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As the global market for Business Intelligence and Analytics continues to experience double digit growth, BI vendors from around the globe will offer creative and lower cost solutions to gain share in the mid and small size company segments that are turning to BI for the first time.

Cloud computing vendors will expand their offerings to include ETL, Data warehouse, reporting, OLAP, advanced visualization and dashboards in one package for the early adopters that moved passed the security concerns.

Software companies will follow the IBM-Cognos lead integrating advanced statistical packages and predictive analytics modeling into their current BI solutions.

More vendors will offer better mobile BI, analytics and advanced visualization applications.

More companies will realize that they can use BI/ Analytics beyond the back office tactical day-to-day operation. They will start to exploit the power of BI software to perform strategic and competitive analysis on the fly to understand market trends better than the competition and increase market share, revenue and profit.

More companies will realize that the semantic quality of their data is constraining the Business Analytics results. They will start to cleanse, organize and structure the data to contain more strategic meaning and provide direction to grow the business.

Some companies will gradually realize they have built unnecessary complexities in the configuration of analytic, BI tools and data marts. While this isn’t an impediment to IT or analyst experts, it causes casual business users to underutilize or not utilize at all the systems. This will gradually change towards a more business intuitive, self serve “analytics for the masses” model.

By Bill Cabiró and Strat-Wise LLC

„Please visit their web site at www.strat-wise.com for additional articles and resources on the strategic use of Business Intelligence and Analytics”

According to a study published by Gartner, the Business Intelligence market increased by 13,4% in 2010, the total value of the global BI market reaching $ 10.5 billion. The growth reflects the customers interest for business efficiency solutions and competitive advantage achievement in economic crisis time. Regarding to Gartner, the BI market is 59% controlled by the major vendors, such as SAP, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft and MicroStrategy.

Most of the companies who are looking to implement an ERP system have a great dilemma: which is the role of the client project manager, in what areas of project management he is involved?

The key goals of any ERP implementation project are to complete it within the established time and budget, with a high degree of customer satisfaction. For this reason, the client Project Manager is responsible, first of all, for ensuring that all customer requirements are planned and executed in a manner that will meet the implementation goals for the project. Second, the client Project Manager will serve as a liaison between the implementation team and the management of the organization. He should submit regular reports to the project progress, project risks or additional required resources. Last, but not least, the client Project Manager manages the availability of key users in the organization.

A discussion about this problem took place recently in the ERP Project Management Group on LinkedIn. After I read more than one hundred comments, I made ​​the following typical activities list of client project manager:
• Prepare and conduct customer/Vendor meetings
• Support and accept the planning of the Implementation phase
• Review and support decision for the project scope
• Acceptance of implementation proposal
• Initiate project planning of all project phases
• Assign adequate resources to the project
• Prepare and conduct the kickoff meeting
• Approve project charges such as travel expenses, equipment, or billable time
• Create and communicate project status reports to the project stakeholders
• Manage the defined budget and budget changes
• Ensure quality and timeliness for the services
• Ensure customer acceptance for delivered services
• Project closing
• Hand over to support team

Do you know others roles, responsibilities or activities that the client project manager must do, could do or don't have to do? If yes, please share them with us.

I recently followed a discussion on LinkedIn about what is important for an ERP: the brand or the flexibility and the functionality? The discussion had started from a simple question: „X or Y - which is best?” (where X and Y are some of the biggest global ERP suppliers). The conclusion that emerged form that discussion was both and neither. Why? Because it depends on what your business requirements are and on how each vendor met your business needs. Most of the comments made ​​reference to the best way to pick an ERP package. Which is to identify how you need the business to run and then find a package that best fits your business processes. Those involved in the discussion noted that too many people are picking one of the top 5 ERP suppliers without understanding how their business plans to function or if the ERP solution is a good fit for their business processes. They just picking a name, a brand, not a product.
The idea is that the brand should count, but did not override. There are many others factors to be considered, such as to define what is the goal in use, which benefits do the business you want, what are the challenges, what is the main area that needs supported, what will be the need in 2 years time and, last but not least, focus on how the license policy and payment is after „go live”. And so you will find that there are other alternatives that probably fits better your business needs. Maybe the top 5 ERP suppliers have the brand, but others have the flexibility and the functionality. Which are more important for an ERP than the brand.

