This case study recaps a nonprofit organization’s business challenges and the benefits it realized upon adopting a business intelligence (BI) solution. The organization needed to combine its data and improve its reporting capabilities for various data types. The BI solution significantly improved the decision-making capabilities of the organization’s executive team, mid-level managers, and employees.
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Social media is providing organizations with a plethora of data about their customers. This paper explains how to leverage business intelligence software and advanced analytics to change the way business is conducted. The end goal should be to personalize marketing messages in a way that allows organizations to narrowly target specific customers based on the knowledge of the customer they already have.
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This guide introduces you to the key concepts of business intelligence, including data modeling, data warehouses, online analytical processing (OLAP), and more. The author debunks many of the prevailing myths that scare small to medium businesses from investigating the use of business intelligence, and explains how the very same techniques and technologies used by massive enterprises are now available to them.
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New business analytics solutions are bringing large-enterprise solutions and benefits down to the medium-size business’s level. They are exceptionally comprehensive but exceptionally customizable to the needs of the individual business, easy to upgrade to target new strategic initiatives, and in tune with customer trends such as social media use. This paper discusses one such effective business analytics solution.
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Read about the technologies in IBM's comprehensive, unified business analytics system and how they work together to help organizations grow in analytics maturity—that is, their ability to use analytics to improve business outcomes.
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Learn why analytics-driven organizations outperform their peers.
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Organizations that have the most success with business intelligence (BI) typically approach it incrementally. Discover a step-by-step strategy for success in this white paper featuring research from Gartner.
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When senior leaders of small and midsize companies invest in analytics tools, they can improve operating results by enabling managers to make fact-based, data-driven decisions. Learn how in this report from Nucleus Research.
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A strong business intelligence (BI) program can be a powerful competitive differentiator for midsize businesses—but many implementations fall short of expectations. Download this paper featuring research from Gartner to discover how you can avoid common pitfalls and build a successful BI program that unleashes your organization’s potential.
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Read how sports, entertainment, and fashion accessory firm Concept One Accessories achieved an 866% ROI in two months using IBM Cognos Express.
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Bio Medical Research (BMR) was replacing its core enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution, and saw this as an opportunity to enhance its business analytics capabilities. And as a midsized business, BMR wanted to find an affordable solution that would offer enterprise-class functionality. Download this case study to learn about the way IBM Cognos Express helped BMR tone up its sales performance with advanced analytics.
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Read how Mercury’s users can now create the most critical reports that they were previously relying on a legacy reporting platform to produce. These include sales commissions, weekly sales, a rolling 12-month sales report, and an inventory summary report.
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McCormick & Schmick’s Seafood Restaurants needed better insight to understand and take advantage of key business trends. Find out why they chose IBM Cognos Express to deliver that insight.
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Read about how Mayflex used IBM Cognos Express to replace a complex spreadsheet system, improve time-consuming budgeting and forecasting processes, compare actuals against budgets at various levels, and save time for end users through automatic system updates.
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Business analytics solutions are not all created equal. This paper from Focus Research discusses the key criteria a midsize company should consider when choosing a solution and explains why IBM Cognos Express is a natural fit.
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In our increasingly intelligent, instrumented, and interconnected world, midsize businesses are finding new ways to use information and technology to be smarter about how they work, where they invest, and the way they interact with their customers. Download this report to learn how they’re doing it.
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Read this report from CFO Research Services to learn why finance executives at midsize companies say that an integrated approach to BI and planning helps maximize their ROI in technology.
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It would be a mistake to think that Web 2.0 is all about technology—and similarly so for Enterprise 2.0. But it would also be a mistake to dismiss the technology altogether. The selection and implementation of enterprise social software solutions and real-time collaboration solutions requires careful thought, consideration, and planning. Find out more, in this IBM white paper. Download now.
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Backup/recovery solution datasheet: IBMTivoli Storage Manager FastBack. Download this datasheet for highlights, features and benefits, and handy listings of backup/DR Server system requirements and Backup Client supported platforms.
