Business Intelligence

China is becoming less of Outsourcing threat to India

I truly believe that it is all in the mindsets!  The systemic model creates the mindsets and they create further opportunities.  Chinese system has created a phenomenal manufacturing engine.  The mindsets in that country are tuned to domination in that area.  They have the brights for dominating the services market.. but the mindsets may be absent... the mindsets that created the Silicon Valley and continues to drive innovation from that small corner of the world.  I am sure even New York can provide all those resources.. but can it provide the mindsets?  Probably no.  Same with China vs India in the services.

As language, attrition and intellectual property (IP) protection continue to haunt the multinationals, the myth associated with China as key challenger to India for offshore supremacy is diminishing gradually....

As language, attrition and intellectual property (IP) protection continue to haunt the multinationals, the myth associated with China as key challenger to India for offshore supremacy is diminishing gradually.

A recent Forrester report ‘China’s Diminishing Offshore Role’ stated that while China’s percentage of global delivery model (GDM) resources for the top services firms such as Accenture has dropped, there has been far greater investment into India and the Philipines.

Based on interviews with a mix of 10 MNCs, Indian, Chinese and Japanese services firms as well as government officials the report states that “while Chinese services firms are supporting a vibrant local IT market, China has not achieved the offshore growth that people expected".

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Evolution of BI

Here is an interesting interview with Howard Dresner - who helped build the BI practice for Gartner.  I think his replies are very insightful....

Gartner credits him for taking business intelligence (BI) from an esoteric “backwater” to a mainstream and highly valued research area. Howard Dresner, who spent 13 years at Gartner and built up the analyst firm’s BI practice, says his vision in 1989 was to establish information democracy—getting information in the hands of all constituents. At that time, eyebrows were raised in management circles with respect to the various pros and cons of this new hypothesis, says the chief strategy officer at Hyperion Solutions Corp. He sees analytics as simply applied business intelligence. “And, this is what I call BI with a purpose,” he adds. In a recent interview with Sudhir Chowdhary, Dresner informs that the next high ground is business performance management (BPM), which is what BI becomes when it evolves.

How has the BI market developed and where is it going?

Increasingly, business intelligence is becoming a feature of business performance management. When I was at Gartner, I recognised that the market was changing—markets do this, they converge functionally and other wise. And this has been happening for the past couple of years now. Increasingly, performance management has become a very high priority especially for business people.

Traditionally, business intelligence has been more of a technology issue. In contrast to this, performance management is more of a business initiative that is being enabled by technology. And, it’s built on BI. You can’t do BPM without BI. So, BPM at this moment of time has a lot of energy surrounding it than BI.

Is BPM the next step to BI?

It’s the other way around. BPM is sort of absorbing BI. It is all about aligning people and process with a purpose. Typically, CIOs and CFOs are grappling with the same set of challenges: How well is your business performing today? What can you do to improve it? BPM delivers the visibility into their businesses that they need to answer these questions—and helps them do what has to be done to improve performance and successfully reach their goals. With BPM, they can collect, organise and analyse data—then distribute it throughout the enterprise using a rich, unified workspace that makes business performance management easier and more powerful than ever before.

Has BI evolved as you had envisaged way back in 1989?

Quite frankly, we have not made the progress I had expected. The only saving grace is that technology has advanced tremendously. It’s just much more usable and more sophisticated. The present BI products are much more evolved. Also, the hardware, software and the entire infrastructure have become much better from where we were in 1989. Who could have imagined scaling BI at an entire enterprise level at that time? But today, thanks to advancements in technology and architecture, one can scale BI to every user constituent.

As far as the impediments are concerned, enterprises are still fairly fragmented—they don’t always view BI as a strategic tool. Besides, BI implementations still tend to be deployed functionally or departmentally.

What should be the key points CIOs ought to keep in mind when adopting BI tools?

