Rich Lechner of IBM came next, talking about the new enterprise and it’s new enterprise data center. Supporting business innovation is impacted, he said, by three things:

Globalization
The change from an exporter to a multi-country set of counties to a truly globally integrated enterprise - tapping into new talent pools around the world.
Rising tide of information
More [...]

Two of Gartner’s smartest analysts - Kurt Schlegel and Gareth Herschel (shameless plug) - just published an excellent little paper called “Business Intelligence and Decision Making“. This paper was one of Gartner’s Strategic Planning Assumptions and the (free) summary says:
A subset of organizations that seek a competitive advantage will evolve the primary role of their [...]

I started with an interesting breakfast this morning with Ian Ayres and Larry Rosenberger. Ian is the author of Super Crunchers (reviewed here in the wiki) and Larry is a research fellow and ex-CEO of Fair Isaac. The two of them were great conversationalists and we ranged across randomized testing (adaptive control), the power of [...]

Neil’s two blog posts on BI and technology rated highly again - the second one getting more traffic from Intelligent Enterprise readers than any other posts. Check them out:

Technology Is Not the Driver of BI Adoption
BI and Technology: Part II

I was checking out Doug Henschen’s interview of Kurt Schlegel - Gartner BI analyst - and page 2 was particularly excellent. Kurt clearly understands the value of being decision-centric and the need for BI to broaden to include rules and predictive analytics. And he plugged the book too, which is always appreciated. It’s a pity [...]

The folks at Kognitio gave me a quick overview of their WX2 product recently. WX2 is aimed at three distinct areas:

Software platform for high performance analytics
Data as a Service - it is being offered hosted to SMBs for instance
Data Warehouse Appliances

WX2 came out of the UK and is the end result of [...]

Neil and I are attending the DAMA conference this week and I will be blogging from some sessions. First one (after a fairly long set of announcements) is the Tuesday morning keynote, Michael Blechar of Gartner on The Yin & Yang of Process and Data: Which Will Be King of the Next Generation of Applications? [...]

SPSS and IBM’s Cognos group recently made an announcement of a partnership to integrate their products. I don’t have any more details than the press release but take this announcement as an indication that IBM/Cognos reached the logical conclusion that Predictive Analytics is distinctly and uniquely different from Business Intelligence/Performance Management and that customers want/need [...]

I saw a post with the title “Has Business Intelligence Outlived its Usefulness?” on Colin White’s blog and my first reaction was one of shock. On reading it, however, I see that Colin is taking aim not at BI in general but at the use of the phrase - a narrower and easier target!
I do [...]

Had a briefing today from the folks at LucidEra about their new product releases (press releases here and here). I met them through their blog and I think this whole area of AaaS (Analytics as a Service, though that’s not the best acronym) is an interesting one. After all, if you think improving operational decisions [...]