New version of Business Intelligence OnDemand released

Today we announced the newest version of Business Intelligence OnDemand. It's available now, and it has two key innovations:

• Content creation and development environment - it's a hosted environment in which you can build and maintain data warehouse components, reports, and analytics.
• BI OnDemand accelerator for Salesforce.com - it's an automated process that can help you create a data warehouse and deploy BI OnDemand for Salesforce.com faster than before.

You can read the full press release at SAP.com.

Measuring your PR impact and benchmarking against your competition

Once again, we find ourselves in a recession. Naturally, the reaction of any business is to review all expenses and ask business owners to justify the existence of all projects. Public Relation is no exception to this exercise. With a median budget to purchase PR-related products of $45,800 which shoots up to $177,500 for companies with more than 1,000 employees (2006 State of the PR Profession Opinion Survey – PRSA and Bacon’s), the PR department could appear to be a good place to find savings. Hence, PR professionals have to be ready to justify the impact of their actions. However, only 6% of PR budgets are dedicated to measure and evaluate the impact PR strategy which automatically requires solutions to be affordable yet comprehensive and global in nature.

The PR solution offered in Information OnDemand a very good match for this rather urgent need. Priced at only $150 per widget, the solution is based on news provided by Newstin, a news media company that aggregates and codes more than 1 million articles daily that come from more than 150,000 information sources in 10 languages and 14 country editions.
Combined with visually pleasing and intuitive BI technology from SAP Business Objects, the result is a quite compelling solution for companies of all sizes that can deliver tangible results within seconds.


The Information OnDemand PR solution offers 5 widgets. This first widget proposes to track sentiment analysis for a given company over time. After entering the name of a company in a simple search box, the end user is asked to confirm the identification of the company from a simple list which includes all companies mentioned in the press along with the chosen company.
The widget opens up and offers a graph counting all media mentions broken into positive, negative and neutral tone. The default language is English but end users can choose to analyze media coverage from 10 languages including all western European languages as well as Chinese and Arabic.
At the click of a box, the count can become a % box clearly allowing the end user to see the how break down of positive and negative mention evolves over time; last 10 days, last 10 weeks and last 10 months and tie it back to annual PR events.
PR professionals can instantly justify their existence by answering simple questions as how many articles mention a given company, in which terms, and for which topics. The tool can also be used to monitor reputation and damage control in time of crises. Compiling the same information by hand would be hugely time consuming and certainly not as complete unless of course you speak 10 languages.

Another key feature includes a table next to the graph allowing identifying the news sources, the key topics as well as the occurrence of key words in the article. This is a pretty handy tool to get a high level overview of the topics addresses in the media and tie it back to positive, negative and neutral converage.


A second widget allows performing a side by side comparison of 2 companies. In a heart beat, end users can see which company obtains the most coverage in a given language as well as understand which company has the highest positive and negative mix at any given point. This is a pretty critical tools in these time of recessions when companies do not necessary have good news to announce and need to exercise damage control.

In times of recession, the whole industry has bad news to announce so it becomes essential to be able to benchmark your company’s image to the entire industry. This is exactly what a third widget allows end users to perform. After choosing from a comprehensive and granular list of industry, a graph displays the mix of positive and negative coverage side by side allowing the end user to determine if his or her company is fairing above or under par in terms of positive media coverage versus the entire industry. If the recession affects the entire industry, it is always a good idea to appear as the industry leader that will survive.

Completed by 2 additional widgets that allow navigating back to the news content, the Information OnDemand PR solution offers all the advantages of a pure SaaS offering. It literally takes 5 minutes for an end user to get a username and password and start working on the PR widgets. There is no software installation, no IT intervention; a simple credit card will work, unless of course you are already an IOD subscriber in which case the PR solution is part of your regular core subscription.

Bertrand Fougnies; Bertrand.fougnies@sap.com

Using Information OnDemand to Guage the Financial Health of Customers, Prospects and Competitors

Current economic conditions are impacting every business however the underlying financial health of individual companies varies dramatically and determines players’ ability to execute and leverage opportunities in this market. Insight into the financial health of customers, prospects, and competitors enables you to prioritize and focus effectively, optimize returns, and enter conversations with valuable background information.