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Small and medium enterprises often find that their “short list” of storage solutions includes products from EMC and IBM. Both companies offer solid products. Hardware/software costs are, for the most part, similar. And both companies offer solid service and support. So, when choosing between these two vendors, what criteria should you use to determine which product best suits your storage needs? Download this advisory now to find out.
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Most business collaboration continues to be conducted via e-mail and shared folders, but forward-looking organizations are increasingly considering socially oriented and real-time collaboration solutions to instantly and seamlessly increase productivity between employees, suppliers, customers, and stakeholders. This white paper discusses new products, services, and technologies entering the enterprise collaboration space.
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Do you need a better backup solution or a better recovery solution? Many businesses are struggling with both an ever-increasing amount of data and a decreasing tolerance to system downtime. You need to reduce the amount of data at risk of loss and eliminates error-prone manual operations from the data protection process. And you need to get your operations back up within minutes of any type of data loss.
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While planning is often seen as a time-consuming task, leading organizations have moved from the traditional spreadsheet-based planning to implementing world-class planning, budgeting, and forecasting software, saving time, reducing errors, and improving internal communication. This IBM white paper discusses the common challenges businesses face with traditional planning processes and how technology can overcome these.
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Financial planning, budgeting, and forecasting can be an endless and arid process for business professionals. Spreadsheet-based planning can prove to be confusing and unorganized, which only costs the company more time and money. IBM's Cognos software can help not only reduce the time spent on planning processes, but also build complex business models and perform ‘what if’ scenarios, enhancing strategic decision making.
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In an industry so reliant on regulatory compliance, UCLH used Lombardi Blueprint and Teamworks solutions to map and improve processes across the entire organization, from administration to patient management, with benefits for employees and patients by optimizing performance across the board. Read more on how Lombardi BPM solutions from IBM helped UCLH revamp its complex administrative processes to increase productivity.
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Mondial Assistance Group relies on efficient sharing of best practices across business units to provide superior customer service to clients worldwide. By choosing Lombardi Blueprint from IBM to execute the 'SOKE' process improvement program, Mondial discovered inefficiencies, managed sharing processes, and improved collaboration across the organization. See how this led to high cost savings and improved client services.
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In the face of increased competition in the market, leading mobile and internet service provider TeliaSonera sought to reduce inefficiencies in sales process and improve customer relations. By enlisting Blueprint Business Process Management (BPM) solutions, TeliaSonera discovered and solved business problems to dramatically improve key sales and service functions, increasing profitability and customer relations. See how.
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As a consequence of the acquisition of Business Objects, SAP has shifted its SAP business warehouse (BW) strategy to a more open data warehousing approach and is now focusing on the former Business Objects portfolio. This guide is designed to help existing SAP BW customers to plan to move to the new business intelligence (BI) environment, and outlines most important architecture options for a data warehouse strategy.
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Today’s finance executives must meet a growing number of complex demands and economic challenges to enable their company’s growth, profit, and risk objectives. Performance management (PM) capabilities such as financial modeling, profitability reporting, planning, budgeting and forecasting, and delivery of key performance information across the enterprise to a broader audience is more important than ever. Find out why.
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It doesn’t make sense to buy software based on price alone. Selecting a specific preferred vendor or spending as little as possible is the wrong choice if people will not use the purchased product and it winds up as “shelfware,” or if it hampers productivity and is an ongoing drain on resources. Learn the five questions financial professionals should ask before choosing a financial performance management (FPM) solution.
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Consolidation in the enterprise performance management (EPM) market has led to a glut of misleading, and sometimes overstated, vendor claims. This has served to confuse end users evaluating solutions, just at the time when an EPM strategy is so important—particularly for organizations looking to broaden their EPM strategies. Find out what you need to know before you start evaluating EPM solutions for your organization.
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Business performance management (BPM) is a set of processes, frameworks, and systems for planning, measuring, communicating, and monitoring business results. In July 2009, Forrester conducted evaluations of 10 business performance solutions (BPS) vendors: Board International, Clarity Systems, Host Analytics, IBM Cognos, Infor, Longview Solutions, Oracle, SAP, SAS Institute, and Tagetik. Find out what they learned.
