Well Managed BI

Location Intelligence Answers the Question: "What Else?"

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Woodhead) — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 21:19:00 +0000

We've all heard the estimate: 80% of business information has a location aspect. It's been repeated so often that it has become common wisdom, but it is a very round estimate, and the importance of location varies quite widely depending on the business you are in.

So, rather than being impressed by a vague number that may or may not reflect our actual business scenario, we should ask ourselves how location information can help us achieve our own strategic objectives, and how it can help us execute on a tactical and operational level.

If business intelligence reports tell us the "what" of business information, and analytical tools help us answer the "why" and "what if" of this information, then location intelligence tells us the "what else."

Location gives us a way to ask the question: "What else should we consider before we make important decisions about our product development, sales and marketing operations?"

Location allows us to group customers, industries and anything else that has geographic specificity to discover what else they have in common -- demographics, psychographics, legislative requirements, climate and a host of other factors that can influence our decisions.

Live Tweeting APOS #StorageCenter Webinar

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Woodhead) — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 14:23:00 +0000

I'll be live-tweeting this morning's Storage Center webinar using the hashtag #StorageCenter. The webinar gets under way at 10am, and will be repeated this afternoon at 4pm.

The webinar will discuss the place of robust archive, backup and selective restore capabilities in a well managed BI strategy for SAP BusinessObjects.

Register here.

My Twitter handle: @WellManagedBI.

Healthcare Regulatory Compliance and APOS Storage Center

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Woodhead) — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 21:56:00 +0000

If you are a provider or payer in US Healthcare, your world has become radically more regulated over the past decade or so, thanks to several pieces of legislation, including:

Privacy Act of 1974
Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)
Statements on Standards for Attestation Engagements (SSAE 16)
Financial Modernization (Gramm-Leach Bliley) Act of 1999 (GLBA)
USA PATRIOT Act of 2001 (Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism)
SOX, the U.S. Public Company Accounting Reform and Investor Protection (Sarbanes-Oxley) Act of 2002

It's a complex landscape. In no other industry is data such an important asset, and yet such a potential liability. The regulatory burden and responsibility continues to grow for both providers and payers. As a BI platform manager in the healthcare industry, you need to be proactive about data governance.

APOS Storage Center can complement your SAP BusinessObjects system and help you with regulatory compliance through the following features:

Rules-based backup, archive, versioning, and selective restore
Offline and online archiving
Extract and export
Versioning, purging retrieving Web Intelligence reports
System performance improvements

Being proactive about data governance means not waiting until you have a problem to have a solution in place. APOS Storage Center resolves SAP BusinessObjects document instance archive, backup and restore issues before they become security and regulatory compliance problems.

Webinar: Proactive Information Management for SAP BusinessObjects

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Woodhead) — Mon, 27 Feb 2012 17:40:00 +0000

Tuesday, February, 28, 2012, 10am ET and 4pm ET.

Register for the webinar.

Most organizations have important compliance and/or operational needs which require them to keep a long history of report instances. Every SAP BusinessObjects platform manager needs control and flexibility over report objects, instances and schedules.

The APOS Storage Center well managed BI solution streamlines administration workflows, minimizes the impact of human error, and gives you more flexibility and control over your SAP BusinessObjects deployment. Storage Center mitigates risk and delivers system storage efficiencies for improved system performance and usability. And it makes migrating your SAP BusinessObjects document instances significantly easier.

Please join us for a 45 minute webinar that focuses on the unique benefits of APOS Storage Center, and the flexible control options that it will provide for you. This webinar will provide a functional overview of the APOS Storage Center solution, including:

Archiving

Business rules driven archive of report instance
On-line and off-line archiving

Backup and Versioning

Business rules driven backup of report instances
Business rules driven backup of report objects with version controls

Selective Restore

Restore specific objects without system downtime

Dynamic Exporting

Conversion to neutral format and compression for long-term storage

Intelligent Purging

Selective purging of instances from main environment

Building a Better Fleet with Location Intelligence

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Woodhead) — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 13:50:00 +0000

You know a technology has arrived when it starts affecting each and every one of us at some basic level without us being aware of it. Like the price of corn, simple things can have giant effects. Truckgps.org has a case study that demonstrates this point well. "Using location intelligence for better truck driver scheduling" tells the story of a company that uses very basic location intelligence to minimize miles driven and balance the driving workload.

