability,” “need for internal expertise,” and “switching costs” are the most common reasons companies pass on open source tools.

Most open source BI vendors are small start-ups, which raises the question of vendor viability. Gentile deflected this issue by point-ing to the rich community of developers that surrounds each open

source product. “If Jaspersoft were to disappear tomorrow, our code would live on for a very long time because there is a strong developer community that has contributed to the code and is invested in its future.”

leading adoptersSmall companies are leading the charge into open source BI, according to Madsen, but medium and large companies are not far behind. Small companies are deploying open source BI tools on an enterprise basis while large companies are using it in departmental pockets, usually to augment existing BI tools or fill a vacuum where no BI tools exist, Madsen said.

Kevin Haas of OpenBI—a BI consultancy that helps companies build applications with open source BI tools—said most of his clients use the free community edition of open source BI products. However, the clients with the biggest applications—those deployed on an enterprise scale—implement the commercial or premium versions of the tools, which offer additional functionality for enter-prise deployments as well as support, scheduled release cycles, and indemnity.

While adoption by end-user organizations is growing slowly, uptake by independent software vendors (ISVs) has been sizable. Open source makes it easy for ISVs to enrich their own applications by embedding open source reporting or analytical tools into their products. In fact, Gentile said hundreds of thousands of people are using Jaspersoft without knowing it because it’s embedded in other applications. The nascent market for software-as-a-service applications has been a particularly robust market for open source BI vendors.

inexorable riseIf the mantra of business today is “faster, better, cheaper,” then it’s inevitable that companies need to explore alternatives to traditional enterprise software. Currently, open source BI tools offer significant cost savings over established BI vendors. As open source BI tools mature and undercut established players on price and flexibility, we will see an inexorable rise in the adoption of open source BI tools.

Wayne W. Eckerson is the director of TDWI Research at The Data Warehousing Institute. He is an industry analyst and the author of Performance Dashboards: Measuring, Monitoring, and Managing Your Business (John Wiley & Sons, 2005). He can be reached at [email protected].

Not all lookers are hooked, though.

Open source isn’t for everyone.

mailto:weckerson%40tdwi.org?subject=

f e at u r e


$$$$Using BI as a tool for surviving the recession requires a combina-tion of “strategic actions, organizational capabilities, and enabling technologies,” according to the latest survey from Aberdeen Group. The firm’s latest report examines how businesses have been able to “insulate themselves from the effects of the eco-nomic recession” using insights from BI. The survey is based on responses from 259 participants actively using BI technology.

Companies are clearly under pressure. Of the 330 organizations participating, 39 percent have seen sales revenue fall, and are feeling pressure to align costs with their falling revenue forecast. (Pricing pressures from customers and increased output to meet customer demand rounded out the top business pressures.)

The researchers used three performance criteria to identify Best-in-Class companies—the top 20 percent of performers in the group. The companies excelled in several metrics, including an 11 percent increase in operating profit since September 2008, a customer retention rate of 96 percent, and providing access to BI software to 56 percent of its workforce.

What do these companies have in common when it comes to BI? More than three-quarters (82 percent) monitor their receivables performance, identifying slow payers and following up; only 72 per-cent of all other companies did so. The companies also are more likely to monitor the sales pipeline (79 percent versus 66 percent of all others). Almost two-thirds (61 percent) can track sales back to marketing leads; only 43 percent of the lowest group (“Laggard” companies) can do this.

No matter what class an enterprise is in—Laggard, Industry Aver-age, or Best-in-Class—the top two strategic actions are the same:

“analyzing sales and focus on the strongest markets” and “optimize for growth without adding capital,” the report points out. “The Best-in-Class are under pressure to increase demand while countering pricing pressure from their customers. So, the intent of the Best-in-Class is to focus on the strongest market segments where there is less pricing pressure, less competition, and sustainable profit margins,” David White, the report’s author, explains.

The report advises enterprises to “closely monitor receivables performance and take action against late paying customers in

order to keep cash-flow strong.” They should “improve their insight into the sales pipeline and marketing performance, [and] consider whether it is appropriate to establish a Business Intelligence Com-petency Center.” Best-in-Class companies should consider using

“corporate performance management to enhance planning, budgeting, and forecasting capabilities.”

BI investment remains strong. Aberdeen found that 64 percent of respondents indicated their enterprise will invest in new or upgraded BI applications for sales and marketing in the next year. Those plans span companies of all sizes: Of the 24 percent of respondents who say they’ll deploy advanced analytics within the next 12 months, 38 percent are small companies (with revenues of no more than $50 million), 36 percent are midsize enterprises (from $50 million to $100 billion in annual revenues), and 45 percent are organizations with revenues of $1 billion or more. Twenty-three percent of respondents plan to adopt dashboards in the next 12 months, and 22 percent are planning to implement real-time BI.

James E. Powell is the editorial director at TDWI.

This article appeared in BI This Week e-newsletter August 26, 2009. For more information or to subscribe, visit www.tdwi.org/publications/newsletters.

BI or Bust Study Highlights Best Practices for a Tough EconomyBy James e. Powell

http://www.tdwi.org/publications/newsletters


f e at u r e

$Text analytics guru Seth Grimes, a principal with consultancy Alta Plana, recently published the 2009 edition of his “Text Analytics: User Perspectives on Solutions and Providers” survey. Like its predecessor, the 2009 version is chock-full of intriguing nuggets—particularly on the demand side.

Not only is text analytics usage increasing (along with an ever-expanding constellation of applications), but the number and variety of sources that text analytics practitioners say they’re consuming also continues to expand.

All in all, the most recent Text Analytics survey suggests a clear and inescapable increase in the consumption—and importance—of unstructured data.

For example, Grimes notes, nearly half (47 percent) of current text analytics practitioners say they’re consuming data from blogs or social networks; slightly less (44 percent) cite data from news arti-cles, e-mail messages (36 percent), online forums (35 percent), or customer/marketing surveys (34 percent). All of this suggests that such unstructured data—which has been viewed as a potentially valuable (but nonetheless unverified) information source—is begin-ning to pay off. “These are on-line and other feedback-rich sources. Their high rate of selection suggests that veteran users have found significant benefit in these sources,” writes Grimes. The rub, he says, is that shops that aren’t currently using text analytics probably don’t know what they’re missing.

“By contrast, only three information-type categories [e.g., e-mail and correspondence, customer or marketing surveys, and con-tact center notes/transcripts] were selected by over 26 percent of respondents who are not yet using text analytics,” Grimes contin-ues. “It’s easy to infer that the value of online materials … has not yet become clear to prospective users. That only a minority chose any particular category suggests … [that] prospective users are more broadly distributed across application categories … [or that] prospective users are cautious about how many different sources they tackle initially.”

Such sources will undoubtedly come later, Grimes suggests, after text analytics adopters first master traditional materials: “[T]he plu-rality—the largest portion—of prospective users will focus initially on materials they have on hand that involve interactions with known stakeholders. Web sources can come later.”

One downside to text analytics success is hype. Grimes found that potential adopters often have unrealistic expectations on the text analytic tip. For example, he notes, prospective text analytics users tend to cite a different—and, not surprisingly, more explicitly remu-nerative—set of ROI drivers than do existing practitioners. This is both good and bad, he explains.

“Of prospective-user respondents, almost a quarter are already using ‘increased sales to existing customers’ as an ROI measure, which make[s] sense. Sales are easily tracked and analyzed by current systems where items such as satisfaction ratings are not,” Grimes writes.

On the other hand, he continues, a total of five ROI drivers are accorded disproportionate weight (cited by 38 percent or more of respondents) by prospective adopters, which suggests that prospects tend to be more exuberant—irrationally so—about the perceived benefits of text analytics than do seasoned users. “These prospective users, and the folks who advise them, would do well to manage and focus their expectations.”

Stephen Swoyer is a technology writer based in Athens, GA.

This article appeared in BI This Week e-newsletter August 12, 2009. For more information or to subscribe, visit www.tdwi.org/publications/newsletters.

Text Analytics to the RescueBy stePhen swoyer

http://www.tdwi.org/publications/newsletters


Da s h b oa r D s , s c o r e c a r D s , a n D V i s ua l i z at i o npages 7–8

These are techniques for visualizing data. Dashboards typically visualize operational or tactical metrics, while scorecards visualize strategic ones. Visualization represents a range of techniques for visualizing data.

e n t e r p r i s e b u s i n e s s i n t e l l i g e n c epages 9–18

Enterprise business intelligence involves deploying query, reporting, and analysis capa-bilities to all employees who can benefit from them as well as to customers and suppliers.

o p e n s o u r c e b u s i n e s s i n t e l l i g e n c epages 19–22

Open source business intelligence consists of query, reporting, and analysis tools built on an open source foundation; in other words, they are free to download and use.

s o f t wa r e - a s - a - s e r V i c epages 23–24

Software-as-a-service is a new way of deliver-ing applications when a third party hosts your applications or infrastructure on a platform outside your firewall. The service provider hosts all customers on the same application and platform, achieving economies of scale and simplifying administration and upgrades.

Enterprise Business

Intelligence Defined

To help you make your way through

the many powerful case stud-

ies and lessons from the experts

articles in What Works in Enter-

prise Business Intelligence, we

have arranged them into specific

categories: dashboards, scorecards,

and visualization; enterprise busi-

ness intelligence; open source

business intelligence; and soft-

ware-as-a-service. What do these

terms mean, and how do they

apply to your organization?


D a s h b o a r D s, s c o r e c a r D s, a n D V i s ua l i z at i o n

c a s e s t u Dy

BI on the FlyCommentary by Mark Seward Vice President, Software Development, E•SPONDER

BackgroundThe city of St. Louis hosted the 2009 MLB All-Star Game, which was expected to draw nearly 50,000 fans and thousands of sup-port personnel for five days of game-related events. Occasions like the All-Star Game are not taken lightly by cities; they require a tremendous amount of planning and are expected to generate revenue. Furthermore, there are security requirements on a scale that most businesses don’t encounter.

the challengeTo ensure a successful event, the city needed access to a tremendous amount of data from more than 35 city, state, federal, and private organizations. Much of this data was dynamic, updated in real time by public safety and maintenance personnel. In addition, data was continuously updated in various facilities throughout the area, such as hospitals.

A further challenge was the requirement for user interfaces that would ensure quick adoption by all stakeholders. The interfaces had to be tailored for various work environ-ments and not disrupt established work flows. Field workers had to interact with the data via portable devices; analysts worked with data on desktop computers; and deci-sion makers needed the data presented in a way that fostered rapid collaboration and interactivity. The system also had to create and distribute action and contingency plans as well as current status reports.

To be cost effective, the end solution should utilize existing applications and resources wherever possible. Many agencies involved in the project were using Microsoft applications and ESRI GIS in their day-to-day operations. These existing applications presented both an opportunity and a conceptual framework for a solution that could successfully manage a large event.

the solutionThe city contacted ESRI and Microsoft part-ner E•SPONDER, which helped manage the 2004 presidential debates in St. Louis. E•SPONDER studied the city’s requirements for the project and proposed a solution based on many of the existing Microsoft applications and ESRI’s MapIt.

Many readers are familiar with the various components of the Microsoft business intel-ligence stack, but MapIt is probably new to most. MapIt is a lightweight mapping solution designed to prepare, serve, and use geo-graphic data stored in SQL Server 2008 and displayed through SharePoint and Silverlight Web-based applications. MapIt utilizes Micro-soft Bing Maps to provide the aerial imagery and street data for mapping.

the BenefitsThe E•SPONDER solution provided a map-centric environment for interacting with data. This approach had a track record of quick acceptance by diverse groups of end users. Microsoft Surface was used to provide a highly interactive “big picture” view of the entire event. High-level decision makers could rap-idly access all levels of personnel, asset, and incident data in a highly collaborative environ-ment. Personnel in the field could access and update data by interacting with maps on rugged tablet PCs and handheld devices.

Leveraging existing application and data assets helped the city of St. Louis optimize the return on their investment in the event. Because ESRI and Microsoft have a close

development relationship, the integration of the two existing application environ-ments was much simpler and quicker than anticipated. “Using MapIt and Microsoft tech-nology, we reduced our development costs and delivered a new solution in record time,” said Mark Seward, vice president of software development for E•SPONDER.

The success of the project has been vali-dated by the city’s adoption of the application as their ongoing incident and event manage-ment system.

For a free white paper on this topic, click here and choose the title “GIS and Business Intelligence: The Geographic Advantage.” For more information about ESRI, click here.

“Using MapIt and Microsoft

technology, we reduced our

development costs and delivered

a new solution in record time.” mark Seward Vice President, Software Development, E•SPONDER

http://www.tdwi.org/Publications/WhitePapers/ww28WhitePapers.aspx?id=810

http://www.tdwi.org/Publications/WhitePapers/ww28company.aspx?id=780


D a s h b o a r D s, s c o r e c a r D s, a n D V i s ua l i z at i o n

l e s s o n f r o m t h e e x p e r t s

BI by Any Other NameBy Steve Trammell ESRI Alliance Marketing

In July of 2009, ESRI introduced MapIt, a program that helps organizations quickly dis-cover and exploit the geographic aspects of their data. MapIt plugs into Internet Informa-tion Server to create connections to Microsoft SQL Server 2008 databases and deliver highly interactive maps through SharePoint and Silverlight Web-based applications. With MapIt, you can put interactive maps that display your information virtually anywhere within your organization. In short, MapIt was developed to bring geographic analysis and map-based reporting to the Microsoft busi-ness intelligence environment.

End users were already using many of MapIt’s individual components, and some developers were using prerelease versions of MapIt to address specific opportunities. We were surprised to hear that one of these developers had quickly implemented MapIt for a large incident management project (described in “BI on the Fly,” page 7). Since MapIt was ostensibly built for the BI market, we were naturally curious why it had been used on this particular project.