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Organizations may find it easy to accumulate data from their enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, but that information often remains unusable to decision makers. A popular solution is to deploy automated tools for reporting, planning, and budgeting, as well as applications like business intelligence (BI) and performance management (PM). Find out how IBM Cognos BI and PM solutions work with SAP ERP systems.
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Managing performance requires that business and IT, working collaboratively, develop a vision of how to integrate information and technology to improve the performance of the organization’s people and processes, and then act on that vision. Using common performance management (PM) tools and systems—designed to ensure the effective use of consistent information—is critical to the success of the business. Find out why.
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The software industry has witnessed a consolidation in the business intelligence (BI) market. In BI, enterprise technology conglomerates identified a growth market and an opportunity to upsell to their existing install base, primarily that of applications such as enterprise resource planning (ERP). This consolidation has rendered sole-sourcing BI from ERP vendors an alluring option for many organizations. Find out why.
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Executives are placing greater demands on the finance department—and the chief financial officer (CFO) —to provide an accurate picture of the financial health of the enterprise, offer insight into how emerging shifts in key market factors will affect the organization, and establish timely scalable measures of corporate performance that align across functions. Learn how BI solutions can help finance departments deliver.
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In late 2004, the senior management team of the Huntsman Corporation, a global manufacturer of chemical products, identified an opportunity to both prepare the company for compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley and achieve cost reductions. Learn how the company selected a new financials solution that helped it reduce audit fees, avoid headcount additions, improve productivity, and create an enterprise-wide analytics platform.
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The United States military is continually looking for ways to cut costs by reducing staff, closing down facilities, and terminating programs that are found not to be cost effective. Learn how the United States Army’s Armament Research Development and Engineering Center (ARDEC) improved employee productivity by upgrading its business intelligence (BI) solution and creating a competency center for BI-related best practices.
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Business intelligence (BI) is a priority for many organizations, promising enhanced visibility and improved efficiencies. But for those with existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, implementing or updating a BI program raises especially interesting challenges. This set of vendor-neutral articles outlines best practices for creating or optimizing BI programs that effectively leverage existing ERP investments.
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Companies require an agile enterprise performance management (EPM) strategy to ensure they have information to support effective decisions. The more information companies generate, the more they need software that places the information in the right context and optimizes the decision-support process. Learn to identify software that can help your organization find the best path to continual performance improvement.
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This white paper is a transcript of an IBM White Glove Events on-demand webinar. In it, you’ll learn how Chevron improved business decision-making by extending SAP NetWeaver data and applications with IBM Cognos 8 Performance Management. Speakers include Daisy Woodhams, senior VI design architect at Chevron, and Sharon Maxon, global category analyst for the consumer packaged goods category at Chevron.
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This white paper is a transcript of a webinar hosted by SAP Insider and presented by IBM Cognos Software. In it, you’ll Discover how Nike—a leading global manufacturer and marketer of athletic footwear, apparel, and equipment—leverages SAP with IBM Cognos solutions to improve its planning and financial performance management process, driving additional business value.
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This white paper is a transcript of a webinar hosted by SAP Insider and presented by IBM Cognos Software. In it, you’ll find out how FirstEnergy Corp., a leading diversified electric company headquartered in Akron, Ohio (US), uses the unified performance management platform of IBM Cognos 8 business intelligence (BI) to enhance the value of its investment in SAP.
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This white paper is a transcript of a webinar hosted by SAP Insider and presented by IBM Cognos Software. In it, you’ll find out how Tellabs Inc., a billion-dollar telecommunications provider headquartered in Napierville, Illinois (US), deployed IBM Cognos 8 business intelligence (BI) in their SAP environment in order to gain insight, extend information access, reduce costs, and improve overall performance.
