Effective July 1, 2013, IBM training has been discontinued. IBM has moved to a partner-led model which shifts the responsibility of IBM’s internal training practice to qualified specialists and partners like Ironside. Clients will now be able to select training from industry experienced partners who can tailor courses and schedules to their needs. Training is obviously a critical piece of utilizing technology and is perhaps why this transition was made. While IBM continues to focus on creating best-of-breed technology, partners and third parties can focus on providing the highest quality training to customers. Read more
Tag Archive for: Business Analytics
Ironside, a Premium IBM Business Partner since 1999, is pleased to announce another expansion into the mid-Atlantic region by opening its newest office in Philadelphia, PA.
Claire Zyvitski recently joined Ironside as a Senior Sales Executive heading up sales for the mid-Atlantic region supporting the IBM Cognos BA Team. Claire has seven years of partner expertise with selling Cognos software and consulting services in the Business Intelligence, Performance Management, and Data Warehousing space. She is an accomplished, driven sales professional with experience in both large Fortune 500 companies and small businesses.
Claire’s focus will be the IBM Business Analytics customers in the mid-Atlantic region (primarily Philadelphia, Washington, and North Carolina). Claire can be reached via (781) 860-8840 x232 or via email at czyvitski@ironsidegroup.com.
Ironside is putting the final touches on a client outreach plan for the final six months of 2013 in the mid-Atlantic region. Make sure you check out our events page for a list of customer events, conferences, and workshops!
We look forward to making additional marketing investments in the mid-Atlantic region over the coming months. Some other marketing examples include BI health checks, implementation jump starts, BI competency center reviews, workshops, lunch n learns, and proof of concepts. We are open to hearing from you about additional ways we can help your prospects and customers.
Lastly, Ironside Group is currently recruiting exceptional business intelligence and corporate performance management pre/post sales resources based in the Mid-Atlantic region, please Contact Us if you are aware of any highly qualified and experienced people.
The Ironside Group is a multidisciplinary technology and advisory consulting firm that specializes in all facets of Business Intelligence. We offer service lines in the areas of business intelligence, data warehousing, predictive analytics, and enterprise planning. We are a long-standing and well-respected IBM Premier Partner, and we specialize in designing and implementing enterprise Business Intelligence solutions utilizing the IBM Business Analytics software suite. In addition to our consulting practice, we offer fully hosted and managed IBM Business Intelligence solutions on our cloud platform, as well as a comprehensive professional training in every facet of the IBM Business Analytics solution stack.
Upcoming Events
Wednesday, July 10th – Philly SIPS & Consumable Analytics Event
If you’d like more information on Ironside, check out our company story. We’d love to talk about what we can do to boost your analytics potential in the mid-Atlantic.
In a world of ever changing government and industry regulations, many organizations are having a challenging experience efficiently meeting compliance requirements. Additionally, as the economy continues to sputter, organizations are exploring new ways to reduce loss, improve decision making around resource allocation, and optimize their business processes. With the latest release of IBM’s Governance, Risk & Compliance (GRC) solutions, which includes: OpenPages and Algorithmics, meeting these requirements and beginning to improve processes internally can become seamless. The painful, long drawn out process of managing market, credit and liquidity risk can soon become an efficient exercise. Integrating your current reporting technologies (IBM or not) will help your organization gain greater risk visibility and be ready for any challenges. Read more
This article is based upon an interview with Monique Dozier, Assistant Vice President of Advancement at MSU.
