CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – 08 Nov 2011: New research released today by MIT Sloan Management Review and the IBM Institute for Business Value (NYSE: IBM) reports that organizational challenges, more so than technology hurdles, are holding companies back from fully integrating analytics across their enterprises. [Read more...]

by Markus Sprenger

Rising fuel prices, the mortgage crisis, a weak dollar, low consumer confidence – the difficulties of the current economic landscape are clear. Most businesses understand what they need to do to survive in these kinds of economic conditions. Budgets need to be watched more closely. Hiring initiatives and employee headcounts have to be evaluated. More energy has to go into sales efforts.

The problem with the typical business responses to harsh economic conditions, however, is that they don’t always go far enough – and are often influenced more by immediate business pain than longer range planning that can help a business not only get through the rough period, but also emerge with stronger processes in place.

One area that even the best-run companies often overlook is the important role that certain processes and solutions provide in helping an organization weather an economic downturn. In particular, properly integrated business intelligence solutions and performance management solutions can have a large, positive impact on operational efficiencies, cost-cutting efforts and individual employee performance. In fact, these solutions can not only help a company ride out hard economic times, but also put it in a better position when business picks up again. They can help improve discrete processes as well as the overall corporate culture, resulting in short-term gains and long-term, foundational benefits. [Read more...]

Now that both established vendors and upstarts offer BI applications as on-demand services, more customers are saying yes to SaaS – gaining faster deployment, and speedier access to reporting data. [Read more...]

05-05-2008 Microsoft has withdrawn its bid for Yahoo after failing to reach agreement on the price. It is rumoured that Microsoft was not prepared to pay the US$ 37 that Yahoo wanted. During the 3 month courtship both companies made promises and announced plans which they will now have to live up to. It will be interesting to see how they do that. [Read more...]

EMC Corporation today unveiled the findings of the largest-ever global survey of the data science community. Spanning the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, India and China, the EMC Data Science Study reveals and quantifies a rampant scarcity across the globe for the prerequisite skills necessary for a company to capitalize on the opportunities found at the intersection of Big Data and data analytics. [Read more...]