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.