Having the right technology is only half the story. Getting people to use it is quite another matter. Hence, before embarking on their tech journey, the CEOs and CIOs have to first start understanding the priorities of the business and the mission of the business—because this is about technology supporting business, not just implementing tools. They ought to pick focused activities. This boils down to a basic reality: You’ve got to do things in as manageable a scope as you possibly can. Hence, implementing a competency centre, platform standardisation, and tool consolidation are all valuable things undertake. Also, BI or BPM is an ongoing process. It will not happen overnight. But, when you compare it to something like ERP, this is a cakewalk.

How can enterprises plan strategically for BI?

Enterprises need to organise for it and have a roadmap. They need to self assess and ask: where are we technologically? Where are we from a business perspective and where do we want to be and what will be the steps to getting there? You can also have a roadmap for BPM. So, it’s more of a journey, not a destination. Not having business intelligence and not having BPM puts enterprises at a significant disadvantage in today’s times. This is not just about technology; it’s just the enabler.

How does Hyperion plan to grow its market in India?

We are extremely strong in verticals like retail, banking and finance, manufacturing, telecom and public sector. At Hyperion and Oracle, we have a comprehensive set of solutions to address their needs.

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Longevity of High Growth Stocks!

So many Indian stocks are growing at a rate mushc faster than the Indian economy - in fact many times. The projections for these stocks growth rate are fantastic at times.. going into many decades. But, can a company - high growth one - keep growing at a multiple to the economy itself for ever?

NO!

Because otherwise it will become the economy itself!

So, the brakes to a company's growth is dependent on the growth of the economy itself. THAT is the reason why all the companies in an economy - who want high growth for a long time - should worry about the growth of the economy as well... because it is not the competition that will slow them down.. but the VERY environment they perform in!!

The bar to successful companies, therefore, is set by their own actions!

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News and Blog Roundup for Business Intelligence

SRC Announces Access to Market Information and Analysis for the ...
PR Newswire (press release) - New York,NY,USA
With this option retailers benefit from a customized Geographic Business Intelligence (GBI) solution that includes corporate data assets, sales performance ...
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Business Intelligence Across Industries.
4Hoteliers - Wanchai,Hong Kong
As business intelligence is gathered efficiently and used proficiently, decisions can be made to benefit your own business organization, ...
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Accuro Healthcare Solutions Inc. Announces Agreement with Tenet ...
PR Newswire (press release) - New York,NY,USA
"One of the benefits providers realize by working with Accuro is that our revenue management and business intelligence divisions work in concert to leverage ...
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SRC and Experian Business Strategies Partner to Deliver Solutions ...
PR Newswire (press release) - New York,NY,USA
Experian Business Strategies has selected SRC's geographic business intelligence technology to give clients accelerated application deployment, ...
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TRADE NEWS: Agilent Technologies and Teradata Establish First-of ...
Business Wire (press release) - San Francisco,CA,USA
(NYSE:NCR), today announced a partnership to provide unprecedented business intelligence (BI) for the telecommunications industry by integrating network ...
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SPOTFIRE SUPPORTS AVANTIUM'S RESEARCH & TECHNOLOGY BUSINESS
Decideo.com - Bois Colombes,France
... Spotfire's enterprise analytics platform to help provide staff in its key business areas, such as finance and sales, with desktop Business Intelligence ...
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Opinion: Enterprise Search Is This Year's Hot Topic For Business ...
Intelligent Enterprise - San Mateo,CA,USA
Will enterprise search become part of the business intelligence sector of enterprise IT? Plenty of analysts and experts said 'yes' at last week's Enterprise ...
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BLOGS

Analysis Services 2005 Performance Tuning
By Ted Malone(Ted Malone)
Microsoft has published an update to the very well done Analysis Services 2000 performance tuning guide for Analysis Services 2005. This guide basically walks you through all of the things that you need to consider when working with ...
Business Intelligence and Agile... - http://portal.sqltrainer.com/

Raikes Explains Microsoft's Integrated BI Plans
Q&A: Jeff Raikes, president of Microsoft's business division, talks about his company's plans for BI tools, including PerformancePoint Server 2007, which he says is scheduled to ship this summer.
Computerworld Business Intelligence News - http://www.computerworld.com

