Cognos - Gold Award for BI Software

Analytics and business intelligence BI Software

GOLD AWARD: Cognos Inc--Cognos Now! version 4.3

Even after an active year in the business intelligence (BI) and analytics market, the Cognos Now! remained at the top of the pack in innovation, according to our judges. Last year, the appliance was called "Celequest Lava" -- and won SearchDataManagement.com's top Product of the Year Honors. Celequest was then purchased by Cognos in early 2007. Cognos went on to optimize, rename and release the family of plug-and-play operational business intelligence and performance management products in May 2007. The Cognos Now! products are available as appliances or hosted software-as-a-service (SaaS) models -- designed for accelerated implementations, minimal IT intervention and a low total cost of ownership.

One organization using the appliance delivered executive dashboards in under a year -- and experts predict operational BI deployments to grow in the next year.

Our judges were impressed at the multi-functional appliance, shipped as a single box with many integrated functions, including:

• A unique "streaming server" with a patent-pending 64-bit memory-based streaming data store for continuous data integration and engines for multi-dimensional analysis, dynamic modeling, business-rules execution, and exception and alert reporting. It monitors business rules and alerts and allows users to drill down from any dashboard to perform root-cause analysis. The data flow engine also maintains and caches "temporal data sets" for time series analysis.
• Operational dashboards with an intuitive interface for customizing metrics, setting alerts and drilling into data.
• Data integration functions for aggregating and correlating data from multiple operational systems, transactional applications, data warehouses, databases, messaging busses and other data sources for a real-time data integration platform.
• A scalable product architecture that enables support for any number of user licenses, data sources, and dashboards.
• An application workbench, so system administrators can set up data integration, analytic models and end-user dashboards to present current information, historical data or aggregated views.
• Data-level security so end-users can only view metric data that is relevant for their job.
• Compliance with service-oriented architecture standards, allowing plug-and-play installation and interoperability with existing application and BI infrastructures, such as Cognos 8 BI.

Cognos Now! pricing starts at $49 per user per month. Learn more about Cognos Now here on the Cognos Web site.

Source: http://searchdatamanagement.techtarget.com

South African Companies Select Progress EasyAsk for Operational Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence BI News : South African Companies Select Progress EasyAsk for Operational Business Intelligence

Progress Software announced today that four South African companies -- Nedbank, Europ Assistance, Matrix Vehicle Tracking and Integrated Healthcare Distribution -- selected Progress EasyAsk software for Operational Business Intelligence to enhance their business users’ ability to quickly and easily access critical business data that can help them in their day-to-day decision-making.

Companies use Business Intelligence tools to access the data they need to help them make business decisions. Traditional Business Intelligence tools often provide only a small subset of executives and business analysts with access to this data, resulting in more than 80% of employees without a path to insight that could improve their business. Conversely, the goal of Operational Business Intelligence is to provide all employees that need to access the data with easy and timely access to the information that they deem most useful.

EasyAsk for Operational BI is the industry’s first data retrieval solution designed for use by all business users, and not just power users and analysts. The EasyAsk software allows business users to ask questions in natural language (i.e., “show the latest sales figures for our widget product line in the last three months”); the software will immediately generate a report in response to the questions. Moreover, EasyAsk will expose additional BI assets or information that may be relevant.

Nedbank, the fourth largest bank in South Africa, relied on a third party reporting system for extracting information from databases. Before implementing EasyAsk software, business users had to first inform IT of the need for access to information locked away in databases. The IT department would then create a reporting program for that specific need, collect the data and create a report for the business user.

“We needed a data query tool that could create reusable criteria and deliver results faster than our current system could provide,” said Derick Oliver, data warehouse delivery manager, Nedbank. “We chose EasyAsk for Operational BI because of its ease-of-use and proven track record of successfully delivering information in a timely manner. Rather than requesting information from our IT department and waiting upwards of a month for the information, EasyAsk delivers accurate information within a day, without IT involvement. Better yet, reports created today can be used month after month, saving huge amounts of time and energy.”

The single ‘search box’ in EasyAsk also provides marketing employees at Nedbank with an easy-to-use data extraction tool, which they now use for customer segmentation analysis as a basis for marketing campaigns.

EasyAsk has helped other companies in South Africa reach their BI goals as well. Europ Assistance, Matrix Vehicle Tracking, and Integrated Healthcare Distribution all chose Progress EasyAsk as their Operational BI solution to meet their diverse Operational BI needs.

Europ Assistance, which offers customers roadside assistance, extracts data from their operational databases using EasyAsk. By granting all employees access to operational data, everyone in the South African office now makes better informed decisions faster.

EasyAsk is also used by all employees at Matrix Vehicle Tracking, a vehicle location monitoring company. They selected EasyAsk as their BI solution because of its ease of use for the entire organization coupled with its powerful data extraction and reporting functionality.

Integrated Healthcare Distribution had an existing BI tool in place when it switched to EasyAsk. The previous system featured a complicated user interface, making it difficult for all employees to access information and make use of it in their jobs. The switch to EasyAsk has empowered all employees, not just power users, with data access, making them more informed and efficient employees.

“The emergence of Progress EasyAsk software in the South African market demonstrates how our EasyAsk for Operational BI solution helps companies of any size realize their BI goals,” said Larry Harris, vice president and general manager, Progress EasyAsk. “A huge barrier to achieving the ‘promise’ of traditional BI tools is their inherent complexity that prohibits widespread adoption by the individuals that are most able to act on the insight for the benefit of the business. This, combined with costly licensing models, has limited the penetration and value of traditional BI tools, which then causes bottlenecks in the flow of information via the few that had the tools and the skills. With EasyAsk for Operational BI, we’ve solved these problems and the result is that business users now have more opportunities to use information in effective, revenue generating activities.”

Source: http://www.businessintelligence.com/ex/asp/id.3273/xe/binewsdetail.htm

Business Intelligence Resources on BetterManagement

BI Articles : Business Intelligence Resources on BetterManagement

Business Intelligence (BI) incorporates a wide range of information and data management techniques, beginning with data extraction, collection, cleansing, integration, aggregation, analysis and manipulation through the use of data marts, cubes, data warehouses and databases. The use of metadata and data modeling helps standardize data definitions and use across the enterprise. From these information sources, department and enterprise level reporting, monitoring, queries and analysis can be performed, and results presented as either ad hoc or standardized reports, dashboards, triggers and alerts.

Beyond reporting, business intelligence provides complex statistical capabilities such as trend analysis, predictive forecasting, pattern detection and analysis, optimization, guided decision-making and experiment design, among others. Through enterprise portals, business intelligence technologies can provide a wide range of users with the timely access to high quality data and advanced analytics they need to make smart strategic decisions and improve operational effectiveness.

Knowledge management methodologies record and disseminate both explicit and tacit process and performance strategies and actions to identify and share best practices and innovative techniques and ideas.

