Sybase South Africa, already one of the market's leading business intelligence (BI) solution providers, has launched a dedicated BI business, The BI Practice. It has taken this step to pull together the critical mass of products, services and skills it has developed over the last decade, and to address surging local demand for BI.
Sybase has in recent years become a leading light in the BI sector. Apart from its own data warehousing offering, Sybase IQ, it has become a major reseller for vendors such as Ascential Software, Evoke and Business Objects.
It has grown from a handful of consultants and salespeople to a team of 20 dedicated BI specialists.
Sybase numbers many top companies among its local BI client base, including Telkom, Pick 'n Pay, First National Bank, Harmony and Lewis Stores. The BI Practice will expand on Sybase's successes, offering a holistic BI service, including consulting, products, deployment, training and support.
"Sybase has evolved to become one of the market's leading BI vendors," says The BI Practice manager Estelle de Beer. "Now that we have created a focused competency, we expect to grow share of market and share of customer, given the rapid uptake of BI in SA."
The BI Practice brings to market expertise and experience in analysis, design, project management and implementation of BI solutions, "It will provide organisations with business needs analysis, data profiling, data extraction, transformation and movement, data warehousing, dynamic data archiving and online analytical processing solutions, as well as business performance management utilising dashboard technology."
"We enable organisations to transfer their information assets into meaningful business insight," says De Beer. "Our solutions form the backbone of an organisation's business analytics platform to provide a complete picture of its business activities." Sybase's product suite addresses data profiling, extraction, loading and transformation, data storage, query and reporting, management dashboards and information portals. Together they allow organisations to develop a strategic, enterprise-wide information architecture.
Integration of data across multiple systems provides organisations with an enterprise-wide view of their business. The BI Practice will continue to provide and expand on its expertise in integrating data across channels and business units, integrating legacy applications to leverage existing data, and integrating data to support low-latency environments that Sybase has established over its years in the BI field.
"An important success factor in any BI solution is ensuring that the relevant users can actually access the data they need to make better business decisions," De Beer says. "The BI Practice develops BI solutions that deliver information securely to the right users, with a high degree of user acceptance and buy-in. It assists organisations with defining the primary focus of its BI initiatives, defining and profiling its target users, identifying the information needs of these users, determining information delivery requirements, and implementing scalable BI solutions."
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