The Changing Dynamics of Business Intelligence
ebizQs Peter Schooff highlights a recent business intelligence podcast moderated by Beth GoldBernstein with vendors comments from.
ebizQ - Business Activity Monitoring - http://www.ebizq.net/topics/bam/?rss

Introduction to Oracle Data Warehouse and Business Intelligence ...
By keith laker(Abhinav Agarwal)
One of the most common questions I get asked by customers and see on the OTN forums is "Where can I find information on Oracle's Business Intelligence products?", this is closely followed by "what is the difference between product X and ...
Oracle Business Intelligence Blog - http://oraclebi.blogspot.com/

Calculate with Attributes - Comparison Of Two Methods
By Aaron Wang
Sometimes we need to calculate key figures on BEx report by attributes to the master data.There are two ways to achieve this and I will compare the difference here.
SAP Developer Network SAP Weblogs:... - http://weblogs.sdn.sap.com/

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SAP's Emphasis on CFO

I had talked about the concentration of SAP on solutions for the CFO that made it go for Outlook... Here is SAP's own thoughts on that topic:

The CFO has been a key focus for SAP throughout the company’s 35-year history. The new cross-functional unit builds upon SAP’s multi-year commitment to holistically address organizations’ expanded business, financial and regulatory requirements via a comprehensive and integrated portfolio of SAP and partner solutions. Through this build/partner approach, supplemented by strategic tuck-in acquisitions, SAP has enabled CFOs to benefit from the most comprehensive enterprise resource planning (ERP) and organizational performance solution spanning CPM, financial value chain optimization and integrated GRC. Working together, SAP experts and CFOs around the world have helped shape the role of business applications to meet the evolving and increasingly demanding requirements of the finance function. The cross-functional unit focused on the CFO will take strategic guidance and input from the many CFOs that work with SAP, tapping experts within the market, regulatory bodies and industry groups, and the rich expertise of SAP partners to continue to shape and drive financial transformation.

“The role of CFO has become more complex and its challenges have multiplied, especially as the bar has been raised on corporate governance, risk management and compliance,” said Lee Dittmar, principal, Deloitte Consulting LLP. “As they strive to meet the demands of boards, the management team, analysts, investors, the media and employees, CFOs play the multiple roles of steward, operator, strategist and catalyst. Technology is central to effectiveness and efficiency in each of these important roles. SAP’s focus on the CFO is consistent with the views of the Deloitte member firm consulting practices. They see CFOs increasingly taking a leadership role in aligning IT projects, priorities and processes with business priorities and, with increased pressure to deliver value, CFOs are expecting more from their technology assets and investments.”

SAP GRC Risk Management
SAP solutions for GRC promote business viability by unifying corporate strategy, control initiatives, and discovery of new business opportunities while mitigating losses. With SAP GRC Risk Management, CFO’s can manage risk in the context of corporate strategy and business performance, ultimately turning risk into a strategic asset and growth driver. SAP GRC Risk Management is a new application providing CFO’s with an integrated framework and consistent approach for enterprise risk management, helping companies manage key risk exposures and balance business opportunities proactively and predictably. CFOs can guide risk measurement and risk appetite planning, identify and analyze risks, balance the costs of risk avoidance with opportunities for growth, and continuously monitor risk over time. SAP is demonstrating its new SAP GRC Risk Management application at SAPPHIRE ’07 at the SAP Demo Station, number 1606 in the “GRC, Performance Management and E-Sourcing Village.”

“CFOs today face increasing pressure to manage risk and drive efficiencies while at the same time playing a strategic role in driving the performance and profitability of the business,” said Doug Merritt, corporate officer and member of the Executive Council, head of Business User Development, SAP AG. “This increasing pressure requires integrity and clear unification of the processes associated with financials, governance, risk and compliance, strategy and profitability management to support business decisions. Only SAP takes this holistic approach in helping customers integrate processes across the business and across functions.”

