HP, Informatica expand alliance

HP and Informatica have introduced a portfolio of integrated business intelligence (BI) solutions that help customers accelerate business decisions by giving them access to more timely and accurate information, reports ITWire.

These offerings combine Informatica's data integration capabilities with the HP Neoview enterprise data warehouse platform as well as HP's BI strategic consulting and implementation services. HP plans to sell these offerings through its BI solutions sales teams.

“Customers view information as a strategic asset, and yet they still struggle to quickly access their data to accelerate decision making,” says Thomas Hogan, executive vice-president, software and solutions, HP. “These new solutions will empower our clients to reduce their information-related costs and gain competitive advantage.”

When migrating to a new BI software platform, companies are often tempted to simply transfer reports to the new system and flip the switch on the old one, states SearchCRM.com

But for the most part, they should resist the temptation, according to Rita Sallam, an analyst with Gartner. "It may not be a bad strategy if you know you want to use your existing reports exactly as is, you're a small shop, or your reports are not mission critical," Sallam said. "But that's not usually the case."

Sallam recommends that companies migrating to a new BI platform run the two in parallel in order to allow time for a "methodical" review of the organisation's reports and reporting requirements and to allow users to make the shift gradually.

French bank Societe Generale has selected MicroStrategy's enterprise BI platform to replace its existing reporting tools, according to FinExtra.

In 2008 the bank began a review of its decision support systems - including sales, financial, marketing, and risk analysis - opting for MicroStrategy 9 following a seven-month proof-of-concept evaluation.

The vendor says its platform will provide around 20 000 SocGen employees with access to diverse data sources for enterprise reporting, detailed analytics, dashboards and ad hoc queries.