BetterManagement presents an extensive library of Business Intelligence topics and resources to help you implement effective information strategies that return the highest value. Live and archived webcasts, business management articles and editorials, business books, and many other industry-focused resources provide guidance and advice from Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing and Knowledge Management experts, as well as real-life examples from companies who are using business intelligence to maximize the value of their information resources.

Source: http://www.bettermanagement.com/topic/whatis.aspx?f=10

Cognos 8 Business Intelligence - Extend BI: Events and Alerts

IBM Business Intelligence BI Software : Cognos 8 Business Intelligence - Extend BI: Events and Alerts

Cognos 8 BI business event management tracks significant events that need attention. It monitors these events and uses decision-process and business-process automation to compress the time to action and resolution.

Definition of events and tasks

• Using event conditions and agents, specify the events to be monitored and the tasks to manage them.
• Manage events in context to ensure appropriate responses are carried out at each stage of the event lifecycle—new, ongoing, or resolved.

Decision-based issue resolution

• Users are notified of events via email alerts or through dynamic Web portal headlines.
• Provide contextual event information by embedding or linking reports, metrics, and event history.
• Through multiple-alert messaging, ensure that a single event results in different messages being generated for all affected issue owners.

Business-process issue resolution

• Initiate an automated response when human intervention is not required.
• Business processes include initiating a Web Service application or stored procedure.

Event lifecycle tracking

• Automated reports show all ongoing events and their status for easy tracking.

Source: For more information, please visit Cognos websit http://www.cognos.com/products/cognos8businessintelligence/business-event-management.html

Cognos 8 Business Intelligence - Extend BI: Cognos 8 Go! Search

IBM Business Intelligence BI Software : Cognos 8 Business Intelligence - Extend BI: Cognos 8 Go! Search

Cognos 8 Go! Search enables everyday users to find reports, scorecards, and other content created in Cognos 8 Business Intelligence.

Increase business intelligence adoption rates

Cognos 8 Go! Search belongs to the Cognos 8 Go! family of consumer modes designed to help you increase business intelligence user adoption rates within your organization.

These consumer modes let users view and consume BI content using familiar applications or devices, such as a BlackBerry®, search engine, MS Office application, or Web browser.

Cognos 8 Go! Search provides users with a familiar, browser-based search bar, sophisticated ranking of results, and the ability to easily fine-tune those results.

Source: For more information, please visit http://www.cognos.com/products/cognos8businessintelligence/go-search.html

Cognos 8 Business Intelligence - Extend BI: Cognos 8 Go! Office

IBM Business Intelligence BI Software : Cognos 8 Business Intelligence - Extend BI: Cognos 8 Go! Office

Cognos 8 Go! Office lets you view and consume with Cognos business intelligence content within Microsoft® Office applications such as PowerPoint® Excel® and Word®.

Increase business intelligence adoption rates

Cognos 8 Go! Office belongs to the Cognos 8 Go! family of consumer modes designed to help you increase business intelligence user adoption rates within your organization.

These consumer modes let users interact with BI content using familiar applications or devices, such as a BlackBerry®, search engine, Microsoft® Office application, or Web browser.

Cognos 8 Go! Office eliminates users' need to cut and paste or manually load data into spreadsheets or presentations. This saves time, prevents errors, and allows users to focus on making decisions rather than data entry.

Source: For more information, please visit http://www.cognos.com/products/cognos8businessintelligence/ms-office.html

Cognos 8 Business Intelligence - Cognos 8 Go! Mobile

IBM Business Intelligence BI Software : Cognos 8 Business Intelligence - Cognos 8 Go! Mobile

Cognos 8 Go! Mobile extends the value of the proven Cognos 8 Business Intelligence architecture by providing users with access to timely, secure, and personalized information on their mobile devices and operating systems, including BlackBerry®, Windows Mobile and Symbian S60 wireless.

Increase business intelligence adoption rates

Cognos 8 Go! Mobile is the latest addition to the Cognos 8 Go! family of consumer modes designed to help you increase business intelligence user adoption rates within your organization.

These consumer modes let users view and consume BI content using familiar applications or on mobile devices, search engines, MS Office applications, or a Web browser.

With Cognos 8 Go! Mobile, users can increase their productivity and improve their decision-making when working remotely by accessing operational and strategic information about customer orders, product performance, and more.

Source: For more information, please visit http://www.cognos.com/products/cognos8businessintelligence/go-mobile.html

Cognos 8 Business Intelligence BI Scorecarding

IBM Business Intelligence BI Software: Cognos 8 Business Intelligence BI Scorecarding

Scorecarding helps you align your teams and tactics with strategy, communicate goals consistently, and monitor performance against targets.

More user communities

• Use scorecard portlets to access and communicate scorecard content and encourage a broader use across your organization.
• Hover over scorecard impact diagrams and instantly receive important metric information for you to act on without having to click anywhere to find it.
• Add new strategic objectives and supporting metrics to scorecards and strategy maps without the need to rely on your IT group for assistance.

Ensure ownership and accountability for performance

• Assign a primary owner for every metric.
• Organize and view scorecards by status to focus on objectives and performance.
• View scorecards by owner to understand accountability.
• View scorecards in a strategy map to see how they fit into the corporate strategy.
• Set events and alerts to keep you aware of when a metric changes status.
• Embed business intelligence capabilities into your scorecards for added context and analysis.
• Manage corrective actions and initiatives from within the application.

Align decisions and tactics with strategy

• Use a metrics network and centralized data store to ensure reliable and consistent information.
• Create a metric, diagram, or scorecard once and use them wherever else they are needed to ensure consistent definitions and targets.

Implement your strategy and execute against it

• Build and deploy scorecards quickly using wizards.
• Scorecard and metric design tools reduce the time you need to create and deploy your system.
• Use menus to define threshold ranges, benchmarks, data source definition, contact names, and URLs for contextual information.
• Create strategy maps, impact analysis and cause-and-effect diagrams, and other elements of the Balanced Scorecard.

Simple deployment and administration

• Recalibrate targets in response to changes in performance with integrated planning capabilities.
• Multilingual: metrics can be populated in any language and then displayed in users' preferred language.
• Single sign-on dialog box.
• Use three and five-state status indicators and plan vs. actual data to reveal progress against targets.

Source: For more information, please visit http://www.cognos.com/products/cognos8businessintelligence/scorecarding.html

Cognos 8 Business Intelligence BI Dashboards

IBM Business Intelligence BI Software : Cognos 8 Business Intelligence Dashboards

Business dashboards communicate complex information quickly. They translate information from your various corporate systems and data into visually rich presentations using gauges, maps, charts, and other graphical elements to show multiple results together.

Cognos offers the full range of dashboards — operational, tactical, strategic — to help you monitor, measure, and manage corporate performance.

You can deploy Cognos dashboards as a standalone application or as a core element of an enterprise business intelligence or performance management platform.

Information-rich, visually appealing displays

Provide business users at every level receive the information they need to make better decisions that improve business performance.

Communicate common business patterns and relationships: trends, rank, part-to-whole, deviation, correlation.

Wide array of chart types (bar, line, gauge, scatterplot, maps) let you match the data to the display.