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As business data volumes expand, the biggest challenge for businesses is channeling reams of data into usable information that supports effective decision-making. Organizations that invest in the SAP Netweaver Business Warehouse continuously seek new ways to leverage the power of all corporate data. Learn how some companies are deploying IBM Cognos business intelligence software in the SAP NetWeaver environment.
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Managing performance means understanding results, setting metrics, fixing plans, and making decisions. Based on best practices, performance management (PM) solutions help coordinate planning, budgeting, reporting, analysis, ad hoc queries, dashboarding, and scorecarding to support decision-making. Learn how PM solutions facilitate the flow of the right information to the right people at the right time.
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IT professionals must fulfill a vast array of business user information needs in a fast-changing technical environment. To succeed, the technology companies choose must meet with a high rate of user adoption and satisfaction. Learn the challenges facing IT and find out how to provide users with the flexible, self-service business intelligence (BI) and planning capabilities that they need for performance management (PM).
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Performance management (PM) solutions can increase agility, improve corporate performance, and increase competitive advantage. But they can also limit you. If they don’t address your real business needs, and aren’t flexible enough to help you find reliable and innovative answers to key business questions, they can hinder rather than help. Discover how business users can manage their performance on an SAP infrastructure.
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This paper details the challenges chief information officers (CIOs) face when seeking performance management (PM) capabilities from their enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions. It details the advantages of implementing a PM system separate from the existing ERP solution in order to achieve greater results and improve efficiency and usability. The paper provides real-world examples and offers recommendations.
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The SAP NetWeaver infrastructure and applications have long been critical information pillars for some of the world’s largest and most successful companies. This demo script from IBM shows how companies can use IBM Cognos 8 with their existing SAP NetWeaver infrastructures. It includes scenarios for finance, IT, and business users, and follows specific steps to demonstrate functionality designed for each type of user.
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For the 3,500 users at the Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center (ARDEC), having organizational data coming from three different sources was causing reporting problems. To provide accurate reports to customers, ARDEC adopted a news business intelligence (BI) solution. Learn how that solution provided self-serve reporting for users, access to all enterprise data, and faster time-to-production.
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Virtualization is a key element of the IT strategy for businesses of all sizes, with a variety of benefits for small and midsized businesses. It helps them to build an IT infrastructure with enterprise-class capabilities and it does so with a form factor—and a return on investment (ROI)—that fits any business. Discover how your business can use virtualization to reduce costs, improve services, and simplify management.
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With Intel, Oracle, and IBM recently announcing next-generation UNIX architectures, Charles King of Pund-IT, Inc. analyzed the announcements. As this report explains, all three vendors have faced competition from “below” in x86 servers and have responded in similar ways—improving reliability, availability, and scalability features, improving performance, and introducing workload optimization. Find out more.
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Virtualization is central to twenty-first-century IT systems, yet many chief information officers fail to understand the benefits it can deliver to the data center. Storage controllers have always offered the ability to carve out pieces of real storage from a large pool and deliver them to a number of hosts, but it is storage virtualization itself that offers improvements that drive operational efficiency. Find out more.
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Dashboards are an important tool in the business analytics arsenal for midsize companies, as they enable managers to measure performance against key performance indicators (KPIs). Yet all dashboards are not created equal. Discover the essential characteristics of successful dashboards, and learn about solutions that provide well-designed dashboards that can help your company measure, manage, and optimize performance.
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Midsize companies may move so fast that they jeopardize the creation of reliable business performance metrics. Without a trusted set of business information and sound analytic processes, a midsize company cannot make informed business decisions, or take the actions required for successful business outcomes. Learn how your midsize company can overcome the four inhibitors to reliable business intelligence (BI).
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Like many of today’s IT decision makers, you may be considering a business intelligence (BI) solution for your midsize company. But how do you go about adding BI without disrupting your company? Without breaking the bank? Without having to add staff members with specialties you’ve never even heard of before? This paper helps answer those questions, with practical advice for bringing BI into your midsize company.
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In-memory analytics provides midsize companies with a faster, more flexible, and arguably lower-cost way of accessing and processing information, allowing users to get answers to business questions in seconds rather than hours. By virtue of its high-performance architecture, in-memory has the potential to help midsize organizations become more informed, and respond quicker to changing market conditions. Find out more.
