May 12, 2008
Business Intelligence the Key to Winning at Outsourcing
Business Intelligence the Key to Winning at Outsourcing
The ability to report on key business metrics via customer portals has become a deciding factor in today’s outsourcing contracts as businesses demand greater transparency and accountability from their suppliers. That’s according to leading business intelligence company, Yellowfin, which says it is increasingly providing solutions to outsourcing companies whose customers want them to underpin their offerings with advanced reporting tools and customer portals so they can monitor the outsourcer’s performance in real time.
Yellowfin CEO, Glen Rabie said momentum for outsourcing continues to grow as businesses seek to lower their costs by leveraging the capabilities of specialist providers. However, he said companies on their second or third round of outsourcing contracts have learned the hard lessons from past experience and now expect far more of their suppliers than simply reducing their expenses.
“In the early days of outsourcing, companies just looked at their transaction costs and didn’t think through all the implications for their business,” Mr Rabie said. “This meant that those who outsourced their HR function had less control over how they met their regulatory and insurance obligations, while companies outsourcing their marketing or product fulfillment lost access to key customer data.”
Mr Rabie said today’s outsourcing customers are driving a new level of service delivery by requiring their supply partners to provide extensive reporting of a wide range of business metrics to enable them to track their KPIs and ensure they meet their regulatory obligations.
“Regardless of whether they are a full service provider or deliver Software as a Service online, today’s outsourcers are expected to demonstrate a level of sophistication in their business intelligence that keeps the customer fully informed about the function being outsourced.”
Yellowfin Levels the Playing Field The business realities of outsourcing as a low margin, high volume approach means that small and mid-sized outsourcers can rarely afford expensive business intelligence tools, which is where Yellowfin’s affordable, web-based solutions come in.
“Yellowfin takes the hard work and expense out of business intelligence with intuitive, easy-to-use solutions that integrate seamlessly into clients’ existing systems and provide real-time access to a full array of reporting, analysis and collaboration tools via an online portal,” said Mr Rabie.
One of Yellowfin’s clients recently won a major outsourcing contract on the strength of its ability to provide the customer with online, searchable access to detailed business analytics about the outsourced function.
“Customers are no longer willing to simply give up control of any part of their organisation and nor should they. They want the reporting capabilities and transparency that will enable them to track their performance in all areas of the business, regardless of who actually delivers the service.”
Mr Rabie said advances in technology made it possible for outsourcing companies to provide secure access to customer and transactional records online.
“We’re increasingly seeing situations where contracts are being awarded on the strength of the outsourcer’s ability to support their service delivery with business metrics and analytics. Indeed, companies which fail to leverage these technological advances to enhance their offerings are destined to lose market share to their more proactive competitors,” he said.
ENDS
Posted by Justin Hewitt at 6:00 AM | Comments (0)
April 6, 2008
New Technology to Marginalise IT's BI role in the organisation
By 2012, emerging technologies will make it easier to build and consume analytical applications, reducing the role of the information technology (IT) department in building these applications, according to Gartner. "Evidence suggests that BI is used aggressively by just 15 to 20 per cent of business users. For the BI sector to thrive, it needs to overcome the fact that most business users feel BI tools are hard to use," explained Neil McMurchy, research director at Gartner.
"Other technologies, such as personal productivity, collaboration and Internet search have been widely adopted by mainstream users in both their business and personal lives. BI has the same opportunity for massive adoption, but it must overcome its wellearned reputation of being difficult to use".
Much of the innovation in the BI space will come from emerging technologies that will make it easier for users to build and consume their own reports and analytical applications. In particular, five technologies — interactive visualisation, in-memory analytics, search integrated with BI, software as a service (SaaS) and service-oriented architecture (SOA) — will help drive mainstream BI adoption.
"However, as a result of this innovation, individuals and workgroups will be less dependent on central IT departments to meet their BI requirements," McMurchy said. "BI teams need to understand how to use these emerging technologies to drive BI adoption, but do it in a way that doesn't undermine the organisation's existing BI architecture and standards". Interactive visualisation will be quickly accepted during the next two years as a common front-end to analytical applications, driven by the ubiquity of rich Internet applications. This technology trend will make reports and analytic applications easier and more fun to use. With its attractive display, it should be more widely adopted by users who aren't accustomed to the grid style of analysis and reporting offered by relational databases and spreadsheets. By definition, interactive visualisation enables users to perform typical BI tasks, such as data filters, drill down, and pivots, with little training by interacting with the visual, such as clicking on a pie wedge, or circling the dots on a scatter plot.