Conditional formatting and exception highlighting draw users' attention to sub-par results and areas that need immediate attention.

Aggregate data from disparate systems into a single view.

Drill-down / drill-through to reports and analysis for additional information and context.

Control when and how you receive critical information by creating personalized alerts, based on custom data conditions.

A single architecture for viewing, querying, analyzing, and authoring for collaborative contributions to any report or dashboard.

Global dashboard filters let users seamlessly orchestrate changes across multiple objects in a portal page.

Operational dashboards

Track core operational processes with continuous data refreshes.

Benefits:

• Monitor operational processes as they happen.
• Get immediate visibility into key performance indicators (KPIs) for corrective action and rapid decision-making.
• Enable exception-based decisions with alerts.
• Provide links to associated reports.
• Self-serve authoring & editing.

Tactical dashboards

Run against data marts or data warehouses to track departmental processes and projects.

Benefits:

Monitor performance on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.

Get visibility into performance of departmental activities, processes, and projects.

Integrate into your corporate portal or deploy as a standalone report.

Drill-down or drill-through to reports and analysis for additional information or context.

Strategic dashboards/Scorecards

Monitor execution of corporate strategic objectives at each level of the organization.

Benefits:

• Track progress against strategic corporate goals
• Map key connections among departments and cause-and-effect relationships between or across departments.
• Support management methodologies including Balanced Scorecard, TQM, Six Sigma, etc.
  Drill-down to reports and analysis for additional information or context.

Source: For more information, please visit http://www.cognos.com/products/cognos8businessintelligence/dashboards.html

Cognos 8 Business Intelligence - Analysis

IBM Business Intelligence BI Software : Cognos 8 Business Intelligence - Analysis

Analysis enables the guided exploration of information that pertains to all dimensions of your business, regardless of where the data is stored. Analyze and report against online analytical processing (OLAP) and dimensionally aware relational sources.

For those who want to explore and perform multidimensional analysis on Cognos 8 BI data in their spreadsheet, there is Cognos 8 BI Analysis for Microsoft Excel®

With the analysis capability, you can personalize the style and quality of BI delivered to your key stakeholders; and you expand the community of BI users.

More targeted information

• Harness a business-friendly tool for OLAP cube building to analyze your data and leverage the platform and security of Cognos 8 Business Intelligence.

More user communities

• Share and leverage datasets optimized for exploration and analysis within your business.

Robust analysis tools

• Perform complex analysis quickly and easily to get to the “why” behind an event or action to improve business performance.
• Analyze what's driving your business with data organized in logical categories such as fiscal periods, sales regions, and product groups.
• Move from summary level to transaction level detail, or from one PowerCube™ to another to find exactly the information you are looking for.
• Sophisticated time trending with built-in customizable time series lets you analyze what has changed over previous years, quarters, months, and other critical measures.

Multi-dimensional modeling capabilities

• Support for all data sources.
• Comprehensive logging and check points.
• Automated cube builds.
• Centralized security and administration provide optimal manageability for IT.
• Time-dependant processing.
• Alternate drill paths.
• Distinct category counts.
• Time-based partitioned PowerCubes create a flexible design environment that streamlines development and enhances ROI.

Easy to use

• Explore large complex data sets using drag-and-drop techniques. Drill down through increasing levels of detail, and view by different dimensions such as sales per region or by product.
• View and analyze data relationships graphically and change displays easily. End-users can easily drill down, rank, sort, forecast, and nest information to gain greater insight into trends, causes, and effects.
• A common XML-based report format means that a report can be opened in whatever client suits a user’s needs.
• User-friendly interface makes multidimensional analysis simple for all users, regardless of their business or technical level.
• The Windows, Web, and Excel clients mean that users can work within a familiar environment—maximizing ROI and decreasing training costs.
• Import and manipulate BI content in Office.

Easy to deploy

• Convert one billion consolidated rows and two million categories from multiple data sources into compact PowerCubes™ ready for analysis.
• Seamless integration with third-party cubes and OLAP servers lets you maximize return on Oracle, Microsoft, SAP BW, and IBM resources you already own; as well as dimensionally modeled relational sources.
• Process and summarize data in the application layer and only return results at a summary level.

Source: For more information, please visit http://www.cognos.com/products/cognos8businessintelligence/analysis.html

Cognos 8 Business Intelligence - Reporting

IBM Business Intelligence BI Software : Cognos 8 Business Intelligence - Reporting

Reporting gives you access to a complete list of self-serve report types, is adaptable to any data source, and operates from a single metadata layer for a variety of benefits such as multilingual reporting.

With the reporting capability, you can personalize the style and quality of BI delivered to your key stakeholders; and you expand the community of BI users.

More targeted information

• Use tabbed portlet pages to navigate across multi-style, multi-page reports with critical information.
• Use briefing books to maximize your professional report presentation with customized page orientation, horizontal pagination, multiple tables of content, and personalized 'no data' scenarios.
• Schedule and burst multi-page reports to ensure that stakeholders receive relevant, consistent, and timely information.
• Save and store reports to any LAN location to save time, increase convenience, and facilitate easy access to reports and information.
• Use global filters to update the content across multiple objects in a portal page.

More user communities

• Allow business analysts to quickly and intuitively create and format statement-style reports with live data with the express authoring mode.

Complete reporting coverage

• User interface supports 10+ languages; reports delivered in 25+ languages.
• Multiple export formats: Excel, PDF, XML, HTML, and CSV.
• Flexible distribution methods: centralized access, email, application integration, and Office.
• A single architecture for viewing, querying, analyzing, and authoring for collaborative contributions to any report including dashboards.
• Report against any heterogeneous data source.
• Web-based deployment.

Advanced authoring capabilities

• Intuitive and accessible self-service report authoring.
• Federated queries.
• Adaptive layout adjusts automatically when objects are added, moved, or removed.
• Embed live applications, Web sites, and non-BI content within a report.
• Drag-and-drop authoring incorporates data, text, charts, graphs, and images.
• Edit reports with prompts and toolbar commands.
• Interactive visualizations and charting abilities.
• Work with data using familiar business terms.
• Use a variety of charts: crosstabs, bar/3D bar, pie/doughnut, line, gauge, funnel, scatter, dot density, waterfall, and more.
• Create complex, multi-page layouts using different data sources without programming or workarounds.
• Conditional suppression and automatic calculations

Source: For more information, please visit http://www.cognos.com/products/cognos8businessintelligence/reporting.html?lid=reporting

Oracle's Hyperion Essbase Visual Explorer

Oracle Business Intelligence BI Software : Enterprise Performance Management Application : Oracle Hyperion Essbase Visual Explorer

Oracle's Hyperion Essbase Visual Explorer (Visual Explorer) software is an innovative performance management interface that is based on five years of research at Stanford University into how to increase user productivity through visual navigation and analysis. This live performance visibility window into Hyperion Essbase can turn a sea of numbers into explicit insight. Visual Explorer helps novice and seasoned users:

• Navigate vast detail across many dimensions
• Quickly identify trends, exceptions and interdependencies
• Understand the relationships that drive business performance

Source: For more information, please visit http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/bi/essbase/visual-explorer.html

Oracle Hyperion Essbase

Oracle Business Intelligence BI Software : Enterprise Performance Management Application : Oracle Hyperion Essbase

Oracle's Hyperion Essbase (Essbase) is an OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) Server that provides an environment for deploying pre-packaged applications or developing custom analytic and enterprise performance management applications.