Several Information OnDemand analytics leverage Thomson Reuters' vast trove of financial data to provide direct access to specific financial metrics and for thousands of global companies.

I looked at Icelandic banks with a Canadian one in the Margin and Revenue Comparison model. Looking at this data on a quarterly basis, one notices inflamed and variable revenue, income and margin figures for the Icelandic banks relative to the Canadian one.

When viewed on an annual basis, the contrast between the entities performance is even more dramatic. Complete 2008 data is not yet available but we know where the exponential growth of these Icelandic companies has led.


I also explored companies using the Profitability analytic and the Growth analytic. Unsurprisingly, wildly oscilating margins are displayed for Iceland's Glitnir bank relative to Canada's Royal Bank.


The opportunity to have this type of information available for any company of your choice in advance of conversations with them is clearly useful and, quite possibly, invaluable. Whether researching disparate prospects or looking for pertinent indicators from known stars and dogs within a given sector, this data gives you an edge.

OnDemand for Uncertain Times

The last 2 weeks have been a roller coaster in financial markets. Every business is affected by these changes. Many are taking a look at how to keep costs down and weather this storm. Businesses are investing only in what is most critical. Solutions of uncertain benefit are not considered.

So, what do you do? You may be in the market for a business intelligence solution. It’s already been determined by the business that providing metrics and information is key to the health of the business. However, investment, even in critical areas, may not be possible to the budget level originally given to the project. You may envision having an on-premise BI server but at this time, you can’t afford the upfront costs for hardware, training, consulting costs to install and configure, and the software license fees.

Enter Business Intelligence OnDemand. With a SaaS BI solution, these upfront costs don’t exist. It means you can be securely sharing reports and dashboards with stakeholders in as long as it takes to get signed up. An implementation time is only as long as it takes to build your first critical report or dashboard.

And, if, after a year or two, you want to go to on-premise BI solution, you can do it. You can download your content (e.g. reports and dashboards) and put that content on an internal Business Objects server. No other SaaS BI vendor can offer this flexibility.

How can you use Information OnDemand to Mash-up your Company's Data with Industry Data?

Information OnDemand provides a very compelling solution, but what isn’t evident is one of the most useful features that happens outside of the platform. If you have a Crystal Reports Developer on staff it is easy to create a great report which joins your corporate internal data with industry data from the OnDemand platform.

To do this simply find the report in the Information OnDemand store which you are interested in and subscribe or add it to your InfoManager. Once in your InfoManager download the report to your desktop. You can then open that report in Crystal Reports XI R2 and refresh it. (Note: all parameters have the correct defaults filled in for you except for your OnDemand password.) You can see it is fetching the most current copy of this data. You can now add your internal datasource to this report easily by creating a new connection and simply dropping the data tables into your report.

This feature can be extended even further. Did you know that with every report subscription you have access to the complementary web service for use in our tools? You can access the information for this web service by clicking on the Properties Action of any Report in your InfoManager. For example, you could merge the Revenue by Competitor Report with the Media Coverage Sentiment Analysis Report with your internal data into your own Crystal Report or Xcelsius document.

Who’s Implementing BI Now?

This is the question many CIOs will be asking the heads of their respective business units this year and even more so in the next. Why you ask? SaaS BI or specifically Business Intelligence from Business Objects OnDemand is making it possible for the Business User to implement a BI solution without having to bid for the next open spot on the IT project roster.

A recent customer who is a leader in pain prescription monitoring required a solution that would enable them to effectively monitor whether or not their sales were achieving drug sample rate goals for each territory. As you can imagine, for a prescription monitoring company this information is vital to their business and helps them continue to be a leader in their industry. Their sales organization uses salesforce and imports the drug sample data into their SaaS CRM. The challenge was how to get their sales managers into the habit of monitoring their sample rates on a daily basis to ensure the sample rate goals were being achieved for each territory. At the time their current reporting solution ran too slow to produce this information so sales managers were either monitoring their rates on an infrequent basis or not at all.

