February 1, 2009
Welcome to the sixth annual edition of TDWI's Best of Business Intelligence: A Year in Review. Each year we select a few of TDWI's best, most well-received, hard-hitting articles, research, and information, and present them to you in this publication.
Stephen Swoyer kicks off this issue with a review of recent major BI developments. "The Calm After the Storm" examines this calm but eventful year, discussing the newfound legitimacy of the data warehousing appliance segment and new and ambitious analytic offerings. Swoyer refers to 2008 as "blessedly tumult-free" and notes it was a year "in which several long-simmering trends seemed to coalesce and boil over."
In "Forecast: The 2009 Technology Market," TDWI Research analysts Wayne Eckerson and Philip Russom bring you some hints about the future of business intelligence and data integration from their TDWI Technology Market Reports (an exclusive benefit for TDWI Members).
To further represent TDWI Research, we've provided excerpts from two of the past year's Best Practices Reports. "Strategies for Managing Spreadmarts" describes how to choose a spreadmart solution that balances business and IT priorities and yields the greatest business value. "Pervasive Business Intelligence" shows the key to making BI pervasive is to persuade users to adopt and use the BI tools that an organization purchases for them.
This volume's Ten Mistakes to Avoid will help you avoid some common pitfalls in gathering BI requirements. And thanks to columns from TDWI's e-newsletters, you'll learn about unstructured data, ad hoc query performance, and open source BI.
In "BI Solutions Strategy," our selection from the Business Intelligence Journal, Alex Chaves-Sanz and Ihsan Al-Awamy explain that as the BI market consolidates, many innovative best-of-breed vendors will be acquired by large business suite players for their unique capabilities, making their competitive stability a major consideration.
TDWI is committed to providing industry professionals with information that is educational, enlightening, and immediately applicable. Enjoy, and we look forward to your feedback on TDWI's Best of Business Intelligence, Volume 6.
TDWI's Best of Business Intelligence is sponsored by the following vendors:
MicroStrategy
MicroStrategy, a global leader in business intelligence technology, provides integrated reporting, analysis, and monitoring software that helps leading organizations make better business decisions every day.
ParAccel
The ParAccel Analytic Database™ gives you faster access to data and the ability to utilize your business information more effectively, allowing you to accomplish in seconds what used to take hours. Make time your competitive advantage—visit www.paraccel.com.
QlikView
QlikView simplifies analysis for everyone. QlikView works the way your mind works—making associations by connecting data from many sources in a few clicks.
Talend + Jaspersoft
Inoculate your business intelligence projects against a tough economy. Request your first aid kit from the leaders in open source business intelligence and open source data integration.
TIBCO Spotfire
Be a BI superhero! Enable users to find game-changing insights in your data. Get a free trial of Spotfire today.
Tidal Software
Learn how you can dramatically raise the reliability and quality of BI by leveraging enterprise scheduling technology to orchestrate data flows and optimize the ETL process.