With a rapid application development environment, Essbase enables business users to quickly model complex business scenarios. Aside from its high scalability, a key strength of Essbase lies in its ability to allow users to "write back" to an application's data repository under security. This makes it ideal for developing forward looking applications such as forecasting, scenario modeling, and "what if" type analysis.

With Essbase, organizations define a dimensional view of their business—and provide business users with new levels of self-sufficiency to access, navigate, and gain actionable insight into critical business issues. All of this through the various end-user tools for Essbase.
For example, Hyperion Smart View for Office (Excel, PowerPoint, Word, Outlook), Hyperion Visual Explorer, and several modules of Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition Plus, such as Hyperion Interactive Reporting, Hyperion Web Analysis, Hyperion Financial Reporting, are some of the various Oracle tools that enable users to interact with an Essbase application.

Essbase provides adaptable data storage mechanisms for specific types of analytic and performance management applications, thereby ensuring sub-second response times regardless of the complexity of the analytics. For example, Block data storage option (BSO) enables driver-based scenario modeling, forecasting, and predictive analytic applications. Aggregate data storage option (ASO) is optimized for massive sparse data sets, supporting thousands of concurrent business users performing sophisticated analyses at the speed of thought.

Source: For more details, please visit http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/bi/essbase/index.html

Hyperion Essbase—System 9

Oracle Business Intelligence BI Foundation and Tools Software : Oracle Hyperion Essbase—System 9

Oracle's Hyperion Essbase - System 9 is the industry-leading OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) Server. Essbase provides an environment for rapidly developing custom analytic and enterprise performance management applications. With a rapid application development environment that is managed by the business, Essbase enables the business to quickly model complex business scenarios. For example, Essbase makes it easy for line-of-business personnel to develop and manage analytic applications that model complex scenarios, forecast the business and perform "what-if" analyses in order to look into the future. Essbase supports extremely fast query response times for vast numbers of users, for large data sets, and for complex business models. It is hot-pluggable across any data source.

BENEFITS

• Richest business user experience—Delivers "speed-of-thought" query response time so users can quickly understand the metrics that influence business performance, ask questions, and make informed decisions. With its outstanding Microsoft Office integration, Essbase resonates with business and financial analysts alike. In addition, a suite of reporting tools satisfies the diverse needs of users across the enterprise. Whether inside a spreadsheet, through formatted reports, via a powerful ad hoc graphical interface, or a data visualization paradigm, business users can easily and intuitively understand what drives the business.
• Highly advanced calculation engine—At its core, Essbase is the most advanced, high performance calculation engine on the market. It ships with over 350 pre-built, out-of-the-box functions, accelerating the development of complex business models. A single point of maintenance makes it easy for an administrator to manage business rules. From straightforward aggregations to complex cross-dimensional allocations; from comprehensive time series intelligence to financial sophistication, the Essbase calculator delivers premium performance and breadth of functionality.
• Best custom analytic environment—Essbase enables line-of-business personnel to drive application design and rapid iterations. The highly graphical "outline" technology makes it easy to build dimensions, hierarchies, metrics, and scenarios. Essbase's unique multi-user read/write technology allows the creation of forward looking applications such as trending, forecasting and scenario analysis. It is the Essbase engine that powers the Hyperion Planning suite of applications. Performance is optimized via a range of data storage and compression methods best suited for the type of application being built. Essbase supports both 32 and 64 bit computing across both Windows and Unix operating environments—capable of massive scalability for enterprise wide deployments.

Source: For more information, please visit http://www.oracle.com/appserver/business-intelligence/essbase.html

Oracle Business Intelligence Standard Edition

Oracle BI Foundation and Tools Software : Oracle Business Intelligence Standard Edition

Expand Enterprise Insight Faster, with Less Cost and Complexity

Oracle Business Intelligence Standard Edition (SE)—a member of the Oracle Fusion Middleware product family—delivers a set of pre-integrated products for building, deploying, and managing BI solutions. Oracle Business Intelligence SE is optimized to work with Oracle data and applications, allowing customers to leverage Oracle technology to develop BI solutions at the lowest total cost of ownership (TCO). It includes Oracle Discoverer for ad hoc query, analysis, and reporting on relational and multi-dimensional (OLAP) data, Oracle Spreadsheet Add-In for analysis in Excel, Oracle Reports for high-fidelity reporting, and Oracle BI Beans.

BENEFITS

• Extensive pre-integration with Oracle technology and applications
• Powerful OLAP analysis and reporting capabilities
• Low total cost of ownership for Oracle-centric environments

Source: For more information, please visit http://www.oracle.com/appserver/business-intelligence/standard-edition.html

Oracle Business Intelligence Standard Edition One

Oracle BI Foundation and Tools : Oracle Business Intelligence Standard Edition One

The Right BI Foundation for the Emerging Enterprise

Oracle Business Intelligence Standard Edition One (SE One) is a complete, integrated BI system designed for deployments from 5 to 50 users. It includes proven, leading BI and data warehousing technology, including Oracle Interactive Dashboards, Oracle BI Publisher for highly formatted reporting, Oracle Answers for ad hoc reporting and analysis, Oracle Warehouse Builder for ETL, and Oracle Database—all in one easy to install package.

BENEFITS

• Proven, leading BI technology—Based on Oracle BI Enterprise Edition technology; priced, packaged and preconfigured for smaller deployments
  
• Ready to grow with your business—Seamless upgrades to enterprise BI products and flexible deployment options enable organizations to "start small but think big"
  
• Empowers end users—Designed with business users in mind, featuring simple yet powerful interfaces that empower end users instead of overwhelming your IT department with simple report building tasks

Source: http://www.oracle.com/appserver/business-intelligence/standard-edition-one.html

Oracle Business Intelligence Suite—Enterprise Edition Plus

Oracle BI Foundation and Tools : Oracle Business Intelligence BI Suite—Enterprise Edition Plus

Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition Plus (Oracle BI EE Plus) is a comprehensive suite of enterprise BI products that delivers a full range of analysis and reporting capabilities. Featuring a unified, highly scalable, modern architecture, Oracle BI EE Plus provides intelligence and analytics from data spanning enterprise sources and applications—empowering the largest communities with complete and relevant insight.

Oracle BI EE Plus also bundles key Oracle Hyperion reporting products for integrated reporting with Oracle Hyperion financial applications.