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One of the greatest challenges facing organizations is the protection of corporate data. The issues complicating data protection are compounded by increased demand for data capacity and higher service levels. Often these demands are coupled with regulatory requirements and a shifting business environment. Learn about data protection strategies that can help organizations meet these demands while maintaining flat budgets.
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In September 2009, IBM Tivoli commissioned Forrester Consulting to examine the total economic impact and potential return on investment (ROI) of deploying monitoring solutions from IBM Tivoli—the IBM Tivoli Monitoring (ITM) and IBM Tivoli Composite Application Manager (ITCAM) family of products. This paper provides a framework to evaluate the potential financial impact of those products on your organization.
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Of the many challenges businesses face today, managing data growth is one of the most daunting. But while there are myriad choices for storage management solutions, most legacy options cannot address changing business requirements, and the results can cost your organization money, time, and peace of mind. Discover solutions that allow you to optimize your service environment and successfully meet your business challenges.
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Despite the slowing economy, data growth continues due to the digitization of infrastructures, the need to keep more copies of data for longer periods, and the rapid increase in distributed data sources. This data growth creates a wide range of management challenges. Discover solutions that can help your company maximize its storage environment and reduce costs while improving service and managing risks.
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The State of Wyoming’s IT organization and its customers were struggling with a mainframe-based chargeback system. For IT, productivity and interface complexity were the major problems. For client agencies, it was a lack of actionable information in billing reports. Learn how a new solution provided more detailed cost accounting and billing information, increased customer satisfaction, and lowered IT operational costs.
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Demand for business expansion, profitability, and an enhanced user experience is accelerating the move to cloud computing. Cloud answers the enterprise’s need to simplify and to use the best resources from the best devices, wherever they happen to reside on the network. For chief information officers (CIOs), it’s an opportunity to reduce operational complexity and deliver greater value to the organization. Find out more.
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Data centers have grown rapidly in size and complexity. At the same time, competitive and economic pressures have made cost control critical. To cut costs and meet service level objectives, organizations of all sizes are initiating projects to simplify IT, consolidate resources, and increase energy efficiency. Discover why companies are turning to virtualization to master these and other data management challenges.
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Service management has become critical for today’s organizations. To remain competitive, businesses need more appropriate services to support their customers, suppliers, and business partners. Discover how “service cycles” have evolved since the 1990s, learn how to make hidden service life cycles visible, and find out how, once they are visible, they can help you improve services and align IT with business objectives.
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The high costs of new or expanded data centers, exponential growth in power costs, increased regulations, and the desire to minimize carbon emissions are all driving the recognition that managing energy is of critical importance. Organizations are focused on deploying more efficient systems and tracking the impact of energy consumption more closely. Learn about the issues associated with “greening” today’s enterprises.
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One of the greatest challenges facing organizations is protecting corporate data. The issues that complicate data protection are compounded by increasing demand for data capacity, and higher service levels. Often these demands are coupled with regulatory requirements and a shifting business environment, which impact infrastructure. IT organizations must meet these demands while maintaining flat budgets. Find out how.
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Unifying development and operations is a critical aspect of enabling a dynamic infrastructure—one that improves service, reduces cost, and manages risk to better meet the evolving challenges of today’s technology, application, and business environments. This white paper introduces a process and product framework to help organizations enable a more dynamic infrastructure for delivery of smarter products and services.
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As companies expand operations into new markets, the percentage of total corporate data in remote offices is increasing. Remote offices have unique backup and recovery requirements in order to support a wide range of applications, and to protect against a wide range of risk factors. Discover solutions that help organizations protect remote data and offer extensive data protection and recovery solutions for remote offices.
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Business process management (BPM) consists of software and expertise, designed to improve the performance, visibility, and agility of business processes. With the right BPM solution, organizations can break down silos of information, streamline workflows, and help business professionals work better by working together. Learn about BPM solutions designed for rapid deployment and quick return on investment (ROI).