SAP Business Profitability Management by Acorn
SAP solutions for corporate performance management enable CFO customers to drive business performance and make timely business decisions. Further extending its corporate performance management suite, SAP today announced that it will resell Acorn System’s profitability management software as SAP® Business Profitability Management by Acorn. Profitability Management provides a crucial component of CPM solutions by providing visibility into the products and customers that deliver the highest value to organizations, thus helping steer companies through their financial transformation. SAP customers will gain greater value from their existing IT investments by extending their integrated ERP business processes to encompass deep profitability management capabilities. CFOs can leverage their trusted foundation built on SAP® ERP with rich functionality for integrated business controls, risk, strategy and profitability management and strategic procurement.

Cross-Functional Unit Focused on the Office of the CFO
SAP’s new cross-functional unit takes an integrated approach to helping CFOs transform the finance function via four key components: People, Partners, Integrated Product Portfolio and Best Practices. SAP expanded the resources and people dedicated to topics around the CFO with the creation of SAP’s GRC business unit, and the company continues to recruit talent and partner with companies to offer deep expertise to customers. SAP delivers an integrated product portfolio with SAP ERP to optimize the financial value chain, SAP solutions for GRC to help customers achieve clear visibility across the business and SAP solutions for CPM for comprehensive decision support. This end-to-end suite for the CFO delivers the foundation for managing financials, mapping compliance and process controls and providing clear decision support.

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News and Blogs on Business Intelligence

Thought I will start bringing some news and blog updates to my readers... these are the updates I receive from Google - I think it is a useful chronicle of things that I cannot always comment on!

Google News Alert

Business Intelligence to Become Leading Business Priority ...
dBusinessNews Seattle (press release) - Seattle,WA,USA
SEATTLE -- At last week's Microsoft Business Intelligence Conference, a survey by Capgemini, one of the world's leaders in Consulting, Technology and ...
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Sypherlink, Meta Integration Partner to Accelerate Data ...
Business Wire (press release) - San Francisco,CA,USA
... cost and quality metrics associated with designing, building and deploying data integration and business intelligence initiatives," said Sypherlink CEO ...
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Data Guard Systems Debuts New Advanced Business Intelligence ...
PR Web (press release) - Ferndale,WA,USA
This new upgrade is a one-of-a-kind suite of business intelligence tools for the cellular retailer and provides cellular retailers and master agents with ...
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Understand.Com Selects OnDemandIQ Hosted Business Intelligence to ...
PR Web (press release) - Ferndale,WA,USA
... a global provider of educational services, has adopted the OnDemandIQ Insights™ hosted business intelligence application to provide senior management ...
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Industry Thought Leaders Join Cognos Innovation Center Advisory Board
Canada NewsWire (press release) - Canada
Staffed globally by experts in planning, business intelligence, management processes, and technology, the Innovation Center partners with more than 2000 ...
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Business intelligence and data warehousing tips from a two-year-old
Search SAP - USA
BOSTON -- A two-year-old can offer interesting insights for approaching complex business intelligence (BI) and data warehousing projects, according to the ...
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Interactive Charting - the next evolution in Business Intelligence
SourceWire (press release) - London,UK
Business intelligence first crawled from software's primordial swamp 15 years ago and despite early promise and massive demand, never quite achieved its ...
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SQL Server Toolbox, Compliance, Business Intelligence
SSWUG.org - Tucscon,AZ,USA
I've spent a lot of time lately pondering the whole business intelligence thing. Really, from tools you have available to you, to new announcements to ...
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Welcome to Insight.businessobjects.com, the World's First Mind ...
PR Web (press release) - Ferndale,WA,USA
Bernard Liautaud is writing a book on business intelligence, and will ask the Insight community for collaborative contributions. ...
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Google Blogs Alert

A Lucid Era for Business Intelligence?
By Darren Cunningham
Over the last few months a small company called LucidEra has managed to capture the imagination of the business intelligence (BI) market. Built from the ground up to be 100% on demand, they have done a great job of promoting the ...
Reporting and Dashboards Blog - http://blogs.salesforce.com/analytics/

IBM rolls out development tool for non-programmers
IBM has introduced a tool aimed at assisting non-programmers in building online forms for automating common manual tasks.
Computerworld Business Intelligence News - http://www.computerworld.com