BENEFITS

• Comprehensive BI functionality built on a unified infrastructure—Includes interactive dashboards, full ad hoc queries and analysis, proactive intelligence delivery and alerts, enterprise and financial reporting, online analytical processing (OLAP) analysis and presentation, high-volume production reporting, real-time predictive intelligence, disconnected analytics, as well as integration with Microsoft Office.
• Pervasive insight to everyone, everywhere—Provides relevant insight to everyone, not just analysts. All levels of the organization can see information optimized for their role.
  Unified business model—Built on an enterprise information model that unifies metadata across the Oracle BI tools and analytical applications for the lowest TCO.
• Hot-Pluggable BI infrastructure—Integrates with any data source, extraction, transformation and load (ETL) tool, major business application, application server, security infrastructure, portal technology, other front-end and analytical tools, and databases including IBM DB/2, Teradata, Microsoft SQL Server; SAP Business Information Warehouse (BW), Microsoft Analysis Services; flat files; XML data; and unstructured data.

Source: http://www.oracle.com/appserver/business-intelligence/enterprise-edition.html

Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation and Tools

Oracle BI Software : Oracle Business Intelligence Foundation and Tools

Oracle Business Intelligence foundation and tools—part of the Oracle Fusion Middleware product family—provide the most comprehensive business intelligence (BI) and analytic capabilities available today based on category-leading products for OLAP interactive dashboards, ad hoc analysis, proactive detection and alerts, advanced reporting and publishing, mobile analytics, desktop gadgets, and more.

• Pervasive—Deliver intuitive, role-based intelligence for everyone in an organization—from front line employees to senior management—that enables better decisions, actions, and business processes.
• Comprehensive—Integrate information from your financial performance management, operational intelligence, and transactional applications.
• Hot-Pluggable—Use your existing data sources and systems. Oracle BI products are hot-pluggable with Oracle and non-Oracle environments.

BI FOUNDATION AND TOOLS

• Oracle BI Suite Enterprise Edition (EE) Plus
• Oracle BI Standard Edition One (SE One)
• Oracle BI Standard Edition (SE)
• Hyperion Essbase

Source: For more information, please visit Oracle Website http://www.oracle.com/appserver/business-intelligence/index.html

IBM Completes Acquisition Of Cognos

Business Intelligence BI Software : IBM Completes Acquisition Of Cognos

ARMONK, NY, January 31, 2008–IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced it has completed its acquisition of Cognos® (NASDAQ: COGN) (TSX: CSN), a publicly-held company based in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. IBM will reveal its business strategy for the Cognos acquisition during a press briefing on February 6.

IBM announced a definitive agreement to acquire Cognos on November 12, 2007. IBM acquired Cognos to accelerate its Information on Demand strategy, a cross-company initiative that combines IBM's strength in information integration, content and data management and business consulting services to unlock the business value of information.

Through this acquisition, IBM and Cognos will become the leading provider of technology and services for business intelligence and performance management, delivering the industry’s most complete, open standards-based platform with the broadest range of expertise to help companies expand the value of their information, optimize their business processes and maximize performance across their enterprises.

The Cognos acquisition supports both IBM’s acquisition strategy and capital allocation model, and will contribute to the achievement of the company’s objective for earnings-per-share growth through 2010. To date, IBM has announced 25 strategic acquisitions in support of its global Information on Demand effort.

Additional information about IBM’s Information on Demand strategy is available at: http://www.ibm.com/software/data/information-on-demand/. For more details about the combination of IBM and Cognos see: http://www.ibm.com/software/data/info/cognos.

Source: http://www.cognos.com/news/releases/2008/0131-2.html

Cognos Positioned In Leaders Quadrant In New Analyst Report

Business Intelligence BI Software : Cognos Positioned In Leaders Quadrant In New Analyst Report

BURLINGTON, Mass., February 1, 2008– Cognos, an IBM company, and the world leader in business intelligence and performance management solutions, today announced it is positioned in the Leaders quadrant of Gartner, Inc.’s new 2008 Business Intelligence Platforms Magic Quadrant.* Gartner evaluates vendors based on completeness of vision and ability to execute.

Enterprise customers and midsize organizations have long relied on Cognos’ proven business intelligence capabilities on top of their transaction systems to reduce costs, improve customer service, streamline reporting and operations and deliver higher-value information to improve decision-making and increase user productivity.

“We view this placement as representative of the continued innovation and industry leadership we provide in the business intelligence and performance management market,” said Dave Laverty, vice-president, Worldwide Marketing, Business Intelligence and Performance Management, Cognos. “With Cognos’ full-range of BI and performance management user capabilities on a single enterprise-class platform, our customers are able to leverage trusted information and move from process automation to optimize business performance for competitive advantage.”

Cognos has also been positioned in Gartner's 2007 Corporate Performance Management Suites Magic Quadrant. View these reports, compliments of Cognos, at http://www.cognos.com/news/analyst_reviews.html.

IBM Cognos 8 Business Intelligence provides decision makers at all levels of the enterprise with groundbreaking capabilities to better manage performance by delivering a consistent, accurate view of all business information. As a complete, flexible product, IBM Cognos 8 BI easily integrates into existing infrastructures with multiple systems and data sources. Its simplified BI environment improves user adoption, enables better decision-making, and provides a robust foundation for departmental BI, enterprise BI and performance management.

*Sources: Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms, 2008, by J. Richardson, K. Schlegel, B. Hostmann, N. McMurchy, February 2, 2008. Gartner, Inc., "Magic Quadrant for CPM Suites, 2007" by Nigel Rayner et al, December 19, 2007.

About the Magic Quadrant
The Magic Quadrants are copyrighted December 2007 and January 2008 by Gartner, Inc. and are reused with permission. The Magic Quadrant is a graphical representation of a marketplace at and for a specific time period. It depicts Gartner's analysis of how certain vendor’s measure against criteria for that marketplace, as defined by Gartner. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in the Magic Quadrant, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors placed in the “Leaders” quadrant. The Magic Quadrant is intended solely as a research tool, and is not meant to be a specific guide to action. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

About Cognos, an IBM company
Cognos, an IBM company, is the world leader in business intelligence and performance management solutions. It provides world-class enterprise planning and BI software and services to help companies plan, understand and manage financial and operational performance. Cognos was acquired by IBM in January 2008. For more information visit http://www.ibm.com/software/data/ and http://www.cognos.com.

Source: http://www.cognos.com/news/releases/2008/0204.html

Global Partner Community Supports IBM Acquisition Of Cognos

Business Intelligence BI Software : Global Partner Community Supports IBM Acquisition Of Cognos

New York, NY– February 6, 2008–Alliance, technology and channel partners worldwide expressed their support of IBM’s acquisition of Cognos in statements following the January 31, 2008 announcement regarding the completion of the purchase of Cognos by IBM (NYSE: IBM).

