There are five key things you need to know about your users before you roll out related technologies to them. In many cases, discovering these five things will require more than just polling end users. To provide the right business intelligence capabilities to the right people, you will need to find the answers to a few important questions,and/or gather additional information from knowledgeable managers within your company.

To some people, "analytics" means building a model that will reveal new knowledge from data. That's too narrow a definition. "Analytics is about solving problems and taking action as part of that. If you built a model to identify which customers are likely to default on a loan, but no one knows who they are and what kind of actions to take as a result, you haven't fully addressed the issue." SAS conceptualizes analytics as a closed-loop process of continuous learning and improvement, where each phase is instrumental to the cycle.

A distinguishing feature of Big Data is a mixture of traditional structured data together with massive amounts of unstructured information. The data can come from legacy databases and data warehouses, from web server logs of ecommerce companies and other high-traffic web sites, from M2M (Machine-to-Machine) data traffic and sensor nets.This white paper outlines the structure of Big Data solutions based on Hadoop and explores the particulars of the elements that comprise it.

Small and medium-sized businesses stand to benefit from business intelligence and analytics capabilities as much as larger organizations do. But midmarket companies have unique needs – and face unique challenges – that need to be weighed when planning and launching a BI and analytics program. In this eBook, written for IT and BI professionals as well as business executives involved in BI decisions, readers will get an introduction to BI and analytics for midmarket organizations plus practical advice on how to get started on deploying a BI system, from building a business case to evaluating BI technology.

Dashboards are useful Key Performance Indicators and metric-reporting mechanisms that enable users to quickly monitor and track performance.This paper offers an overview of best practicebusiness intelligence (BI) dashboard design principles and discusses data integration options forgetting data into a dashboard.

Data warehouse appliances that bundle analytic databases with server and storage hardware are becoming increasingly popular choices for organizations looking to reduce costs, deployment times and management complexity. But the data warehouse appliance market is changing dramatically due to vendor acquisitions, and new developments in appliance technology are further complicating things for prospective buyers. In this eBook, IT and data warehousing professionals and business executives involved in data warehouse purchases will get an overview of data warehouse appliance trends and practical advice on how to evaluate and choose the right appliances for their organizations. Readers will also learn about the limitations of data warehouse appliances and pitfalls to avoid in using them.