UPS minimizes left-turns. Advanced route planning minimizes fuel consumption and accidents. An old story, but given new life with a recent InformationWeek interview with UPS CIO Dave Barnes (and a good example of delivering effectively on a strategic multi-year IT project).
Facebook’s community app platform. As BI vendors try to web-2.0 themselves, they will need to create communities — will they start turning to new platforms, such as Facebook’s? From the look at the applications available so far, no — but over 25s are their fastest-growing segment, and there’s at least some interest in the enterprise space: “interesting… harder to build than consumer… maybe ability to better integrate applications some down the line”. Disclosure: I only signed up two weeks ago…
MySQL going public? How much is open-source worth in the BI space? This will presumably be eagerly watched by open-source BI vendors such as Pentaho. I’m a big fan of iStockPhoto for cheap, royalty-free images for presentations, and it turns out that they use Pentaho and MySQL.
SAP’s Performance Management Blog. Nenshad Bardoliwalla was at Hyperion before joining SAP. His blog gives insight into how the acquisition of Outlooksoft fits into SAP’s strategy (with link to SAP’s CPM presentation in May), and talks about Pilot’s web 2.0 approach to strategy (see previous posting.) And some inevitable Oracle/Hyperion bashing.
Microsoft PerformancePoint a tough sell? Stephen Sawyer writes that Office, Excel and confusion shaping up as PerformancePoint Server’s biggest competition.
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2 responses to “BI Briefs: UPS, Facebook, MySQL, SAP, Microsoft”
[…] UPS drivers used to decide what route to take, now the system just tells them where to go, without any left-hand turns […]
Update: Article on Zoho integrating with Facebook: “As the first office application on Facebook, it’s a small step toward bringing traditional social networking sites credibility in the workplace. But it still needs work.”