We discovered that incident management requires input of data from many operational units within an agency, as well as outside pri-vate organizations. This disparate but highly relevant data should be presented to decision makers as a comprehensive “big picture” view into the overall status of an event. At the same time, this view must provide an intui-tive means of accessing granular asset and readiness data for all available assets. Finally, decisions based on information derived from the data should be distributed to those who can act quickly and effectively. Access, anal-ysis, and communication are the hallmarks of successful BI projects, so incident manage-ment can be viewed as a very specialized form of BI.

The differences between BI and incident management are more a matter of degree than applications. For instance, collaboration in the decision-making process is extremely important. The analysis and status of an unfolding event is typically presented on multiple screens. Many are touch sensitive, so map-based views of an event can be zoomed, panned, and queried rapidly by a team of people. Drill-down to granular asset and resource data is achieved by tapping symbols on the map.

Wireless updating of data in the field is the norm rather than the exception for incident management. Tablets and handheld devices with map-based interfaces are used to access and update asset data and readiness information for various resources in real time.

The lesson we learned with this particular project was that our preconceived ideas regarding BI users were in fact too narrow. We also learned that our new application was not just a BI tool but a solution that could address a wide variety of challenges faced by many different types of organizations.

The lesson for BI users: There are prob-ably other units in your organization facing challenges that can be addressed with your skills and knowledge. These departments

may use terminology that seems unrelated to your skills, but a discussion may reveal issues that can be resolved with your help. This offers the potential of improving your organization’s overall performance and also gives you new stakeholders invested in the maintenance and expanded usage of your applications and skills.

For a free white paper on this topic, click here and choose the title “GIS and Business Intelligence: The Geographic Advantage.” For more information about ESRI, click here.

The lesson for BI users: There

are probably other units in your

organization facing challenges

that can be addressed with

your skills and knowledge.






Enterprise BI Beyond

the Enterprise:

Customer-Facing

Business IntelligenceBy Jake Freivald Vice President of Marketing, Information Builders

A few decades ago, gas stations transformed themselves by supplying “self-service” pumps and employing just one person to staff a station and collect money from customers. It was a win-win situation: The stations reduced payroll costs and earned higher profits even as customers paid lower fuel prices. Stations that offered self-service also gained market share over those that didn’t. It was the difference between cod-dling people, which is expensive and slow, and empowering people, which is cheaper and faster.

There’s an opportunity today to achieve similar results with customer-facing busi-ness intelligence. We’re so used to thinking of BI as an inward-facing activity that we don’t think about providing it to our custom-ers, partners, and suppliers. When we do give them information, it’s frequently in hard copy reports and fancy brochures, or maybe spreadsheets and flat files. It feels like we’re giving them what they want—like we’re cod-dling them—but in fact they could get more value by accessing the information that they want, in the way they want it, directly.

If you think about the kinds of information you collect already, you’ll see a lot of things that you could share with third parties to your mutual benefit. Product information, package delivery status, and billing details come to mind—they already form the basis of self-service applications for large compa-nies—but there are other large, untapped information resources inside your enterprise. Sometimes those resources can even be exploited for profit, creating revenue-generat-ing BI, of all things.

There’s nothing conceptually difficult about customer-facing or revenue-generating BI. You have to access enterprise data sources and make their information easily accessible to external end users. But you can’t give these users complex tools; you have to focus on highly parameterized BI applications, the sort of thing people can tackle without training. They have to see everything in context. Ideally, users should be able to find the information through keyword searches, simple forms, and basic Web-interface capa-bilities such as drop-down boxes and radio buttons. The old usability paradigms (drag and drop, slice and dice) have to give way to simpler user experiences that are still power-ful enough to provide any permutation of the data that your users want.

And of course you’ll need to scale securely. With any luck, there are a lot more people outside your company than inside who can use your information. Many of our clients report tens or hundreds of thousands of users, and the largest applications run into the millions. You still need to manage who can ask for what. That’s not something you can take for granted in a BI platform.

At Information Builders, our effort to create large-scale, pervasive BI applications has led to the recognition that these applications are ideally suited to support customer-facing initiatives. Here are some examples of Web-FOCUS applications that reach beyond the enterprise:

• A premier distributor of paperback and hardcover books built a self-service reporting environment that “provides

publishers with information that they can’t get anywhere else in the industry as quickly,” according to their CFO. That information includes which titles are selling, where, and in what quantities. The CFO told Information Builders, “This puts us in a completely different light with our partners.”

• A major automobile manufacturer built a warranty management application that allows each dealer in its network to moni-tor how much its warranty performance varies from the average performance of others within the same region. More than 14,000 dealers rely on the system, including all the company’s dealerships worldwide. The application has been deployed in 14 languages and more are planned to support the Asia-Pacific markets. It helps the manufacturer instantly identify numbers that are out of line while creating an environment of healthy competition between dealers. The application—and the behavior changes it caused—have saved the manufacturer $40–60 million per year based on better warranty repairs.

• Canada’s leading processor of credit card and related transactions, Moneris Solu-tions, generates revenue by repurposing information it would have collected anyway. Like most credit card proces-sors, Moneris charges a small percentage of each sale for electronically processing and authorizing credit card purchases. In addition, the company built a WebFO-CUS-based application called Merchant Direct that allows merchants to view their




Visa and MasterCard transaction data online, including consolidated statements and reports and a customized view of card payment activity. This is incredibly valuable to its customers, who are willing to pay a fee to gain insight into the buying patterns these transactions provide. With more than 1.7 billion transactions annu-ally and more than 300,000 customers, the application needed to be highly scal-able and extremely easy to use.

• One client, the nation’s leading profes-sional employer organization (PEO), manages more than 100,000 work-ers—professionals who specialize in everything from accounting to administra-tive support—for thousands of clients and tens of thousands of worksites. This allows its clients to avoid the arduous tasks in recruiting, hiring, and paying employees directly. A large component of this involves information sharing: providing access to self-service, client-facing reports for payroll, benefits, and employee information.

In effect, the company acts as a full-service human resources department for small- and midsize businesses, offering payroll and taxation processing, workforce management, benefits administration, and workers’ compensation. By providing staffing and full reporting and analysis capabilities, smaller firms maximize their productivity by leveraging the same type of formal HR processes as their larger counterparts without maintaining their own staff or expensive infrastructure.

• Scottish and Southern Energy (SSE), one of the largest vertically integrated elec-

tricity and gas companies in the UK, is enhancing customer service while cutting support costs with a self-service portal built on WebFOCUS. The application is helping the company’s customers reduce their energy consumption expenses—a benefit to both the individual company and to the environment. Its Business Energy Centre (BEC) Web site provides 420,000 corporate customers with online retrieval of “day plus one” billing and usage data, which is dynamically updated every 24 hours. It provides accurate, detailed intelligence that helps organiza-tions identify usage peaks and troughs, spot trends, and take prompt action to reduce consumption levels. The informa-tion provided helps companies cut costs and meet environmental sustainability targets through smarter, more conserva-tive gas and electricity usage.

• As part of its commitment to the pub-lic’s right to know about health-code compliance, the New York City Depart-ment of Health and Mental Hygiene allows access to inspection records for any of its 20,000 restaurants. Providing the information online helped eliminate paper-based processes, reduce the time to look up inspection results (it originally could take up to four days), and reach thousands more people with information related to their potential health risks. Per-haps more importantly, the restaurants

felt pressure knowing their inspection results were easy to find, and inspection scores rose. This application can be seen online at http://tinyurl.com/nycrestaurant.

You get the idea: The possibilities are mind boggling. Many of the best applications can be made with data you already collect. It’s just a matter of looking for ways to empower your customers and partners—looking for the win-win situation that only self-service appli-cations can provide.

For a free white paper on this topic, click here and choose the title “The World’s Best Business Intelligence Applications: Customer-Facing, Revenue-Generating BI.” For more information about Information Builders, click here.

Customer-facing BI apps need to

be scalable: Many of our clients

report tens or hundreds of thou-

sands of users, and the largest

applications run into the millions.





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Adopting an Enterprise

BI Standard to Share

Information on

Students, Admissions,

and EnrollmentCommentary by Daniel E. ThomasDirector, Applications Development, University of Miami

The University of Miami (www.miami.edu) is a private educational institution with an enrollment of 15,600. The students are enrolled in 120 bachelor, 108 master, 49 doctoral, and 2 professional programs in the university’s five campuses. To create an effective and diverse educational environ-ment, the university needed a uniform way to manage and access student information from the admission process through graduation.

In 1997, the University of Miami selected MicroStrategy for its BI needs, and today it has deployed this platform across the institu-tion to anchor multiple BI applications. End users are able to access a single BI interface that reaches a number of data marts across the university. These data marts are available to all departments that might have an inter-est in either prospective or current students. Most users have access to prompted grid reports to ensure personalization and data security. Since the user base has grown more proficient with the product, the queries are more sophisticated, including predictive analysis and trending.

The admissions department relies on MicroStrategy to track the qualifications and diversity of each incoming class. As a result, admissions offices can segment the prospec-tive student population to more effectively customize its interaction with students in a particular demographic or qualification group.

Building classes that meet admission goals depends on predicting and monitor-ing acceptance rates based on offers. The MicroStrategy tool allows for clear insight into

current numbers and allows for comparisons to previous year totals.

In addition, the financial aid area can ana-lyze student data to determine the number receiving aid and the type of aid. This can be critical data in both recruitment and retention; students’ ability to finance a col-lege education significantly affects their academic performance and the continuation of their studies.

The University of Miami also created a human resources data mart on the MicroStrategy platform to meet its human resources needs. The university employs more than 16,000 faculty and staff who work with students. Their hiring, professional pro-gression, and achievements affect both the university as well as the students.

The purpose of HR analyses is twofold: to aid in finding and retaining the best talent and to serve as a feedback mechanism to the university and the federal government. The HR data marts can be used to analyze the recruitment and retention of the most talented professionals in each field, giving the university excellent faculty and staff, as well as a good reputation in professional circles.

The human resources department must also report on affirmative action and equality to the federal government. Users can analyze the hiring, career progression, and compensation of individuals from different groups to iden-tify strengths or weaknesses. The university sends the results to the government to comply with federal mandates, but it also uses this

data to help attract and retain qualified indi-viduals from different backgrounds. Users can view trends and use predictive analytics to see what attracts these individuals.

Since implementing MicroStrategy, the human resources department has been able to run queries faster and analyze data in more ways than before. The new methods of analyses allow the department to look for trends, predict needs and opportunities, and plan strategies to meet the needs of these turbulent economic times.

New data marts are being developed to support space management activities and benefits administration. Reporting for the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) utilizes many structures already available in the data marts. Future initiatives include broader tools for supporting financial aid and the budgeting process.

For a free white paper on this topic, click here and choose the title “Evolving from Departmental Islands of BI to a Cohesive Enterprise BI Environment.” For more information about MicroStrategy, click here.

http://www.miami.edu






Fostering

Departmental BI While

Working Toward an

Integrated Enterprise

BI EnvironmentBy Dan Paladino Analyst, Industry and Solution Marketing, MicroStrategy

the enterprise Bi VisionA successful enterprise BI environment seamlessly encompasses a wide variety of applications across an organization’s depart-ments and workgroups. A key feature of enterprise BI environments is that they are based on a common set of building blocks (i.e., metadata) with which users can develop reports, dashboards, and other BI compo-nents. This promotes internal self consistency and a single version of the truth across the enterprise at the lowest cost of ownership. In addition, the high performance and scal-ability of enterprise BI supports the needs of the entire organization, regardless of how or where business users access their BI.

Enterprise BI also enables business users to address their immediate requirements by leveraging all five styles of BI, including dash-boards and scorecards, enterprise reporting, OLAP analysis, advanced and predictive analysis, and alerts and notifications. With these capabilities, business users can build a wide variety of applications for both depart-mental and interdepartmental use.

developing an enterprise Bi Blueprint to achieve enterprise BiIt can take several years to successfully establish a fully integrated, cohesive enter-prise BI environment. To achieve enterprise BI, organizations must first develop and evolve an enterprise BI “blueprint” or strat-egy. Such an overarching strategy takes time to implement and will be revised over time, but is essential to the direction of an organi-zation’s enterprise BI development.

The cornerstone of any enterprise BI blueprint should be the incremental gathering of data and development of BI metadata and applica-tions across the organization. As the amount of collected data increases, that data should be increasingly lev-eraged through BI applications. This leads to more business users having the opportunity to benefit from BI insight. Perhaps most importantly, however, is that the incremental costs of enterprise BI become justified as the number of users grows and the return on investment becomes clearer.

promoting the growth of departmental Bi applications and merging them into the enterpriseMore specifically, the key to incrementally building an enterprise BI environment is to foster the growth of departmental BI applica-tions across the organization. Departmental BI is inevitable. Its smaller scale, flexibility, and convenience enables individual depart-ments and workgroups to satisfy their immediate business imperatives in a timely fashion. As a result, more and more depart-mental “islands” of BI surface throughout the enterprise over time.

It is important to promote the use of these systems across the entire organization. This creates, in effect, an information culture with an understanding of the value of BI invest-ment. Fostering departmental BI is essential to increase user adoption and lay the neces-sary groundwork for an integrated enterprise BI environment that encompasses all of these departmental islands.