There is no knowledge more basic to location intelligence than just knowing where things are at any given moment. That's what GPS gives you. Applying that knowledge systematically to a real business problem creates location intelligence.

In the case of this anonymous company, the dispatcher balances the workload to avoid unnecessary hiring and firing, and plans the most efficient routes for drivers and cargos, saving the company large amounts on wages and fuel, as well as improving customer satisfaction:

Where work needs to be reassigned Joe can update the route planning to add or remove clients against a driver based on the current number of orders, while still keeping a driver focused on delivering mostly in their nearby territory.

Location intelligence is about taking GPS data and using it to manage a fleet more profitably, making informed decisions and planning clearly for the future. It's about having the hard data to use when required to dispose of underutilized assets or request additional drivers.

The rising cost of fuel and commodities is making such simple efficiencies essential.

Via @gpsfortrucks.

Healthcare Outcomes and Business Analytics

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Woodhead) — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 16:24:00 +0000

In 2001, the Institute of Medicine (IOM), an arm of the US National Academy of Sciences, released a report detailing the many failings of health care provision in the US, and laying out a plan to fix health care. The plan was to become more proactive and less reactive in engaging patients and families to manage their healthcare, improving the overall health of the population, improving the safety and reliability of the healthcare system, coordinating patient care amongst multiple agencies, delivering palliative services, eliminating abuse, maximizing access, and improving the healthcare system's information infrastructure.

In fact, the focus on healthcare IT at the IOM goes back even further. In 1991, they published "The Computer-Based Patient Record: An Essential Technology for Healthcare"(revised 1997), a report heralding computerized patient records as the best hope for higher quality of care.

In the Fall 2010 issue of the Journal of Healthcare Information Management (a publication of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society ‑ membership required), Judy Murphy writes about the progress that has been made in healthcare since the IOM's push for better healthcare IT began over twenty years ago:

Robert Wachter, author of two books on patient safety and editor of the federal government's two leading safety Web sites, gives efforts an overall grade of B-, a slight improvement from his grade of C+ when he performed a similar analysis five years ago. Wachter says that overall, the past decade has seen progress in hospitals' responses to accreditation requirements, regulation and error reporting, but health IT has lagged behind, with research in the area slowly advancing and remaining underfunded.

As Judy Murphy notes, progress has been at best mediocre:

Unfortunately, the attractive claims linking health IT and quality outcomes rest on scant empirical data. Several studies and system reviews published in 2009 and 2010 have demonstrated some evidence for cost and quality benefits of computerization at a few institutions, but with little evidence of broader application.

And it seems that the long-term strategic objectives of this initiative have been obscured by the shorter-term tactical objectives:

The modest quality advantages associated with computerization are difficult to interpret, and are clouded by the fact that the quality indicators used today often reflect care process metrics rather than patient care outcomes. In other words, we are measuring how many patients receive smoking cessation counseling or prescriptions for beta blockers; we are not measuring how many patients quit smoking or what their reinfarction rates are.

The bright spot in all of this is the use of clinical decision support tools:

...it also seems clear that implementing and adopting health IT is not enough. The evidence points out that, unless you specifically use systems with clinical decision support tools and paired with practice changes, you are unlikely to improve quality and patient safety and unlikely to achieve overall reductions in health costs.

Before computerization of healthcare records, we said that healthcare was data-rich, but information-poor. Post computerization, it seems healthcare IT is information-rich, but analysis-poor. In other words, we have the information we need to make a difference, but haven't yet applied the appropriate analytics tools and mindset to the larger strategic objectives.

Clearly, budget is a large part of the problem, but in the age of doing-more-with-less, asking for a larger budget is probably a non-starter. So business analytics managers in healthcare need to look at ways to liberate resources from repetitive administrative tasks so they can spend more time adding value to outcomes via better decision support capabilities. You can't focus effectively on the larger issues if you spend all your time resolving the smaller ones.

Location Intelligence and Enterprise Bandwidth

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Woodhead) — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 14:41:00 +0000

The Constellation Research website has an interesting article on the importance of location in enterprise software. The key insight is this:

If location was stored with objects, that data could then be used to filter information, just like how facets such as time and author are used today... In other words, location is an important data point that could be used to reduce the rapidly increasing amount of information that is being pushed into activity streams.

