2010 Football World Cup Business Intelligence

There are only three matches left in this year’s World Cup, and the competition is wide open after a series of upsets have knocked out some of the big international players, including the winners of the last three world cup tournaments: Italy, France, and Brazil. To enhance your enjoyment of the game – or simply to see a real-life example of what you can do with business intelligence technology, check out the suite of tools offered as part of... [Read More...]

Season’s Greetings with Xcelsius!

Here is a season’s greetings dashboard that shows off some of the latest features of Xcelsius 2008 SP3. Tweet the color you’d like to see in the garland. The dashboard updates every 30 seconds. How long Twitter search takes to recognize the tweet can be pretty variable – but most of the time, it’s less than a minute. How it works: I set up an Excel XML Connection that grabs a feed from Twitter using the search term “#twitterlights”. The... [Read More...]

A Big Cryptographic Boost for On-Demand BI and Extranets?

A recent cryptographic breakthrough made by Craig Gentry that potentially has huge consequences for business intelligence. One of the big problems plaguing the use of on-demand business intelligence has been concerns over data security. As Forbes and others have reported, the new techniques could reassure companies who want to take benefit of cloud computing for analysis (at a cost of massive computing power). As IBM Research VP Charles Lickel notes... [Read More...]

Test Your Decision-Making Skills!

I sometimes sit in a café called “La Terrace” near my home in Paris. It’s next to the Metro stop Ecole Militaire, which is one of the closest stops to the Eiffel Tower. So each time I have my coffee and croissant, some of the 7 million or so visitors to the tower each year come out of the metro and consult this map of the 7th Arrondissement to try to help them figure out which way to go. Here’s a close up – the Eiffel Tower is at the top... [Read More...]

End of a LucidEra?

According to the company web site, on-demand BI vendor LucidEra was formed: “to shake up the stagnant business intelligence industry and traditional approaches to corporate information access and analysis by delivering business visibility as an on-demand service.” And LucidEra has indeed been innovative, developing deep expertise in the area of Sales Pipeline analytics with a 48h Pipeline Healthcheck service that in the words of Phil Wainwright,... [Read More...]

Economist Research: Decision-Making in Turbulent Times

Technology is indeed the answer! Or at least, that’s what is suggested by a new report from the Economist Intelligence Unit, Staying the course? Technology decision-making in turbulent times. The study shows that the current climate provides a good opportunity to drive through major initiatives, that business leaders are looking to technology as in important instrument to prepare their firms for recovery, and that the key importance of better information... [Read More...]

Here Comes Web 3.0: Wolfram|Alpha Launches Today

Wikipedia defines Web 3.0 as the “semantic web”, “making it possible for the web to understand and satisfy the requests of people and machines to use the web content.” We’ll get a step closer to that vision when Wolfram|Alpha (or maybe just “WolframAlpha” – their web site uses both) launches later today.   Wolfram|Alpha is a product from Wolfram Research (famous for its beautiful Mathematica software) that has been generating... [Read More...]

The Case for Independent Business Intelligence

The time is ripe to discuss the future of independent BI, after the purchase of Hyperion by Oracle and continued speculation on the future of the remaining vendors. Will there be a ”domino effect”? A commentary in Business Week sums up the “domino effect” opinion (more prevalent among financial analysts than industry analysts) that the deal will lead to the purchase of the remaining large independent players. Here are... [Read More...]