Johannesburg, 18 Sep 2007
Sybase SA`s BI Practice, in association with ITWeb, is to host international data warehousing guru Ralph Kimball in South Africa for a one-day business intelligence (BI) event, themed Straight Talk on Practical BI Techniques for Proven Results, to be held at Montecasino, in Johannesburg, on 13 November 2007.
Kimball, known worldwide as an innovator, educator, and consultant in the field of data warehousing, will highlight his data warehouse methodologies and suggested best BI practices.
The event, targeted at business and IT management, will kick off with a keynote address by Kimball, who will give an engineer`s perspective of how to effectively build platforms for BI systems that are simple, fast, relevant and cost-effective.
Following this, there will be a showcase of case studies and a Q&A session with Kimball. The afternoon will include a three-hour interactive workshop, entitled `Best Practices for Building the Data Warehouse`. During this session Kimball will introduce classic best practices for building effective data warehouses and he will demonstrate how the most important data warehouse subject areas are implemented using proven techniques.
Kimball has remained steadfast in his long-term conviction that data warehouses must be designed to be understandable and fast. His books on dimensional design techniques have become the all-time bestsellers in data warehousing. To date he has written more than 100 articles and columns for Intelligent Enterprise and its predecessors, winning the Readers` Choice Award five years in a row.
After receiving a PhD in 1972 from Stanford in electrical engineering, Kimball joined the Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC) where he co-invented the Xerox Star Workstation, the first commercial product to use a mouse, icons and windows. He then became vice-president of applications at Metaphor Computer Systems, pioneering decision support software and services provider, where he developed the Capsule Facility, in 1982. The Capsule was a graphical programming technique, which connected icons together in a logical flow, allowing a very visual style of programming for non-programmers. The Capsule was used to build reporting and analysis applications at Metaphor.
Kimball founded Red Brick Systems in 1986, serving as CEO until 1992. Red Brick Systems, now owned by IBM, was known for its lightning-fast relational database optimised for data warehousing. Ralph Kimball Associates incorporated in 1992 to provide data warehouse consulting and education.
"Business Intelligence and data warehousing has reached a new level of maturity, both as a discipline and a technology market," says Estelle de Beer, practice manager at Sybase SA`s BI Practice, sponsor of the event. "Increasing regulatory imperatives, cost pressures and a desire to optimise business processes and streamline the enterprise make BI/DW one of the top 10 critical CIO priorities, according to a Gartner survey."
De Beer adds that because of Kimball`s exceptional achievements in BI as a global discipline, it made perfect sense to Sybase SA`s BI Practice to make this investment to extend Dr Kimball`s BI expertise to IT and business management in South Africa.
Sybase SA`s BI Practice has become one of SA`s premier BI solution providers that partners best-of- breed technologies and methodologies from the world`s leading BI vendors and visionaries to create comprehensive BI solutions that deliver real-time business insight.
"We help organisations transform the quality and intelligence of their business information to achieve optimum business performance and help customers align performance management with critical business procedures," she says. "This gives our clients meaningful integrated business insight, enabling better business decision-making, so our customers can access, manage and extract real business insight every day."
The cost for the one-day conference is R1 995 and an early bird rate of R1 395 is on offer to delegates who book before 8 October. Those interested in booking can contact Jenny at Sybase on 011 202-1000 or e-mail jenny@sybase.co.za. Delegates can also register online with itweb.co.za or contact Maggie at ITWeb on 011 807-3294, or e-mail her at Maggie@itweb.co.za.
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