The company that gave us HANA is at it again with a pair of new business intelligence product offerings that could reshape how business data is analyzed. Over the last few years SAP showed us what could be analyzed (millions of rows of big data) and when it could be analyzed (at speeds measured in seconds and milliseconds).
Read moreBusiness Intelligence (BI), as we know it today, is an industry that’s been on a wild ride for the last 25 years. It has evolved from the basic idea of a top-down methodology to store data and provide the means for better decision making to full-scale, enterprise-wide, mission-critical systems used by every corporation in the world. BI and its older brother, Data Warehouse (DW), have become necessary components for doing business in the 21st century.
Read moreListening to customers and then developing tools that perfectly solve their business problems may seem like common sense for BI software makers, but it hasn’t always been the case. In the not-so-distant past, new releases were based purely on mysterious in-house choices made by product development teams. The new features added were mostly what they perceived to be the needs of users or were requested by a single deep-pocketed customer. New releases always came with some new functionality, but they also left customers craving more. The product development team just didn’t know it. There has always been a major disconnect between users and the vendor’s software development team. Thankfully, that model is changing.
Read moreIn the world of enterprise business software, there are four titans that stand above the rest. I like to call them the “Big Four of BI” — SAP, Microsoft, IBM and Oracle. Most people see these powerful vendors as only competitors, which of course they are. But they’re far from enemies. In fact, did you know they are actually partners? The partnerships between these software giants are strategic alliances and bring increased ROI to users when their products integrate easily.
Read moreCyber-attacks are a painful reality in today’s ultra-connected world of gadgets, global positioning and gigabytes of everything. It’s very likely that if you’re reading this, you’ve been a victim of some form of cybercrime in the last 12 months. Whether from an attack on your health insurance provider, a mass credit card hack, or intrusion of your favorite big box retailer — malicious invasions come in many different forms and we’re all susceptible. This is especially true for high-profile organizations and mainstream corporations. Who can forget the near constant coverage of the Sony Pictures hack in 2014 that resulted in thousands of confidential articles and emails exposed to the world?
Read more