Inside Info Ramps Up for the Launch of QlikView 11 in Australia

Posted on by Sonia Johnson

QlikView’s latest release, QlikView 11 is due out at the end of this year and has focused its attention in five key areas:

  • Social Business Discovery – Allowing users to collaborate on discoveries & generate multiplicative insights.
  • Comparative Analysis – Builds on QlikView’s unique associative analysis engine with more enhanced levels of quick, comparative analysis of different data views and selection states.
  • Mobile Business Discovery – Extending QlikView’s mobile capability to allow users to make decisions ‘on location’ taking advantage of being in a particular place at a particular time.
  • Rapid Analytic App Development – New capabilities to improve application development.
  • Enterprise Platform – Improvements to capabilities designed to improve performance of large deployments and make them easier for IT to secure and administer

 

Getting the Right Balance – Internal vs External Business Intelligence Skills

Posted on by Sonia Johnson

One challenge a lot of organisations face when implementing or looking to enhance their Business Intelligence capability is deciding on the right mix of internal and external skills to provide the necessary organisational elasticity required by the business. Inside Info’s Managing Consultant of our Microsoft Business Intelligence Practice, Ian Forrester, explores the elements that make up a business intelligence capability and the importance of those elements in the success of the overall initiative. 

There are typically four areas where specific skills are required. They are as follows:

  • Business engagement and requirements definition
  • Data warehouse architecture and build
  • Report and dashboard tool development
  • User education and training

The skills requirement for each of these areas is different and in assessing the appropriate approach, it is important to understand the ideal skills profile, the duration of the requirement and the implications of having the wrong skills. The framework provided in this article has been designed to facilitate this decision making process.

Industry analysts like Gartner and recruitment specialists like Michael Page, point to a skills shortage this year in IT, with the area of Business Intelligence seen as the biggest technical priority according to the majority of CIO’s surveyed in Michael Page’s 2011 CIO Viewpoint survey.  According to Michael Page, CIO’s are trending towards service providers who can offer CIO level peers to execute projects because of a lack of internal capacity.  The ultimate success however of any BI initiative, depends on getting the right blend of internal skills to ensure the solution is relevant and utilised, and right level  of specialist external skills to ensure technical quality and robustness of the platform.
 
 

Wesfarmers Industrial CIO Heads New Microsoft Business Intelligence Practice at Inside Info

Posted on by Sonia Johnson

Inside Info, the Australian business intelligence (BI) and information management specialist, announced the appointment of Ian Forrester as Managing Consultant of its newly created Microsoft Practice group.

Best known as Australia’s QlikView business intelligence experts, Inside Info has now extended its service capability establishing a Microsoft Business Intelligence Practice team under Forrester’s leadership. The company has achieved Microsoft Data Platform Silver Partner status in May and is planning to achieve Silver Business Intelligence Partner status within a few months, having completed a number of client engagements in the first half of 2011.

Prior to joining Inside Info, Ian Forrester was the CIO of Wesfarmers Industrial & Safety and previously the GM of IT at United Group Rail, in both roles responsible for the strategic direction of the IT function for the Group. Ian has also been responsible specifically for ERP, CRM and business intelligence solutions at CSR Group where he worked as the Head of Applications and earlier as the Lead SAP Consultant at PricewaterhouseCoopers managing key implementations.

“With a number of clients either already using or considering the Microsoft SQL Server Data Warehouse and Microsoft Business Intelligence platform, we wanted to be able to offer this capability as part of a total service.  Given we have a number of senior Microsoft SQL and BI professionals as part of our service team, establishing a dedicated Microsoft BI Practice was a logical next step,” said Stuart Barnard, Managing Director of Inside Info.

“Our clients tell us that the ability to relate to their business is a key factor in choosing to work with us. We were looking for someone to lead our Microsoft Practice with strong commercial, business process and leadership experience as well as a passion and understanding of Microsoft Business Intelligence. Ian is the perfect fit”.

In the role of Managing Consultant for the Microsoft Practice, Ian is supported with a team of fully certified Senior Microsoft Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence Consultants in Sydney and Melbourne.  

“We’re particularly interested in partners that have expertise in both front-end data visualisation design as well as strong technical data management capability.  Inside Info’s track record in this area together with their experienced Senior Microsoft Business Intelligence Consultants, means they are a welcomed edition to the Microsoft BI Partner network in Australia,” said Marcy Larsen, Microsoft’s SQL Server and Business Intelligence Product Manager.

QlikView business intelligence now available on iPad

Posted on by Admin

It was announced overnight the immediate availability of QlikView for iPad at the Gartner Business Intelligence Summit in Las Vegas.  An interactive enterprise business intelligence solution provides mobile professionals access to decision-critical information through an intuitive touch interface. Built from the ground up to support the Apple iPads’s native multi-touch interface, QlikView for iPad takes mobile business intelligence to a new level of touch-based interactivity, enabling freeform exploration of business data without the limits of static reporting.  With QlikView for iPad, business users on the go can access the exact information they need, when they need it. This is in contrast to competitive offerings that merely serve up static, web-based reports and do not allow users the interactivity they require to get timely answers.  A free download of QlikView for iPad is available from Apple’s App Store on iTunes or visit  www.qlikview.com/ipad to watch a demo video and read more about the app. Continue reading →

Better Inside Info for Education Providers

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Australian education providers can now manage and monitor school academic performance themselves more accurately with the latest business intelligence software application, QlikView for Education, from Inside Info. Continue reading →

Beware of In-Memory Business Intelligence Imitators

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Gartner have announced today the 2010 Enterprise Business Intelligence Suites (EBIS) Magic Quadrant’ report, where QlikView has been positioned by Gartner in the Challengers quadrant. Continue reading →