Interactive Charting - the next evolution in Business Intelligence ...
Business intelligence first crawled from software's primordial swamp 15 years ago and despite early promise and massive demand, never quite achieved its true potential. It was developed as a technology to serve one basic need. ...
Ecademy: user blogs - http://www.ecademy.com/module.php?mod=blog

Business intelligence : a new challenge for librarians?
Accart, Jean-Philippe (2001) Business intelligence : a new challenge for librarians?. In Proceedings Spezialbibliotheken heute : Wettbewerb und Kooperation, Hannover (Germany).
E-LIS - http://eprints.rclis.org/

BI is the #1 priority!!
By desh kapoor
At last week's Microsoft Business Intelligence Conference, a survey by Capgemini, one of the world's leaders in Consulting, Technology and Outsourcing services, found that six in ten respondents (61%) believe business intelligence (BI) ...
Business Intelligence - http://businessintelligence.typepad.com/business_intelligence/

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BI is the #1 priority!!

BI is BIG with the IT organizations these days.  Here is a confirmation of this from a survey by CapGemini.

At last week’s Microsoft Business Intelligence Conference, a survey by Capgemini, one of the world’s leaders in Consulting, Technology and Outsourcing services, found that six in ten respondents (61%) believe business intelligence (BI) will be their #1 I.T. priority over the next 3 years, compared to less than one in three (32%) who are betting on service-oriented architecture. The five-question survey of participants was conducted onsite last week at the inaugural conference in Seattle, Washington.

An additional two-thirds of respondents (63%) say BI investment is a “major growth area” or “big bet” for their organization today, compared to one-quarter (26%) who are “just starting the BI journey.” However, four in ten (42%) see their organization at the more mature “insight” (established forward-looking view) or “intelligence” (embed continuous improvement) levels of BI acceptance, compared to 36 percent who are still starting out in “data” mode (building the foundation).

Here are some more findings of the survey:

• Nearly half (48%) say transparent reporting & compliance management is the most desirable business outcome from the existing BI efforts inside their organization;
• The top 3 areas of Corporate Performance Management BI inside organizations today are performance management (30%), information architecture (21%) and management & strategy (16%).
• Three-quarters of respondents (74%) hailed from the US, with smaller percentages from Canada (7%), Europe (7%) and Central/South America (7%).
• Nearly half (48%) of respondents were CXOs, while the rest were functional members of their organization (sales, marketing, procurement, etc.)
• One-quarter (23%) were from companies with more than $10 billion in annual revenue, while 30 percent work for companies with less than $100 million.

Actuate joins CPM with its BI product

Another BI related company is getting active coming out with newer products.  Just got this press release for Actuate.  I think the space in BI area is very active with many software product makers in the market.  Part of it has to do with the different needs - expanse and money - for different categories of players.  Also, taking care of certain industries helps a product maker.  It will be a while before you see consolidation of most of the players before a clear market structure comes out - High end integrated ERPs with BI (SAP and Oracle); Middle tier specialised analytical tools players - COGNOS, SAS etc.; and then the small to medium tier - who will rule that end of the market with their nimble footing.  The wild horse is the Open Source market that every one will need to fight against.. once it matures a bit.

The Press release from Actuate:

Actuate announced yesterday its major product launch of the year - Actuate PerformanceSoft BI. Merging Performance Management best practices along with Business Intelligence reporting capabilities, Actuate's new offering brings:

• Enterprise-class reporting to the Performance Management capabilities of Actuate Performancesoft Suite. 
• It simplifies the analysis of Performance Management information by offering users interactive, intuitive reports that can be customized to meet their specific needs.
• Companies can now maximize their return on investment in the Actuate Performance Suite by presenting performance information to a wider audience.

BI vs BPM - the debate continues!

There is this classic debate these days that rages on between different BI practitioners of BI versus BPM (Business Performance Management) and how are the two related.  For me it was simple.. BI becomes BPM when it grows up!  BPM encompasses BI, but not the vice versa.  The father of BI also seems to agree with that view.

