Mark Smith's Analyst Perspectives

At the Information Builders 2010 conference I spent some time to learn about the latest in its business intelligence (BI) technology and also performance management, which my colleague has analyzed recently (See: “IBI’s Eye Popping New Performance Management Software”). But I focused more on information management, which is becoming a strategic component of the company’s portfolio. Its iWay Software includes a suite of integration adapters used to interoperate across processes and data types...

Cliché or not, a business’s most valuable asset is its people, and for 15 years Softscape has been dedicated to providing applications that help human resources organizations handle a range of processes that I call workforce performance management, including what the industry refers to as talent management. Privately held Softscape operates in 156 countries, and its customers range from large companies (with 1,000 to 10,000 employees) to the extremely large (which have over 50,000 employees)....

At its annual user conference in Las Vegas, Kronos unveiled the next stage of its approach to workforce management to its customers and partners, showing an aggressively confident posture after completing its fiscal year 2010 with revenue increased 9 percent to $741 million. Kronos is the largest provider of workforce management systems for time and attendance, scheduling, absence tracking, hiring and workforce analytics. Kronos offers the software in several delivery options: through...

At its annual user conference in Las Vegas, Kronos unveiled the next stage of its approach to workforce management to its customers and partners, showing an aggressively confident posture after completing its fiscal year 2010 with revenue increased 9 percent to $741 million. Kronos is the largest provider of workforce management systems for time and attendance, scheduling, absence tracking, hiring and workforce analytics. Kronos offers the software in several delivery options: through...

At the Oracle Business Intelligence analyst summit in June, company executives touted the advances and accomplishments of Oracle Business Intelligence 10g over the last several years along with outlining the features of what was announced in April as Oracle Business Intelligence 11g is now available for purchase. The new version was three years in the making, and so I last wrote about aspects of that back in 2008. Apparently it took this longer-than-usual product cycle to fully integrate the BI...

I have written often about how business applications and services operating on the Internet must be interfaced to the enterprise. When businesses rent applications through software as a service (SaaS) or cloud computing, they create challenges in making that data usable by a range of analytic systems inside the enterprise. Pervasive Software specializes in providing data integration and management software for these purposes and has evolved its technology for distributed data integration.

At MicroStrategy World in Cannes, France, MicroStrategy announced today the general availability of MicroStrategy Mobile for the Apple iPhone and iPad. This release adds another means of getting business information and metrics to a broad audience of mobile workers through their preferred technology. Supported by our benchmark research and in my recent blog I noted the growing demand by business for simpler access to mobile business intelligence.

The market for business intelligence (BI) and performance management has grown as more businesses see the need to understand, optimize and align performance at all levels of employees. But while the technology has evolved to become easier to use, organizations have been slow to use it to create performance metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs). At last that is starting to change. Our benchmark research in business intelligence and performance management found that 41 percent of...

Managing large volumes of enterprise data continues to challenge IT organizations as they deal with administration and storage of no longer just terabytes but now petabytes of data and costs increase accordingly. This massive size of data complicates the underlying issues of where and how to store it easily in low-cost hardware and manage the data efficiently. One attempt at a solution is Hadoop, an open source community-based project. It began as part of Yahoo and was led by Doug Cutting, who...

The demand for access to business information and applications through mobile technologies such as the Apple iPhone and iPad, devices running Google Android or using RIM Blackberry is surging as consumer preferences and behavior spill over into the business workforce. The massive growth of adoption of these technologies around the world as consumers seek instant access to information has many business managers wondering how to benefit from the trend. The drive for mobility is part of the 2010...