By leveraging the location aspect of business intelligence / enterprise information, we can refine our searches to the most relevant data, and reduce our use of enterprise bandwidth. So not only does location intelligence allow us to be more effective in targeting our activities, but also to be more efficient in our use of enterprise resources.

Location Intelligence for Alternative Energy Smart Grids

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Woodhead) — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 19:35:00 +0000

Electrical utility corporations and location intelligence providers have long understood the usefulness of location intelligence to the generation, transmission and consumption of electrical power. The advent of alternative energy supplies and smart grids have made this connection even stronger.

A smart grid:

is a digitally enabled electrical grid that gathers, distributes, and acts on information about the behavior of all participants (suppliers and consumers) in order to improve the efficiency, importance, reliability, economics, and sustainability of electricity services (Wikipedia).

Although the term "smart grid" has been with us for a while, the reality has been slow to develop, largely because smart grid deployment is complex and capital-intensive. For example, one of the first deployments, the Telegestore project in Italy (completed in 2005) saves about 500 million Euros per year, but cost 2.1 billion Euros to deploy. As one of the first such deployments, they had to take responsibility for the design and manufacture of meters, the development of system software, and they had to act as their own system integrator (Wikipedia).

While the world lags in the development of smart grids, the growing popularity of, and need for, alternative energy sources adds a new wrinkle. It's one thing to manage the supply and demand of electrical power efficiently when you have complete control of the rate of generation, quite another when you're using wind and solar, and the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine.

Growing complexity calls for better ways to analyze data. Smart grids are all about location: where is the power generated? Where consumed? Consumption is obviously an important determinant of where energy should be generated, and alternative generation method, with their low environmental impact, are more amenable to demand-centered location. (NIMBY ‑ not-in-my-backyard ‑ syndrome is likely to be less pronounced then for, say, a nuclear power plant or a hydro-electric dam.)

A recent article in LBx Journal describes the collaboration between SolarReserve and NV Energy. Nevada (NV) Energy manages their smart grid using location intelligence, particularly for site selection, but also for "generating consistent reliable energy to the grid is a whole."

For upper management, location intelligence provides a means of visualizing all of the business intelligence that influences strategic decision making ‑ LI delivers a map of your customers and prospects, suppliers and competitors, assets and liabilities, challenges and opportunities, and your strengths and weaknesses.

For operations, it's all about knowing who is generating and consuming, where and when they are doing so, and how to make supply meet demand without waste.

For more information on location intelligence for utilities, view the recorded APOS webinar:

Location Intelligence: Energize Decision Making in Utilities

Webinar: Well Managed BI with APOS COO Allan Pym

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Woodhead) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 15:18:00 +0000

From time to time on this blog, I have offered definitions and illustrations for the concept of well managed BI (here and here and here and here and here). Today you can join APOS COO Allan Pym for a 45-minute webinar on that will answer the question: How . do you get from a curative (reactive) BI practice to a progressive (proactive) BI practice?

Allan will examine some of the BI platform management trends and issues facing organization today, and discusses strategies and best practices you can implement to establish a well managed SAP BusinessObjects deployment.

Register for the well managed BI webinar.

When Thursday, January 26, 2012, 2pm ET

Location Intelligence and the Kia Optima

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Woodhead) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 15:03:00 +0000

Some time ago, we published a location intelligence white paper called "Whole Brain Analytics: The Science Behind Location Intelligence." In that white paper, I talked about the cognitive differences and complementarity between the right brain and the left brain, and noted that Mercedes-Benz had used this cognitive distinction in a highly original advertising campaign.

Now Kia has done something similar:

Similar, but the Mercedes-Benz effort was a print campaign, which allowed them to cater somewhat more to the left brain than a 30-second TV spot can:

Left brain: I am the left brain. I am a scientist. A mathematician. I love the familiar. I categorize. I am accurate. Linear. Analytical. Strategic. I am practical. Always in control. A master of words and language. Realistic. I calculate equations and play with numbers. I am order. I am logic. I know exactly who I am.
Right brain: I am the right brain. I am creativity. A free spirit. I am passion. Yearning. Sensuality. I am the sound of roaring laughter. I am taste. The feeling of sand beneath bare feet. I am movement. Vivid colors. I am the urge to paint on an empty canvas. I am boundless imagination. Art. Poetry. I sense. I feel. I am everything I wanted to be.

Posted by Tom Woodhead at 4:00 p.m.