To eventually reach the goal of enterprise BI, organizations should work to incrementally consolidate their departmental islands of BI into the enterprise environment. This process must be transparent to business users as their applications are migrated into a more efficient, cost-saving, and scalable enterprise BI framework. Any BI tool used to conduct this evolution must ensure this gradual, transparent consolidation of departmental islands of BI.

summaryEnterprise BI environments provide organiza-tions with high performance, optimal data and user scalability, and access to multiple cross-departmental applications. Although successfully developing an enterprise BI environment can take several years, it is a worthwhile investment because it promotes a single version of the truth and low total cost of ownership. To achieve enterprise BI, organizations should develop an enterprise BI blueprint. This development strategy should be focused on fostering departmental islands of BI and finding a way to eventually merge them within an enterprise BI environment.

For a free white paper on this topic, click hereand choose the title “Evolving from Departmental Islands of BI to a Cohesive Enterprise BI Environment.” For more information about MicroStrategy, click here.

Enterprise BI environments provide a single version of the truth across the enterprise, as well as high performance, scalability, and access to a wide variety of cross-departmental applications from a single interface.




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Qualcomm Speeds

Time to

Business AnswersCommentary by Steve Rimar Senior Programmer Analyst, Qualcomm

Qualcomm Incorporated (Nasdaq: QCOM) is a leader in developing and delivering innova-tive digital wireless communication products and services based on CDMA and other advanced technologies.

Understanding the usage of internal applica-tions is vital. With Qualcomm’s numerous business intelligence (BI) systems, obtaining application usage information sounds easy. However, employees from the product devel-opment services team could not easily utilize these tools to obtain this information. They did not lack the skills to do so; they simply lacked the time and resources.

Steve Rimar, Qualcomm senior programmer analyst, discovered QlikView while looking for a solution to some of the department’s key reporting and analysis challenges. Rimar was intrigued by the appealing visual analysis and ability to rapidly develop new applications. After downloading the fully functional free trial of QlikView, he built an application for analysis of Qualcomm’s Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) system—within a few days.

The QlikView solution he developed accesses a large data set within the PLM application, providing analysis on the number and pro-files of employees using the system, along with specifics on peak usage time, system performance and speed, average product turnaround time, and bottlenecks in the pro-cess. With Qualcomm’s existing BI solutions, development time for the same application could have taken weeks or even months. After experiencing QlikView’s ease of use and the minimized amount of predefined analysis required for development, the team made the decision to purchase QlikView.

reduced reporting time and optimized staffing accelerate time to marketAlthough QlikView was originally intended for reporting within Qualcomm’s product development services organization, use grew organically as employees recognized the potential of QlikView analysis for functions outside of IT. More than 100 dashboards and reporting applications have been deployed across 15 business units. These applications have given employees one-click access to information that had previously taken them hours or days to track down.

For example, a QlikView application for the ASIC System Test (AST) group has enabled Qualcomm to increase efficiencies in the chip testing lifecycle and ultimately improve throughput time. Previously, each group had to compile and distribute individual Excel spreadsheets, since the AST group includes nine different subdivisions and employees in both the United States and India. Today, the department’s 40 users share a single view of how each chip feature is testing against each phone, with powerful trending analysis of coverage percentage, automation complete, and other key testing metrics. Qualcomm has been able to save one day each month previ-ously spent generating reports. The same AST application also enables Qualcomm to opti-mize staffing to meet timing commitments to the company’s manufacturing suppliers.

“Qliking” for Quality: efficiency and transparency in Quality control In addition to increased reporting and staff-ing efficiencies and the associated cost savings, QlikView has enabled Qualcomm to provide its engineers with the intelligence to improve quality control processes. Before QlikView, a quality technician spent at least

four hours each week preparing reports for eight different Qualcomm product fami-lies—an exhausting five-step process that included querying data from the company’s Manufacturing Execution System (MES) using Qualcomm’s former BI software prod-uct, exporting to Microsoft Excel, creating a pivot table, refreshing the existing chart, and manually calculating yield and defects per hundred units (DPHU) to complete the chart. Today, the weekly reporting process has been completely eliminated, saving the qual-ity technician 16–20 hours each month.

putting Business intelligence in the hands of end usersQualcomm recognizes the additional value QlikView brings to its end users. “Since QlikView is an all-encompassing tool and we don’t need to spend a lot of time gathering and modifying requirements, it only takes a few days to get new applications up and running, allowing us to quickly expand to additional users,” said Rimar.

For a free white paper on this topic, click here and choose the title “QlikView 9 for Business Answers: Making Organizations Smarter and More Productive than Ever.” For more information about QlikView, click here.

“With QlikView’s ability to enable

IT groups to rapidly deploy

applications, we are able to put

the power of data analysis into

the hands of our engineers faster

than ever before.” Steve Rimar Senior Programmer Analyst, Qualcomm






Mobile BI Gets

InteractiveBy Anthony Deighton Senior VP of Products, QlikView

Most people have already formed their opin-ions of mobile business intelligence—and unfortunately, the majority of these opinions are unfavorable. However, there’s good reason for this: Early attempts at transform-ing useful business applications into mobile versions have failed. Some were quick to gain that first-mover advantage to the small screen by simply shrinking their application to accommodate the reduced real estate of the screen. Other attempts pushed out static reports, which may have been marginally helpful, but typically created a frustrating user experience with no opportunity to inter-act with the data. These approaches may have given access to some information, but certainly didn’t provide a positive experience.

Two things have happened since BI appli-cations were first introduced to mobile devices. First, the connectivity of 3G wireless networks has improved to the point where mobile devices have become a reliable busi-ness tool. Second, the iPhone has set the standard for multi-touch interactivity with mobile devices that consumers—who are also business users—have quickly become accustomed to.

As the worlds of serious business applications and personal mobile devices merge, people want and expect their BI to be within arm’s reach. When thinking about BI for mobile users, consider what people will expect from the application in this environment as well as the capabilities of the mobile platform.

Simply put, what people really need from mobile BI are answers to questions. Shrink-ing down a top 10 customer report for a salesperson on the go is an answer to one question. But what if the salesperson has more questions? Enter the age of interactive business intelligence.

The mobile device in that salesperson’s hand can pinpoint their location via GPS services enabled on the mobile platform. Why not leverage that capability to automatically deliver relevant information on customers in the salesperson’s current vicinity?

Let’s then consider the way we interact with the mobile device. Assume the salesperson has eight records he or she wants to look through. Each record should have its own screen for the best readability, and the user should be able to thumb through the records in “cover flow” mode—like flipping through music selections. With the inevitable need to answer more questions from the delivered data, the user can pinch and swipe the screen to highlight a specific selection and drill down for more information. To move to the next answer, the user can simply shake the device to erase.

This is the new world of mobile BI. By engaging in this new experience, people’s opinions of the mobile enterprise applica-tion will change dramatically. Beyond static views, the ability to interact with data makes a significant difference in the usability and adoption of these applications. We’ve found that beyond sales and service road war-riors (and executives who need to check in on the business), interactive BI on a mobile device is especially useful in the healthcare industry, where doctors can drill down to the records of their patients without the need for a laptop.

Like any maturing application with a useful experience, the applications will proliferate until people don’t remember how they ever survived without them. That’s miles away for the “fun” applications that have never been taken very seriously in the market. But with the recent introduction of true mobile interac-tivity for gaining business answers, that time is now.

For a free white paper on this topic, click here and choose the title “QlikView 9 for Business Answers: Making Organizations Smarter and More Productive than Ever.” For more information about QlikView, click here.

Simply put, what people really

need from mobile BI are answers

to questions.





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Delivering Value

of Half a Billion

Dollars Annually

Auto giant builds comprehensive customer view, resulting in increased auto sales, improved customer experience, and reduced costsBy Bob Hartline CDI Marketing, Acxiom Corporation

the opportunityOne of the world’s largest automakers manu-factures cars and trucks in 34 countries, employs more than 240,000 people, and sells and services vehicles in some 140 countries. This company sold approximately 8.35 million cars and trucks in 2008.

Building upon those numbers, the com-pany’s goal was to sell even more vehicles and service in the years to come by influenc-ing buying behavior. There are many factors that go into a car purchase decision, making it a challenge to effectively market to the consumer. Factors include unpredictable gas prices; finding a car company that’s innova-tive and in tune with the customer’s needs; finding a reliable, safe, and quality product at an affordable price; and whether to go with a foreign or domestic brand.

If that wasn’t daunting enough, the company also realized that when a consumer buys a vehicle, that information goes into one data-base. That’s what should be expected, right? But if that same consumer also signs up for the in-vehicle communications and diag-nostics system, his or her information goes into another database. What if the consumer finances the purchase through the auto manufacturer’s financial arm? You guessed it—that consumer’s information goes into yet another database.

It’s no wonder with a footprint so large that the auto giant was having a hard time keep-ing up with its customers. Its data was not integrated across divisions, which resulted

in an inaccurate and incomplete view of cus-tomers and prospects. Also, its data hygiene efforts were not coordinated throughout the company, causing duplicated efforts and slow response times.

Sometimes the company would even forgo entire marketing campaigns. Executing a campaign to all new car buyers subscribed to the in-vehicle communications system without knowing who they are and what other relationships they have with the auto manufacturer could negatively affect cus-tomer satisfaction.

The company needed a solution that would enable it to clean, integrate, and manage customer and prospect information across multiple divisions in a central repository. The solution must also marry that information with product and service relationship data to:

1. Improve automotive consumer intel-ligence and customer lifecycle contact optimization to increase the company’s ability to sell more vehicles

2. Improve marketing effectiveness and tar-geting through dynamic messaging and personalization

3. Respond faster and more accurately to changing market conditions through improved consumer targeting

4. Reduce costs related to duplicate data, poor customer interactions, and ineffi-cient marketing efforts

the solutionThe automotive manufacturer chose Acxiom to create a data quality and customer recog-nition management solution to manage the data that moves in and out of its data ware-house. The solution had to meet the current pressing need, be able to grow with its marketing capabilities, and support its future hub applications to confidently recognize customer data company wide.

Acxiom’s arsenal in the area of data quality and customer recognition management was perfect for the challenge. Acxiom Data Qual-ity delivers the highest level of accuracy in the industry, thanks to the Acxiom knowledge base and AbiliTec. Acxiom is able to clean and enrich data to a level exceeding the USPS.

This lift translated into additional revenue and cost savings for the automotive company’s marketing organization. Combining the clean data with AbiliTec—Acxiom’s patented linking technology—provided an accurate and per-sistent link for the recognition of individuals within and across the client’s comprehen-sive data infrastructure. Unlike traditional software-based matching that sorts and groups similar records within a geography and attempts to match prospective records together, AbiliTec uses exclusive matching algorithms to apply consistent consumer and address links, regardless of name changes, moves, nicknames, or name variations.

The power and performance of Acxiom Data Quality and AbiliTec is made possible by the Acxiom knowledge base of consumer

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information that has been compiled more than 35 years. The Acxiom knowledge base includes more than two billion historical occupancies, hundreds of sources, up to 20 years of history on an individual, reliable and time-tested matching algorithms based on more than 40 years of experience, con-tact data (name, address), associative data (date of birth, gender, phone number), and internal metadata.

The final piece of the puzzle was a robust customer recognition management capability that could link and group customer and pros-pect information from disparate records to recognize the individual across many

different divisions based on company-specific data, business record–matching rules, and AbiliTec. On top of the linking and grouping, a consolidated view of each consumer and his or her relationship to the company needed to be maintained over time. AbiliTec was able to ensure the company stayed relevant to customers, which is key to success in today’s customer-centric marketing environment.

To get the auto manufacturer the solution it wanted, Acxiom first needed a handle on its disparate data sources. Data was previously consolidated from multiple automotive divi-sions, but was not as usable as it should be. Its affiliate partners and financing company provided data, and data was also captured from its service and parts organization. The company could now track the lifecycle of a customer across its massive database, even down to the granular dealership level. To pre-serve its prior investments, Acxiom carefully leveraged the company’s existing customer data repositories, creating a smooth transi-tion and minimizing potential disruption to the infrastructure that was already in place.

In addition to tracking customers and compil-ing collective information into one database, the auto giant also needed to be aware of actual vehicle owner data. When vehicles are sold from one person to another or pur-chased at an auction, it’s easy to lose sight of the vehicle owner. Acxiom and R.L. Polk & Co., a provider of automotive information, worked together to accurately track the vehi-cle ownership of all vehicles after they leave the lot. This provided the automotive com-pany the ability to correctly estimate its car park and precisely target its marketing efforts for extended warranty and maintenance pro-grams, as well as new purchase offers. With Acxiom’s data hygiene and postal services, this auto manufacturer quickly reestablished contact with key customers, reduced print and postage costs, and improved overall deliverability of campaigns.

the BenefitsAcxiom helped breathe new life into the auto company’s marketing campaigns, cultivating its most current prospects. Measurable busi-ness benefits include:

• Increase in sales of more than 90,000

vehicles and $36 million in seasonal

car-care programs

• An $18.6 million reduction in operational

costs and savings

• A savings of $1.2 million annually in

returned and “spoiled” mail through

address hygiene

• Efficient and strategic marketing efforts

targeted at distinct types of customers at

specific points in the customer’s lifecycle,

achieving a 99.9 percent campaign quality

and on-time performance

• An expanding outreach program to

customers who were lost due to over-

suppression of customer files

Acxiom built a strategic, long-standing rela-

tionship with the automotive manufacturer.

Throughout the years, Acxiom has helped

the auto giant clean, integrate, and maintain

its customer data, which in turn has allowed

the company to recognize its customers and

improve overall customer service. The results

speak for themselves: 8.35 million vehicles

sold globally in 2008 with $506 million in

sales profit attainment and $18.6 million in

cost reductions and savings.

For a free white paper on this topic, click here and choose the title “’Excuse Me, Have We Met Before?’ How Knowledge-Based Customer Recognition Helps You Really Know Your Customers.” For more information about Acxiom Corporation, click here.