In 1989, Howard Dresner, a leading analyst for Gartner, coined the term “business intelligence.” In 1994, this thought leader, strategy advisor, and former Gartner Research Fellow, made the following powerful prediction: Read more
SPSS allows users in almost any industry to see into the future. The solution is part of IBM’s Business Analytics portfolio and works seamlessly with Cognos, the world’s flagship business intelligence reporting tool. Utilizing predictive analytics, SPSS connects data to effective action. SPSS draws on a powerful reserve of algorithms to analyze an organization’s existing data, as well as newly-captured data to enable smarter decisions and improve outcomes. When integrated with Cognos, different levels of users — from executives to analysts — can see game changing reports, scorecards, and other visuals on their desktops or mobile applications (as illustrated below). Read more
The Ironside Group and IBM are hosting a series of complimentary Lunch N’ Learn’s where we will discuss benefits that our customers are experiencing with Integrating Budgeting, Reporting, Consolidation and Forecasting using IBM Business Analytics Solutions. Read more
As the velocity of business increases, business users are less willing to wait for the IT department to create custom reports and analytics. In order for customer analytics to be truly effective, they must be made available to all customer-facing personnel and attain the status of supporting fact-based decision-making used by the entire enterprise. At the same time, BI teams would like to offload report and analytics creation duties to users and focus on morevalue-added activities. 
A new crop of self-service BI and analytics tools promises to empower users while liberating the BI team from ad hoc reporting tasks. To work, these tools must be easier to use than previous generations of BI tools, and give the BI team a measure of control over the semantic representation and use of back-end systems and oversight of the creation of standardized reports and dashboards for decision-making. Read more
Today’s business moves at hyper speed. Your response to both opportunities and emerging threats must be just as swift. Making smarter, fact-based decisions requires more than analysis; it requires deep, customer-centric, context-rich understanding. 
That’s what IBM Performance 2012 is all about—the increasingly vital role of analytics to recognize and even anticipate evolving trends. At Performance 2012, you’ll discover how IBM can help you deliver critical insight, faster, to stakeholders across the enterprise.
Here’s some of what you’ll learn:
— How you can profit from analytics
— Techniques for identifying and prioritizing strategic investments
— Modeling approaches that help cut costs and seize opportunity
— Sneak peeks at upcoming technologies—and how to prepare for their arrival
— Customer successes using analytics and the lessons learned
The Ironside Group is a proud sponsor of the IBM Performance Events in the following cities:
April 4, 2012 – New York, NY
April 17, 2012 – Boston, MA
May 24, 2012 – Atlanta, GA
June 7, 2012 – Hartford, CT
To attend one of the IBM Performance events, click on the link next to your preferred location and register for FREE today! We hope to see you there.
Traditional thinking when considering an enterprise business intelligence software purchase is for IT own it, operate it, and be wholly responsible for everything involved with it. Factor in a challenging economy, little room for adding headcount, and internal resources spread thin on multiple projects. If this seems like too much of a burden to undertake, but you’d still like to reap the benefits of an enterprise BI solution then it may be time to think outside the box and explore the idea of having your solution hosted and managed externally.
As we work with our customers, one important thing we have observed is that line of business customers in organizations of all sizes are trying to become less reliant on IT and more self-sufficient. Their major concern is the amount of internal resources and infrastructure they will need to dedicate to a solution. Although IBM designs their products to be easy to manage internally, sometimes having dedicated resources to manage the solution is not feasible.
What are the IBM Cognos TM1 Integration Points?
IBM Cognos TM1 is fast becoming a critical component of the IBM business analytics suite of offerings. As the application becomes more prevalent in the industry, we are seeing more and more customers inquiring about the integration points between IBM Cognos TM1 and the IBM Cognos BI suite of tools. There are six common integration points between TM1 9.5.2 and IBM Cognos BI:
-IBM Cognos BI Security
-Utilization of previously developed TM1 Web content within the Cognos Connection interface through TM1 Portlets
-TM1 cubes as a data source within the IBM Cognos BI environment
-TM1 Widgets
-TM1 cubes as a source within the IBM Cognos BIA studio
-IBM Cognos TM1 Package Connector to access IBM Cognos Framework Manager packages
Read more
Ironside helps companies translate business goals and challenges into technology solutions that enable insightful analysis, data-driven decision making and continued success. We help you structure, integrate and augment your data, while transforming your analytic environment and improving governance.