Business Objects has just released the updated Xcelsius 2008 after a long beta program. What are the top new features of this exciting data visualization and dashboard tool? Let’s find out the top 10:
Copy-Paste- Productivity is bound to increase through collaborative development now as it is possible to copy-paste components between XLF files.
Filtered Rows - Selector components like List box and combo-box now include a new option in the insert-options list. This is the “Filtered rows” option, automatically removing duplicates. In the previous version, this worked only with the Filter component.t
SaaS has taken off in a big way in the past few years. And BI has not been lagging behind. For leading vendors like BOBJ (an SAP company) or Cognos (an IBM company), it’s going to be close to 2 years now since they started their SaaS BI.
What exactly are the advantages of SaaS over the traditional approach?
Benefits are aplenty, from zero costs of purchasing hardware, hiring of key IT personnel like system administrators and DBAs, to minimal implementation and maintenance costs. With CRM being made affordable to SME (small and medium-sized enterprises) by salesforce.com (note the huge success of its AppExchange), and the fact that large enterprise adoption of BI was complete, meant that the only scope for future growth in BI would come from upgrades of platforms (analogous to Microsoft’s Windows operating system - think of BOBJ upgrading from 6.5 to XI) or from expansion in the SME space with better offerings.
Last time I talked about the trends in the BI space. Let’s look into one of those trends - M&As and how it is shaping BI as we know it.
A recent BusinessWeek article claimed the end of the best-of-breed approach to BI with the demise of the major pure-play BI vendors like BOBJ now owned by SAP thanks to a friendly takeover or Hyperion acquired by Oracle or the latest - IBM’s acquisition of Cognos. While it is true that some of the major players have been acquired by the bigger businesses, there is no reason as to why the mid-size companies should go out of business.
By definition Business Intelligence (BI) has been about making decisions based on information obtained from meaningful data. At one point of time we had terms like decision support systems (DSS) to define technology which has finally evolved into BI as we know it now. Or has it? Somewhere along the line, we became entangled in the technology aspect of it and with all the buzzwords of data warehousing, data mining, dimensional modeling, data marts, **CRM **and **SCM **it is not difficult to see why. It is only of late that the focus has moved back to the “decision making” aspect of BI rather than focusing on the technology per se.
This blog is going to have a series of posts about trends and recent happenings in the BI space, some theory on data warehousing and BI - classical as well as newer approaches. It will also feature some tutorials on some technologies and implementations I have worked with as well as useful links.