Smaller companies that lack a current base of investments in BI systems will increasingly turn to service companies to deliver services that integrate, analyse, and report on data from numerous systems. Wider adoption of SaaS business models will make analytical applications more widely used, particularly among midsize companies. However, even large companies with full BI and data warehouse teams will embrace the SaaS model for some aspects of BI. The best example today is in Web site analytics, where business users — typically in marketing — can access very sophisticated reports and analytic applications of Web site activity with virtually no need for IT by using a software-as-a-service provider.
SOA, coupled with a move toward a model-driven architecture, based on a visual drag-and-drop development style, will make it easier to build BI applications. A proliferation of this drag-and-drop style of development will drive resurgence in departmental analytical application development. This will, in turn, encourage adoption and usage, but also has the potential to result in more rogue deployments that buck standards set by a central BI team in IT.
About Yellowfin Business Intelligence
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At Yellowfin, we are making Busienss Intelligence easy.
Yellowfin is regarded the most easy to use and integrate, embeddable BI solution on the market. Yellowfin works closely with leading international Software Vendors and System Integrators throughout Asia, North America and Europe.
Yellowfin's Business Intelligence suite is an innovative and flexible 100% web-based solution for reporting and analytics. It provides a full range of data access, presentation and information delivery capabilities that can be easily integrated into any third party application or delivered as a stand alone enterprise platform.
Visit Yellowfin's home site to take an online tour or request a demo, you will see how Yellowfin will improve the efficiency and profitability of your organization.
www.yellowfin.com.au
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Posted by Justin Hewitt at 8:15 AM | Comments (0)
Yellowfin discusses Consolidation and its impact on the Business Intelligence Market
Yellowfin discusses Consolidation and its impact on the Business Intelligence Market
The past year has seen a huge amount of activity in BI Tool consolidation. We have continued to comment on this activity but now at last we have the release of a Gartner Report that comments on these changes and spells out what this means for the industry and BI customers as a whole.
According to Gartner the business intelligence (BI) market is in a state of flux. Whilst they see this as a threat to the long-term existence of a separate set of vendors in the market, it’s also an opportunity for BI to deliver more value to users. As companies incorporate BI into their eco-systems by making BI more strategic and pervasive, and increasingly embed BI functionality into their workflow and business processes, the case for BI as a mission critical functionality increases.
Gartner’s Key Findings
The purchases by SAP, Oracle, IBM and Microsoft have consolidated big portions of the stand-alone BI market. These purchases will accelerate both industry understanding of the value of BI and also the value derived from BI by end users.
Innovation will be driven by new vendors who will start by filling in the gaps in ‘mega-vendors’ product lines.
BI platform revenue will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8.6% during the next five years.
Why the Consolidation?
According to Gartner the main reasons for the level of acquisition seen in 2007 included:
IBM, Oracle, Mircrosoft and SAP are increasingly looking to control access to organisational information by locking customers into their technology stacks.
Increased revenue, both by growing product license revenue, and also by reaping current maintenance revenue.
Embedding analytics directly into workflows and processes, both from an application and middleware perspective, is a capability that is gaining increasing significance.
What does this mean for the customer?
Interestingly not a lot of commentary by Gartner on what it means for existing customers but if we look at the recent announcements by SAP then we can get a sense of what is to come. SAP have announced:
A rationalisation of their Business Objects / SAP product set – by either wholesale removal of overlapping product sets or integration into a single product. Not great for those customers that have a significant enterprise investment in now redundant products.
Increased prices for Business Objects – in an attempt to recoup their $7 Billion investment. Consolidation (reduced competition) and “ownership” of data accesses is reducing price pressures on Vendors.
What does this mean for the independent Vendors?
With recent consolidation, remaining stand-alone BI players will have to accelerate innovation to maintain their leading edge. Some emerging areas in BI are predictive modelling, enterprise search, interactive visualization techniques and in-memory analytics. Independent Vendors can also continue thriving by specializing horizontally, geographically or vertically. Embeddable BI tools will become more of an option for OEMs and custom business application developers as they seek alternatives to products that may be owned by their competitors.
About Yellowfin Business Intelligence
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
At Yellowfin, we are making Busienss Intelligence easy.
Yellowfin is regarded the most easy to use and integrate, embeddable BI solution on the market. Yellowfin works closely with leading international Software Vendors and System Integrators throughout Asia, North America and Europe.
Yellowfin's Business Intelligence suite is an innovative and flexible 100% web-based solution for reporting and analytics. It provides a full range of data access, presentation and information delivery capabilities that can be easily integrated into any third party application or delivered as a stand alone enterprise platform.
Visit Yellowfin's home site to take an online tour or request a demo, you will see how Yellowfin will improve the efficiency and profitability of your organization.
www.yellowfin.com.au
Share:
Posted by Justin Hewitt at 7:15 AM | Comments (0)
