Business Objects wins lawsuit

Business Objects announced that on 25 June, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed the victory Business Objects previously obtained in a patent infringement lawsuit filed by MicroStrategy in 2003, According to BusinessIntelligence.com.

"Our foremost goal is to support our customers, and this matter never distracted us from that focus," said David Kennedy, senior VP and general counsel of Business Objects.

On 10 December 2003 MicroStrategy sued Crystal Decisions, which was acquired by Business Objects one day later, on 11 December 11 2003, alleging infringement of three patents.

The Data Warehousing Institute and the Business Intelligence Network has created BI-BestPractices.com, says eWEEK.

This site serves as a collaborative, interactive community forum for the business intelligence/data warehousing industry.

It provides relevant articles, case studies, podcasts, blogs and message boards, delivering the expertise of industry leaders and the collective experience of the BI/DW community from a vendor-neutral environment.

IBM has unveiled a comprehensive strategy to enable dynamic warehousing, a new generation of business intelligence capabilities that enable organisations to gain real-time insight and value from their business information, says All Africa.

According to Ethelbert Mbama, IBM Software sales manager for West Africa: "Traditional data warehousing efforts were focused on query and reporting to understand what happened, and the second wave focused on technologies such as online analytical processing and data mining for historical analysis to dictate business planning."

He believes IBM's new approach is about analysing information on-demand, to help customers improve business transaction by making available and analysing information in real time, to help customers optimise each transaction, such as in the call centre, in the field, when helping customers, or when taking orders.

IDC analyst Alys Woodward noted at a recent conference in London, "I have been to companies where they say: 'You can't say data warehouse', because it's such a dirty phrase," according to ZDNet.

Prior failures with building data warehouses have been so expensive and horrendous that the term can become an enterprise swearword, not to be uttered outside of the darker corners of the data centre.

Altis Consulting CEO, Gavin Cooke, a veteran of more than 10 years of working on data warehousing projects, acknowledges that the range of technologies has changed in recent years. "It can be quick from a technical point of view," Cooke said. "You can do the build part in as little as eight weeks, but you've got to allow time for the business to understand the data. It takes three months to digest it."