Sales Operations was the business unit that quickly put into place a reporting solution that consisted of a sample rate dashboard showing each sales manager’s actual sample rates against their target goal. The key to the dashboard was not just the visibility into the sample rates but that it ran quickly and was live (on-demand) information. The solution comprised of Crystal Reports to design the dashboard report and Business Objects OnDemand application crystalreports.com to process and deliver the report quickly and securely within the salesforce portal.

With the evolution of Business Intelligence OnDemand from Business Objects undertaking a BI project can now be done by a Sales Administrator, Marketing Director, Operations Manager, Finance Administrator and the list goes on. To get more information on how and why that is I encourage you explore our site and turn on BI in your unit.

Measuring media and public sentiment

Information OnDemand allows our customers to quickly, easily, and cost effectively monitor public sentiment and media coverage of their companies and brands.

Furthermore, we've just released some exciting new offerings within this line up that have been very well received by previewers.

Context
The problem that this solution addresses, from the customer's perspective is as follows...

I want to know how the media and market at large perceives my company or brand:

• What’s the general tone of coverage – positive, negative, ambivalent, etc?
• What’s the volume of coverage?
• What are the sources behind this coverage?
• How does coverage vary by Geo?

Here are two specific value propositions for major functions within organizations...

Marketing
In many organizations, field and corporate marketing uses events, campaigns and PR to communicate the company’s values and message to its customer segments and the market.

A major problem in the past – and this has been one of the drivers for the takeoff of online advertising – is that it’s very difficult to measure the results of these campaigns and events.

So, the value of a solution that, in essence, helps to close the loop, introducing measurability, can’t be understated. Enter the Information OnDemand Media Sentiment solution.

Finance
One of the big problems in corporate finance is estimating the value of companies – for counterparties in a corporate transaction or for management wishing to better understand the locus and drivers of value for the organization.

A phenomenon that has been of difficultly in the last few years is the increasing proportion of brands' and intangibles' values to companies’ overall value. For example, Coca-Cola has an estimated brand value of over $50B (Vivaldi Partners estimate), which, as of the time of writing, is nearly half its enterprise value.

This means many things, including:

• Companies need to be fundamentally good managers and trustees of their brand value. In order to manage it, they first need to understand and measure it.
• Finance companies need to become better at estimating present and sustainable brand value – since this is such a dominant element of valuations.

The Information OnDemand public sentiment solution delivers answers to these questions by monitoring, aggregating, and analyzing coverage by the world's major news organizations and then delivering this information through visual, interactive reports.

Please check us out further at information.ondemand.com

Ecommerce tells the truth!

Uncertainty is a major source of stress when making important business decisions. Procurement professionals and sales professionals all know too well that determining if they bought or sold for a good price is a question that can usually only be answered by rumors or educated guesses. Calculating market share is also more often a guesstimate and internal political exercise than a true scientific look at the market reality. Not knowing with certainty can be especially dangerous in these uncertain economic times. How many companies do not understand their poor earnings because executives are being told they are the market leaders in all areas they cover?

Fortunately, Ecommerce, that is now worth in the vicinity of $160 billion (http://news.ebay.com/about.cfm), offers some real answers based on facts and not educated guesses. True undisputable facts, as opposed to guesses and pleasing, have always been a better way to run a business and to make appropriate decisions.

Information OnDemand has partnered with AERS to aggregate and distribute all the transactions data from EBay. With about 40% of all Ecommerce transactions, the information we provide to all professionals is more than ubiquitous and should clearly help drive accurate, rationale, fact-based business decisions. Clearly, looking at Ecommerce can be the difference between making the analyst estimate EPS and not making it!

Just in the last 30 days on EBay:

US $12 million worth of laptops were sold! This accounts for more than $144 million annually! Dell dominates in volume, but Sony and HP are able to command a much higher price per unit!

