Business Intelligence – From Backroom to Mission-Critical

Business 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.

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SAP Eyes the Future with an Ear on the Past

Listening 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.

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Power Partnerships of the BI Elite

In 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.

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Protecting SAP HANA from Decrypting Eyes

Cyber-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?

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SAP HANA is Like LED Floodlights for Business Data

“Bigger and faster” is a major understatement when describing the raw power of today’s high-performance databases and database appliances. Unless you’ve been stranded on a deserted island in the South Pacific and have a volleyball named Wilson, you’ve probably heard terms like big data, columnar databases and predictive analytics more times than you’d like to admit. But there’s a good reason for that — we’re living in a database revolution and these terms describe tools that are nothing short of transformative to nearly any type of business.

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