Well Managed BI Whitepaper

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Woodhead) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 21:33:00 +0000

Our newest whitepaper, "Well Managed BI: Managing Your BI Platform for ROI," is now available for download as a PDF on the APOS website.

The whitepaper presents a detailed look at the APOS Well Managed BI Capability Maturity Model (CMM). Learn how you can become a progressive BI practitioner.

SAP BI 4.0 - One of Top BI Stories of 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Woodhead) — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 13:04:00 +0000

SearchBusinessAnalytics:

One of the biggest business intelligence (BI) software developments of 2011 was the debut of SAP BusinessObjects 4.0, the first major update to SAP AG’s flagship BI and analytics platform in more than three years. The new version is fully integrated with SAP’s enterprise information management products and offers an improved user interface, better mobility, social networking tools and the ability to analyze unstructured data, according to SAP.

BI 4.0 marks the first major update to BusinessObjects since its acquisition by SAP, and answers concerns about SAP's roadmap for business intelligence. The new release promises better integration and user experience, especially for enterprises running SAP solutions. It paves the way for enterprises to realize huge benefits with in-memory computing (HANA), as well as mobile and collaborative (StreamWork) BI.

Here's a summary of what's new in BI 4.0 (SP2), from SAP's documentation:

Extends the information infrastructure provided by earlier releases and integrates seamlessly with the existing product line.
Supports all deployment models and lets you fine tune administration and configuration of the entire system.
Brings together features from across the SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Suite to meet your evolving reporting needs, from providing web access to Web Intelligence, to improving SAP Crystal Reports interactivity and personalization.
Facilitates migration from SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise 5.x and 6.x to SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence platform 4.0, however you need to migrate to Release XI 2.0 first.
Delivers new tools to drive user productivity and self-service reporting.
Delivers more reporting capability with fewer reports.
Includes a variety of major enhancements spread across our data access methods, administration capabilities, and report design options.

Simplifies business monitoring with dashboard functionality and improved user experience.
Delivers the strongest self-service query and analysis solution for SAP customers.

Big Data Analytics Skills Shortage

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Woodhead) — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 15:03:00 +0000

A recent article at SearchBusinessAnalytics cited "raw and user-unfriendly technology" and lack of "skilled experts" in these technologies as the biggest challenges for large enterprises seeking the considerable benefits of big data analytics. As enterprises become more information driven, and business intelligence and analytics become critical to competitive advantage both strategically and operationally, there just aren't enough skilled personnel to handle the development of the needed predictive modeling and predictive analytics applications.

The greatest need is for more data scientists -- people who have post-graduate educations in statistical analysis. As demand grows, and supply remains relatively constant, individuals with these skills will command larger and larger portions of corporate business analytics budgets.

While this "crisis" seems worrisome, it is a problem that the average business intelligence platform manager would love to have. They would all like to be pushing the data analytics envelope to provide proactive and progressive solutions that meet or exceed their enterprises' information needs. Instead, these managers are dealing with smaller curative or preventive issues that won't go away, and which occupy altogether too much of their budget, and their resources' time.

The oldest (okay, maybe second oldest) service-type business proposition in the world goes something like this: If I can make (or save) you $50, will you pay me $5? In IT, such a proposition speaks to both return on investment (ROI) and total cost of ownership (TCO): you make back the money you invest in the service, and you save on the cost of operating the system.

That's the promise of APOS well managed BI solutions. You conserve the time of your resources, and you can move away from fixing and preventing problems, and toward providing progressive business intelligence solutions for your information consumers.

SAP BI 4.0 Strategic Vision

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Woodhead) — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 14:36:00 +0000

SAP BI 4.0 is the first major update of BusinessObjects since its acquisition by SAP, so there has been much discussion about new features and the direction in which SAP is taking their enterprise BI solution.

Cindi Howson has a nice summary of SAP's BI strategy, and the roles of BI 4.0 and recent acquisitions are playing in that strategy. SAP's HANA effort bolsters real-time analytics performance through in-memory computing, and SAP Cloud initiatives bring in-memory computing to smaller enterprises with smaller budgets. With this ambitious in-memory undertaking, SAP is aiming to become the number 2 database player by 2015.

SAP is positioning itself, through the acquisition of Sybase, as a provider of high-security mobile BI, and with the acquisition of SuccessFactors as the number-two SaaS vendor in revenue (after Salesforce.com).

