Blog Featured Archive

BI Visionary Santiago Becerra to Deliver Keynote at IBIS 2012

By
Paul
Published: April 9, 2012Posted in: Blog Featured, IBIS, Paul Blogs on BITags: , , , ,
BI Visionary Santiago Becerra to Deliver Keynote at IBIS 2012

There have been two majorly inspiring and revolutionary solutions in the world of Business Intelligence in the last decade and one person, Santiago Becerra, has been behind both of them.

The first was Xcelsius, the data visualization dashboard tool that rocketed first Business Objects and then SAP to the forefront of business intelligence dashboard solutions. Santiago once told me that the idea for Xcelsius came about after a casual conversation with one of his sons, who was a computer game developer, about making business applications more visual and interactive like computer games. Santiago had created “Gamification” before it had even become a word (according to Wikipedia it was first used in March 2004 several years after Xcelsius was created). Xcelsius was not only ahead of its time, it was a game changer for Business Objects after they acquired the company from Santiago in late 2005 as within two years it was their hottest selling product and was taking over as the user interface of choice for business intelligence.

Roambi Cardex on iPad

After seeing Xcelsius successfully settled into Business Objects, Santiago moved into semi-retirement but his visionary mind could not stop conjuring up new ideas. After seeing a line of people queuing up for an iPhone, he bought one for himself and became intrigued by its visual display capabilities. This led to inspired, revolutionary BI solution number 2. Gathering together some of the original team that had made Xcelsius successful and some very talented developers, he created the most spectacular BI visualization solution ever seen on a mobile device – Roambi. Today, Roambi is the leading BI visualization solution for mobile devices with a plethora of awards and an ever increasing global presence, Some of the Roambi views like Cardex and Squares have got to be seen to be believed (especially on the iPad) – these are designs of pure genius. You can download demo versions for free off the iTunes store.

Roambi Squares on iPad

Needless to say, I was ecstatic when Santiago Becerra agreed to deliver the keynote address at this year’s IBIS 2012 event. With the theme of the conference being Inspired Business Intelligence 2.0, it is a perfect match-up. Few people have contributed more than Santiago to inspiring the world of Business Intelligence.

Equally as exciting, is a new executive seminar track at this year’s IBIS also entitled Inspired Business Intelligence 2.0 that will consist of 12 customer presented case studies on some pretty cool and inspired BI solutions. The final list of customer presentations will be announced in a couple of weeks so stay tuned.

In the meantime, I suggest you reserve a place at IBIS 2012 very soon as the event is limited to just 250 attendees and seats are filling up fast.

Register now.

BusinessObjects E-Learning Deal of the Century

By
Paul
Published: March 14, 2012Posted in: Blog FeaturedTags:
BusinessObjects E-Learning Deal of the Century

We all love a good deal whether it’s a “buy one, get one free” pizza or free wiper blades with your oil change.

However when it comes to SAP BusinessObjects training, the deals traditionally tend to be somewhat fewer and more conservative. In a survey that InfoSol conducted last year amongst BusinessObjects users, one of the main reasons cited for not attending an SAP BusinessObjects training class was cost.

As an Authorized SAP BusinessObjects Education Partner, InfoSol will frequently offer special deals on training courses from discounts to giving free SAP Press books with certain courses.

At the same time, more and more people are finding that they simply do not have the time to attend a 2-day or 3-day instructor led training course or that they need to train people from many different locations and the cost of bringing them all together in one place on top of the cost of the training itself is way too high. For this reason self-learning or e-learning courses have become increasingly popular. These courses allow you to train from anywhere at any time.

However, the downside to e-learning is that you have no instructor or topic expert to go to ask questions if you do not understand something. This can diminish the effectiveness of the training as well as cause great frustration for the learner.

So InfoSol has put together a new training offering that brings the best of all worlds together: BusinessObjects Certified e-learning courses, and access to a live instructor, all for a “deal of the century” price. We’re calling it the E-Learning Plus Offering

InfoSol is now offering the new SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Subscription Library which offers more than 60 BusinessObjects E-Learning courses, everything from Web Intelligence, Crystal Reports, Xcelsius, Explorer, Live Office to the new BI 4.0 offerings along with up to 90 minutes access to a live instructor. You have access to all these courses on-line and the instructor for a period of 12 months. You can take as many as you like as many times as you want. In addition, if any new courses are released while you are subscribed, you will have access to those as well at no additional charge.

So how much do you think this would cost? Well if you subscribed to all those courses individually, the cost would in excess of $10,000 and the subscription period would only be 6 months and that would not include access to a live instructor.

The cost for this new InfoSol BO E-Learning Plus offering for 12 months is just $2,000! Incredible!

If you need additional live instructor assistance beyond the 90 minutes, you can purchase additional time at a special discounted price.

In addition to the SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Subscription Library, there is also the SAP BusinessObjects Administration and Data Services Subscription Library with over 40 courses on BusinessObjects Administration, Migration, Universe Design and Data Services (Data Integrator, Data Quality). This library is available also for 12 months with up to 90 minutes of access to a live instructor at the same $2,000 price.