Solution SnapshotCustomer: Automotive giant

The Opportunity: Data was not inte-grated across divisions, resulting in an inaccurate and incomplete view of cus-tomers and prospects. Data hygiene efforts were not coordinated through-out the company, causing duplicated efforts.

The Solution: Acxiom’s arsenal of data quality and customer recognition man-agement tools was used to create a data quality and customer recognition management solution to manage the data that moves in and out of its data warehouse.

The Results:• Increase in sales of more than

90,000 vehicles and $36 million in seasonal car-care programs

• An $18.6 million reduction in operational costs and savings

• Efficient and strategic marketing efforts targeted at distinct types of customers at specific points in the customer’s lifecycle





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NetworkIP Dials Up

Blazingly Fast Call

Detail AnalysisCommentary by Stephan Broquie Director of Business Application Development, NetworkIP

Founded in 1998, NetworkIP is the innovator and leader in providing prepaid services to the telecommunications industry. NetworkIP provides a carrier-grade platform, as well as products and services that enable its cus-tomers to offer telephone calling cards, audio conferencing, and other prepaid services on a turn-key basis. The company’s customers include major carriers, telecom service pro-viders, distributors, resellers, CLECs, ILECs, ISPs, and publishers.

Customers rely heavily on access to the data in NetworkIP’s call detail records (CDRs) to make business decisions such as calling program rate changes. NetworkIP answers this need with its award-winning Integrated Connection Solution (ICS) platform. Using the ICS application, customers can mine the CDRs to analyze their traffic patterns, monitor and forecast their profitability, and perform other analyses.

Customers loved the application. But as NetworkIP’s business evolved, its custom-ers became savvier and more data-hungry. They started requesting reports that Stephan Broquie, director of business application development, couldn’t easily support with the summary tables he and his team had built. In short, the ICS had become a victim of its own success.

Broquie explained: “Our customers’ focus used to be mostly on what happened last week and last month. Today, customers want to know things over a long period of time. They want to look at trends and at things that happened over the last 12 months, and to be able to compare this year with last year. Most of our queries have only been able to accom-modate a date range of 90 days. And, within

a 90-day date range, the system will provide a response within a minute or so. This clearly wasn’t good enough.”

Customer demands were outpacing the application. Broquie and his team needed to provide a solution that would let custom-ers query the raw CDRs for any period of time. It would have to store at least two years’ worth of CDRs—about 1.2 billion records, each containing approximately 200 pieces of information—and deliver responses in 10 seconds or fewer for 90 percent of queries.

NetworkIP selected the Vertica Analytic Data-base, a high-performance, column-oriented RDBMS that runs on industry-standard, Linux-based hardware. Because of its speed, the Vertica database lets NetworkIP avoid working with summary or aggregate data, which improves accuracy, reduces DBA time, and allows NetworkIP and its customers to do more granular analysis.

“Vertica gives us near-real-time access to data,” said Broquie. “ICS Reports include data that may be only 30 minutes old—instead of a day old. Formerly, I couldn’t provide our customers any information for today until tomorrow, because our summa-rization process took place at night in batch. Vertica’s trickle loading capability enables data to flow into the system on a 24/7 basis so customers can quickly evaluate the effects of calling plan changes and readjust them accordingly—cycles which can now happen several times per day.”

The company is also seeing big performance advantages with internal use. For example, it has cut the time to perform a critical monthly cost analysis of toll-free traffic from 12 hours (using MySQL and summary tables) to 10 seconds (using Vertica). NetworkIP also analyzes call data in near real time, making routing decisions based on complex trade-offs to deliver the best customer experience at the lowest cost.

“We spent most of last year creating a new data mining center with a reporting engine that is very flexible and allows us to

create new reports very quickly,” Broquie explained. “What I didn’t have until now was a database engine that could support this type of flexible reporting.”

Vertica will also save money for NetworkIP in hardware and administration over the long term. NetworkIP is running on a four-node cluster of Dell 2950 servers. Each server has two quad-core CPUs with 16 GB of RAM and 1.2 TB of storage across four hard drives. To scale database performance and storage, Broquie and his team can just add inexpen-sive, off-the-shelf servers.

“The bottom line is that Vertica is solving problems. It is solving our current problems and it will allow us to launch a new genera-tion of applications that will help our business grow,” concluded Broquie.

For a free white paper on this topic, click hereand choose the title “Optimizing DBMS Architectures for Next-Generation Data Warehousing.” For more information about Vertica Systems, Inc., click here.

The Solution at a GlanceThe Customer: NetworkIP (www.networkip.net)

The Industry: Telecommunications

The Application: Data warehouse and Web-based BI application for analyzing CDRs

The Benefits:• Queries up to 1,000 times faster

• Eliminates the need for aggregate data and enables faster, more granular analysis

• Allows the company to cost-effec-tively store and query two years’ worth of CDRs

• Provides near-real-time analysis

• Reduces network cost analysis query time from 12 hours to 10 seconds; enables daily cost adjust-ments versus monthly

• Provides the ability to create new reports in days instead of weeks



http://www.networkip.net



Six Ways to Transform

the Economics of

Data WarehousingBy David Menninger Vice President of Product Management and Marketing, Vertica Systems, Inc.

For more than a decade, IT organiza-tions have been plagued by high data warehousing costs, with millions of dollars spent annually on specialized, high-end hardware and DBA personnel overhead for performance tuning. The root cause: data warehouse database management software that was designed 20 or 30 years ago to handle write-intensive OLTP workloads, not query-intensive analytic workloads.

Although state of the art for so many years, those OLTP DBMSs were always the wrong tool for the job of data warehousing. This has become more apparent—and more costly—as the amount of data that companies need to analyze and the number of people who need to analyze it have skyrocketed. Over time, these costs and missed opportunities to serve the business upset the economics of the data warehousing and greatly diminished its return on investment (ROI).

Verizon, Mozilla, Comcast, JP Morgan Chase, and dozens of other companies have imple-mented a new generation of data warehouses that are more economical, make data centers “greener,” and most important, enable the business to make data-driven decisions at more levels and on more fronts so they can out-innovate and out-execute competitors.

how to achieve speed, simplicity, and dramatic savings, tooUse a DBMS built from the ground up to handle large-scale data analysis workloads for many concurrent users. The following innovations have enabled customers to manage terabytes of data faster, more reliably, and more economically:

1. Blazing speed on commodity hardware. You don’t need costly “big iron” or spe-cialized data warehouse hardware to get great performance. Columnar data storage provides answers to queries 50 to 200 times faster than traditional data-bases while running on “green” grids of inexpensive, off-the-shelf servers.

2. Compression lowers storage costs. Most data warehouses are 5 to 20 times larger than the amount of data loaded into them, due to indexes and other auxiliary structures designed to improve perfor-mance. With columnar data structures, storage is often 4 to 15 times smaller than the amount of data loaded, due to aggressive compression. This dramati-cally lowers storage costs and further improves performance.

3. no DBmS “tax.” Licensing should be based on the amount of data stored, not on the type or amount of hardware on which the database runs. Deploy on 1 server or 100, and unless the data volume rises above the license limit, you can change your data warehouse hard-ware without having to change your license.

4. Free replication and high availability. When you are managing terabytes of data, licensing should allow you to repli-cate data without limit (or added fees) to ensure high performance and high avail-ability. In addition, there should be no extra costs for development, testing, or staging copies of the database.

5. Eliminate “rip and replace” upgrades. As data volumes and BI users rise, data warehouses often outgrow the hardware on which they were deployed, resulting in expensive “rip and replace” upgrades. A shared-nothing MPP architecture enables a data warehouse to scale “out” by adding inexpensive servers to the cluster to handle the additional load.

6. Lower maintenance costs. You should not need a legion of DBAs to tune perfor-mance. Configuration, database design, optimization, failover, and recovery should be automated, lowering DBA costs and speeding up delivery of solutions to the business.

For a free white paper on this topic, click hereand choose the title “Optimizing DBMS Architectures for Next-Generation Data Warehousing.” For more information about Vertica Systems, Inc., click here.






Monolith Serves SaaS

BI to the Quick-Serve

Restaurant IndustryCommentary by Bruce Belvin CEO, Monolith

Monolith Software Services, headquartered in Charleston, SC, provides software and services to the Quick-Serve Restaurant (QSR) industry. The company brings powerful and cost-effective solutions to restaurant owners and operators by combining state-of-the-industry open source technologies with a product philosophy that lets customers lever-age existing investments in hardware and other technology infrastructure.

Monolith’s suite of proven tools enables com-panies—typically those operating multiple restaurants under multiple brands—to more effectively track and manage restaurant per-formance at a cost significantly below that of its competitors.

maintaining the growth curveMonolith’s early success and reputation for extensive restaurant industry expertise enabled rapid growth in an industry filled with tough competition. As its Above-Store Monitoring offering was adopted by larger companies, Monolith needed to upgrade the solution. Above-Store Monitoring is a BI tool offered online in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model.

Among Monolith’s requirements for a viable solution, support for multi-tenancy, in which a single instance of software serves multiple client organizations, was critical. “The nature of SaaS dictates that you have one imple-mentation serving many different companies,” said Bruce Belvin, CEO of Monolith. That meant every application or infrastructure software component in the solution stack had to accommodate this need.

“Our solution lets owners consolidate, sepa-rate, and analyze their store performance along a lot of dimensions—geography, prod-uct type, product grouping, and a range

of demographics,” said Belvin. “So the technology had to let people access things according to their current need.”

a preference for open sourceTo create a competitive, robust, and highly appealing SaaS solution, the Monolith team decided to continue its reliance on open source software components. The QSR industry’s low margins require that operators seek cost-effective solutions. Licensing and other costs for some BI and ETL solutions can be prohibitive, and Monolith eliminated some candidates for this reason alone.

The proposed solution stack was founded on Linux and, for the data warehouse, the MySQL database platform. The warehouse would be fed using specialized restaurant data polling software developed in-house, as well as Talend’s open source enterprise-grade ETL, Talend Integration Suite. The analysis and reporting solution selected by Monolith is the Jaspersoft Business Intel-ligence Suite.

“We chose Jaspersoft and Talend for a couple of key reasons,” said Belvin. “They could do everything we needed them to do. The teams were a good fit. The pricing model was ideal. And they gave us the best assurance we heard anywhere that they would help us implement the multi-tenancy features we need.”

“The combination of Talend’s code generator and of the use of industry standards makes Talend incredibly portable and versatile. We were able to convert all our in-house code as well as incorporate some new data sources (fairly complex processing) into Talend integration processes in just a few months,” Belvin clarified. “Coupled with Jaspersoft’s full range of BI functionality—its modern user interface, self-service dashboarding,

ad hoc queries, and flexible analytics—the combination was a perfect fit and saved us countless developer hours.”

The fully implemented SaaS solution now serves more than 3,500 end users in more than 60 ownership organizations. Data is polled daily from more than 2,000 individual restaurants.

The solution has proved a good fit with Monolith’s go-to-market strategy. “Staying open source throughout the stack has let us keep our cost model where we want,” said Belvin. “Our potential buyers are small business owners who might be choosing between our solution and fuel for their boat or motor home for the next year. Because we have to compete on this emotional level, being able to go fast and price aggressively gives us a real competitive advantage.”

For a free white paper on this topic, click here and choose the title “Open Sesame: Why Open Source BI, Data Integration, and Data Warehousing Solutions are Gaining in Acceptance.” For more information about Talend, click here.

c a s e s t u Dy

“Staying open source throughout

the stack has let us keep our cost

model where we want.” Bruce Belvin CEO, Monolith






BI in the Cloud:

Getting StartedBy Andrew Lampitt Director of Business Development, Jaspersoft

For data warehouse and business intelligence architects seeking to deploy more effective BI solutions at less cost, cloud-based BI can help—especially for temporary, unpredict-able, prototype, and proof of concept projects. Implemented correctly, cloud-based BI eliminates the need to fund or find new infra-structure or consume scarce data warehouse resources. For successful BI in the cloud, a number of preferred practices are emerging:

First, stack the deck. Every BI solution, cloud based or not, requires a number of components: reporting and/or analytics, ETL, database, and the tools to manage these components as well as the underlying com-puting infrastructure. Carefully choose each of these elements.

Pick your projects. To get started in the cloud, choose an application that requires a data footprint of less than 1 TB (you can scale out later if your application catches on). Consider BI projects shelved due to resource constraints—you may identify that gem of a project with the potential to make a big busi-ness impact. Making a business case may become a nonissue, as your potential cost may not hit the bureaucracy threshold. In any case, you can accurately predict and control costs, which will be low, and your project can be retired as easily and affordably as it can be started.

Insist on open source BI. Aside from archi-tectural concerns and high costs, proprietary solutions can also lock you in—just when you’re trying to become more flexible. Pre-mium, “commercial open source” versions will give you the support, stability, and extra features you may need while remaining highly affordable. You can also use a free trial version to build a complete solution before you ever spend a penny on BI.

Look for a full range of BI functionality: ana-lytics, reporting and report serving, ad hoc query, and in-memory as well as disk-based analytic power. Your BI solution should be easy to administer and use, with a rich but easy-to-learn browser interface. It must be based on a modern architecture that clusters easily for high scalability and works seam-lessly in virtualized environments.

Stay with open source for ETL. To minimize the need for busy administrators, use an ETL solution offering a full graphical environment for handling data transformation and integra-tion tasks; scripting is too much trouble for do-it-quickly projects. Your ETL technology should scale well, leverage commodity hard-ware, play well in virtual environments, and offer a no-cost trial version.

