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Quick Takes Week of June 22

June 26, 2009

June 26: Larry Zagata at MiPro Consulting offers a commentary at the company’s Unfiltered blog on the deeper use of business intelligence. All too often, he says, BI projects are established in response to requests from end users in order to solve a specific problem or to smooth a given process. The far more prudent approach is to embed BI within business processes. In that way, a perpetual feedback loop is created in which the task the BI intelligence is performing is continually refined. This ensures that the information that is gathered is usable on an ongoing basis.

June 25: This is a nice column by Microsoft regional sales manager Rob Busch in BizTimes.com, which serves Milwaukee and southeastern Wisconsin. Busch points to four activities – “software plus service,” unified communications, virtualization and business intelligence – as tools that can help companies survive the bad economy. He provides a good overview of BI’s benefits. It’s nice to see the category’s value being positioned in simple and clear ways in general business publications.

June 24: The case for Web analytics tools is persuasively made by Cindy Waxer at CNNMoney. The first half of the story is a mini case study of IndustryWizard, an online corporate network that used Lyris HQ Web Analytics to re-imagine its email newsletter. The company was able to almost double clickthrough rates and increase the time spent on the site from 4:31 to 9:17. Waxer also discusses Google Analytics, Piwik and Omniture.

June 23: Here are how some sites handled the news late last week that LucidEra had shut down: Seeking Alpha suggested that the shutdown, while unfortunately, is a natural part of the evolution of the BI/analytic software-as-a-service segment. CNET’s Dave Rosenberg confirmed the news and offered an analysis by Birst CEO Brad Peters. Jessica Tsai at destinationCRM posted analysis from ThinkStrategies’ Managing Director Jeff Kaplan. We spoke to Lucidera Co-Founder and CMO Scott Rubin last month and to Kaplan in April.

June 22: This ITWorld piece by Derek Slater adds an interesting twist to the idea that all roads lead to security. The premise is that security departments are positioned to use their tools and know-how for tasks that are far broader than pure security. Examples are as nebulous—but important—as “brand protection” and as granular and mundane as helping to choose off-site meeting venues. In the longer term, Slater says, security staffs may help improve business processes. The connection to BI is clear: Moving beyond the bits and bytes of pure security requires security folks to have access to a great percentage of the data a company collects.

–Carl Weinschenk

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Podcast: The Converging Worlds of BI and SaaS

April 7, 2009

Jeff Kaplan has run the consultancy THINKstrategies since 2001. He says that the emergence of software-as-a-service (and its young sibling, platform-as-a-service) is a having a huge impact on the business intelligence market.

Kaplan maintains a blog at the THINKstrategies site. Following the podcast is the part of a late March posting that deals with BI and SaaS. The rest of the post can be found here.

Listen to the Podcast:

Is Business Intelligence a Viable SaaS Business? Forrester Research issued a new report suggesting, “The SaaS BI space is largely unproven.” This came as news to a myriad of SaaS-oriented BI vendors listed on the SaaS Showplace. I’ve known and done business with many of these companies for the past three years. As I stated in 2007, and in numerous whitepapers and webcasts, SaaS-based BI solutions are perfectly designed to respond to the escalating pressures on companies of all sizes to better leverage corporate and customer data to improve their performance. Not only are they more economical and easier to deploy, but they are better architected to permit multi-user access across increasingly dispersed organizations. That is why the rising demand SaaS BI vendors are experiencing disputes Forrester’s findings.

 

 

 

 

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