Malaysian university opens BICC

University Utara Malaysia (UUM) has signed a memorandum of understanding with SAS Malaysia for an SAS Business Intelligence Competency Centre (BICC) at the university’s premises, according to The Star.

UUM is the first university in Malaysia to embark on the setting up of a BICC, which will promote and support the effective use of business intelligence (BI) in the university.

The establishment of the centre is part of the university’s drive to become a centre of excellence for management.

SAS and Sun Microsystems have a new initiative to help organisations establish an enterprise-wide analytic architecture, according to Business Wire.

The SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform powered by Sun’s Datacenter of the Future helps organisations better manage, optimise and enhance current and future SAS and Sun IT infrastructures throughout the enterprise.

“Launching this initiative together, SAS and Sun spotlight the need to align IT with business needs,” said Claudia Imhoff, president of Intelligent Solutions.

IBM has introduced a suite of integrated software to help customers better manage the performance of IBM data warehouses, according to Reuters.

The new DB2 Warehouse Performance Management Suite provides capabilities for reporting and analysis of data and system utilisation that will help enterprises more quickly and easily deploy, manage and scale BI and data warehouse applications.

To further the capabilities of this suite, IBM is partnering with Appfluent Technology to deliver a comprehensive data warehouse life cycle management solution that combines the performance optimisation with performance monitoring.

Business Objects has expanded its support for Microsoft technologies with the introduction of a new portal integration kit, according to PR Inside.

Available free of charge, the Business Objects Enterprise XI R2 SharePoint 2007 Portal Integration Kit enables users to incorporate their Web Intelligence and Crystal Reports within the Office SharePoint Server 2007 environment.

"SharePoint Server 2007 has gained significant traction among companies looking to manage content and facilitate information sharing, as well as enjoy the benefits of Web services," said Jon Dorrington, VP of strategic alliances at Business Objects.