The potential benefits to enterprises upgrading to SAP BI 4.0 are huge, and it will be interesting to see the adoption rate. Will large enterprises choose to upgrade as a means to improve competitive advantage and operational efficiency? There are many factors to consider.

SAP BI 4.0 "Monsta" Project - Testing the Limits

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Woodhead) — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 19:07:00 +0000

The Global SAP Co-Innovation Lab (COIL) Network is an SAP Research initiative designed to promote project-based co-innovation between SAP and network members.

David Cruickshank blogs about the so-called "Monsta" BI 4.0 implementation, which is the single largest such project attempted so far. The deployment reflects many of the current, industry-wide BI trends:

Developments within SAP[,] and BI as an industry itself, suggests [sic] strongly that this growth trend in analytics is nearly epic, and with the release of HANA, the push for BI on mobile devices, and an "analytics anywhere, anytime" direction, the need to scale up is [sic] and to be capable of supporting larger and larger environments is predictable. A truly large BOE environment could be anything larger than 2-4,000 users concurrent (usually equivalent to a 20-50,000 total user base for BOE), which would start pushing up against ~100 CPU. This COIL project tests architectural, scalability and performance limits of valuable interest serving as a confidence builder internally, but also externally. Future customers for environments of this size would feel much more comfortable to find that SAP tested this in our own labs prior prove that it works. To develop the tests and to produce such proof points as an orchestrated co-innovation activity among multiple partners from the SAP ecosystem adds validation and opens up new opportunity to accelerate innovation on this front.

The project's stated objectives:

Establish customer confidence in large scale BI deployments
Optimize SAP BusinessObjects Enterprise Architecture

The project is not only monstrous in size:

2 - 4,000 concurrent users
20 - 50,000 total user base
~100 CPUs

...but in scope as well, testing SAP BI 4.0's capabilities against the market's demand for:

Extensive analytics
Mobile BI
Pervasive BI
Scalability

Early results are positive, and David assures us that the project has generated enough comments, reports and insights to fill numerous white papers and tech briefs. We look forward to those.

Follow further results at David Cruickshank's blog.

APOS IDAC Webinar

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Woodhead) — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 20:37:00 +0000

Please join us on Thursday, December 1, 2011, for a presentation on the new APOS Intelligent Data Access Controller (IDAC) solution.

IDAC allows you to monitor, manage and audit all of your SAP BusinessObjects data connections, providing the information you need to understand your BI data connectivity, to manage query processes effectively, and to increase the efficiency of your BI and data solutions.

IDAC logs BI query metadata to ensure you know who is running which queries, where, and when. It lets you:

Monitor:

Real-time tracking of BI queries
Automatic alerting (thresholds exceeded)
Automatic cancelling of runaway queries

Manage:

Visual query management console
Manual query intervention
Complete data access control - security, compliance, content promotion

Audit:

Audit query processing times
Audit query usage patterns
Audit user behaviour

Follow APOS Systems on LinkedIn.

APOS LI Mobile for Android

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Woodhead) — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 19:26:00 +0000

APOS LI Mobile for Android is now available. The mobile version of the APOS Location Intelligence Solution (LIS) enables field personnel to see the geospatial relationships inherent in your business intelligence, providing faster speed to insight and timely responses to rapidly changing conditions.

Our enterprise location intelligence combines geospatial data and processing from Esri GIS with your business intelligence system. Your business intelligence system presents a single coherent vision of your corporate reality. When you add geospatial information, you create an environment in which you can understand and communicate information more quickly.

Download the free demo app at:

https://market.android.com/details?id=air.BB.APOS

Follow APOS Systems on LinkedIn.

APOS LI Mobile for PlayBook

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Woodhead) — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 19:23:00 +0000

APOS LI Mobile for the BlackBerry PlayBook is now available. The mobile version of the APOS Location Intelligence Solution (LIS) enables field personnel to see the geospatial relationships inherent in your business intelligence, providing faster speed to insight and timely responses to rapidly changing conditions.

Our enterprise location intelligence combines geospatial data and processing from Esri GIS with your business intelligence system. Your business intelligence system presents a single coherent vision of your corporate reality. When you add geospatial information, you create an environment in which you can understand and communicate information more quickly.

Download the free demo app at:

http://appworld.blackberry.com/webstore/content/66121?lang=en

Follow APOS Systems on LinkedIn.

Whither the Mainframe?