Choose your database carefully. Depending upon your database size and query complex-ity, a traditional RDBMS may be suitable—or you may prefer a high-performance analytic engine that can ensure the query speed users require. Choose a column-oriented solution so you’re not wasting overhead retrieving entire rows; a massive parallel processing (MPP) architecture is a must for scalability and performance. Efficient, high-compression technology is also essential; ideally your choice will perform data opera-tions on compressed data. Administration should be browser based with a modern architecture that can scale linearly.

Keep management options open. Use a cloud management solution to provide for automatic scaling, monitoring, and notifications. Ide-ally, the solution will include preconfigured templates for push-button provisioning and launching the database, BI, and ETL com-ponents of your solution. Also, it should help you manage in and across multiple public and

private cloud environments, as well as your on-premises environment.

make it easy on yourself. Try to find all four components of your cloud-based BI stack preloaded and ready to use on one of the mainstream public clouds. This way, you can skip most of the administrative work and quickly get on with your proof of concept, prototype, or one-off analysis effort.

To see how these practices can be leveraged today, explore the Amazon EC2-based BI solu-tion created by Jaspersoft, Talend, Vertica, and Rightscale at www.rightscale.com/bi.

For a free white paper on this topic, click hereand choose the title “Open Source in the Business Intelligence Market: Crossing the Threshold to Mainstream Adoption.” For more information about Jaspersoft, click here.

Consider BI projects shelved due

to resource constraints—you may

identify that gem of a project

with the potential to make a big

business impact.

http://www.rightscale.com/bi





The Swiss Colony

Harnesses Web Data

for BICommentary by Mark Douma Director of Internet Marketing and Operations, The Swiss Colony

Founded in 1926 by Ray Kubly, The Swiss Colony is one of the world’s largest and most successful multi-title catalog compa-nies. Today, customers can purchase almost anything from The Swiss Colony’s line of catalogs, including jewelry, furniture, cook-ware, small appliances, bedding, electronics, and decorative items.

As could be expected, the company has developed a strong infrastructure to capture and report information generated by its cata-log business. However, when e-commerce grew as a channel, a new series of analytical requirements emerged. “We were doing a lot of our own analysis and building a lot of reports using SQL statements and then dumping data to Excel,” said Mark Douma, director of Inter-net marketing and operations. Moreover, the company was not fully satisfied with the data produced by its Web analytics applications.

“The Web analytics data was intriguing, but it stopped short of being truly actionable, unless you can really integrate it with your customer data warehouse,” Douma said. That kind of integration was not a core competency for most Web analytics vendors, he added.

About two years ago, the team explored how to better integrate its Web data with other customer data. As the first step, one of the technical analysts in Douma’s group developed an extraction, transformation, and load application using Perl to parse Web logs. That effort assured the team it could integrate data from its different chan-nels. For reporting in the proof of concept effort, The Swiss Colony decided to use the reporting module from Pentaho Corporation. Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition provides comprehensive reporting, OLAP analysis, dashboards, data integration, data mining, and a BI platform.

The Swiss Colony initially turned to Pentaho Reporting because the company didn’t want to invest in a traditional reporting product for a proof of concept project. However, as the team got more involved in the develop-ment process, it decided to use the Pentaho Data Integration module as well. “As we got more into the reporting, we realized that we wanted to tweak some of the data. We could have rewritten the ETL process in Perl, but it made more sense to use Pentaho,” Douma said. For the project, The Swiss Colony part-nered with OpenBI, a business intelligence consulting company and Pentaho partner that specializes in open source technology.

Douma felt very comfortable opting for a commercial open source solution. “Our goals aligned very well,” he said. ”They sell sup-port. They have a lot of incentive to provide great support, and they do.”

The company has integrated nearly 400 GB of data from its 12 e-commerce Web sites with the 1+ TB corporate data warehouse, and the application is in the process of being rolled out. The flexibility of the reporting and ability for users to generate their own reports is critical. “With the Web, there is a big dif-ference between what is trackable and what is measurable,” Douma said. “You have to determine what problem you are trying to solve and then solve it. For example, we can now look into our search data in ways that were not possible with any other tool. Our use of Pentaho has opened up new areas of analytics for us.”

As the project matures, The Swiss Colony anticipates using additional Pentaho mod-ules. “With OpenBI and Pentaho, we can use exactly what we need and they provide support. And the turnaround time for support

requests and feature enhancements is faster than I have experienced with commercial vendors,” Douma said. In the final analysis, the Pentaho implementation has allowed The Swiss Colony to move to the next level in its business intelligence and analytics capacity.

“With OpenBI and Pentaho, we have ramped up faster than we ever could have by our-selves,” Douma said.

For a free white paper on this topic, click hereand choose the title “Deploying Business Intelligence on Sun Fire X4275 Servers.” For more information about Pentaho Corporation, click here.

c a s e s t u Dy

“Pentaho’s BI suite and top-notch

professional support enabled us to

deliver a successful, high-value BI

solution at a much lower cost than

would have been possible with the

expensive, proprietary alternatives.” mark Douma Director of Internet Marketing and Operations, The Swiss Colony






Streamlining Selection

and Budgeting for

BI SuccessBy Jared Cornelius Manager of Product Marketing, Pentaho Corporation

Good news for prospective business intel-ligence buyers: The BI market has evolved significantly over the last few years, providing customers more ways to try before they buy. This streamlines the selection process and reduces the risk of making a bad technology decision. However, technology selection is just one ingredient in BI success. Beyond traditional rules about collaboration between business and IT, executive sponsorship, and other best practices, the structure of project budgets can play a key role in driving short- and long-term BI success.

prove it!To try out a given vendor’s BI software in your environment, you previously had to work through an arduous series of calls with a sales person, disclose lots of information about your project, and sign confidential-ity agreements. Customers are tired of this model, and it’s becoming easier than ever to get your hands on BI software for evaluation with little or no friction from some vendors.

Commercial open source vendors, such as Pentaho, frequently provide direct access to product downloads, documentation, and other technical resources. Some software-as-a-service (SaaS) BI vendors also provide “sandboxes” for product evaluation. Even the BI megavendors are beginning to recognize the need to provide greater access to poten-tial buyers.

Now, instead of making a critical BI technol-ogy decision based on some PowerPoint slides, a scripted demo, and a long request for proposal (RFP), you can find out yourself whether a given BI tool can meet your needs in your environment.

Speaking of RFPs, their role and importance in the selection process is changing as well. Tight IT budgets over the last 18 months are driving organizations to focus on their most important functional requirements rather than laundry listing features, from the imperative to the inconsequential, and seeing which vendors check the most boxes. It’s critical to understand your users’ functional require-ments, and it will save you a lot of time in the selection process if you separate the must-haves from the nice-to-haves. Do not allow a BI vendor to try to dictate your requirements based on their feature list.

pay as You go, and Budget for Bi successAnother thing that’s changing in BI—also accelerated by recent economic softness—is a shift away from traditional software licens-ing processes in which you prepay a large licensing fee to cover all foreseeable users and phases of your BI project. Vendors have driven this behavior with inflexible per-user pricing models and steep per-seat fees that force customers to buy BI capacity they won’t need for 2 years—just to get a good discount and bring the price down.

BI vendors like Pentaho are now offering models that provide more flexibility with options such as per-CPU or per-server pric-ing, concurrent user licensing, and others. These options are offered on a low-cost subscription basis that includes support and maintenance, so you don’t need to pay huge up-front fees to use the products. You can also expand your deployment to more users as your success grows without having to purchase user licenses every time your usage expands.

The other unfortunate implication of dis-count-driven overspending on BI software licenses is that it leaves you with a budget that’s not structured for success. Experi-enced BI practitioners know how important non-technology factors are in BI success. If you’ve spent your entire project budget on software, you won’t have the appropriate funding for technology services, business domain consulting, or end-user training. Picking the right tool is a hollow victory if you can’t effectively deploy it, drive usage, and achieve the business benefits that drove your BI project in the first place.

Learn more about how to drastically change the economics of BI at www.pentaho.com/low_cost_bi.

For a free white paper on this topic, click hereand choose the title “Deploying Business Intelligence on Sun Fire X4275 Servers.” For more information about Pentaho Corporation, click here.

Picking the right tool is a hollow

victory if you can’t effectively

deploy it, drive usage, and achieve

the business benefits that drove

your BI project in the first place.

http://www.pentaho.com/low_cost_bi





Metro Atlanta YMCA

Better Aligns Its

Mission, Member

Programs, and

Marketing Activities

with On-Demand

Business IntelligenceBy Barbara Lewis Director of Marketing, Birst

Founded in 1858, the Metro Atlanta YMCA helps children learn and grow, brings families closer, and encourages individual health and well-being. As part of this broader mission, the YMCA has become the largest child care provider in Atlanta, enriching the lives of more than 10,500 children every day.

wanted: Better Bi solutions to Better serve Ymca membersThe Metro Atlanta YMCA constantly strives to support its local communities. To create high impact programs and increase member enrollment and participation, the YMCA’s marketing team needed a better way to understand member needs.

Past attempts to promote its programs were overly time consuming and not as effective as the team wanted. The YMCA tried com-bining income statements and budgets with the member database to summarize trends, create marketing strategies, and predict outcomes. Employees and volunteers spent valuable time pulling pivot tables from Excel spreadsheets.

“Before Birst, we spent more time compiling accurate data than interpreting data,” said Betsy Lenahan, chief marketing officer for Metro Atlanta YMCA. “We created a seasonal menu like a restaurant and showed our whole list to as many people as we could to see where there was a good match between what we were good at, what it would cost

for us to deliver the experience, and what people wanted and felt they were willing to pay. It was a complicated, time- and resource-consuming process. Our volunteers told us we needed better BI tools. We agreed and started searching.”

more than pretty pie chartsAfter comparing a variety of BI solutions, including those provided by Cognos and Oracle, Lenahan and her marketing team selected an on-demand business intelligence solution called Birst. “Cognos is still sitting in the package in the back,” said Lenahan. “We felt the time and expense of the data map-ping would slow us down and cost too much.

“I wasn’t looking for pretty pie charts showing what we already knew in spreadsheet form,” Lenahan said. “I wanted to see trends that would help me take immediate action—and I got just that.

“I also needed something that would require minimum IT involvement because their agenda is so full already. I don’t have a BI background, but with Birst’s on-demand solution I was able to get up and running with a trial in just a few hours. Since our first conversation, Birst has been focused on pro-viding what we needed quickly and at a very fair price.”

what gets measured, gets doneMetro Atlanta YMCA purchased Birst Groups and it was implemented within 30 days. Deployed across 28 branches, Birst helps the YMCA better align member programs and marketing activities with the organiza-tion’s goals. The YMCA’s new, multilevel

member support and engagement market-ing program is based on the demographics, tenure, and frequency of involvement of YMCA members.

“We’re now able to focus on solving needs within member households,” continued Lenahan. “I can think more strategically about clustering and reaching out to custom-ers in a way that’s meaningful for them. For example, we now know we have over 10,000 kids in elementary school and we’re finding new ways to enrich and support their lives. We have thousands of households with kids under 4, so we’re looking at what we can do to help parents raise preschoolers. I believe that what gets measured gets done. With Birst, we’re deepening our engagement with our members.”

For a free white paper on this topic, click here and choose the title “Why On-Demand BI?” For more information about Birst, click here.

c a s e s t u Dy

KEY SELECTION CRITERIA

• Easy to evaluate, purchase, and implement

• Affordable

• Requires minimal IT involvement

• Advanced analysis for identifying key trends

• Ability to export to other applications

“I wasn’t looking for pretty pie

charts showing what we already

knew in spreadsheet form. I wanted

to see trends that would help me

take immediate action—and I

got just that.” Betsy Lenahan Chief Marketing Officer, Metro Atlanta YMCA






Why On-Demand BI?

How this full-feature, low-cost approach to BI is increasingly chosen by savvy IT managers

By Brad Peters CEO, Birst

In a difficult economy, smart businesses are pursuing every opportunity to maximize performance while minimizing costs. Busi-ness intelligence solutions are in demand as companies seek to optimize efficiency, effec-tiveness, and their competitive edge. While investments in conventional on-premise BI solutions are impractical and unattractive right now, the allure of on-demand BI solu-tions has never been stronger.

On-demand BI solutions, which are hosted solutions accessed over the Internet, offer the benefits of traditional BI while improving the economic bottom line. These solutions provide powerful and flexible business insight but are faster, easier, and less costly than traditional “behind-the-firewall” solutions.

The business benefits of on-demand BI are compelling and real:

increased access, maximum resultsLower cost and higher ease of use get BI into the hands of those who can make the biggest impact. Conventional solutions tend to be expensive and IT resource intensive, limit-ing their availability to a handful of dedicated analysts. On-demand solutions are easier, less costly to deploy, and require little expertise to use. As a result, they are more accessible to business users throughout the organization.

faster roiA faster “time to value” allows for a quicker return on investment. On-demand BI solutions offer quick deployment and easy customization. Unlike traditional BI imple-mentations, which can take 12 to 18 months or longer, on-demand BI solutions can typi-cally be up and running in just a few weeks.

Ongoing maintenance and customization is also faster and easier. All software upgrades

and architecture changes are handled by the vendor and automatically delivered to the customer.

lower implementation and ongoing costsThere are limited up-front costs and IT resource requirements. On-demand BI pro-viders manage all of the back-end systems for their service, so customers are spared the hardware and setup costs associated with traditional BI solution deployment. Up-front costs for implementation are significantly less than traditional solutions.