In a discussion started on Business Intelligence Professionals Group on LinkedIn, 276 BI specialists have tried to answer to a simple question: why does a BI implementations fail and how can specialists prevent this from happening again and again and again and ...

BITSoftware participates on April 21, in Bucharest, at „Cloud Computing, SaaS, IaaS", a tehnology conference dedicated to cloud computing and that promotes some of the most reliable solutions available on Romanian market. The event will be held at Intercontinental Hotel.

Few years ago, only large companies needed ERP software. Now, it can benefit form this technology even the small and mid-size businesses. In a recent article published on erpsoftwareblog, Jeff Pyden stated that the cloud computing technology is faster adopted by businesses with no more than 50 employees. In his opinion, „the emergence of the cloud is yet another step toward making this powerful technology available to those who otherwise may not be able to afford it.”

He indicated five reasons why small and mid-size businesses prefer a cloud ERP solution rather than a traditional one: limited budgets, faster deployment, security and data management, businesses continuity, growth and scale.

The first indicated reason - limited budgets - refers to the total costs of implementing and maintaining an on-premise ERP solution, which „is often not feasible for small businesses”. „It’s difficult for many small and mid-sized businesses to afford the up-front costs of an on-premise ERP solution”, Jeff said. But what is the option? An open source ERP, of course. For example, the total cost of implementation and use of our open source solution, SocrateOpen, is less than the on-premise version.

The faster deployment refers to the fact that „a cloud-hosted ERP solution can be deployed quickly, allowing businesses to start reaping the benefits of the solution sooner”. By streamlining and connecting internal processes, such as finance, sales, marketing, invoicing and others, „organizations can work more efficiently and gain a competitive edge from the beginning”.

In terms of business continuity, with an ERP system in the cloud, „it’s easier to get back up and running after unforeseen interruptions”, said Pyden. In other words, it’s important to consider a solution that is accessible via the cloud, because you will be able to recover data more quickly than from a physical database.

Finally, the „growth and scale” reason refers to changes that occur in a business lifetime, which can becomes larger or fluctuate in size, and in this case the „cloud-based applications can easily scale to accommodate growth”. This means that users can quickly be added or removed as needed.

The conclusion is that the ERP in the cloud is good for small and mid-size organizations, cause „cloud-based applications can provide fundamental business services to young companies at a fraction of the cost”.

I wrote earlier on December 2010 an article about what should I know when I want to implement an ERP system. I said than that are 7 steps you should not skip and 5 factors that you should not be omitted. I come now and fill in what I said in December. Besides the steps not to skip and the factors not to omitted, for a successful implementation you must follow another four guidelines:
1. Take small steps to implementation
2. Focus on the long term benefits of the implementation
3. Don’t make the new software feel like the old software (if it si the case!)
4. Be flexible with the implementation plan
You must keep in mind that every company and every implementation is a little different. Your software implementation project will take time, hard work from everyone involved, and the dedication of your project team. And be prepared for the small deviations that will inevitably occur. But, if you and provider`s implementation team will work together, the ERP Implementation projects will be a success.

David Linthicum said recently, in his article published on InfoWorld.com, that „those who follow the world of business intelligence (BI) have probably noticed both an increase in new cloud BI providers and the movement of existing providers to the cloud”. BI in the clouds means that the information is copied to a cloud data warehouse and then is structured, typically around the important parts of a business: sales, inventory, manufactoring, payments. „Once the data is in the cloud, you can run reports, create dashboards, and perform analytical operations that support core business decisions from a Web app”, said Linthicum. He belives that the use of Business Intelligence in the cloud is „a game-changer”, being „affordable and available” to those who need access to this information.

But what is the benefit? Why should I choose a cloud BI solution instead of a traditional BI solution?

According to Linthicum and other specialists in cloud computing, the traditional data warehousing and BI „have always been too expensive” and moreover, the users who needed these BI systems to make critical business decisions „typically had no access, with IT citing cost and complexity of deploying and managing the front-end BI tools”. Instead, with a cloud-based BI, the cost drops dramatically and managers „can use the information to improve business operations when it counts”. Plus, cloud-based BI provides better support for smartphones and tablets and makes it available to those who actually need them.

So, there are enough benefits for you?

The most common question on almost every manager lips is „Why do I need an ERP system?”. And the answers provided by the ERP suppliers are: to reducing costs and to increase your profit,