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Woodhead) — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 16:14:00 +0000

IT industry pundits have been predicting the demise of the mainframe computer for at least twenty years, but they have for the most part been wrong. The mainframe computer is still with us, and hosting mission critical information and business processes.

But it may be the human part of the human-machine interface that finally triggers the mainframe's downfall:

A study of 520 CIOs in large enterprises in eight countries found most are worried about the impact of the increasing number of mainframe workers who are retiring. Here are the results of the study, which was done for Compuware Corp. of Detroit.
(CIOs Worry About Losing Mainframe Talent, IT World Canada)

CIOs are faced with a dilemma: they can either increase their efforts to train more mainframe resources, or they can move mission critical business processes away from legacy mainframe applications. However, mainframe IT is unlikely to attract many star trainees simply because the mainframe market is shrinking. While there may be a shortage of mainframe technologists developing, who wants to invest in an education that may lose all relevance in 10 to 15 years.

The fact is that mainframe revenues are falling:

The revenue declines have sparked a new round of speculation about whether the mainframe is headed for extinction. For example, wrote Steve Hamm in Business Week on August 6, 2009: "IBM's 45-year-old line of mainframe computers has survived the onslaught of minicomputers in the 1980s, the Unix operating system in the '90s, PCs and the Internet. But a 39 percent plunge in mainframe revenues in IBM's second quarter seems to signal that this longtime mainstay of IBM's business is on its way to the junkyard." (The Mainframe: Up, Down, In or Out? CIO Zone)

The plunge in revenue and the shortage of mainframe technologists may turn the demise of the mainframe into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

What is your corporate strategy for managing mainframe change? Are you leveraging your BI system for greater ROI by using it to replace legacy mainframe applications? Is your BI system well enough managed to allow you to be this progressive?

Follow APOS Systems on LinkedIn.

Thanksgiving Football and Leadership Lessons

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Woodhead) — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 22:00:00 +0000

Unless you're a die-hard football fan, you probably don't look beyond the players on the field, and perhaps the coaches on the sideline. (Just as theater goers don't often give much thought to the stage manager.) But a professional football team goes beyond the actors on the field. It is a business organization like most others, and decisions taken at all levels of the organization affect the results on the field.

SAP co-chairman Bill McDermott, NY Jets GM Mike Tannenbaum talk about leadership.

Follow APOS Systems on LinkedIn.

US Military Logistics, Well Managed BI

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Woodhead) — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 13:42:00 +0000

A recent notice published at FedBizOpps.gov declared that the US Department of the Air Force, Air Force Materiel Command (AFMC), has renewed its maintenance contract with APOS Systems for the APOS Administrator (InfoScheduler) solution. AFMC's commitment to the APOS Administrator solution validates our belief that well managed BI is a critical component in any organization's quest to fulfill its core mission.

Learn about AFMC's commitment to well managed BI, timely information delivery, and greater operational efficiencies.

Follow APOS Systems on LinkedIn.

Product Pipeline: Location Intelligence

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Woodhead) — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 19:42:00 +0000

Announcements from the APOS Development team on new APOS Location Intelligence Solution (LIS) features:

LIS is now available for SAP BusinessObjects 4.0 users.
The LIVE viewer wizard has been improved to give you more flexibility in selecting base maps.

Follow APOS Systems on LinkedIn.

Product Pipeline: APOS Storage Center

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Woodhead) — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 19:39:00 +0000

Announcements from the APOS Development team on new APOS Storage Center features:

Storage Center is now a 64-bit application
Storage Center now lets you exclude unwanted folders from archiving rules at the CMS level.

Follow APOS Systems on LinkedIn.

Product Pipeline: APOS Publisher

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Woodhead) — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 19:36:00 +0000

Announcement from the APOS Development team on new APOS Publisher feature:

Distribution Server now supports SSH FTP.

Follow APOS Systems on LinkedIn.

Product Pipeline: APOS Insight

noreply@blogger.com (Tom Woodhead) — Fri, 11 Nov 2011 19:24:00 +0000

Announcements from the APOS Development team on new APOS Insight features:

The KPI "Report Extended Info" service now logs all tables accessed by reports to a separate table in the database, so that you can analyze table usage in relation to reports.
KPI now caches passwords to access report SQL statements when offline.
KPI now sends email notifications when KPI scans are complete.
RealTime Monitor for SAP BusinessObjects XI 3.1 now supports IBM DB2.

Follow APOS Systems on LinkedIn.