My friend, Jeby Cherian, made a great analogy on this blog in one of his comments - where he likened Dashboards to fuel monitors and says that BPM has a higher purpose.. akin to GPS in a car.  Its no longer useful to make sure you are burning the least fuel if you are going West instead of going East!  And that is an important distinction... is BPM just Dashboards?  No!  It is far more than that.  It is the integration of forecasting, analytics, Reporting and Actual performance review. 

Here, Cindi Howson of BIScorecard weighs in on this issue.  But I think she is looking at the elephant and debating on its trunk versus its leg.. little realizing that it is talking of the same organism.  Also, I dont think she really gets the remark of the Applix CEO correctly.  What Plummer means - and it is just my judgment - is that BI is about past data.... while BPM (where forecasts are integral) looks at the future.  Yes, looking at the past data helps a company which has NO reporting discipline whatsoever!  But it is a question of degree.  Those who have that capability, become much better at their work when they join the analysis of the past with the analytics and forecast of the future.

You have to know where you stand before you step forward.  But just because you need to find your footing on terra firma does not mean that you keep standing there for eternity!  The ability to stand should lead to a step forward.  Otherwise standing is just as paralytic as being on the bed all day long!

Whenever I disagree with someone smart, I automatically assume I must be wrong and seek to understand why. So it really bothered me that Doug Henschen was so certain that customers are driving demand for BI/PM convergence in this blog. It also doesn't sit too well with me that the vendors are clearly pursuing this strategy, while I'm saying I'm only seeing a handful of customers buying into it.

Let me clarify though:

A BI solution that delivers measurable business benefit and thus improves business performance is the goal for most BI deployments. I strongly disagree with Applix's CEO Plummer's comment "BI has always offered a historical perspective, but the insight hasn't been actionable." As one customer recently explained to me, "we saw an immediate lift in sales the week we deployed our BI solution." Why? Because the BI team went to great lengths to understand the business drivers and to deliver information that allowed all front-line workers to affect those drivers. Note: Applix is not the only vendor to try to pidgeon-hole BI as backward-looking and inactionable.

Improving performance with better access to information has always been a theme to BI. (This is not the type of "convergence" I'm disagreeing with.)

Where I most take issue is with claims that customers are demanding that BI and Performance Management tools (budgeting, planning, and balanced scorecards) come from the same vendor. My customer base doesn't show this, this site's reader poll didn't show it, nor do preliminary successful BI survey results indicate it.

Thinking my view must be skewed, I asked Nigel Pendse (who publishes the extensive OLAP survey) if he had any better data on this convergence.

Nigel's response (edited):

"I've always believed that the BI/PM distinction was artificial, but ... I fully agree that buyers don't see any compelling reason to buy their PM and BI products from the same vendors. This is again a vendor-driven idea, with little or no supporting evidence from the marketplace. So, yes, I entirely agree that CFOs and CIOs have different agendas and vendor allegiances… I'm very much in the best-of-breed camp, and The OLAP Surveys also support the value of this approach."

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COGNOS selling a BI Box!

Interesting!  Cognos is packaging BI as a commodity!  They are selling BI Out-of-a-box.. literally!  Their Celequest acquisition seems to be helping.  What is interesting to me is.. how does this box integrate with the underlying ERP and other systems?  I guess its preconfigured solutions in the box are very similar to the "Business Content" provided by SAP's BW system.. anyone has any views on this?

Cognos is offering business intelligence as a prepackaged hardware appliance or as a hosted service

Sold under the brand Cognos Now, the new offerings include self-service dashboards, integrated data, analysis and reports. The products target small and mid-size businesses, and can be used for analyzing customer data within Salesforce.com.

The Cognos Now appliance is based on technology from Celequest, which was recently acquired by Cognos. The hardware includes the preconfigured server, the BI application, and all other necessary software for a fixed price regardless of the number of users, dasboards, or data sources.

The appliances comes in three editions, SMB, Standard and Enterprise. Each has different processor and memory configurations to address a range of customer requirments, Cognos said. The new products were introduced Monday.

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