“This is an exciting time for Cognos and IBM partners as our opportunities to innovate and collaborate grow significantly.” said Mel Zeledon, Senior Vice President, Global Alliances, Cognos, an IBM Company. “As part of IBM we have the ability to expand our vision as the leading BI and Performance Management provider, allow our partner base to both leverage a broader set of solutions from IBM and enable open interoperability with multiple non-IBM technologies, solutions and services in heterogeneous environments, in order to advance information management driven initiatives for their customers”

Global partners resoundingly support of the IBM acquisition of Cognos:

Alliance Partners

Capgemini
“Through a collaborative partnership and global alliance Capgemini and Cognos bring together global management and IT consulting experience as well as leading business intelligence and performance management solutions. We welcome the acquisition of Cognos by IBM and will continue to leverage our mutual expertise to deliver the guidance, strategy, and implementation projects that move organizations toward better business decisions company-wide. We believe that this merger brings together two of the leaders in the Business Intelligence space and the integration of technologies will strengthen Cognos' ability to win in this highly competitive market.”
Scott Barnes, Vice President, Business Intelligence, Capgemini

Deloitte
“Deloitte Consulting and Cognos have developed an Alliance to help our clients around the world achieve their business intelligence and performance management objectives. With the addition of Cognos to IBM's information management portfolio, we can look forward to continued collaboration and joint momentum with both IBM and Cognos to help our clients reach their goals.”
Bob Dalton, a principal with Deloitte Consulting LLP and Deloitte's IBM Alliance leader

Satyam Computer Services
“To help our clients manage their performance and intelligence needs so that they are better able to extract greater value from their processes and market endeavors, we’ve been working extensively using strong analytics and business management capabilities. Cognos has been a formidable ally in this pursuit. The Cognos acquisition increases IBM’s ability to provide a significantly enhanced and integrated platform. We are convinced our clients will benefit from the synergy leverage these merged capabilities will provide.”
Shailesh F.Shah, Chief Strategy Officer, Satyam Computer Services

Tata Consultancy Services
“TCS shares the Cognos vision for making business intelligence a mainstream and pervasive technology. As a charter member of the Cognos Partner program and a premium System Integrator to IBM Alliances, we combine mutual strengths and capabilities to deliver business value to the market. We are excited about this acquisition and look forward to continued collaboration in opportunity creation and best-in-class delivery."
Dr. Santosh Mohanty, Global Director and Practice Head,
Business Intelligence & Performance Management, TCS.

Teradata
"Teradata and Cognos have been partners for more than 10 years. Together, we provide our customers a flexible and comprehensive performance management solution, including strategic and operational BI as well as enterprise planning solutions. Looking ahead, we expect to continue expanding our partnership to provide mutual customers with a broad range of expertise in end-to-end analytics solutions. It is partnerships like this that will validate and grow our respective leadership positions in the forefront of the analytics industry."
Darryl McDonald, Chief Marketing Officer, Teradata Corporation.

Technology Partners

Appfluent
“As an existing technology partner of IBM, delivering comprehensive data warehouse lifecycle management solutions and of Cognos, delivering analytical applications for enterprise IT via the Cognos 8 BI platform, Appfluent is enthusiastic about the combination that the joining of these companies brings to the market. We’re eager to continue our technology integration and work with them to advance information management driven initiatives for our joint customers.”
Frank Gelbart, CEO, Appfluent

BrightStar Partners
“As a long standing Cognos Platinum services and reseller partner and Powered by Cognos solution provider, BrightStar Partners is passionate about Cognos as a company and as a solution to Performance Management, and are dedicated to supporting their vision through implementation and software sales under the IBM fold.”
Neil Morgan, President, BrightStar Partners Inc.

Clarabridge
"As a leading provider of text analytics, our OEM partnership with Cognos lets joint customers use Cognos BI to tap into rich customer experiences and insights contained in unstructured data. We are excited to move forward with our partnership initiatives with Cognos under IBM and see the combination as valuable to the information management market."
Sid Banerjee, CEO, Clarabridge

RIM
“As a technology partner of both IBM and Cognos, RIM is pleased to continue our collaboration with the companies now that they have united. Together we will continue to help customers improve mobile productivity and organizational workflow through enhanced wireless access to a wide range of business applications. In particular, the extension of SOA components to the BlackBerry platform is making it easier for our mutual customers to access and input information remotely and we look forward to further leveraging this powerful architecture to support the evolving needs of the mobile workforce.”
Jeff McDowell, Vice President, Global Alliances, Research In Motion

North America Partners

CBH
“As a powered by Cognos solutions provider and long time Cognos Partner we are pleased to see the teaming of two leaders in information management and performance management. We fully anticipate continued success in accelerating our customers’ performance management initiatives as part of the IBM partner community.”
Joe Baird, President NA, Parson Consulting

Creeth-Richman
“IBM’s acquisition of Cognos is a powerful testament to the validation and growth of the performance management sector. As a long-time Cognos partner, we and our clients have benefited from the company’s innovative, best-of-breed technologies as well as its commitment to support and service. Moving into this new era of performance management, we will fully leverage Cognos and IBM’s joint expertise and platform openness to help our clients find and implement creative solutions to their business problems, while providing reliable support and a relationship built on trust.”
Richard Creeth, President, Creeth, Richman & Associates, Inc.

Grant Thornton
“Cognos clearly has strong financial performance management and reporting solutions today, and with the acquisition by IBM we expect these offerings to be sustained and enhanced by IBM’s software strength in information management.”
Hank Steininger, Managing Partner, Grant Thornton

ISA Consulting
“IBM’s acquisition of Cognos combines one of the largest business software powerhouses with a world-leading performance management software company. The strategic move will only further strengthen the suite of solutions offered by both vendors. We are excited about this venture and how it will enhance the Cognos performance management solutions to meet the increasing demands of current and future ISA customers.”
Lou Polisano, CEO, ISA Consulting

Revelwood
“As a company that provides performance management solutions that enable companies to predict, measure, evaluate and impact business performance, we are very enthusiastic about our partner, Cognos, becoming part of IBM. With IBM’s performance management partner initiative already in place, we are confident that our partnership with Cognos - supported by IBM – will remain strong, providing each company with additional opportunities in the future.”
Kenneth Wolf, CEO, Revelwood

EMEA Partners

Eniac
“Eniac has been a proud IBM Premier Business Partner for 30 years, an IBM SOA Specialty Partner as well as a Cognos Certified solutions partner for a decade, and more recently a Cognos Platinum Reseller partner. We attest to the value that the combined companies bring to the information management space and will work readily with the expanded team to continue delivering winning solutions and services our customers to achieve performance management excellence.”
Bert Vrielink, Director, Eniac Business Intelligence

Inca Software
“As a leading reseller of Cognos software and services in the UK, Inca welcomes the acquisition of Cognos by IBM and the opportunities for collaboration and innovation this joining will deliver. We are committed to continuing to providing the full range of Cognos solutions and the skills to implement and support effective planning and business intelligence applications.”
Chris Kerrison, CEO, Inca Software

Asia-Pacific Partners

CDP Group
“We believe that the combination of these two great companies will bring both compelling vision and execution to the performance management market. We are now able to offer our New Zealand customers and prospects an extremely enhanced and vibrant outlook, with stronger and more innovative solutions, that can revolutionize their operational effectiveness.”
Allen Keyte, Director, CDP Group

Cortell Group
“Cortell is pleased to join the broad IBM-Cognos ecosystem based on our considerable experience in building a customer base that has come to rely on Cognos TM1. We applaud this advancement in performance management by teaming two industry leaders and we look forward to continuing to build our practice on IBM Cognos proven solutions.”
Ernest Glad, CEO, Cortell Group

Focus Strategies & Solutions
“As a leading Cognos partner, Focus is delighted about the opportunities that the IBM acquisition brings to our organization. We see this exciting development as a real vehicle for growth and expansion of our business, particularly from the perspective of end-to-end Information Management solutions and services. We can deepen our relationships with our accounts and provide them with a comprehensive offering that is second to none. We feel that the combination of the two organizations is really synergistic, with minimal overlap, and will bring enormous benefit to us and more importantly, to our customers.”
Tom Reich, Managing Director, Focus Strategies & Solutions

Additional Partner Statements in Support of IBM’s acquisition of Cognos can be found at www.cognos.com/news/releases/2008/0206-quotes.html.

