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/.