LOCAL PARTNERSHIPS KEY TO SUCCESS IN BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE (BI) SPACE, SAYS MICROSOFT
Fostering local partnerships key to success in Business Intelligence space Representing the two companies are (L-R) Chin Jun Fwu – Product Marketing Manager, Application Platform, Microsoft Malaysia, Ng Wai Mun, Director of Server and Tools, Business Marketing Organisation, Microsoft Malaysia, Gorman Siah - Director of Software Solutions, I-Power Berhad and Peter Tam, Senior ISV Manager, Microsoft Malaysia.
Wednesday, September 26, 2007 – The decision-making process is critical to organisations seeking to improve competitiveness and profitability. But with recurring types of problems, this process can often lead to automation, which can be detrimental when it involves processes that touch on suspicious transactions, setting prices, recommending products and services, extending credit or monitoring product quality.
Business intelligence (BI) is no longer a luxury for a few large companies, and is an essential part of the IT portfolio used across the world to help understand the health of the organization, said Chin Jun Fwu, Product Marketing Manager for Application Platform, Microsoft Malaysia Sdn Bhd. “At its core, BI is all about collaborating on a shared view of business drivers and to reduce the time spent on decision-making.”
“Business intelligence is not a new technology - it has been around for over 10 years - and remains a top spending priority for foresighted organisations. IDC reports that the market for business intelligence is worth over US$13 billion worldwide, and forecasts an 8% year-on-year growth over the next three to five years.
“However, given these points of optimism and recent customer surveys which have shown the tremendous returns on investment for business intelligence, industry reports tell us that business intelligence has only reached close to 20-30% of its potential in organizations,” Chin added.
Toward this end, Microsoft SQL Server Business Intelligence provides end users with software support that matches their natural decision-making processes rather than simply receiving reports without any context – enabling greater consistency in the way business decisions are made.
Some of its key benefits to organisations include:
§ Capturing the decision-making processes of the best performers, thus improving the overall quality and consistency of your decision-making process.
§ Providing support for collaboration, since decision-making is most often a collaborative process.
§ Providing forward-looking insights by integrating planned and forecasted information with actual historical facts and allowing changes to future plans and forecasts to facilitate what-if solutions for future events.
§ Providing rule management capabilities or integrate with a rules engine in order to make decisions actionable. Translate a policy or rule into the specific form required by each relevant operational system.
§ Capable of capturing what decisions were made and why. The resulting repository of decisions (the decision base or knowledge base) anchors a learning environment and provides a persistent record to address compliance demands.
“We believe that Microsoft SQL Server provides an ideal solution to this situation, and makes the barrier to entry to the business intelligence club so low that there is no reason not to make business intelligence systems a core part of the corporate infrastructure of even the smallest companies,” Chin added.
Business Intelligence unearths the inside story
Microsoft Malaysia had earlier hosted an event with their independent software vendor (ISV) partners to help customers understand how they can put the effects of business intelligence into their organizations.
The event saw six key ISVs showcase their respective business intelligence solutions. Among them was I-Power Berhad who spoke about the value of business intelligence, and the strength of Microsoft’s SQL Server as the platform of choice.
“We believe that Microsoft’s next generation of data management and analysis solutions will deliver increased security, scalability and availability to enterprise data and analytical applications while making them easier to create, deploy and manage. This is the heart of the business intelligence challenge, and we believe Microsoft – through SQL Server – has the best platform to help ISVs meet them,” said Gorman Siah, Director of Software Solutions, I-Power Berhad.
“Microsoft provides the best platforms for local ISVs to innovate and create new IP – as testified by I-Powers commitment to choosing Microsoft as the platform of choice for the development of their business intelligence suit of services. We have a larger partner ecosystem comprising some 5,000 partners and 800 ISVs such as I-Power, and we believe that it is the strength of such partnerships that will prove crucial in driving the success of business intelligence in Malaysia and around the world,” said Peter Tam, Senior ISV Manager, Microsoft Malaysia.
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