TDWI The Data Warehousing Institute

By Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard At the end of March, Tableau Software released version 8 of its product, both improving its core visual data discovery capabilities and upping the ante in its challenge to traditional BI. In addition, the privately held company filed its application for an initial public offering, expected in summer and to trade under the ticker symbol "DATA." Version 8 packs over 90 new features but the most noteworthy is support for browser-based authoring. To date, Tableau has... Read More of this Article from Cindi's Blog...

By Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard SAS laid out its plans for visual analytics, big data and cloud at its annual analyst summit last week in Steamboat, Colorado. SAS has come a long way since it first set its sights on the BI market back in 2004. With Visual Analytics, the company now has a visually appealing product that combines ease of use with SAS' mathematical brain power. Visual Analytics (VA) was first released last March, leveraging in-memory processing with a new visual interface. It has s... Read More of this Article from Cindi's Blog...

By Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard Last week at TDWI I was proud to moderate and participate in a special panel on Women in BI: Having It All or Hard Choices? We tackled the issues of juggling career and life, decline in women in math and science degrees, and the gender pay gap. Juggling career and life is not only a challenge for mothers and women. It is an elusive quest for any worker who also wants a life. I've pondered this issue since I was a teen, raised largely by my then bachelor father wh... Read More of this Article from Cindi's Blog...

Last week at MicroStrategy's annual user conference in Las Vegas, CEO and co-founder Michael Saylor kicked off the keynote with his vision of how mobile and social are changing not just BI, but the world. Saylor described improvements to MicroStrategy's core BI platform as a "toolset for application developers to build compelling apps that are beautiful, agile, mobile, and fast." Mobile has been a part of MicroStrategy's focus for a number of years, and this vendor has been steadfast in its str... Read More of this Article from Cindi's Blog...

In the last year, many people seem to want to give a sexier name to business intelligence, whether "business analytics" or "big data." To me, it’s still just business intelligence, that illustrious, top-ranked technology that can help companies boost revenues, improve customer service, or control costs, by making better decisions, faster. So whatever you want to call this category, here are my predictions for the top BI trends for 2013, and a look back on highlights of 2012. 1. Dashboards Expan... Read More of this Article from Cindi's Blog...

SAP announced last week  the availability of SAP BusinessSuite powered by Hana, fulfilling a vision it laid out three years ago to leverage the power of in-memory processing not only for analytics but also for transaction processing. I'll confess that I was one of those skeptics about the OLTP aspect of SAP's in-memory vision. At the time, in-memory was gaining ground in the BI space, with momentum mainly by smaller vendors such as QlikTech, TIBCO Spotfire, TM1 (acquired by Cognos then IBM). In... Read More of this Article from Cindi's Blog...

I’m pleased to announce that the third edition of SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.0: The Complete Reference is now available in print and ebook. The book is intended for BI administrators, developers, and business users who are both long-time and new SAP BusinessObjects customers. Here’s what you need to know about what’s new, what’s covered, and the back story for the book that almost wasn’t. What's Covered There are a few chapters on administrative tasks such as securing the data and content, migrat... Read More of this Article from Cindi's Blog...

Big Data took New York by storm last week to a sold out Strata Conference. Good thing the conference was the week before Hurricane Sandy! I was lured to Strata by both the traditional vendors I cover such as SAP, SAS, and Tableau exhibiting there, as well as the big data analytics start ups such as Datameer and Karmasphere. There’s a high degree of hype around big data, but there’s also a high degree of innovation, tangible benefits, and venture capital. So coming from the BI world, here’s t... Read More of this Article from Cindi's Blog...

Last week at Oracle Open World, much of the mainstage headlines were about cloud, but in the BI space, it was about Exalytics, Oracle’s in-memory engineered system for BI. Released in February, Exalytics is Oracle’s latest engineered system that leverages the TimesTen in-memory database to provide fast BI. Both the meta data for Oracle BI Enterprise Edition (OBI EE) can be cached in-memory as well as data from the data warehouse and Essbase cubes. For example, customer Sodex cited 10 times fa... Read More of this Article from Cindi's Blog...

Last week at TIBCO’s annual user conference in Las Vegas, TIBCO announced Spotfire 5 with in-database processing and a new predictive analytics engine for open source R models. TIBCO Spotfire 5 is expected to become generally available before year end, bringing in-database processing, a revamped in-memory engine, and a new predictive analytics run-time engine for R. Like many visual data discovery tools, TIBCO Spotfire has long had its own in-memory engine to provide speed-of-thought explorati... Read More of this Article from Cindi's Blog...