By Antone Gonsalves

The economic recession will force many organization to cut IT costs, but the one area where belt tightening can lead to better efficiency is in business intelligence.

The value of BI becomes more apparent in tough economic climates, when smart information and knowledge management professionals use the technology as a corporate asset to continue to survive, compete and thrive, according to a recent report by Forrester Research.

So rather than across the board cuts, Forrester recommends a more targeted approach of BI consolidation and optimization, as well as an evaluation to see if lower-cost technology alternatives will do. “These approaches can enable you to do more with less, leading to a win-win scenario that contribute to both your top and bottom lines,” said the report, entitled “BI Belt Tightening In A Tough Economic Climate” and written by analyst Boris Evelson.

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By Ken Lewis

Just over a year after Europe’s biggest business software firm purchased French company, Business Objects, SAP has announced that its business intelligence software revenue across Australia and New Zealand has grown by 24 per cent year on year.

SAP says it is succeeding in convincing customers to switch to SAP BusinessObjects solutions, signing deals with more than a dozen new customers in Australia and New Zealand (ANZ), while also expanding sales to existing SAP and Business Objects customers.

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By James Kobielus

The economic outlook isn’t all gloom and doom. Bright spots remain in some substantial IT growth sectors–most important, in the sprawling business intelligence (BI) market.

In the past month, we’ve seen solid financials–in some cases, record growth and profitability numbers–from leading BI vendors, including SAP (Business Objects), IBM (Cognos), and privately held SAS Institute. Oracle and Microsoft also seem to be doing fairly well with BI-related revenues. Even vendors that only participate in BI environments as a provider of data warehousing (DW) solutions (e.g., Sybase) or data integration (DI) middleware (e.g., Informatica) are reporting outstanding financials all the way through year-end 2008. That includes the period just passed when the world economy began to spiral wildly out of control.

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Call it a case of odd timing: just one day after Microsoft Corp. announced its first-ever companywide lay-offs, its Business Intelligence group announced a lay off and reshuffling of its own. It’s PerformancePoint Server, a performance management (PM) tool that Redmond released 14 months ago, was moved into Microsoft’s Office SharePoint Server group.

Officials say there’s no connection — that the reshuffling had, in fact, been planned for months. They concede that the timing, coming on the heels of Microsoft’s first-ever layoffs (and just one day after Redmond reported earnings that fell short of Wall Street’s expectations), is nonetheless unfortunate.

“Part of our regular strategy reviews at Microsoft is looking at what we’re doing relative to what the market is doing — how people are purchasing software, how they’re using it,” says Kristina Kerr, lead product manager with Microsoft’s Business Intelligence product management group.

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Business Objects, an SAP company (NYSE: SAP) and the world’s leading provider of solutions that optimize business performance, announced it has been positioned by Gartner, Inc. in the leaders quadrant of the “Magic Quadrant for Corporate Performance Management (CPM) Suites”¹ report.

According to Gartner, “Leaders’ performances excel in the CPM suite market segment. They can deliver breadth and depth of CPM suite functionality, as well as provide enterprisewide implementations to support a broad CPM strategy. Leaders successfully articulate a business proposition that resonates with buyers, and are supported by the viability and operational capability to deliver on a global basis.”

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This intensive five-day workshop gives the information and hands-on experience needed to deliver state-of-the-art, integrated reporting and analytics solutions using Microsoft Business Intelligence.

For further information please visit the Training page or click here to view the course outline.

Sealanes is a family owned and operated food services, distribution and ship supply business based in Western Australia.  Since its inception in 1922 the business has become the only of its kind in Australia which supplies groceries to the local food service market, provides offshore supplies to rigs around Australia, distributes seafood and is involved in the retail sale of seafood and provisioning of ships with groceries and technical goods in ports around Australia.

Project Overview

CSG implemented Business Objects Edge as a Business Intelligence solution for Sealanes.  The organisation required a solution which would allow quick and reliable access to critical information needed for executive management decision making and one which would enable them to have a real time understanding of business performance.

Client Requirements

Sealanes’ existing ERP system offered them little flexibility in relation to reporting and trend analysis.  They had no ability to access information quickly and no dashboarding capability.  The CFO required a system which would:

• Provide easy to analyse dashboards to give a full view of business performance  at any time;
• Provide quick and reliable access to key information needed for executive decision making;
• Enable in depth analysis and tracking of business performance;
• Easily integrate with any ERP system

Our Solution

CSG identified Business Objects Edge as the most appropriate business intelligence solution for Sealanes.  The implementation resulted in the opening up of access to information stored within Sealanes’ legacy ERP system enabling the business to quickly monitor performance without having to spend huge amounts of time manipulating Excel spreadsheets.  The Xcelsius dashboards give the executive management team a full view of business performance without any software training at all and have enabled them to make better decisions which are based on analysis of accurate and reliable information.  With plans to implement a new ERP system in subsequent years, Business Objects also gives Sealanes the flexibility to integrate with any ERP system which they decide to choose in the future.

Business Benefits

Through implementing Business Objects Edge, Sealanes has gained:

• The ability to understand the business in more structured terms;
• Quick and reliable access to critical information leading to better, more informed decision making;
• Real time tracking and understanding of business performance;
• Improved ability to analyse data and business trends

From the Sealanes CFO

“In the future we will be able to confidently identify when we need to run relevant marketing campaigns to increase customer activity or how the cost of Sealanes’ products affects customer purchasing.  A perfect example of this was from analysing the cost of our salmon sales.  In the past if a product was not generating enough revenue for Sealanes we would increase the cost.

After analysing how these cost increases affected the customers buying patterns we could see that this was decreasing the amount of Salmon sales significantly.   We found that by reducing the cost dramatically this reduced the amount of profit per sale, but the overall amount of profit for ALL salmon sales, in that month, were much higher.  As the CFO, I am always cautious about spending money without understanding the value it will provide to the business.  With Business Objects Edge, I have already seen extreme value provided back to Sealanes and would advise any company to at least explore how to manage their information more successfully.”

Crystal Reports 2008 is a powerful, dynamic, actionable reporting solution that helps you design, explore, visualize, and deliver reports via the web or embedded in enterprise applications. It enables end users to consume reports with stunning visualizations, conduct on-report business modeling, and execute decisions instantly from the report itself – reducing dependency on IT and developer resources.

Key benefits provided by Crystal Reports 2008:

• Empower end users to explore reports interactively
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• Enjoy comprehensive report deployment options and an improved report designer.

For further sales information contact Lee.Unthank@csg.com.au.
For training information contact Caroline.Smith@csg.com.au.

BusinessObjects XI 3.1 connects your users together by removing boundaries for sharing information. Our suite of innovative functionality benefits all types of users – analysts, casual users, managers, and executives – and transcends company walls to customers and partners. In addition to an interactive user experience that brings your users together, BusinessObjects XI 3.1 offers everyone an easy-to-use-and-adopt solution that simplifies the way users share insights. BusinessObjects XI 3.1 is open and works within any organization’s environment, whether that is an SAP or Oracle application or a Teradata database.

For further sales information contact Lee.Unthank@csg.com.au.
For training information contact Caroline.Smith@csg.com.au.