Ironside is proud to announce the launch of its innovation center with a number of exciting new packaged Ironside solutions built on the IBM Business Analytics and Information Management portfolio. These solutions are designed to accelerate and multiply client return on investment and address specific functional and industry business problems. Be sure to contact us or stop by our booth at IBM Information on Demand next week to speak to our industry and functional solution experts in person. Read more

softlayer logoIn our never-ending quest to provide best-in-class managed business analytics to their diverse portfolio of customers, Ironside is pleased to announce we have entered into a new strategic partnership with SoftLayer (An IBM Company). Ironside is one of the world’s only managed services providers that exclusively specializes in the hosting and cloud deployment of managed IBM Business Analytics and Information Management solutions. Widely regarded as the foremost IBM Business Analytics and Information Management platform experts, Ironside brings decades of combined implementation and platform management experience and expertise that our consulting customers have enjoyed since 1999. Read more

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

On September 10th, IBM announced the release of Cognos TM1 10.2. This release contains a substantial amount of enhancements and bug fixes, which further integrate Cognos TM1 with Cognos Business Intelligence and provide better performance when planning and forecasting. One major focus area was enhancing IBM Cognos TM1 10.2 Performance Modeler. Read more

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

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

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

Difficulty: Easy

Required Ingredients: Prompt macros and static values within a prompt parameter.

Scenario:

You have some existing reports that prompt on Year and Month.

Users would like a better experience by having default selections provided for them. For scheduling purposes you’d also like to set relative time so the report can run based on current month and current year. You can accomplish this using macros. Read more

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

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