Wesfarmers Industrial CIO Heads New Microsoft BI Practice at Inside Info

Sydney, August 23, 2011 - Inside Info, the Australian business intelligence (BI) and information management specialist, today 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 Customers Outperform Best-In-Class with Dashboards

QlikView Customers Outperform Best-In-Class with Dashboards

Free Aberdeen Group Report

“  We have interactive visibility into sales, profitability, logistics and supply chain performance. Our initial applications were delivered in just four weeks with excellent results  ”

Wayne McIntosh, Finance Director
“  We can measure and work to continuously improve profitability, targeted delivery, superior service & quality performance. Until now, we never had true gross margin analysis by customer; this has improved servicing of accounts  ”

Rob Pyne, General Manager, Australasia Corporate Services
“  QlikView delivered value fast for Amcor – with Inside Info working with us to design & deploy our BI applications we saw a significant return in a few months  ”

Rob Pyne, General Manager, Australasia Corporate Services
“  Senior management are now analysing living information themselves with QlikView… saving our IT team at least 500 hours a year in manual report development  ”

Peter Crescitelli, IT Project Manager, Bianco
“  We realised value from our investment within days. We built a powerful profitability analysis application that was back on the desks of business managers in 6 days, showing for the first time an integrated view of customer profitability at a material level  ”

Tim Hogan, Manager, Business Intelligence
“  It’s not a trivial exercise to go into an organisation, understand the business need and solve it. Inside Info’s ability to translate our needs into easy to use data models first time and every time has been invaluable. The whole relationship is simple  ”

Haydn Jones, IT Operations Manager
“  Inside Info using QlikView gave us a 15% improved return on rebate investment, while also helping us to better manage promotions, stock, customers and resources to fuel future growth of the business  ”

Nick Vasic, Financial Controller
“  QlikView is the best management tool I’ve ever used  ”

Kim Naylor, CEO, Fujitsu General, NZ
“  Using QlikView, Inside Info has allowed our customers to more easily identify health market trends through more effective geographic and gender profiling, better management of medicines and identification of prescription anomalies and their impact on consumers  ”

Jon Marshall, Managing Director
“  In one example Inside Info & QlikView streamlined a data process from what was days or weeks, or so complicated it wouldn’t be considered, to seconds and that means a better value proposition for us and our customers  ”

Jon Marshall, Managing Director
Subscribe for News Alerts

RSS Feeds
Media Contact:

Sonia Johnson
Inside Info
T: +61 2 8084 8889
E: info@insideinfo.com.au