BI industry

Lessons from LucidEra on BI for the mid-market

August 3, 2009

Here are two tips from LucidEra veterans Ken Rudin and Darren Cunningham about BI in the mid-market: Forget “freemium” — the new term for free service leading to paid service — and be wary of users’ ability to analyze data. Rudin co-founded the company and in June saw it fold for lack of renewed funding [...]

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Tableau conference stats

July 20, 2009

Attendance at the Tableau Customer Conference in Seattle, which runs today through Thursday, will be above 300 — versus 187 last year. Tableau Software VP of marketing Elissa Fink says that of the 300, 112 have signed up for Tableau certification training. It’s impressive.

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Storage goes node to node

June 25, 2009

The bad guys do it. Malware and terrorists distribute themselves, hide, and wait for a call from Mother. Now one company is doing the same with backup storage. As the bad guys have known for a long time, the strategy is cheap and reliable. “It’s disruptive as hell” for the data storage industry, says up-to-now [...]

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Recession reactions: hunkerers and builders

June 11, 2009

There are the hunkerers and the builders. Those are the two basic reactions to the recession that Jill Dychè observes. She’s a principal down at Baseline Consulting, and she reports seeing more builders. The hunkerers “are using the economy as an excuse for a fair bit of inertia,” she emails. But the builders are using [...]

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Recession: value of alert messaging resonates

June 4, 2009

KnowledgeSync automates the kind of routine tasks that skilled staff disdain: issuing simple invoices, inquiry followups, low-inventory alerts, etc. It’s a BI specialty that cuts cost fast. VP of sales and marketing Don Farber says that, considering the economy, he’s pleased with just a five- to seven-percent dip in sales this year. The benefits are [...]

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Recession: Government workers say one thing’s for sure

June 3, 2009

Members of the “large government organization” my secret source addressed on Thursday are sure of one thing: One day, someone with authority is going to walk in and demand records, complete records, on where how they used the Troubled Asset Relief Program money. These visitors will ask to see where money went and how it [...]

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BI terms that mean something

May 28, 2009

What a radical idea: break business intelligence down by the types of work to be done — financial intelligence, human-resources intelligence, risk intelligence, etc. — instead of by the technology — data warehousing, data integration, dashboards, etc. “If I put my feet in the shoes of a business person listening to someone pitching ‘business intelligence,’ [...]

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Also “not BI”

May 27, 2009

From a reader who identified with “That’s not BI“: His product has performed BI functions for many years, though it still goes unacknowledged except by users. “Sometimes the looking down the nose from the cognoscenti gets to you.”

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Just-in-time training at the desktop

May 26, 2009

There’s a new way to learn BI skills — at the desktop. eLearningCurve launched May 15. Former TDWI education director Dave Wells directs the program.

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A new game for BI

May 19, 2009

BI might be best made into a game. Tableau Software, for example, doesn’t call its tool a game, of course. You don’t sell business software that way. But to many of its users, it might as well be a game. Tableau looks like more fun than any other computer game I know of. We’ve seen [...]

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