Ongoing costs are also lower: On-demand BI vendors typically charge a subscription fee that provides a single price for use of the application, maintenance, and support.

scalabilityEasily scale from small to enterprise level. On-demand solutions are designed to support a large number of customers simultaneously with capacity to spare. This means any individual customer can quickly expand his or her on-demand solution by simply requesting a larger account size or more users.

flexibilityQuickly adapt to changing business needs. On-demand BI solutions can be updated easily, so business users can quickly add new reports and dashboards, data sources,

and analyses. With traditional BI, such changes could take weeks or months, involv-ing significant IT resources.

greater VisibilityEasily share data and reports, even out-side the firewall. On-demand applications are deployed over the Internet so users can easily share data with others, both within the company and with outside partners. In addi-tion, users can integrate data from multiple sources located anywhere, including other business units, or from suppliers and partners.

low risk, high rewardDue to these significant benefits, on-demand BI is likely to have a substantial impact on your bottom line. BI is becoming much more accessible, flexible, and affordable for every-one. On-demand technologies are making it worthwhile for any size organization—from small and midsize businesses to large enter-prises—to implement a BI solution that will lead to new insights and greater effective-ness throughout the business.

For a free white paper on this topic, click here and choose the title “Why On-Demand BI?” For more information about Birst, click here.

On-demand BI solutions, which

are hosted solutions accessed over

the Internet, offer the benefits of

traditional BI while improving the

economic bottom line.




f e at u r eTDWI research

TDWI research

ANALYTICAL TOOLS FOR BUSINESS ANALYSTS

By wayne w. eckerson

Businessanalystscanbenefitfromthreetypesofanalyticaltools:OLAP,visualdiscovery,andExcel-basedtools.Visualdiscoverytoolsarethenewestadditiontothebusinessanalysttoolbox.

1. OLAP TOOLS.Otherthanspreadsheetsanddesktopdatabases,OLAPtoolshavebeenpopularwithbusinessanalysts,especiallyfinancialanalysts,wholikebeingabletoslice/dicedatadimensionallyandnavigateupanddownorganizational,product,andaccounthierarchiesatthespeedofthought(whichmostOLAPtoolssupport).Fromabusinessperspective,OLAPtoolsmakeiteasytouncovertherootcausesofproblems,identifytrends,andcompareperformanceacrossgroups.

OLAPtoolsstoredatainmultidimensionaldatabasesorcubes,whicharelikespreadsheetsonsteroids—supportingmultipledimensionsinsteadofjusttwo.Onedownsideofthisapproachisthatthecubescontainonlysummaryinformation,becauseittakestoolongforOLAPdatabasestocalculatedatavaluesattheintersectionofeverydimensionineveryhierarchy.Vendorsofmultidimensionaldatabases—whichincludeOracle(Essbase),Microsoft(AnalysisServices),andSAP(BusinessWarehouse)—havemadegreatstridesinexpandingtheamountofdatathatcubescancontainbydynamicallycalculatingdatawithincubesandjoiningdataacrosscubes.Someofthesevendorshavealsomadeitpossibleforuserstoinputdatavaluestoperformplanning,budgeting,and“what-if”analyses.

Manyvendorsalsoprovidegraphicalclientstoolstoaccessthedatabases,althoughExcelisstillthepreferredOLAPclientinthefinancedepartment.SAP,forinstance,isworkingonanewOLAPclientcode-namedPioneerthatwillblendthebestofitsBusinessExplorer(BEx),anExcel-basedclientforSAPBWgearedtodataanalysts,andBusinessObjectsVoyager,agraphicalOLAPclientdesignedforBIprofessionals,accordingtoJohnMacGregor,productmanagerforVoyager.SAPhasjustintroducedSAPBusinessObjectsExplorer,whichallowsfordataexplorationontopoflargevolumesofdatausingthesearchparadigmandahighlyvisualuserinterface.

SomevendorshaveabandonedphysicalcubesanduseSQLtodynamicallycreatevirtualcubesfromrelationaldatabases.ThetwodominantvendorsofthisrelationalOLAP(orROLAP)approachareMicroStrategywithitsMicroStrategy

9product(whichembedsROLAPinaBIplatform)andOraclewithitsOracleBIExtendedEditionproduct,whichitinheritedfromSiebelAnalytics.AlthoughROLAPtoolscanaddressmuchlargervolumesofdatathanMOLAPproducts,theirqueryresponsetimesareslower.Toaddressthisproblem,ROLAPvendorsaremakingcreativeuseofcaches,64-bitoperatingsystems,andoptimizedandmulti-passSQLtoprovideconsistentlyfastqueryperformance.

2. VISUAL DISCOVERY TOOLS.Oneofthefastest-growingtoolsetsforbusinessanalystsarevisualdiscoverytools.Severalsponsorsofthisreportoffervisualdiscoverytools,includingADVIZORSolutions,TIBCO(whichsellsSpotfireProfessional),SAS(whichsellsSASJMP),andTableauSoftware.Thetoolsprovide“speedofthought”analysis,conformingtothewaybusinessanalystswanttoconsumeandinteractwithdata.Applicationsbuiltwithvisualdiscoverytoolsarepopularwithcasualusers,wholikethepoint-and-clickfilteringanddrill-downtodetail.

Versus BI tools.Unlikereportingtools,visualdiscoverytoolsprovidesub-secondresponsetimesforanyactiontakenagainstthedata(e.g.,filtering,drilling,calculating,sorting,ranking)becausetheystoredatainmemoryinsteadofremotedatabases(althoughsomecanquerydatabasesdynamicallyaswell).TheyarefastertodeploythanBItools,becausetheITdepartmentdoesn’tneedtocreateasemanticlayerorimplementspecifictypesofdatabaseschemas.Visualdiscoverytoolsalsocanbelessexpensive.Acustomercanpurchaseafewdesktoplicensesat$500to$1,000eachtogetstarted,thenaddaserverextensionlatersopoweruserscanpublishlive,interactiveviewstoothers.

Visualdiscoverytoolslinktablesthatmaynotperfectlymatch,eitheringranularityortablerelationships(e.g.,one-to-one,one-to-many,many-to-many),accordingtoDougCogswell,CEOofADVIZORSolutions.Theflexibilitytoassociatedataacrossmultipletablesmakesiteasytouseanattributeinonetabletofilterfieldsinmultipleothertablesonthefly,somethingthatcanbedifficulttodoinSQL.

Forexample,supposeauniversitywantstoinvitepotentialdonorsforanewfootball/lacrossecomplextoadinnerinNewYorkCity.WithoutITassistance,andinlessthan20minutes,aneventplannercanuseavisualdiscoverytooltoidentify34prospectsfromalistof94,000thatplayedbothfootballand


TDWI research

Tableau’sdrag-and-dropinterfaceprovidesmultidimensionalvisualizationsbydynamicallyqueryingrelationaldatabases,OLAPcubes,andenterprisedatawarehouses,includingTeradata.Theresultislive,interactivedashboardsandreportsthatcanbesharedviabrowser,workbook,andembeddinginWebapplications.

Versus spreadsheets.Unlikespreadsheets,visualdiscoverytoolsprovideanalystswithunboundedaccesstosizablevolumesofrawdata.A32-bitdesktopoperatingsystemwith2GBofRAMcancomfortablyholdsixtoeightmillionrowsofdata.A64-bitWindows2003servermachinewith16GBofRAMcanhold20–50millionrowsofdataand50concurrentuserswithoutperformancedegradation.Somecanholdmoredatabyshuttlinginfrequentlyuseddatatodisk.

Visualdiscoverytoolsalsoprovidemoresophisticated,interactivechartingandvisualizationthanspreadsheets.Usingamousetopointandclickanddraganddrop,analystscanquicklyidentifypatternsandoutliers,explorecausalrelationships,compareperformanceamonggroups,andgeneratetargetlistsorsegments.Infact,mostspeed-of-thoughtanalysisisdonevisually,notwithpivottablesorgrids.(Seethesidebar,“VisualAnalysisTechniques,”nextpage.)

Versus OLAP.UnlikemostOLAPtools,visualdiscoverytoolsfitthestructureofthequestionbeingaskedratherthanfittingtheanalysistothestructureofthedata,according

lacrosse(across-table,one-to-manyrelationship),liveinNewYork,NewJersey,orConnecticut,andhavegivenmorethan$10,000inthepastfiveyears(anothercross-table,one-to-manyrelationship).Monthslater,whentheuniversityreceivesthedonations,ananalystmightcreateastatisticalprofileofthebiggestgiversandrunitagainsttheentirealumnipopulationtoidentifyotherpotentialathleticfacilitydonors.(SeeFigure16.)

Visualdiscoverytoolsarequicklymovingupstream,fromdesktoptodepartmentalandenterpriseapplications.Mosthavebeefeduptheirauthoringandpublishingcapabilitiessoanalystscancreatehighlyinteractivedashboardapplicationsforcasualusers.Forexample,SpotfireProfessionalisaserver-based,enterpriseanalyticsplatformthatsupportsarangeoffunctionality—frominteractivereportsanddashboardstostatistics,datamining,dataintegration,andreal-timedatadelivery.

Thevendorsalsosupportinnovativevisualizationsanddataminingfunctions.Forexample,ADVIZORSolutionssupports15charttypes,includingstandardssuchaspie,bar,andlinecharts,aswellasmoreinnovativetypes,suchasscatterplots,heatmaps,timetables,dataconstellations,andparaboxes.SASJMPintegratesavastarrayofanalytics,includingregressions,clustering,choiceexperiments,andsoon.Manyvendorshavealsomovedbeyondnightlybatchloadstosupportdynamicdatadelivery.Forexample,

Visual discoVerY tools

Figure 16. Here, an event planner using a point-and-click visual discovery tool has identified 34 potential donors from a list of 94,000 and is now viewing the group’s characteristics, such as donor rating.


toWilliamSmith,principalofClaraview,adivisionofTeradata.Visualdiscoverytoolsdon’tneedanITpersontodesignadimensionaldatamodelbasedonrigiddimensionsandhierarchies.Asaresult,thetoolsaren’trestrictedtopredefinednavigationpathsandhierarchies.Inaddition,thetoolsusea“load-and-go”approachinwhichanalystsloadrawdatafrommultiplesourcesandsimplylinktablesalongcommonkeystogetaunifiedviewofthedataset.Thetoolstypicallyloadatomic-leveldata,notaggregateddataviaalengthycalculationprocess.Asaresult,mostvisualdiscoverytoolscanbedeployedinafewhoursordays,dependingonthecomplexityandcleanlinessofsourcedata.

Downsides.ABIpuristmightbequicktopointoutsomeofthedownsidesofvisualdiscoverytools,especiallywhenimplementedindependentlyofaBIplatformanddatawarehousingenvironment:(1)Theydon’taddressdataqualityissues,(2)theydon’tgeneratestandardreports,(3)thedatasetsarenotpersistentandmustberefreshedfromscratcheachtimethereisachange(althoughsomenowsupportdynamicupdatesordirectqueryconnections),(4)theydon’tjoinlargetables;theysimplylinktheminmemory,(5)theydon’tsupportdimensions,aggregations,hierarchies,orpredefinedcalculations,unlessadesignerspendstimeto

TDWI research

modeltheseconstructswithinthetool’smetadata(ifallowed),and(6)performancewilldegradeifallthedatacan’tfitinmemory.

Ofcourse,mostofthese“deficits”don’tbotherbusinessanalysts.Forexample,mostprefertoworkwithrawdata—defectsandall—ratherthanaggregatedorprecalculateddatafilteredthroughametadatalayer.Mostalsodon’twantthedatatochangeunderneaththemandprefertoworkwithsnapshotsratherthandynamicallychangingdata.Thetoolscanhelpanalystsperformrudimentaryqualitycontrolbecausetheymakeiteasytospotoutliers.

3. EXCEL-BASED ANALYTICAL TOOLS.AnotherimportanttoolsetforbusinessanalystsisExcel-basedanalyticaltools.BecausebusinessanalystsprimarilyuseExceltoperformthebulkoftheiranalyses,somevendorsbelievethatforcingthemtoadoptanewinterfaceisludicrous.“Ifyoucan’tbeatthem,jointhem”isacommonrefrain.

Excel plug-ins.Ofcourse,mostofthesevendorsarewellawareoftheproblemsthatExcelcreateswhenusedoutsideofamanagedBIenvironment.That’swhymostvendorsofferBItoolsinwhichExcelisthefront-endtoaBIserverofsome

VISUAL ANALYSIS TEChNIqUES

Visual discovery tools let users analyze data

visually by clicking on charts and visualizations

rather than manipulating tables and grids.

see Figure 17. common visual discovery

operations include:

• Drag a group or data element onto a

chart to display it

• Drag a slider or click on a chart to

filter data

• hover over a data point in a chart to

view its details

• Use the cursor to highlight data points

in a chart to create a new group

• click to drill down or across or filter data

• work with one table or many linked tables

in memory

Visual discoVerY tools

Figure 17. Visual discovery tools often resemble dashboards but are much more interactive. In the top image, a dashboard is filtered using checkboxes; in the lower image, every view is filtered by directly clicking one mark in one view.


TDWI research

OthervendorshavecreatedExcel-basedproductsthatrunonadesktopyetcanbemanagedinacentralizedfashion.Forinstance,Lyzasoftshippedadesktoptoolin2008gearedtobusinessanalyststhatgivesthemanExcel-likeinterfacetogather,analyze,andpresentdatafrommultiplesourcesusinganintuitivevisualdesigntool.Thetooltracestheanalyst’ssteps,capturingtheworkflowsinacentralrepositoryforreuseandauditing/monitoringbyanalystsandITadministrators,respectively.ModelSheetprovidesaWeb-basedmodelingenvironmenttocreateandmaintainspreadsheetmodels,deliverthemusingconventionalspreadsheets,andmanagechangesinacentralizedfashion.