US $8 million worth of SLRs were sold! This is $96 million annually! Nikon and Canon are head to head in the SLR market with 50% of market value representing for each a nice $US 2 million worth of brand new SLRs.

In total, Garmin alone has sold more than US $2 million worth of GPS among which half were brand new units. TomTom and Magellan are in second and third, but they are catching up.

We can also tell you about desktops, MP3 players, video games, video game consoles, watches and more, so why don’t you check us out and you will know the truth.

Options for Updating OnDemand Data

SaaS BI faces a unique challenge other SaaS applications do not have: updating data. Transaction-oriented applications like SalesForce and NetSuite store the data with the application itself so it is readily available. A SaaS BI application, however, does not own the source data. It is easy to post a report on crystalreports.com, but how do you update that report so the data is fresh? There are two methods: push and pull. Refer to the diagram as we explore both.

Pushing Data

Pushing data updates to your reports involves software that you install near the data source itself. In our case, we have two choices: Desktop Publisher and FTP Agent. Desktop Publisher runs the report locally inside your corporate network and then updates your reports on crystalreports.com. The FTP Agent is used to move massive amounts of data to our “Business Intelligence OnDemand” solution--a data warehouse that we are hosting for you. Pushing data is easy to setup and secure, since nothing from outside your network will access your data. Desktop Publisher in particular is very flexible and can get you up and running very quickly with a SaaS BI solution from any data source you have. However, the reports are limited to scheduled updates only (hourly, daily, weekly, etc), and the reports never contain “live” data.

Pulling Data

If you want your reports to be updated live or on-demand, then you need to pull data into your reports. This is easily done if your data source is external and available via web services (SalesForce is a good example). In this case, your reports can simply call the web service to update the data whenever the report is opened. If your data source is internal, then we can install a proxy agent called Open Data Connector in the “DMZ” of your corporate network. This allows controlled and secured access to an internal data source. The advantage of pulling data is that reports are always up-to-date. However, it is more complicated to configure, especially for internal data or if your external data source does not have access through web services.

Is SaaS BI really catching on?

I’ve seen over the past three years a transformation and adoption of customers moving to SaaS BI offerings (like Business Objects OnDemand). Why is this happening? There are really three reasons why customers are adopting SaaS BI: better collaboration amongst companies, faster time to deploy BI, and lower up front costs.

Better Collaboration amongst companies: I’ve seen a new breed of customers who want to share content with their customers and their partners. In traditional BI, IT manages their BI systems, but when it comes to sharing content outside the organization, IT finds it difficult to allow for external collaboration. SaaS BI provides the ability to share content securely both internally and externally and allow users to collaborate quickly about their information.

Faster time to deploy: As I’ve worked with various OnDemand customers, they all want to immediately deploy BI to meet the demands of their business so they can make better decisions. If they can’t access their data or BI, customers can’t forecast and make timely decisions. That’s why Business Objects OnDemand provides the ability for businesses to quickly deploy BI without having to wait for a BI infrastructure to be implemented.

Lower up front costs: In addition to faster time to deploy, SaaS BI provides a subscription cost basis which provides lower up front costs to an organization. You can subscribe on a year term basis and determine the number of users you’ll need. Subscriptions can be handled as an expense in an organization whereas investing in an internal BI system, hardware and software becomes a capital investment and requires a corporate IT budget.

Is SaaS BI really catching on? You bet it is. Here is a link to one of our customers Rapid Advance who leverages our Business Objects OnDemand solution for their partners and customers. For more information on Business Objects SaaS BI, go to http://www.ondemand.com/.

The SaaS'y CIO

As many of you recall, the 90's transformed CFO's from a "controller" centric functional leader to a more "business" focused strategic leader. One of the primary drivers for this transformation can be traced back to Darwin who said that each one of us had to evolve to survive.

