TweetI had a briefing with TIBCO on their Spotfire 4.0 release, announced today and due to be released by the end of November. Spotfire is the analytics platform that TIBCO acquired a few years back, and provides end-user tools for dimensional analysis of data. This includes both visualization and mashups with other data sources, such [...]
Tagged Spotfire, tibbrTweetContinuing in the SAP World Tour in Toronto today, I went to a breakout innovation session on NetWeaver Business Warehouse (BW) and HANA, with Steve Holder from their BusinessObjects center of excellence. HANA, in case you’ve been hiding from all SAP press releases in the past two years, is an analytic appliance (High-performance ANalytic Applicance, [...]
Tagged SAPWTTweetI attended the keynote at IBM’s CASCON conference in Toronto today, where Judy Huber, who directs the IBM Canada software lab, kicked off the session by reminding us that IBM software development has been happening in Canada since 1967 and continues to grow, and of the importance of collaboration between the research and industry communities. [...]
Tagged cascon2011TweetThe second half of the workshop started with Renée Miller from University of Toronto digging into the deeper database levels of BI, and the evolving role of schema from a prescriptive role (time-invariant, used to ensure data consistency) to a descriptive role (describe/understand data, capture business knowledge). In the old world, a schema was meant [...]
Tagged cascon2011TweetI only have one day to attend CASCON this year due to a busy schedule this week, so I am up in Markham (near the IBM Toronto software lab) to attend the NSERC Business Intelligence Network workshop this morning. CASCON is the conference run by IBM’s Centers for Advanced Studies throughout the world, including the [...]
Tagged cascon2011TweetJames Kobielus of Forrester brought the concepts of predictive analytics to processes to discuss optimizing processes using the Next Best Action (NBA): using analytics and predictive models to figure out what you should do next in a process in order to optimize customer-facing processes. As we heard in this morning’s keynote, agility is mandatory not [...]
Tagged bbccon11TweetThis is a big conference. We’re in the Mandalay Bay Events Center, which is a stadium that would probably hold a hockey rink, and although all the seats are not full, it’s a pretty big turnout. This is IBM’s centennial, which is a theme throughout the conference, and the opening session started with some key [...]
Tagged iod11TweetDan Kearnan, senior director of marketing for business analytics, provided a overview of SAP’s business analytics in the short breakout sessions following the keynote. Their “run smarter” strategy is based on three pillars of knowing your business, deciding with confidence and acting boldly; his discussion of the “act boldly” part seemed to indicate that the [...]
Tagged saprbtTweetWe had the chance for a small group of bloggers and analysts (okay, I was probably the only one with “blogger” on my name tag) with Mark Aboud, Managing Director of SAP Canada, and Margaret Stuart, VP for the Canadian BusinessObjects division. Since this was a roundtable Q&A, I’ll just list some of the discussion [...]
Tagged saprbtTweetSAP is holding a Run Better Tour to highlight some of their new releases and customer success stories, and today it’s in Toronto which allows me to check it out without having to get on an airplane. I attended the Women’s Leadership Forum breakfast this morning, featuring Amanda Lang of CBC News, and she’s speaking [...]
Tagged saprbtTweetA group of bloggers had an update today from Steve Lucas, GM of the SAP business analytics group, covering what happened in 2010 and some outlook and strategy for 2011. No surprise, they saw an explosion in growth in 2010: analytics has been identified as a key competitive differentiator for a couple of years now [...]
TweetWow, has it really been a month since I last blogged? A couple of weeks vacation, general year-end busyness and a few non-work side projects have kept me quiet, but it’s time to get back at it. I have a few partially-finished product briefings sitting around, and thought it best to get them out before [...]
TweetMy last session for the day at CASCON is to hear Alex Lau of IBM, and Andrei Solomon and Marin Litoiu of York University discuss their research project on real time monitoring and simulation of business processes (they also presented a related paper this morning, although I missed the session). This is one of the [...]
Tagged cascon2010TweetI attended the keynote this morning, on the theme of looking forward: first we heard from Mike Rhodin, an exec in the IBM Software group, then Brenda Dietrich, a mathematician (and VP – finally, a female IBM exec on stage) from the analytics group in IBM Research. IBM Research has nine labs around the world, [...]
Tagged iodgcTweetI had a pre-IOD analyst briefing last week from IBM with updates to their ECM portfolio, given by Ken Bisconti, Dave Caldera and Craig Rhinehart. IOD – Information on Demand – is IBM’s conference covering business analytics and information management, the latter of which includes data management and content management. The former FileNet products fall [...]
Tagged iodgcTweetI’m at IBM’s Information On Demand (IOD) conference this week, attending the opening session. There are 10,000 attendees here (including, I assume, IBM employees) for a conference that covers information management of all sorts: databases, analytics and content management. As at other large vendor conferences, they feel obligated to assault our senses in the morning [...]
Tagged iodgcTweetSummer is the time when no one holds conferences, because vacation schedules make it difficult to get the attendance, so webinars tend to expand to fill the gap. I’ll be presenting on another BP Logix webinar on August 10th, discussing process intelligence and predictive analytics; you can register (and see my smiling face in a [...]
TweetTIBCO announces their cloud-based BI/analytics today: TIBCO Silver Spotfire, and you can even sign up for a free one-year trial. This shouldn’t be a huge surprise to those watching TIBCO announcements to date: at their conference in May, “Silver Analytics” was mentioned in the general session as an upcoming product release, and they’ve made much [...]
TweetPeter Graf, SAP’s Chief Sustainabilty Officer, and Scott Bolick, VP Sustainability, spoke to a group of bloggers and analysts at a sustainability roundtable today. Graf started with SAP’s definition of sustainability: increase short and long-term profitability by holistically managing economic, social and environmental risks and opportunities. Sustainability changes business processes drastically, especially those processes that [...]
Tagged sapphirenowTweetWe’re overtime on the general session, 2.75 hours without a break, and Matt Quinn is up to talk about the TIBCO product stack and some of the recent releases as well as upcoming releases: Spotfire 3.1 BusinessEvents 4.0, with an improved Eclipse-based development environment including a rule debugger, and a multi-threaded engine BEViews (BusinessEvents Views) [...]
Tagged tucon