Wayne W. Eckerson is the director of TDWI Research at The Data Warehousing Institute. He is an industry analyst and the author of Performance Dashboards: Measuring, Monitoring, and Managing Your Business (John Wiley & Sons, 2005). He can be reached at [email protected].

sort.EvenMicrosofthasrecognizedthisproblemandhasgraduallybegunofferingBI-friendlyversionsofExcel,suchasExcelServices(athin-clientversionofExcelthatworkswithSharePoint)andSQLServerTableServices(anExcelplug-inforusingdataminingfunctionsinAnalysisServices).

MostleadingBIvendors,suchasSAP,SAS,andMicroStrategy,currentlyofferMicrosoftOfficeplug-insthatletusersviewandinteractwithpredefinedBIreportsasMSOfficedocuments,suchasanExcelspreadsheet.Theplug-insmaintain“live”connectionstotheBIreportssousersalwaysviewthemostup-to-dateinformation.MostvisualdiscoverytoolsflipthatparadigmandsourcefromExcelratherthanpublishtoit.Tableau,forexample,enablesuserstoflipbackandforthbetweenthespreadsheetdataandTableau’svisualizationsofit.Excelisoneofthemorepopularsourcesofdataforvisualdiscoverytools.

Excel clients.Severalvendorshavegoneastepfurther,makingExcelafull-fledgedclienttotheirBIservers.ThisletsbusinessanalystscreatereportsnativelyinExcel(oranExcellook-alike)insteadofhavingtocreatethereportsintheBItoolandthenexportthemtoafileordownloadthemtoExcelviaasmartplug-in.

Forexample,severalvendorsuseExcelasaclienttoaccessoneormoreOLAPservers.XLCubedandMicrosoftrunExcelnativelyagainstMicrosoftAnalysisServices;SAP’sBExAnalyzerrunsagainstBusinessWarehouse;andApplix(nowownedbyIBMviaCognos)usesExceltoaccessTM1.Othervendorsprovidespreadsheet-basedaccesstorelationaldatabasesviaananalyticserver.Eiviaprovidesthin-clientaccesstoanExcel-likespreadsheetthatletsusersperformwhat-ifanalysesagainstalldimensionsandhierarchiesinadatawarehouse,whichisnotaneasytask!

This article was excerpted from the full, 28-page report, Beyond Reporting: Delivering Insights with Next-Generation Analytics. You can download this and other TDWI Research free of charge at www.tdwi.org/research/reportseries.

The report was sponsored by ADVIZOR Solutions, Inc., MicroStrategy, Oracle, SAP, SAS, Tableau Software, Teradata Corporation, and TIBCO Spotfire.

mailto:weckerson%40tdwi.org?subject=

http://www.tdwi.org/research/reportseries


b e s t p r a c t i c e s awa r D s

PREDICTIVE AnALyTICS

ArcARC is an airline-owned company that provides financial settlement solutions and data and analytical services to the travel industry. For years, travel agency fraud was identified at the physical travel agency location by performing an audit of paper coupons and weekly reports. It typically took two days to review the volumes of paperwork and prepare a report on findings drawn from patterns and trends from 13 weeks of data.

With the ARC industry data warehouse, along with the imple-mentation of predictive fraud models, ARC can now analyze 39 months of data in minutes to detect patterns and trends across an entire industry.

ARC’s advanced predictive models are flexible enough to meet changing business and industry needs. Curtailing fraud involves predictive modeling of real-time data; ticketing anomaly monitoring; scrubbing data for known fraud schemes; providing information for taking counter-measures; and creating and promoting best practices for the industry. ARC now responds, in near real time, to emerging scenarios and identified trends, rapidly adapting and adjusting its predictive models to meet and counter new challenges.

DATA GOVERnAnCE

bMO FinAnciAl grOupEstablished in 1817 as Bank of Montreal, BMO Financial Group is one of North America’s largest diversified financial services provid-ers. In 2004, the Bank’s Board of Directors approved a policy that declared information a strategic asset. The policy includes all infor-mation media: paper and electronic. Data warehouses, marts, and unstructured data repositories are all within scope.

The bank instituted a multi-year program to develop and institution-alize the roles, standards, and processes to support the policy. The governance program has focused on creating trust in the bank’s information through education and awareness; processes and sup-porting technology; monitoring and reporting; and emerging risk management. The program has evolved to become an ongoing department within the bank’s information management function with close ties to operational risk.

Defining great customer experience and meeting regulatory require-ments both demand accurate and timely information collected from around the bank. BMO has demonstrated increased information management maturity and is realizing the benefits of a taking a formal, holistic, and integrated approach to managing information.

TDWI’s Best Practices Awards recognize organiza-

tions for developing and implementing world-class

business intelligence and data warehousing solutions.

Here are summaries of the winning solutions for 2009.

For more information, visit www.tdwi.org/BPAwards.

Best Practices Awards 2009

http://www.tdwi.org/BPAwards



GOVERnmEnT AnD nOn-PROFIT

chArlOtte-Mecklenburg schOOlssolution sponsors: Mariner & Microsoft corporation

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools is a consolidated city-county school district that has been nationally recognized for academic achieve-ment and business innovation. The district, North Carolina’s second largest, has more than 137,000 students in pre-kindergarten through 12th grade, 19,000 employees, and 180 schools.

CMS decision making is guided by its Strategic Plan 2010: Edu-cating Students to Compete Locally, Nationally and Internationally. Among the plan goals was the creation of a Data Dashboard as requested by the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education. The Data Dashboard, built in collaboration with Mariner and Microsoft, was launched in the fall of 2008. It has provided an accessible visual interface that allows parents, school administrators, and citizens to monitor district progress on the plan’s goals. The Data Dashboard has increased the district’s transparency and credibility by making available in-depth information about schools and academic progress.

The Data Dashboard helps administrators and the public proactively monitor district performance on strategic plan goals, as well as a wide range of academic and operations indicators.

EnTERPRISE BI

FreescAle seMicOnductOrsolution sponsor: teradata corporation

Freescale Semiconductor designs and manufactures embedded semiconductors for the automotive, consumer, industrial, and net-working markets. Freescale launched an enterprisewide data and analytics platform to enable faster and more informed business decision making. A first for the semiconductor industry, this joint business and IT enterprise business intelligence (EBI) program combines factory, engineering, and business data into a single data warehouse, enabling cross-domain analytics. EBI-enabled new ana-lytic capabilities have cut business process cycle times from days to hours or even minutes.

Since going live in mid-2007, the EBI program has become the infor-mation and analytics backbone of Freescale’s business application programs. It has enabled the successful launch of reengineering initiatives in supply chain, manufacturing, customer service, qual-ity, and finance, and has improved yields, reduced customer quality incident-response times, improved sales and marketing’s pricing process, and consolidated financial data and reporting.

The EBI program has delivered significant business value by observing many best practices, including use of an enterprise data model, a consistent focus on providing end-to-end analytical capa-bilities, and effective leverage of ERP data for analytics.

BI/DW On A LImITED BUDGET

iMpAX lAbOrAtOries, inc.IMPAX Laboratories, Inc., a technology-based specialty phar-maceutical company, applies its formulation expertise and drug delivery technology to developing controlled-release and specialty generics as well as branded products.

IMPAX’s enterprisewide single data warehouse platform (SQL), single report tool (IBM-Cognos) integrated data from source ERP, operational systems, spreadsheets, and third-party data. The proj-ect was created to deliver one centrally located “version of the truth” and provide timely, accurate, and actionable information to all levels of the organization. It allows business users to modify existing reports and create new BI reports for themselves, saving an esti-mated 2,600 hours of labor monthly.

Portals or dashboards were key. The BI team asked mid- and upper-level managers for five key performance indicators; resulting dashboards delivered data relevant to each manager’s functional business area.

The implementation across an 800-employee company in four loca-tions—from business requirements gathering and data modeling to reporting and training—was successfully completed by a three-member BI team, with assistance from outside consultants.

RADICAL BI

ingersOll rAnd, industriAl technOlOgies sectOr

Ingersoll Rand Industrial Technologies Sector provides products, services, and solutions that enhance its customers’ energy effi-ciency, productivity, and operations. Products include complete compressed air systems, golf and utility vehicles, tools and pumps, as well as material and fluid handling systems and environmentally friendly microturbines.

ITS’s BI initiative began in response to impaired visibility and timeliness of information across discrete systems. BI was expected to radically accelerate the access and transparency of information across the globe. By having the flexibility to source data from multiple disparate legacy and strategic data sets, staff could focus on performance improvements days earlier rather than data collection.

Today, IR ITS has an enterprise BI solution that spans four geo-graphic regions, five market channels, eight disparate data sources, and 137 product categories. It includes analysis on pre-sales, order management, services, procurement, supply chain, and operations. The solution’s agility, breadth, and rapid implementation are proving invaluable given the volatility and turbidity in the current market. BI has reduced the time to benefit for both visibility and decisions.



mASTER DATA mAnAGEmEnT

nAtiOnAl instruMentssolution sponsor: initiate systeMs, inc.

National Instruments (NI) transforms how engineers and scientists design, prototype, and deploy systems for test, control, and embed-ded design applications.

NI’s customer-centric master data management platform (CDI hub) project addressed duplicate and disparate customer data. With-out a single, trusted, and complete view of its customers, NI was unable to deliver excellent technical support; NI employee produc-tivity was decreased; and the company could not fully understand its customers.

NI implemented Initiate Organization and Initiate Consumer from Initate Systems, Inc. Source system customer contact records are loaded into the CDI hub in near real time utilizing SOA. Initiate’s comparison algorithm identifies and links together duplicate cus-tomer contacts.

NI can now consistently deliver the correct level of service (techni-cal support) to its customers. Users now have a 360-degree view of each contact: leads, opportunities, quotes, orders, service requests, installed products, and notes, associated with all the duplicate contacts. The new internal search leverages Initiate’s probabilistic search and match capabilities to find contacts on the first try with 99 percent accuracy.

DASHBOARDS AnD SCORECARDS

rbc WeAlth MAnAgeMentsolution sponsor: birst

RBC Wealth Management, a wholly owned subsidiary of Royal Bank of Canada, is one of the nation’s largest full-service securities firms with more than 2,300 financial consultants and 5,000 employees.

RBC WM had been delivering a reporting and sales development tool to their field advisors, but delivered information was stale; was Excel-based (labor intensive); and reports had to be run manually.

RBC WM implemented the RBC Dashboard to provide greater vis-ibility to its business, customers, and revenue-growth opportunities. After a brief implementation period, financial advisors saw immedi-ate value in the information and positive business impact from the dashboard. Delivering the right information to the right people who can use it daily empowers its financial advisors and their clients.

RBC Dashboard has been live for over three years, exceeded its targets, and is now used by hundreds of financial advisors. RBC Dashboard has become a core operating platform that an ever-increasing user base considers essential to their success and profitability.

CUSTOmER InTELLIGEnCE

spOkAne teAchers credit uniOnEstablished in 1934, STCU is the Inland Northwest’s largest and most successful credit union. With more than $1 billion in assets, STCU is a full-service financial institution with more than 350 employees serving 80,000 members through 13 branch locations.

An ambition of every progressive retail financial institution is to pro-vide employees with the tools to help optimize members’ financial lives. By leveraging its data warehouse as the analytical engine behind a simple front-end programmed in-house, STCU is achiev-ing this objective with its “Conversation Engine” solution.

The tool studies each member’s individual portfolio of services and transaction behaviors, and identifies specific opportunities for members to (1) improve their rates or lower their fees by adjusting their product mix, (2) save time by adding member services that deliver greater convenience, (3) improve the quality of member data to bolster accuracy and security, or (4) recognize and celebrate the individual members. The tool’s radical simplicity was critical to its highly successful adoption in the company, and its rich source of information has been paramount to a service revolution for STCU.

EnTERPRISE DW

telenOr pAkistAnsolution sponsor: t-bird

Telenor Pakistan is the world’s seventh largest mobile operator, with 164 million mobile subscriptions in 13 countries. In just four years, the company has become the fastest-growing mobile operator in Pakistan.

The initial DW solution suffered from serious granularity and history restrictions. The BI team realized it was inadequate for Telenor Pak-istan’s long-term BI road map and market ambitions. Three months after launch, the team started to plan, design, and build a state-of-the-art, Teradata-based enterprisewide data warehouse.

The EDW is based on the Teradata Communication Logical Data Model; it integrates information from all major network and IT sources (13 months of call detail records, customer data, billing and payment information, customer interactions, and more) to build a 360-degree view around the customer—a challenge for a com-pany with 20 million subscribers and huge traffic volumes.

Multiple applications are running on the EDW (campaign manage-ment, revenue assurance, Google Earth, dashboards, customer portals, etc.) to fully capitalize on this rich information resource and 360-degree customer view. This fully integrated EDW will be one of the key differentiating factors that will help the company to outperform and be a leading service provider in Pakistan’s dynamic telecom market.



OPERATIOnAL BI

ge rAil servicesGE Rail Services (GERS), a North American transportation and leasing service provider, provides repair and maintenance services for leased railcars.

GERS uses a variety of IT operational systems and interfaces with external partners and industry service providers. One of its most powerful BI applications to date is Shoptimizer, a real-time opera-tional analytics tool that finds the optimal shop to provide railcar repairs subject to over 20 constraints and dynamic parameters.

