Business Objects upgrades

In its first move as a SAP company, Business Objects has unveiled a major upgrade to its flagship business intelligence (BI) platform, says CRN.

BusinessObjects XI 3.0 offers updates to many of the individual applications that make up the BusinessObjects XI portfolio, including the Crystal Reports 2008 reporting software and Xcelsius 2008 data visualisation tool.

The new 3.0 release will be available by the end of the first quarter, while an on-demand version of the release is slated for availability later this year.

SAS has been placed in the Leaders Quadrant of the Magic Quadrant for BI Platforms, 2008, by Gartner, reports irish dev.

According to Gartner: "Leaders are vendors that are reasonably strong in the breadth and depth of their BI platform capabilities, and can deliver on enterprise-wide implementations that support a broad BI strategy. Leaders articulate a business proposition that resonates with buyers, supported by the viability and operational capability to deliver on a global basis."

SAS BI helps organisations, including 96 of the Fortune 100, understand the past, monitor the present and quickly predict outcomes to meet any performance objective, such as maximising shareholder value, predicting inventory levels or monitoring defects.

Millbrook, a provider of property and casualty insurance BI and data services, and Cognos, have agreed to partner to provide BI solutions for the property and casualty (P&C) insurance industry, according to PR Web.

Cognos chose Millbrook because of its rich insurance specific data models, depth of experience in extracting, transforming and loading data from multiple sources and insurance vendor systems, and a deep knowledge of P&C insurance.

Millbrook and Cognos work together to help the insurance industry benefit from the integration of the comprehensive Cognos 8 BI v3 product and Millbrook's insurance data models, pre-defined ETL processes and unsurpassed domain knowledge of the P&C insurance environment.