So how do you sign up for the “Deal of the Century”?  Just email education@infosol.com.

 

Looking for Inspired Business Intelligence Solutions

By
Paul
Published: March 1, 2012Posted in: Blog Featured, IBISTags: , , , , ,
Looking for Inspired Business Intelligence Solutions

Last week I was visiting a customer in the transportation business. They were showing me a new safety business intelligence dashboard they were working on to analyze accidents and crashes. The first phase of the project focused on all accidents and crashes over a three year period. With more than 16,000 commercial vehicles on the road every day, this is a lot of data to analyze. However, what really struck me was the incredible number of ways they were able to slice, dice and analyze this data in the dashboard looking visually at data by region, depot, type of vehicle at the same time as looking at personnel and all the different categories of accidents and to compare all this at different time periods.

I was floored by the incredible amount of detailed information available at the click of a button and had to ask the question as to how much data was actually available to the dashboard. The customer explained that they had reduced the amount of data from about 500,000 rows to about 300,000 rows by organizing it as a cube in their Teradata Data warehouse and were loading it daily into the XML Data Cache (XDC) and using their XDC connectors in the Xcelsius dashboard solution.

They then showed me phase 2 of the project where they had placed a series of bubble charts on top of a geographical map to show location and type of accidents. They had built in the ability to zoom in on different regions of the country which was really cool.

But what really blew my mind were their plans for phase 3 where they are looking to collect geographic location information from the vehicles which are all equipped with satellite navigation systems that would transmit the location of the accident. The Business Intelligence dashboard would then display where most accidents and accidents of the same type were happening down to the exact street location so they could look for patterns and trends.

This is a truly inspired business intelligence solution and one of many that I am seeing these days. It is for this reason that at this year’s IBIS 2012 event in Dana Point, CA in June, there will be a 3-day Executive Track dedicated to “Inspired Business Intelligence Solutions”.

The track will consist of 12 inspired BI solutions presented by the customers themselves that created them. We have already encouraged several customers to present their solutions but we are still looking for a few more.

Inspired people with inspired ideas create inspired BI solutions so if you would like to submit your solution for this year’s IBIS and receive a $500 discount if selected then Just email ibis@infosol.com  a description of your inspired solution focusing on the following points :

- Why did you create it?

- How did you create it?

- What were the benefits?

Please include any additional diagrams, screenshots, documents, quotes , photos or anything else that will help to further explain your inspired solution. Also provide your contact information and the best times to call you to discuss your entry.

Of course, if you would just like to come along and listen to 12 highly informative inspired business intelligence customer case studies and save $400 then be sure to Register by March 31 to take advantage of the early bird discount.

 

Xcelsius on iPad and iPhone Wows Attendees at IBIS Welcome Reception

By
Paul
Published: June 20, 2011Posted in: Blog Featured, IBIS, InfoSol, News, Xcelsius, Xcelsius End UserTags:
Xcelsius on iPad and iPhone Wows Attendees at IBIS Welcome Reception

IBIS 2011 kicked off last night with its welcome reception and solutions showcase demonstrating some of the latest business intelligence solutions and one solution in particular created quite a buzz – MyBI Mobile.

As I walked around the showcase showing Xcelsius dashboards running on an iPad, people stopped with looks of disbelief mixed with wonder.

“How are you doing that?”

“Xcelsius doesn’t run on an iPad or an iPhone”

Well, I am happy to report that with MyBI Mobile, not only does Xcelsius run on an iPad and an iPhone, but also on an Android. And it not only runs but it sings too! It has a fabulous simple menu system to serve up different content on the device and that content can also be Crystal Reports, Web Intelligence, Desktop Intelligence in addition to Xcelsius. With Web Intelligence you can also create new reports from the mobile device – that’s cool! When viewing and interacting with the content, you can perform a “pinch and zoom” action on any part of the screen to automatically enlarge that area of the dashboard or report.

While many companies have invested in building both dazzling and effective Xcelsius dashboard business intelligence solutions, they have often been challenged when trying to find ways to move these to mobile devices. The operating system for the IPhone and IPad (iOS) does not support Flash and SWF outputs natively but with MyBI mobile the barriers have been lifted. You can now take your key Xcelsius dashboards and just serve them up on iPads, iPhones and Androids without changing them and interact with all the features just the same as on the PC.

I cannot express enough how incredible this is and what it means to the millions of Xcelsius users around the world who want to take their dashboards mobile  - you are free of your shackles and you can now deliver Xcelsius to the most popular mobile smart devices out there.

I recently heard there are an estimated 200 million iOS devices in use today and now all those users can enjoy the full functionality of the amazing data visualization of Xcelsius through MyBI Mobile.

If the excitement at IBIS is anything to go by, you will certainly be hearing and seeing a lot more of this solution in the coming months so stay tuned.