Prior to Shoptimizer, repair shop selections were made by customer service representatives without critical knowledge of shop capac-ity, shop capability, railcar movement patterns, and overall railcar condition. Railcars could wait weeks for repair or be transferred to another shop. Now, Shoptimizer calculates shop capacity dynami-cally and allocates capacity based on railcar type and predicted work requirements. It displays other recent repairs and predicts the full scope of likely required repairs based on just one defect reported by the customer. It also predicts the probable destination for the railcar upon completion. In addition, constraints are applied for international moves and overall transit distance and route proba-bilities. These features are critical in eliminating unnecessary GERS shipping and leasing costs.

tdwi thanKs this Year’s panel of expert Judges:

• Sid Adelman, Principal, Sid Adelman & Associates

• John Bair, CTO, LaunchPoint

• Steve Dine, President, Datasource Consulting, LLC

• Jill Dyché, CBIP, Partner, Baseline Consulting

• Wayne Eckerson, Director, TDWI Research, TDWI

• Dan Evans, CBIP, Sr. Group Manager, BI Practice, Avanade, Inc.

• Jonathan G. Geiger, CBIP, Executive Vice President, Intelligent Solutions, Inc.

• Patty Haines, President, Chimney Rock Information Solutions

• Claudia Imhoff, President, Intelligent Solutions, Inc.

• Krish Krishnan, President, Sixth Sense Advisors Inc.

• Mike Lampa, Sr. Manager, Enterprise BI, Dell, Inc.

• Evan Levy, Partner, Baseline Consulting

• Tony Lopykinski, Managing Principal, Maven Advisors, LLC

• Justin Manes, Consultant

• Joyce Norris-Montanari, CBIP, President, DBTech Solutions, Inc.

• Mark Peco, CBIP, Partner, InQvis

• Laura Reeves, Principal, StarSoft Solutions

• Philip Russom, Senior Manager, TDWI Research, TDWI

• Todd Saunders, EVP Customer Solutions, CONNECT: The Knowledge Network

• Hugh Watson, Professor of MIS, University of Georgia

• Nancy Williams, CBIP, Vice President, DecisionPath Consulting

• Steve Williams, President, DecisionPath Consulting

• Barb Wixom, Associate Professor, University of Virginia


s o l u t i o n p r o V i D e r s

Solution Providers

The following solution provid-

ers have shared their enterprise

business intelligence stories and

successes, technology insights,

and the lessons they have learned

for What Works in Enterprise

Business Intelligence.

acxiom corporation

611 East Third Street Little Rock, AR 72201

1.888.3Acxiom

[email protected] www.acxiom.com

A global leader in interactive marketing services, Acxiom connects clients with their customers through deep consumer insight that enables effective and profitable market-ing initiatives and business decisions. Our consultative approach spans multiple indus-tries and incorporates decades of experience in consumer data and analytics, information technology, data integration, and consult-ing solutions for effective marketing across digital, Internet, e-mail, mobile, and direct mail channels. Founded in 1969, Acxiom is headquartered in Little Rock, Arkansas, and serves clients around the world from locations in the United States, Europe, and the Asia-Pacific. For more information about Acxiom, visit www.acxiom.com.

Birst

153 Kearny Street, 3rd Floor San Francisco, CA 94108

415.644.5400 Fax: 415.762.4115

[email protected] www.birst.com

Birst™ is the leading provider of on-demand business intelligence solutions. Birst brings the benefits of fact-based decision making to a broad audience by making it affordable, fast, and easy to use. Birst is designed to support users of all sizes—from individuals to groups and entire companies—so that everyone can benefit from greater insight into their business. By easily integrating information from key systems, like CRM, operational, and financial systems, execu-tives and individual contributors using Birst can have the information they need to do their jobs more effectively.

mailto:info%40acxiom.com?subject=

http://www.acxiom.com

http://www.acxiom.com

mailto:info%40birst.com?subject=

http://www.birst.com



Jaspersoft

539 Bryant Street, Suite 100 San Francisco, CA 94107

415.348.2300 Toll Free: 888.399.2199 Fax: 415.281.1987

www.jaspersoft.com

Jaspersoft’s open source business intel-ligence suite is the world’s most widely used BI software, with nearly 9 million total downloads worldwide and more than 10,000 commercial customers in 96 countries. The company’s Jaspersoft Business Intelligence Suite provides a Web-based, open, and modular approach to the evolving business intelligence needs of the enterprise. Jaspersoft’s software is rapidly updated by a community of more than 98,000 registered members working on more than 350 proj-ects, which represents the world’s largest business intelligence community. More infor-mation is available at www.jaspersoft.com and www.jasperforge.org.

information Builders

Two Penn Plaza New York, NY 10121

Toll Free: 1.800.969.INFO International: 212.736.4433 Fax: 212.967.6406

[email protected] www.informationbuilders.com

Information Builders’ award-winning combi-nation of business intelligence and enterprise integration software has been providing innovative solutions to more than 12,000 customers for over 30 years. WebFOCUS is the world’s most widely utilized business intelligence platform, providing the security, scalability, and flexibility needed at every level of global extended enterprises. Its sim-plicity helps create executive, analytical, and operational applications that reach dozens to millions of users. Our iWay Software suite provides state-of-the-art integration compo-nents that address all SOA, application, data, and information management requirements. Together, these products give Information Builders’ customers the ability to grow and innovate according to their needs.

esri

380 New York Street Redlands, CA 92373

909.793.2853, ext. 2366 Fax: 909.307.3046

[email protected] www.esri.com

Since 1969, ESRI has been giving customers around the world the power to think and plan geographically. The market leader in geographic information systems (GIS), ESRI software is used in more than 300,000 organizations worldwide, including each of the 200 largest cities in the United States, most national governments, more than two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies, and more than 7,000 colleges and universities. ESRI applications, running on more than one million desktops and thousands of Web and enterprise servers, are the foundation for the world’s mapping and spatial analysis. To learn how to see your data in a new way, visit us at www.esri.com.

http://www.jaspersoft.com

http://www.jaspersoft.com

http://www.jasperforge.org

mailto:askinfo%40informationbuilders.com?subject=

http://www.informationbuilders.com

mailto:strammell%40esri.com?subject=

http://www.esri.com

http://www.esri.com



microstrategy

1861 International Drive McLean, VA 22102

703.848.8600 Fax: 703.848.8610

[email protected] www.microstrategy.com

MicroStrategy, a global leader in business intelligence and performance management technology, provides reporting, analysis, and monitoring software that enables lead-ing organizations to make better business decisions every day. Designed to support the most demanding business intelligence applications, MicroStrategy is ideal for enterprisewide BI standardization. Compa-nies choose MicroStrategy for its advanced technical capabilities, sophisticated analyt-ics, and superior data and user scalability. MicroStrategy is built from a single archi-tectural foundation, making it the most integrated and efficient BI architecture available. With an intuitive Web interface, MicroStrategy enables business users to seamlessly access enterprise data for enhanced decision making. More information about MicroStrategy is available at www.microstrategy.com.

pentaho corporation

5950 Hazeltine National Drive, Suite 340 Orlando, FL 32822

407.812.OPEN (6736) Fax: 646.573.2545

[email protected] www.pentaho.com

Pentaho Corporation is the commercial open source alternative for business intelligence. Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition provides comprehensive reporting, OLAP analysis, dashboards, data integration/ETL, data mining, and a BI platform, making it the world’s leading and most widely deployed commercial open source BI suite. Pentaho provides support, services, and product enhancements via an annual subscription that can lower total cost of ownership by 90 percent compared to traditional, proprietary BI offerings. Founded in 2004 as the pioneer in open source BI, Pentaho’s products have been downloaded more than five million times, with production deployments ranging from small organizations to The Global 2000. Learn more at www.pentaho.com.

QlikView

150 North Radnor Chester Road, Suite E220 Radnor, PA 19063

484.685.0600 Fax: 610.975.5987

[email protected] www.qlikview.com

QlikTech is the world’s fastest-growing business intelligence company. Its flagship QlikView product delivers instant business answers, enabling users to easily explore their data without limits. Unlike traditional BI, QlikView delivers immediate value with pay-back measured in days or weeks rather than months, years, or not at all. It is the only BI offering that can be deployed on prem-ise, in the cloud, or on a laptop or mobile device—from a single user to the largest global enterprise.

Through QlikView’s disruptive, in-memory associative approach, business users have experienced unprecedented success and satisfaction, backed by its unique 30-day money-back guarantee. QlikTech has more than 12,000 customers in 95 countries and more than 800 partners worldwide. For more information, please visit www.qlikview.com.

mailto:info%40microstrategy.com?subject=

http://www.microstrategy.com

http://www.microstrategy.com

mailto:info%40pentaho.com?subject=

http://www.pentaho.com

http://www.pentaho.com

mailto:infous%40qlikview.com?subject=

http://www.qlikview.com

http://www.qlikview.com



Vertica systems, inc.

8 Federal Street Billerica, MA 01821

978.600.1000 Fax: 978.600.1001

[email protected] www.vertica.com

Vertica Systems is the market innovator for high-performance analytic database management systems that run on industry-standard hardware. Vertica has developed column-oriented analytic database tech-nology with an MPP architecture that lets companies of any size store and query very large databases orders of magnitude faster and more affordably than other solutions. The technology’s unmatched speed, scalabil-ity, flexibility and ease of use helps Vertica’s 100+ customers, including JP Morgan Chase, Verizon, Mozilla, Comcast, Level(3) Communications, and Vonage, capitalize on business opportunities in real time. Vertica is headquartered in Billerica, MA. For more information, visit the company’s Web site at www.vertica.com.

talend

105 Fremont Avenue, Suite F Los Altos, CA 94022

714.786.8140 Fax: 714.786.8139

[email protected] www.talend.com

Talend is the recognized market leader in open source data integration. After three years of intense research and development investment and with solid financial backing from leading investment firms, Talend revo-lutionized the world of data integration when it released the first version of Talend Open Studio in 2006.

Talend’s solutions are used primarily for inte-gration between operational systems, as well as for ETL (extract, transform, and load) for business intelligence and data warehousing, migration, and data quality management.

Unlike proprietary, closed solutions, which can only be afforded by the largest and wealthiest organizations, Talend makes data integration solutions available to organiza-tions of all sizes and for all integration needs.

mailto:info%40vertica.com?subject=

http://www.vertica.com

http://www.vertica.com

mailto:info%40talend.com?subject=

http://www.talend.com

BI Training Solutions:As Close as Your Conference Room

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in today’s economy. So TDWI Onsite Education brings the

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It’s just that easy. Your location, our instructors, your team.

Contact Yvonne Baho at 978.582.7105 or [email protected] for more information.www.tdwi.org/onsite

TDWI_OnsiteAd_2009_r4.indd 1 4/29/09 12:58 PM


a b o u t t D w i

TDWI, a division of 1105 media,

Inc., is the premier provider of

in-depth, high-quality education

and research in the business intel-

ligence and data warehousing

industry. TDWI is a comprehensive

resource for industry information

and professional development

opportunities. TDWI sponsors and

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ences, regional seminars, onsite

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m e m b e r s h i p

www.tdwi.org/membership

In a challenging and ever-changing busi-ness intelligence and data warehousing environment, TDWI Membership offers a cost-effective solution for maintaining your competitive edge. TDWI will provide you with a comprehensive and constantly growing selection of industry research, news and infor-mation, online resources, and peer networking opportunities developed exclusively for its Members. TDWI offers a cost-effective way to keep your entire team current on the latest trends and technologies. TDWI’s Team Mem-bership program provides significant discounts to organizations that register individuals as TDWI Team Members.

w o r l D c o n f e r e n c e s

www.tdwi.org/conferences

TDWI World Conferences provide a unique opportunity to learn from world-class instruc-tors, participate in one-on-one sessions with industry gurus, peruse hype-free exhibits, and network with peers. Each six-day conference features a wide range of content that can help business intelligence and data warehousing professionals deploy and harness business intelligence on an enterprisewide scale.

s e m i n a r s e r i e s

www.tdwi.org/seminars

TDWI Seminars offer a broad range of courses focused on the skills and techniques at the heart of successful business intelligence and data warehousing implementations. The small class sizes and unique format of TDWI Seminars provide a high-impact learning experience with significant student-teacher interactivity. TDWI Seminars are offered at locations throughout the United States and Canada.

c h a p t e r s

www.tdwi.org/chapters

TDWI sponsors chapters in regions throughout the world to foster education and networking at the local level among business intelligence and data warehousing professionals. Chapter meetings are open to any BI/DW professional. Please visit our Web site to find a local chapter in your area.

o n s i t e e D u c at i o n

www.tdwi.org/onsite

TDWI Onsite Education brings TDWI courses to customer sites and offers training for all experience levels. Everyone involved gains a common knowledge base and learns in sup-port of the same corporate objectives. Training can be tailored to meet specific business needs and can incorporate organization- specific information.

c e r t i f i e D b u s i n e s s i n t e l l i g e n c e p r o f e s s i o n a l ( c b i p )

www.tdwi.org/cbip

Convey your experience, knowledge, and expertise with a credential respected by employers and colleagues alike. CBIP is an exam-based certification program that tests industry knowledge, skills, and experience within five areas of specialization—providing the most meaningful and credible certification available in the industry.

w e b i n a r s e r i e s

www.tdwi.org/webinars

TDWI Webinars deliver unbiased information on pertinent issues in the business intel-ligence and data warehousing industry. Each live Webinar is roughly one hour in length and includes an interactive question-and-answer session following the presentation.

About TDWI

http://www.tdwi.org

http://www.tdwi.org/membership

http://www.tdwi.org/conferences

http://www.tdwi.org/seminars

http://www.tdwi.org/chapters

http://www.tdwi.org/onsite

http://www.tdwi.org/cbip

http://www.tdwi.org/webinars

TDWI Partner Members

These solution providers have

joined TDWI as special Partner

members and share TDWI’s strong

commitment to quality and content

in education and knowledge

transfer for business intelligence

and data warehousing.

http://www.tdwi.org/Publications/Partners/index.aspx

http://www.tdwi.org/Publications/Partners/index.aspx

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