About Cognos, an IBM company
Cognos, an IBM company, is the world leader in business intelligence and performance management solutions. It provides world-class enterprise planning and BI software and services to help companies plan, understand and manage financial and operational performance. Cognos was acquired by IBM in January 2008. For more information visit http://www.ibm.com/software/data/ and http://www.cognos.com.

Source: http://www.cognos.com/news/releases/2008/0206.html

Oracle Data Mining

Oracle Business Intelligence BI Software : Oracle Data Warehousing : Oracle Data Mining

Oracle Data Mining (ODM)—an option to Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition—enables customers to produce actionable predictive information and build integrated business intelligence applications. Using data mining functionality embedded in Oracle Database 11g, customers can find patterns and insights hidden in their data. Application developers can quickly automate the discovery and distribution of new business intelligence—predictions, patterns and discoveries—throughout their organization.

CONNECTORS & EXTENSIONS

• Oracle Data Miner—A graphical user interface that helps customers mine their Oracle database to find valuable hidden information, patterns, and new insights
• Oracle Spreadsheet Add-In for Predictive Analytics—Enables Excel users to mine their Oracle Database using simple, ‘one click’ Predict and Explain analytics features
• Oracle Data Mining JDeveloper and SQL Developer Extensions—Allows Java and database developers to easily integrate advanced analytics into their applications
• ODM Connector for mySAP BW—The ODM Connector Enables SAP Business Warehouse 3.5 users to seamlessly mine data using Oracle Data Mining within the SAP Data Mining framework

Source: http://www.oracle.com/solutions/business_intelligence/data-mining.html

Oracle OLAP

Oracle Business Intelligence BI Software : Oracle Data Warehousing : Oracle OLAP

Oracle OLAP—an option to Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition—is a calculation engine that supports the entire spectrum of advanced analytical applications including planning, budgeting, forecasting, sales, and marketing to help identify key business trends and model complex business scenarios. OLAP cube materialized views in Oracle Database 11g dramatically improves the performance of complex analytic queries accessing multi-dimensional data.

BENEFITS

• Reduced Data Movement and Latency—With Oracle OLAP, you no longer have to replicate data into a stand-alone, proprietary OLAP server because all of your multi-dimensional data is stored directly into the Oracle Database relational engine. Decision makers benefit from much faster access to higher quality information.
• Lower IT Costs and Complexity—Oracle OLAP enables you to reduce costs and dramatically simplify your IT environment. With Oracle OLAP, you eliminate the need to purchase additional hardware and you only have to maintain a single server and security model. Oracle OLAP also supports SQL access to multi-dimensional data types, so you can leverage your existing investment SQL tools, applications, and skills.
• Enterprise-Scale Analytics with Grid Computing—Simply providing decision makers with access to data is meaningless if the data is unavailable. Oracle OLAP and Oracle Real Applications Clusters together provide the foundation of Very Large Multi-dimensional Databases (VLDM) which can provide thousands of concurrent users with continuous access to information.

Source: http://www.oracle.com/solutions/business_intelligence/olap.html

Oracle Partitioning

Oracle Business Intelligence BI Software : Oracle Data Warehousing : Oracle Partitioning

Partitioning enables tables and indexes to be split into smaller, more manageable components and is a key requirement for any large database with high performance and high availability requirements. Oracle Database 11g offers the widest choice of partitioning methods including interval, reference, list, and range in addition to composite partitions of two methods such as order date (range) and region (list) or region (list) and customer type (list). Oracle Partitioning—an option to Oracle Database 11g Enterprise Edition—is also foundation of Oracle's Information Lifecycle Management strategy, which aligns the business value of information to cost-effective storage tiers for large data warehousing and transaction processing applications.

BENEFITS

• Faster Performance—Lowers query times from minutes to seconds
• Increases Availability—24 by 7 access to critical information
• Improves Manageability—Manage smaller 'chunks' of data
• Enables Information Lifecycle Management—Cost-efficient use of storage

Source: For more information, please visit http://www.oracle.com/solutions/business_intelligence/partitioning.html

Oracle Warehouse Builder

Oracle Business Intelligence BI Software : Oracle Data Warehousing : Oracle Warehouse Builder

Optimized Data Integration for Oracle Databases

Oracle Warehouse Builder enables you to take raw data, typically in different formats and disparate systems, and transform it into high-quality information that's optimized for business reporting and analytics. With a single, easy-to-use interface, Oracle Warehouse Builder enables you to design ETL processes and implement data integration for all your data movement requirements. Using a common metadata repository, Oracle Warehouse Builder combines state of the art data integration capabilities with enterprise data quality tools to deliver end-to-end data integration optimized for Oracle Databases.

BENEFITS

• Design data warehouses and manage corporate metadata
• Migrate data from legacy systems
• Consolidate and integrate data from disparate data sources
• Cleanse raw data so that it becomes quality information
• Available with all database editions

Source: http://www.oracle.com/solutions/business_intelligence/warehouse-builder.html

Oracle Data Warehousing

Oracle Business Intelligence BI Software : Oracle Data Warehousing

WHY ORACLE?

Oracle Database 11g offers fast, reliable and secure reporting, online analytics, and data mining on Data Warehouse that can scale-out at low cost.

• Manage extract, transform and loading of quality data with Oracle Warehouse Builder
• Improve data warehouse performance, availability, and manageability by partitioning large tables
• Find patterns and insights hidden in the data warehouse with Oracle Data Mining
• Execute analytical queries quickly with Oracle OLAP's cube-organized materialized views

ORACLE DATA WAREHOUSING PRODUCTS

• Oracle Database 11g
• Oracle Warehouse Builder
• Oracle Partitioning
• Oracle Data Mining
• Oracle OLAP

Source: For more information, please visit http://www.oracle.com/solutions/business_intelligence/dw_home.html

Oracle Strategic Operational Planning

Oracle Business Intelligence BI Software: Enterprise Performance Management EPM Application : Oracle Strategic Operational Planning

Align Operational Feasibility With Financial Goals
Oracle Strategic Operational Planning enables the alignment of key operational planning processes with financial planning to provide a common perspective across financial and operational plans. It addresses a range of high-value planning processes, such as demand-supply alignment, product allocation and integrated revenue planning, which are supported poorly with spreadsheet tools today. The solution is based on an innovative change-based data modeling engine that allows rich cross-functional modeling and interactive business impact analysis at an enterprise scale. It complements existing financial and supply chain planning systems by linking these functional plans into an integrated business planning framework. This allows planners across business functions to change operational assumptions, re-evaluate planning scenarios, assess business impact, and rapidly update the plan of record.