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Committed to keeping pace with market trends, optimizing operations, and streamlining the student experience, Barnes & Noble wanted to upgrade its e-commerce platform. Learn how the company found a solution that offered the functionality, scalability, and reliability needed to create customized online solutions for each of its campus bookstores, while also having the capacity to quickly bring new stores online.
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While concerns regarding open source are still being debated, many companies are experimenting with and deploying open source application servers in their data centers. While some are attracted to the ability to modify source code as needed, many are attracted to the perceived cost savings of open source. This white paper compares the total cost of ownership (TCO) of one open source and one commercial application server.
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With an increasing number of enterprise applications and access points, organizations face the challenge of providing convenient access while ensuring strong security. Enterprises need software solutions to help ensure that the right users have access to the right information in a timely manner. This white paper describes Tivoli Access Manager for Enterprise Single Sign-On, including its key features and benefits.
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Just because your company isn’t a major corporation with hundreds of offices and thousands of employees doesn’t mean you’re not under the same pressures to maintain access to critical information. But buying the same solutions as the major players in your industry can be expensive and unnecessary. Learn about next-generation data protection and recovery options specifically for small and midsized businesses (SMBs).
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Organizations seeking to align the software delivery process with business strategy and goals are beginning to adopt a collaborative software delivery life cycle. While not always an easy change to make, moving to a collaborative approach has clear benefits for companies and their customers. Learn how three companies improved software quality by following a collaborative approach throughout the software delivery lifecycle.
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The National Geographic Society’s (NGS) Genographic Project is a five-year worldwide scientific study to trace the migration of humanity across the planet. After gathering over 210,000 genetic samples, NGS faced the challenge of processing the massive amounts of data collected. Learn how NGS chose a combination of solutions that helped it gather, manage, secure, store, and analyze hundreds of thousands of genetic samples.
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IBM Lotus Web Content Management software is IBM’s Web content management system offering. Lotus Web Content Management software provides tools to apply business rules and processes to content, helping to ensure that specific information assets from across the enterprise are delivered via Web sites and portal. This factsheet provides a detailed overview of key Lotus Web Content Management features.
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Hartman Rauta Oy (Hartman) had been using IBM Lotus Notes V7 software as its legacy e-mail and messaging platform. Although satisfied with the existing system, the company wanted to take advantage of updates and improvements available in the latest version. Hartman also wanted to implement a virtual group working environment to support improved communication and collaboration. Learn how Hartmann managed the update.
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To lower the high cost of continuous updates as well as improve customer service and better support sales staff productivity, TRI-WEST needed to replace its static Web site with a portal solution that would serve both internal users and customers. Learn how the company worked with its chosen vendor and integration partner to build a portal solution that serves the public as well as customers and employees.
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Business users have become more technically adept, and they expect more accessibility and flexibility in their business applications. Many have become accustomed to the high standards of customization they encounter on the Web. And they’re demanding a similar experience from the organizations for which they work. Discover tools that enable your employees to contribute substantial strategic value to your organization.
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Portals are becoming integral to innovation for many organizations. From content aggregation portals to sophisticated enterprise process portals, organizations have used portal solutions to improve productivity, streamline processes, enable new delivery models, and provide IT with a powerful platform for application development. Get a total cost of ownership (TCO) comparison of different portal solutions.
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Although the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) has become a global requirement, many organizations are lagging in compliance. For many companies, regulatory compliance can already be an overwhelming and confusing area to navigate, and the need to comply with the PCI DSS might feel like yet another burden. Discover the efficiency gains of building a strategy designed around PCI compliance.
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The chief executive officer’s (CEO’s) priority list has expanded, resulting in more risk and uncertainty. People skills are now as important as market factors. Environmental issues demand twice as much attention as they did in the past. Suddenly, everything is important, and change can come from anywhere. Learn what the enterprise of the future will look like, according to over 1,000 CEOs interviewed for this white paper.
