Tag Archive for: Business Intelligence

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Ironside Webinar Series: An Introduction to IBM Cognos 10.2.1 Rapidly Adaptive Visualization Engine (RAVE)

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In June 2013, IBM introduced its rapidly adaptive visualization engine (RAVE) as part of IBM Cognos 10.2.1. This highly evolved engine raises the visualization standard within the business analytics landscape, and can be fully customized to fit any specific business requirements.

RAVE or Extensible Visualizations are far more advanced than what we are accustomed to. They are interactive, animated and are available in more variety, including heat maps, spider maps, tag clouds, bubble charts etc. Read more

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Netezza – Design Best Practices & Guidelines

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Today’s big data challenges for both transactions and analytics are increasing demands on data systems. Traditional data warehouses sometimes struggle as they are often NOT designed to meet the demands of advanced analytics on big data. That’s where solutions like Netezza come in.

IBM PureData for Analytics (formerly Netezza) is a data warehouse appliance that has a purpose-built analytics engine and an integrated database, server, and storage. With simple deployment, out-of-the-box optimization, no tuning, and minimal ongoing maintenance, the IBM Netezza data warehouse appliance has the industry’s fastest time-to-value and lowest total cost of-ownership. Read more

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What’s New in Cognos 10.2.1 FP1 and Cognos Insight 10.2.1

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Earlier this week (and without much fanfare) an incremental, but none the less exciting update to Cognos BI was released. Cognos 10.2.1 FP1 (Fixpack 1), also known as Cognos 10.2.1.1, includes a number of new features that build on the June’s impressive release, especially in the area of extensible visualizations or RAVE. Read more

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The Business Intelligence Maturity Model

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Much has been written recently about the value of transforming data into useful information for decision making. It has become a strategic must-have for organizations to figure out how to use the structured historical data they already own, make sense of the ever-expanding amount of unstructured social media data out there, and implement the appropriate analytics platform to use these assets to their fullest extent through developing business intelligence maturity. Read more

Ironside Public Training Practice Expands to Philadelphia and Washington D.C.

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In September, Ironside public training classes will start being offered near Philadelphia and in Washington, D.C. as part of the firm’s expansion into the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States.

The move expands the reach of an IBM Cognos, SPSS and TM1 training practice that has earned rave reviews from customers at private classes across the country and at public training classes in cities such as Boston, Detroit, Atlanta and Fort Lauderdale.

Ironside public training in IBM Cognos has been available since the firm’s founding in 1999 in Massachusetts. We recently began offering SPSS and TM1 classes as well.

The expansion of Ironside public training offerings comes at a time when IBM is getting out of the training business and leaving the job of increasing adoption of IBM business analytics software to its top business partners.

Ironside is a full-service IBM Premier Business partner, offering software resale, training, and consulting across the full suite of IBM business analytics products, including SPSS, Cognos BI, and TM1.

The Mid-Atlantic training expansion begins with a September 9 IBM Cognos Active Report Class in King of Prussia, PA. Ironside will offer IBM Cognos Workspace and Workspace Advanced (2 days) and IBM Cognos Multidimensional Report Authoring (2 days) classes later in that same week.

During the week of September 23, Ironside is offering an IBM Cognos Report Studio Fundamentals (3 days) and/or Advanced (2 days) training class in Washington, D.C.

The week of September 30 features an IBM Cognos Framework Manager Fundamentals and/or advanced class in King of Prussia.

Additional classes have been scheduled through November. Visit the Ironside public training schedule for the full listing of all public classes in Washington, D.C., King of Prussia, and other cities in the eastern U.S.

At Ironside, we write our own full color training manuals. The curriculum is continually informed by the experiences of our 70 plus consultants and taught by our best in breed instructors, who all have experience as former IBM instructors.

For information about Ironside IBM Cognos, SPSS, or TM1 offerings, to request a particular class be held, or for pricing on private classes – contact Steven Kreytak at 781 860 -8840 x284 or at skreytak@ironsidegroup.com.

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Overview of IBM Cognos BI 10.2 System Metrics

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IBM Cognos Business Intelligence platform has built-in monitoring systems that gather different metrics on each service, dispatcher, server and server group. These system metrics provide better insight into the status and overall health of a Cognos BI environment. The performance of these system metrics play a key role in tuning a BI environment to its full potential. Read more

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IBM Moves Away from an Internal Training Model

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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

Ironside Continues Its Expansion into the Mid-Atlantic Region!

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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!Philadelphia

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.

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Managing External Data in Cognos Workspace Advanced

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IBM Cognos Workspace Advanced and IBM Cognos Report Studio allow you to integrate external data directly into your reports. This allows you to create a report using an external source that contains data which is not part of your IBM Cognos Business Intelligence enterprise data. You can import your own data file and start reporting on it right away. After importing, your external data file is protected by the same IBM Cognos security as your enterprise data, thus allowing you to report on your data in a secure and private environment. Read more

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How Michigan State University is Leveraging IBM Analytics and Ironside Group to Improve University advancement

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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