University offers BI

Xavier University will now offer a concentration in business intelligence (BI) as part of its MBA programme, according to Biz Journals.

"Our MBA students who choose the BI concentration will be able to demonstrate skills that are highly sought after by employers," said Raghu Tadepalli, associate dean in Xavier`s Williams College of Business.

Courses will be offered in data mining, and database and warehousing, among others, and students also will get hands-on experience.

MicroStrategy has honoured two companies for demonstrating best practices in their BI deployments, according to CNNMoney.

The MicroStrategy Honours Award recognises organisations for outstanding corporate performance improvements as a result of their MicroStrategy-based BI applications.

The 2007 winners are Intesa Mediofactoring and the University of Bologna.

IBM has unveiled a new release of its Alphablox for Linux, Unix, and Windows BI application development software, according to IT Jungle.

With Alphablox version 9.5, both Java and non-Java developers can build Web-based BI dashboards and scorecard applications.

It has also added new features to help developers design, develop, and test their analytic applications, and to help users interact with data and perform calculations.