marketing/PR

Stalking the why: selling visual analysis

October 21, 2009

How do you show the value of visual analysis to business people? Dan Murray can show it in demos, but he keeps looking for the “magic dust” that explains in a snap. He sees visual analysis as a key part of low-cost business intelligence at small- and medium-sized organizations — and he’s set out with [...]

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BI buying decisions: the rule of thumb

September 11, 2009

A longtime salesperson of BI products says the average decision to buy relies on these factors: • About 50 percent of the decision — whether to buy any BI at all or which product to buy — is based on expected ROI. This part always comes first. • About 20 percent is about career. Someone [...]

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InfoWorld goes “moo!” over Jaspersoft

September 8, 2009

What’s “Bossie”? It’s InfoWorld’s acronym for “Best of Open Source Software” — a prize it granted Jaspersoft last week. But “Bossie” is also a cow’s name, and that’s a clue to what’s going on here. InfoWorld added letters — “ie” to make “Bossie” — so I retraced by eliminating them. On a hunch, I first [...]

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“Press here”: timeless cartoon

May 19, 2009

This cartoon by Timo Elliott is good. It was funny in 2007, and it’s funny today.

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Sleight of hand

May 18, 2009

“We’re confusing folks who can benefit from this. It’s sleight of hand.” – On drifting BI terminology by a keen observer who’d rather not be named

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That’s not BI

May 14, 2009

A pair of officials in double-breasted suits arrived at a New York school for a meeting with the principal. On their way to his office, a young student excitedly offered to demonstrate his skill at computer programming. In a story told in 1984 by Nicholas Negroponte, I heard echoes of today’s business intelligence industry. The [...]

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What’s an SaaS vendor to do?

May 6, 2009

SaaS vendors who also sell on-premises versions have a tricky little problem, Claudia Imhoff says. How do they sell both at the same time? A few people from SaaS vendors who attended Claudia’s Tuesday session mentioned two strategies: One is to separate the sales forces, with one selling the on-premises version, and another selling the [...]

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Less than meets the ear

April 8, 2009

Last week, SAS Institute did what few other rearrangers of jargon have done: They got attention — in the way fashion hounds do. They’d like to replace “business intelligence” with “business analytics.” Why? Because “business intelligence is not “where the future is.” Last year’s styles are never next year’s. Sooner or later, all clothes, cars [...]

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Pulling on the root of bad business writing

March 23, 2009

In his fine weblog Startup Diaries, David Silverman takes a good stab at answering the eternal question: Why is most business writing so bad? He writes, for example, “I blame this on an educational system that rewards length over clarity. When you get tick marks for bulls’ eyes — and no demerits for the number [...]

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Rejecting stale tech marketing words

March 12, 2009

Read a pile of technology marketing and you quickly assume that you alone despise many of the words you keep hearing. They’re words like optimize, leverage, synergy, and utilize. People in this industry don’t really talk like that, do they? Many don’t, at least not in private, and they don’t tweet like that, either. One [...]

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