This decade will be the time for the CIO's transformation. As a member of the CIO-Collective (http://www.cio-collective.com/who.html), I have spoken to several CIO's who are actively discussing this change. CIO's are changing the way they look at their teams and the strengths of their organizations. One would need to analyze the resources (people and capital) that are assigned to keep the applications running versus resources that are partnering with their business partners to solve their problems. As someone responsible for our SaaS products at Business Objects OnDemand, I continually focus on the value we deliver to our customers. Our #1 priority is to not just provide an OnDemand tool to our Enterprise Subscription customers, but to focus on solutions in specific business domains. By partnering with our customers in solving their business problems, our SaaS solutions bring the collective best practices to every customer. Every SaaS solution creates a virtual social-network of users that drive consumption of innovation in new and different ways.

The time is right for CIO's to evaluate SaaS solutions in the context of the Business Value to their business. For us, Security, Data Privacy, Scalability, Disaster Recovery and tight integration with Identity / Policy Management infrastructures are just core to our overall architecture. Yes, it is critical that every CIO should evaluate SaaS Solution providers against these features ... The SaaS'y CIO would look for the Business Impact their organization can deliver to their business. I would love your thoughts on this topic. Yes, IT Does Matter !! (http://www.nicholasgcarr.com/doesitmatter.html)

Featured Partner: Newstin

One way that Information OnDemand delivers and leverages external data to enhance the internal BI of customers is through data and industry partnerships. One of our newest sources is Newstin who aggregates news feeds from thousands of sources, across languages, and applies a rich taxonomy to articles enabling quick searches, and broad, efficient insight into issues and media coverage.

With our focus on enhancing corporate BI, this source can readily deliver summarized (or detailed) information on the tone of media coverage associated to a chosen company, and on the names of and frequency of occurrence of the chosen company with other companies, people, topics, regions and other areas of categorization.

Check out our current Newstin offerings in the store at:
https://information.ondemand.com/istore/#shopby=InfoStore/Newstin
(I recommend the Media Coverage Sentiment Analysis offering.)

And come back again soon to see an enhanced selection of content from this rich data partner!

New Information OnDemand Solutions

In the last month, we’ve introduced new Information OnDemand solutions that extend the value of Information OnDemand to not only knowledge workers, but our partners and IT; these features are:

• Address Cleansing Web Services. This allows our partners and customers to integrate address validation and cleansing capabilities directly within their business applications or solutions, respectively. In a previous release, we introduced a bulk address cleansing solution, focused on direct sales and marketing, for helping to manage and maintain large address lists. The web service builds on this, allowing address validation and cleansing to be performed in-place within reference applications, fostering a better, more fluid, end user experience.
• Data Web Services Beta. Information OnDemand brings, amongst other things, structure, accessibility, and analysis to external information. Our customers have expressed the desire to extend analysis of the existing models. Data Web Services allow customers to do just this… Customers or partners are free to access the data sets behind models to perform their own analysis… and, if they wish, republish the resulting analysis. The only restriction is – this stems from our data provider partner agreements – that the data is consumed within any of Business Objects' BI tools.
• Administration and Content management tools. We have had a great response to Information OnDemand from our partners. They see immense value in bringing together leading content, our BI tools, and their business process knowledge. What have been missing are automated tools to support our partners’ development and knowledge contributions. That has partially changed as of this release -- we now have the tools for partners to post and manage their offerings. We've not yet fully automated the entire design-create-test-deploy lifecycle, but are working on extending the capabilities here.

If you would like to see these solutions for yourself, feel free to visit us at information.ondemand.com.

Hello World, From Information OnDemand

This is the introductory post about Information OnDemand, the newest Business Objects OnDemand product!

In this BLOG, we'll share product updates as well as our personal views of the world, specifically in the content and software industries.

What is Information OnDemand? Information OnDemand is a product that allows customers to access leading business information. While traditional BI has done a great job at helping companies to look at their internal information assets, the focus has tended to be internal in nature. But that's only part of the picture… what about the world outside the firm? Information OnDemand organizes this information, bringing structure, accessibility, analysis, and affordability to this contextual information… in essence making your BI complete.

In future blog articles, we'll say how Information OnDemand is doing this. Stay tuned.