Welcome to this
second edition of Praxatelligence...

... and a belated happy new business year to all!

This is the year of the Rat and in Chinese mythology the Rat year is a year of plenty, bringing opportunity and good prospects. It will be marked by speculation and fluctuations in the prices of commodities and the stock market; the world economy in general will boom. Business will be on the upswing and fortunes can be made. It will be an easy time to accumulate wealth.

Well, that sounds wonderful, and if eventful, businesses will more than ever need to know where their costs and revenues are being created and sourced to monitor that profit! However, this is also the time to make long-term investment plans as the bonanza the year of the Rat brings will serve to see us through the bleak years that may follow. All ventures begun at this time will be successful if one prepares well. But do not take chances or unnecessary risks - the year of the Rat is still ruled by the cold of winter and the darkness of night.

In the BI space we are witnessing a trend to the implementation of operational reporting in the form of interactive dashboards: For example, in a manufacturing environment and in contact centres. These dashboards are now much easier to implement given the new technologies available and the easier connections to back-end repositories.   Additionally, we are seeing added uptake to providing users with easy to use on report analytics with the ability to slice and dice and graph data for informative decision making.

In this issue, read what is happening in the Business Objects world with the SAP ownership changes and the new product announcements. Please contact us if you have any interest in these new solutions – we look forward to a great year with you!

Kind Regards

John Simeon

BI Practice Manager

NEWS...

A LEADER IN CORPORATE PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT

GARTNER SAYS

In Gartner’s latest research paper (published 19 December 2007) on Corporate Performance Management (CPM) Suites, it places Business Objects as a “leader” in this arena. Business Objects owned the space with recent acquisition owner, SAP, Cognos and Oracle Hyperion.   In its evaluation Gartner states, “Business Objects has built a comprehensive CPM portfolio….the CPM portfolio has particular strengths in financial consolidation and profitability modeling. Business Objects has a visionary strategy to create a broad EPM solution that will build on its CPM portfolio.”   This showcases Business Objects’ breadth, depth, visionary strategy and capability in the Performance Management offering.

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SAP/BO INTEGRATION UPDATE

Late last year SAP, the world’s leading provider of business software, integrated Business Objects into its operation, consolidating 2 of the technology industry’s biggest brands.  Both SAP and Business Objects have a shared vision to transform the way the world works by connecting people, information and businesses and their plan is to make the combination of the companies bring greater choice and value to its customers.

Three months on, SAP and Business Objects have successfully finalised the integration and have been working closely to ready both companies to deliver on their commitment and future vision that encompasses the following:

• Bring Business Objects into the SAP Group as an independent business unit focused on performance optimisation and business intelligence
• Offer its customers the flexibility to choose the business applications, technology platform, and partner ecosystem that's right for their business
• Protect its customers’ investments while they work in concert to deliver a consolidated and unified portfolio of solutions
• Deliver a broad solution portfolio to enable business performance optimisation, starting with financial performance management and governance, risk, and compliance
• Deliver a next-generation business intelligence platform, starting with information discovery and delivery and enterprise information management, for any type and source of information
• Make available to our joint partners the advantages of our applications, technology, and worldwide resources to enable them to better serve our common customers

On 13 February, 2008, an online webcast was presented where SAP and Business Objects shared their vision, strategy, product offerings, and more. To review this event, please click HERE.

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Product & Technical Update...

What's New In BusinessObjects XI 3.0?

When organisations want to track, understand and manage their information on a single enterprise business intelligence (BI) platform, BusinessObjects XI has long been delivering the industry’s most connected, interactive, and open BI solution.  

BusinessObjects XI 3.0 is the latest release extending on the proven BusinessObjects XI platform, giving organisations a better shared insight into their business and providing substantial functional improvements and innovations for the users.

Discover what’s new in BusinessObjects XI 3.0, the industry’s most advanced and complete platform for enterprise performance management, reporting, query and analysis, and enterprise information management.

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Lives Hanging On The 'Edge'

Business Objects' Edge Series is an affordable and proven suite of business intelligence products for small and mid-size organisations.

Find out why a health centre is “excited” over Business Objects' Edge Series and how it is saving lives.

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Xcelsius DYNAMIC VISIBILITY :

The Dynamic Visibility functionality lets you control the visibility of a component using the Dynamic Visibility function that is found on the Behaviour tab on the property sheet.

Display Status:

The component is visible or invisible depending on the cell value. By default, if the cell contains the number 1, the component is visible; if the cell is empty or has a value other than 1, the component is invisible.

Display Status Key:

You can define any other value to activate the status list of a component. For example, you can specify that the Display Status Key is the name of a Metric or Indicator. When the cell in Excel has that specific metric name, the component is visible. Using the Display Status Key simplifies model creation. Imagine that you need to show a world map to present the revenues by region. You want to use the Icon component on top of each region so that when you pass the pointer over it, a chart appears. You can create a model that inserts the region name on a pre-defined cell when each icon is selected. All other icons will do the same; they will even use the same destination cell. Then you can create the various charts and use the Display Status Key to make each chart visible when the respective region name is on the pre-defined cell. Since the destination cell will have no region name or just one region name at a time, you will see no chart or only one chart at a time, depending on the selection.

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Xcelsius XML INTEGRATION DYNAMIC REFRESH (USING EXCEL 2003) :

Did you know you can update your source data without re-importing a spreadsheet into Crystal Xcelsius? Extensible Markup Language (XML) defines a format for sharing data across platforms. Because Excel 2003 and Crystal Xcelsius both offer built-in XML capabilities, you can use the XML format to feed data dynamically into your Crystal Xcelsius-built model or dashboard. The advantage is, once you have built an XML-enabled model, you can eliminate the re-import process.

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Crystal Reports XI
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Dashboard and Visualisation
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Data Managers
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Query and Analysis
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