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Traditional analytic tools run queries against a data warehouse (DW) with user queries being processed against the data stored on relatively slow hard drives. In-memory analytics leverages a significantly more efficient approach where all the data is loaded into memory. This results in dramatic improvements in query response time and end-user experience. Find out how in-memory analytics can help your organization.
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Celina Insurance Group, a mutual insurance carrier that serves eight states in the midwestern US, wanted to increase competitiveness against larger insurance carriers by integrating independent agents into business processes and providing superior services and support. Find out how a new collaborative extranet helped the company reduce policy turnaround times, improve service to agents and customers, and more.
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Appliances are taking up permanent residence in the data warehouse (DW). The reason: they are preconfigured, support quick deployment, and accelerate online analytical processing (OLAP) queries against large, multidimensional data sets. Discover the core criteria you should use to evaluate DW appliances, including performance, functionality, flexibility, scalability, manageability, integration, and extensibility.
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E-commerce technology continues to evolve rapidly. Research conducted in 2008 indicated that 46 percent of retailers interviewed expected to upgrade their implementation of e-commerce technology by the end of 2010. This report identifies and evaluates e-commerce platform vendors on the basis of functionality and market impact, calls out key issues in e-commerce for retail, and provides a quantitative ranking of vendors.
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Five criteria usually dominate storage purchase decisions in the small and midsized enterprise (SME) marketplace: product features and functions; cost; reliability; service; and support. Using these criteria, SMEs often find that their final shortlists of vendors include storage products from EMC and IBM. Find out what criteria your SME should use to choose between these two vendor’s offerings.
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Virtualization technologies allow IT organizations to consolidate workloads running on multiple operating systems and software stacks, and allocate platform resources dynamically to meet specific business and application requirements. This paper discusses the advantages of virtualization, highlights IBM PowerVM, and analyzes the performance of virtualization technologies using industry-standard benchmarks.
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It is a challenging time for Oracle EnterpriseOne (E1) users. Organizations must contain IT costs and still meet business demands. In many cases, pressures to improve performance and increase efficiency are magnified by today’s economic conditions. One solution is to employ—or continue to employ—the IBM Power server platform and i for core E1 systems. Learn how four different installations fared with this solution.
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Facing a projected 400 percent increase in transactional volumes for its key grain handling application, CBH Group needed to boost performance, resilience, and availability. Learn how the company’s new server consolidation and virtualization program helped it achieve a 400 percent increase in transaction volumes, cut costs, reduce power and cooling requirements, and enable rapid response to new business requirements.
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In these challenging times, midsized businesses need to simplify IT infrastructure and reduce costs. Yet, with diverse storage, server, and network requirements—as well as limited physical space to store and manage systems—they have few options. Discover how virtualization can offer small and midsized businesses significant benefits—not simply in server consolidation, but also with affordable business continuity.
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There is a belief that midsize companies simply can’t afford, can’t handle, or can’t appreciate business intelligence (BI)—but that’s simply not true. Midsize companies can and do benefit from a variety of tools built specifically for the midsize market that are often easier, less expensive, and faster to adopt and use than the ones designed for giant enterprises. Learn the truth behind the top three myths about BI.
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Traditionally, business intelligence (BI) isn’t something you just install onto a server or client computer—which may be why some midsize companies have avoided it. Learn the basic processes by which BI is introduced into an environment, find out why it’s traditionally a time‐consuming and expensive proposition for most companies, and discover some of the ways in which you can implement BI more easily and for less money.
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Every company needs a clear set of goals and objectives to achieve maximum benefits from its business intelligence (BI) and planning projects. But a company must do more than state its goals to achieve its BI and planning objectives. It needs a working framework that provides a blueprint for success. Learn how a software solution can provide essential BI and planning functions while setting the stage for future growth.
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While earlier generations of business intelligence (BI) tools were sized and priced for enterprise organizations, that’s changing. New technologies, including in-memory analytics and interactive visualization, are making it possible for a broader range of users to build and use BI applications. Learn how these technologies are leveling the playing field—allowing midsize organizations to compete with larger enterprises.
