SPSS (originally, Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) was released in its first version in 1968. SPSS is among the most widely used programs for statistical analysis in social science. It is used by market researchers, health researchers, survey companies, government, education researchers, marketing organizations and others.

Background
SAS Institute Inc. has been a major producer of software since it was founded in 1976. SAS was originally an acronym for Statistical Analysis System but for many years it has been used as an arbitrary trade name.

• While the majority of other BI vendors focus on historical analysis, SAS focuses on forecasting, predictive modeling and optimization. SAS system functions are embedded within cross-functional and industry-specific applications. SAS is the only BI vendor of any scale where their customer base uses data mining or predictive modeling extensively.
• SAS derives an increasing percentage of its revenue and growth from packaged analytic applications built on its BI platform. This platform incorporates advanced analytics into cross-functional and industry applications around specific business problems. For example this platform has been used for situations such as risk management, warranty analysis and anti money laundering.
• Although SAS has made progress in providing tools for users beyond its traditional user base, it is yet to overcome its reputation for being more difficult to use. Many of the data manipulation and advanced analysis tasks performed by users require SAS programming language knowledge.

DB Analytics – We have been using SAS products since 1992 primarily in the areas where they have market dominance – statistical analysis and data mining. Our specialist expertise is in the following components:

• Base SAS – Considered the core component of SAS. It’s key use is to manage data especially SAS data sets.
• SAS/STAT – Statistical Analysis with a number of technical processes to provide statistical information such as analysis of variance, regression, multivariate analysis, and categorical data analysis.
• Enterprise Miner – the leading data mining tool with a wide variety of applications.

Background
In 2008 Pentaho emerged as viable player in the BI platform market and openly competes against traditional BI platform vendors. After just four years in existence, Pentaho built a comprehensive open-source BI platform that includes data integration and data mining capabilities

A key part of Pentaho’s strategy is to forge OEM relationships with commercial independent software vendors (ISVs) looking to easily embed BI functionality at a low price point. Pentaho is affordable and offers a subscription-based model that avoids an initial large payment for the software license. Beyond a handful of large customers, Pentaho had more departmental deployments with smaller data volumes than other vendors.

DB Analytics – We have extensive experience with the Pentaho BI Suite Enterprise Edition.

Background
Microsoft has been investing steadily, supporting a myriad of Finance-focused software companies and continuing to make inroads with its own product set. Microsoft has built and acquired an impressive set of products in this area:

• 1989 – MSFT SQL Server 1.0 for OS/2 debuts
• 1998 – OLAP Services debuts, forerunner of today’s Analysis Services
• 2000 – Great Plains/Solomon – now Dynamics GP/SL
• 2000 – Major release of Analysis Services (hits its stride)
• 2002 – Navision/Axapta – now Dyanamics NAV/AX
• 2004 – MSFT Reporting Services released
• 2006 – ProClarity acquired
• 2007 – Performance Point released

Summary
Microsoft has done a good job of incorporating basic BI tools and capabilities into the product. They have also been successful with integrating these extensions into the typical environment of a Windows developer. Microsoft’s pricing and packaging of its BI platform make it an attractive proposition for organizations new to BI or firms that are looking to reduce their portfolio of BI tools. However the ability to execute programmes in a BI environment must also be viewed from a scalability and performance perspective. While in the past, SQL Server has lead some benchmarks in OTLP processing, it still fails to address the needs of large scale, query intensive applications based on very large data volumes.

That said, the moderate overall complexity as well as an impressive level of autonomy, SQL Server delivers very good manageability for the environments it supports best – small to medium applications on the Windows platform. Some of its initiatives (Analysis Services, Performance Point) take more years to come to fruition – longer than many businesses can wait.

DB Analytics acknowledges the growing importance of Microsoft within the BI arena. Microsoft is driven by innovation and they will continue to release new products to market. As such, we will continue to utilise Microsoft systems where they work best and will remain proficient as the versions and tools evolve. We have comprehensive experience with the following Microsoft products:

• SQL Server 2005 Integration Services – an SQL Server integrated ETL tool for the consolidation of your data in a central data warehouse.
• SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services – an SQL Server integrated OLAP-Module to organize your data in a multi-dimensional data cube and to optimize for analyzing purposes.
• SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services – an SQL Server integrated Reporting tool.

Background
IBM Cognos is one of the leading business intelligence providers. The dominance in this area was built around ease of reporting and ready access to ad hoc tools that analysts preferred to use. Founded in 1969, Cognos employed almost 3,500 people and served more than 23,000 customers in over 135 countries. Cognos was originally known as Quasar and adopted its current name in 1982.

Cognos acquired the following companies and assimilated their products with a lot of functionality:

1999 – LEX2000 – now Cognos Finance, although discontinued

Background
Hyperion (Oracle) is a veteran in business intelligence market, both as IMRS (founded, 1981, Stamford, CT) and Arbor Software (founded, 1990, Sunnyvale, CA). An early focus in Finance allowed Hyperion to build an enviable market position – they are the leader in market share, functionality and ability to handle complex Finance needs. In 2007, Gartner placed Hyperion in its “Leader” quadrant for both Business Intelligence Platforms and Corporate Performance Management.

Hyperion was acquired by Oracle in 2007. Oracle quickly declared almost the entire Hyperion suite as Strategic while working effectively on significantly expanding sales.
Oracle Hyperion Essbase – to model complex business scenarios use Hyperion® SystemTM 9 BI+TM Essbase AnalyticsTM (Essbase Analytics) software and perform sophisticated analysis at the speed of thought. With best-in-class interfaces, Essbase Analytics delivers meaningful insights that are easy to interpret and understand even by non-technical users. For managing finance or any other business area in your company, Essbase Analytics can deliver all the analysis you require either through a single, stand-alone deployment that fully utilizes data from your enterprise data sources, or as the foundation for custom or packaged BPM solutions.

Highlights
• Innovative visual interface
• Sophisticated calculation engine with over 100 pre-built financial and statistical functions
• Multi-User write back enables forecasting and scenario modeling activities
• Multiple data storage options (Multidimensional, Hybrid, Relational)
• Fully published APIs for custom analytic application development (C, VB, Java, XMLA)

Oracle Hyperion OBIEE Interactive Reporting – (formerly Brio Intelligence Suite) provides executives, business users and analysts with the most intuitive user-directed query and analysis capabilities available today. This business intelligence software delivers these capabilities through an intuitive and highly interactive interface that lets users design their own dashboards, then quickly monitor and navigate to relevant information. It’s easy to deploy, provides access to data locked in transactional systems, and leverages information from your existing data stores to deliver unequaled business intelligence reporting.

Highlights
• Easy, wizard-based development of graphical, interactive dashboards
• Deliver multiple levels of viewing and analysis in a single report
• Gain rapid, broad user adoption with easy-to-use thin-client interface
• Pre-defined and “drill anywhere” analysis
• Direct support for heterogeneous data sources

DB Analytics first started working with Interactive Reporting in 2001 and Essbase in 2002. Both product families have subsequently been deployed in a number of successful BI projects. DB Analytics has extensive operational experience as well as consulting experience with the Hyperion product range.