SAP Visual Intelligence
SAP Visual Intelligence 1.0 (internal project name “Hilo”) will generally available tomorrow*. It is the latest innovation in the SAP BusinessObjects Explorer solution family. It is a desktop-based visualization and data manipulation solution that is designed to complement (not replace) the existing Explorer products. After downloading and installing the application (approximately 150 MB), users can connect to SAP HANA sources and start data... [Read More...]
Are You Ready For SAP’s Big Data Processing Framework?
Steve Lucas, EVP of Database and Technology, unveiled SAP’s Big Data Processing Framework at the keynote session of SAP Insider BI2012 in Orlando earlier this year. I was honored to have the opportunity to be on stage with Steve for the first time, and we were ably assisted by Fred Samson. In the recorded session below, we discuss what “big data” means, why you should care, and how SAP is making it easy to Ingest, Store, Process, and Present... [Read More...]
BI Past, Present, Future — Interview with TEC
Note: the following post is republished with permission from Technology Evaluation Center’s excellent blog. It is a part of a series of interviews by Jorge Garcia on trends in the analytic industry. It is hard to imagine that organizations like SAP or former Business Objects (BO)—now a division of SAP—were once start-up companies. Nowadays on the business intelligence (BI) scene it’s almost impossible to avoid BusinessObjects. Like... [Read More...]
Fashion + Analytics + Social = The Perfect Ensemble
I’ll be presenting at Decoded Fashion next week at the Lincoln Center in New York: “The first Fashion and Technology Forum Series connecting the world’s best startups and most noteworthy technologies to the Fashion, Beauty and Retail industries to accelerate innovation and increase the bottom line.” It promises to be fascinating, with a wide range of sessions on different aspects of using technology in the fashion business, including... [Read More...]
Concrete Examples of How Health Intelligence Saves Lives
An excellent article in Health Data Management by Greg Gillespie gives some wonderful examples of the power of analytics to improve health outcomes, looking at data from some of the 2,000+ clinical trials that Cleveland Clinic is currently running. I strongly encourage you to read the original article (also available in pdf format), but here are summaries of the three use cases highlighted: hand-washing analytics, central-line analytics, and blood-transfusion... [Read More...]
Presentation: How Big Data Shapes Business Results
Steve Lucas and Timo Elliott onstage at SAP BI 2012, Las Vegas. Image courtesy of Matthias Wild At this week’s SAP BI2012 conference, I had the honor of co-presenting the keynote, “How Big Data Shapes Business Results” with Steve Lucas, SAP EVP Business Analytics, Database & Technology, and with demo support from Fred Samson. The big theme of the last year has been big data. There was a lot of innovation in many areas, but big data has... [Read More...]
Just Add Analytics – Even to Toothbrushes
I recently saw a presentation mentioning that there “are more mobile phones than toothbrushes in the world”, and according to some research by the 60 second marketer, it seems that in all likelihood, this is absolutely true: My next thought was “why not combine the two?!”. Here’s my quick mockup of an iPhone case of the future: But as usual, truth is stranger than fiction. Just when you think you’ve seen every use of analytics possible,... [Read More...]
Business Intelligence Best Practice Twitter #SAPChat
I will be the host of the next #SAPChat, an interactive panel discussion carried out entirely over Twitter. It’s scheduled for 9am PST / 18:00 CET on Wednesday February 29th, and the subject will be “Business Intelligence Best Practice”. We will be discussing how best to implement business intelligence projects successfully, with an emphasis on people-focused hints and tips rather than technical discussions. And with only 140 characters available,... [Read More...]
2012: The Year Analytics Means Business
The real trend this year is not the technology. It’s about helping business people make better decisions, and actually change the way companies do business. Analytics has always been about transforming business, but the recent huge changes in analytic technology have created interesting new opportunities for business innovation. Most organizations are now starting to understand the technical opportunities, but many struggle to apply those new opportunities... [Read More...]
BI and The Limitations of Human Cognition in Den Bosch
I presented at my first conference of the year last week, the Heliview Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing 2012 conference in ‘s Hertogenbosch, Netherlands. The first keynote, by Erasmus scholar Dr. Roeland Dietvorst, was about “Performance Management in the Brain”, and a subject close to my heart: the (severe) limitations we evolved apes have when trying to make rational decisions. He illustrated his point with examples of great research... [Read More...]
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