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Although companies typically find it easy to accumulate data from their enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, it often remains unusable or unavailable to the decision makers who need it. Learn how deploying automated tools for report building, planning, and budgeting, as well as other applications such as business intelligence (BI) and performance management (PM) can help your company make the most of its ERP data.
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To be agile, managers and business users at midsize companies need timely and accurate information that can drive strategic business decisions. Business intelligence (BI) and planning applications provide this information by increasing visibility into key metrics and improving business processes and decision-making. This datasheet outlines some of the functionality of the IBM Cognos Express BI and planning solution.
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Many senior managers of small and medium-sized businesses hesitate at the cost and complexity of adopting technology such as business intelligence (BI) and performance management (PM). But these companies cannot postpone the adoption of BI or PM indefinitely. This research note explains how smaller companies can benefit from adopting a BI and PM solution, and makes the case for adopting IBM Cognos Express.
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Business reporting is a priority for IT and business users at midsize companies. These companies, lean on resources, need a single reporting solution that addresses a full range of reporting requirements and users. Discover complete reporting solutions that can recognize and accommodate different kinds of users, provide complete coverage for all types of reports, and access all enterprise data, regardless of the source.
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Midsize organizations are uniquely positioned to take advantage of a performance management (PM) approach to business. Compared with larger companies, they have more agility to bring information and people together and respond faster to changing market conditions. Learn how PM can help midsize companies turn disconnected data into information, turn information into valuable insight, and turn insight into action.
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Most companies have an incredible amount of data living in transaction-based, distributed systems and databases. But these databases are often not designed to communicate with one another, allow users to explore data in unusual ways, or quickly provide high-level summaries of data. Learn how business intelligence (BI) systems can provide these and other benefits, and how to implement BI in your organization.
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In 2001, a leading North American resort owner purchased a 50 percent interest in Blue Mountain Resorts. To prepare for the demands of being part of a publicly held company, Blue Mountain began evaluating business intelligence (BI) and performance management (PM) systems. Find out how the company’s chosen solution helped improve reporting, avoid head-count additions, reduce labor costs, and decrease inventory levels.
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In 2006, Envision Credit Union’s new chief financial officer (CFO) was looking to improve the visibility, efficiency, and accuracy of the company’s accounting and finance functions. Find out how a new business intelligence (BI) and analytics solution helped Envision reduce administrative costs, increase the average amount of overnight cash investments, and improve operational visibility, without adding staff.
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According to Nucleus Research, IBM Cognos business intelligence (BI) software can help companies make better use of their data when performing tasks related to reporting, financial statements, budgeting, and analysis. Learn about some of the barriers to better data use, as well as the key features and functions of this BI solution—and how you can improve data access and analysis, employee performance, and productivity.
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Sole-sourcing business intelligence (BI) software from enterprise resource planning (ERP) vendors is an alluring option for many companies. But in addition to the benefits, there are drawbacks. A study of 100 enterprises from the United States and the European Union that have deployed BI and ERP from the same vendor investigates whether customers are experiencing what sole-sourcing promised to deliver. Learn more.
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Extending the capabilities and value of SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse is a concern for users. To improve data use and fact-based decision making, and reduce stranded spreadsheets, SAP users can choose a business intelligence (BI) software solution such as IBM Cognos 8, with budgeting, planning, and forecasting functions. Find out more about how you can improve your business performance management content with BI.
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Finance professionals who plan, budget, and forecast in an SAP environment always need to drive additional value from their SAP solutions. One of the most pressing challenges is extending SAP functionality with a planning, budgeting, and forecasting solution that offers critical modeling and analytic capabilities for improved financial performance management. Learn how a business intelligence (BI) solution can help.
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Nearly half of all new products do not justify the resources it takes to launch them—they fail in the marketplace. Product lifecycle management (PLM)—a powerful IBM e-business on-demand enabler—is a strategic approach to creating and managing a company. Learn how to improve supply chain communication and business process, and innovation by linking technology islands together and break down the barriers between function silos.
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