BENEFITS

• Align financial and operational plans—Identify and resolve critical gaps between financial and operational plans by linking functional plans, planning models and assumptions in an integrated framework.
• Achieve consensus across functions—Manage cross-functional collaboration and approval workflows to share planning assumptions and decisions throughout the organization.
• Understand business-wide impact of plan revisions—Assess the impact of plan alternatives on key financial and operational metrics. Establish financial desirability as well as operational feasibility of plans and drive fact-based decisions.
• Reduce planning cycles and improve productivity—Leverage technology for rapid cross-functional modeling, interactive scenario analysis and dynamic planning to compress decision cycles.
• Leverage existing financial and supply chain planning solutions—Complement functional planning and execution systems and integrate relevant data and master data from these systems to provide an environment for integrated business planning. Submit plan changes back to planning and execution systems for immediate action.

Source: http://www.oracle.com/appserver/business-intelligence/strategic-operational-planning.html

Hyperion Financial Data Quality Management

Oracle Business Intelligence BI Software: Enterprise Performance Management EPM Application : Hyperion Financial Data Quality Management

Oracle's Hyperion Financial Data Quality Management (Data Quality Management) is a packaged solution for finance users that help develop standardized financial data management processes with its Web-based guided workflow user interface. Its data preparation server can ease integrating and validating financial data from any of your source systems. And to further reduce your data integration costs as well as data mapping complexities, Hyperion Financial Data Quality Management includes prepackaged BPM Adapters for Hyperion Financial Management—System 9, Hyperion Planning, Oracle BI Suite Standard Edition and Hyperion Enterprise.

BENEFITS

• Increase quality—Improve your financial data quality and confidence in the numbers
  Simplify data handling—Abridge the collection, mapping, verification, and movement of financial data
• Standardize—Rely on repeatable financial processes
• Reduce expenditures—Lower the cost of compliance
• Improve productivity—Eliminate manual file manipulation and bottlenecks

Source: For more information, please visit http://www.oracle.com/appserver/business-intelligence/hyperion-financial-performance-management/hyperion-financial-data-quality-management.html

Hyperion Workforce Planning

Oracle Business Intelligence BI Software : Enterprise Performance Management EPM Application : Hyperion Workforce Planning

Oracle's Hyperion Workforce Planning (Workforce Planning) software is a special-purpose planning module that makes headcount, salary and compensation planning fast and efficient across the enterprise. Designed with pre-built functionality and best practices that are ready to use right out of the box, it simplifies the planning of workforce and workforce related expenses, such as bonuses, fringe benefits, overtime and merit increases. It also automatically and seamlessly links your workforce expense plans into Hyperion Planning—System 9 to deliver accurate and real-time awareness of the business impact of your workforce decisions on your overall expense plans.

BENEFITS

• Deploy Quickly—Simplify implementation and reduce maintenance requirements with prebuilt functionality
• Improve Confidence—Address all workforce planning requirements with a fully flexible and open architecture
• Enhance Accuracy—Achieve greater accuracy, predictability, and accountability through detailed headcount, salary and benefit planning
• Optimize Resources—Assess real-time impact of salaries and associated workforce expenses
• Save Time and Money—Reduce workforce planning cycle time by eliminating dependency on spreadsheets

Source: http://www.oracle.com/appserver/business-intelligence/hyperion-financial-performance-management/hyperion-workforce-planning.html

Hyperion Capital Expense Planning

Oracle Business Intelligence BI Software : Enterprise Performance Management EPM Application : Hyperion Capital Expense Planning

Oracle's Hyperion Capital Expense Planning software is a specialized planning module that automates the planning of capital assets and capital asset related expenses, such as depreciation, maintenance and insurance. Capital Expense Planning includes pre-built functionality and best practices that easily plan for all your capital expenses. It is also directly linked to Hyperion Planning—System 9 so you can immediately assess the impact of your capital expenses on your overall expenses and financial statements.

BENEFITS

• Deploy Quickly—Simplify implementation processes and reduce maintenance requirements
• Improve Confidence—Manage all capital expenses easily, ensure security over data, calculations, and global settings
• Optimize Resources—Assess the immediate impact of capital expense decisions on financial statements
• Enhance Accuracy—Achieve greater accuracy, predictability, and accountability by involving operational-level planners
• Gain Efficiency—Eliminate manual steps by using a comprehensive planning solution

Source: For more information, please visit http://www.oracle.com/appserver/business-intelligence/hyperion-financial-performance-management/hyperion-capital-expense-planning.html

Hyperion Strategic Finance

Oracle Business Intelligence Software : Enterprise Performance Management Application : Hyperion Strategic Finance

Oracle's Hyperion Strategic Finance (Strategic Finance) software is a financial modeling application that lets executives identify and understand the full financial impact of alternative corporate strategies. Strategic Finance software delivers pre-packaged modeling and forecasting so your finance experts can better spend their time testing alternative strategies, building contingency plans, and understanding the impact of those strategies and plans on your company's long-term performance.

BENEFITS

• Create Business Value—Integrate long-term planning, treasury strategies and corporate development analysis
• Save time and money—Reduce model-building efforts using pre-built financial modeling logic
• Improve Strategic Decision-making—Perform more comprehensive financial analysis in less time, reduce simulation time from days to minutes
• Minimize risk and uncertainty—Improve accuracy of financial models with ensured accounting integrity
• Deploy Quickly—Implement quickly with minimal IT support

Source: http://www.oracle.com/appserver/business-intelligence/hyperion-financial-performance-management/hyperion-strategic-finance.html

Hyperion Performance Scorecard—System 9

Oracle Business Intelligence BI Softwares : Enterprise Performance Management Application : Hyperion Performance Scorecard—System 9

Hyperion Performance Scorecard—System 9 (Performance Scorecard) software, a Balanced Scorecard Collaborative certified application, helps companies clearly articulate strategy and goals, communicate them across the enterprise, and monitor key performance indicators. The software offers you complete strategy-and accountability-mapping capabilities, as well as Web-based message boards, forums and discussion threads.

BENEFITS

• Communicate effectively across the enterprise—Share operational performance management strategies throughout the business
• Clarify business objectives—Align the enterprise with corporate strategy, plans and objectives
• Focus resources—Improve operational efficiency through a continuous business performance management cycle
• Increase employee participation—Promote collaboration and accountability for results
• Create value—Build future economic value for key stakeholders

Source: http://www.oracle.com/appserver/business-intelligence/hyperion-financial-performance-management/hyperion-performance-scorecard-system9.html