Paul Blogs on BI

I recently visited several large companies in the UK to talk with them about their Business Intelligence deployments and strategy. During one of the discussions, the topic of where the Business Intelligence group belongs in the organization came up. At this particular company, the Business Intelligence (BI) group was part ...

The last six months have seen a remarkable upsurge in BusinessObjects customer activity and it has taken me a little while to identify what’s possibly behind this. It’s certainly not due to any marketing campaign or initiative from SAP who are preoccupied with other products and have really not paid ...

BusinessObjects is the most widely used business intelligence suite in the world and for good reason – Crystal Reports, Web Intelligence, Xcelsius Dashboards, Explorer remain amongst the best products in their respective classes and are being used to create amazing BI solutions. As part of InfoSol’s “Let’s Speak BO”  initiative ...

On a recent visit to a metal manufacturing company in Oman, the I.T. Manager was discussing how he wants to use their InfoBurst and BusinessObjects applications for more operational reporting because of the huge success they have been seeing in this area recently. A few years ago they had built ...

The Ancient inhabitants of Lebanon, the Phoenicians, were known for their trade and commerce and the modern Lebanese continue to be very astute in business. Despite the country being ravished by wars in the last few decades, the Lebanese have rebuilt and recreated their economy. They take both an optimistic ...

This is a question I asked at the Town Hall session at the recent SAP Analytics and BusinessObjects Conference held in Ft. Worth, Texas. I qualified the question by stating that everything that SAP was promoting in their keynotes and on their booth were their Analytics tools namely Lumira, Predictive ...

I was recently asked if I would write the foreword for the SAP Press book, Web Intelligence 3rd Edition BI 4.1 SP3.  It made me think about my experience with BusinessObjects and Web Intelligence and how far the product has come so I thought I would share it. I definitely ...

I went to see Lady Gaga in concert last week and it was quite a show. Non-stop energy, entertainment, excitement and some pretty amazing costumes. Gaga also likes to talk between songs and she spoke a lot about community. She shared how her community had helped her through some hard ...

The messaging from SAP at this year’s Sapphire and ASUG Annual Conference was remarkable, radical and actually quite refreshing. If we are to take Bill McDermott (CEO) at his word, organizations (including SAP) need to eliminate layers of management, stop attending meetings and simplify business processes. The mantra of the ...

Growing up, I had always wanted to be a doctor but somehow I ended up in the world of computer software. I found I had a natural ability for troubleshooting customer problems and I worked for several years in customer technical support .  I distinctly remember one customer telling me ...