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.

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.

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.