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T h e F u T u r e o F B u s i n e s s i n T e l l i g e n c e
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market DynamicsProfound changes in the Bi industry and in the marketplace compelled us to take a hard look at how we should evolve to continue delivering superior value to our customers. this was our commitment when we started the company nearly fifteen years ago, and it remains a bedrock principle for us today. We recently decided that it’s a good time to share our thinking publicly.
The most important changes (at least for us) have been with our friends at Microsoft and the evolution of the SQL Server product line, one of their most successful and profitable ventures. A few short years ago, SQL Server and companion products such as SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) were sold “à la carte”. Customers would
choose from a complex and sometimes confusing array of products.
Today, SQL Server is sold as one of three all-inclusive bundles: Standard, Business Intelligence and Enterprise, plus a smattering of specialized offerings such as
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Azure-based SaaS products. It’s now very clear which capabilities each bundle includes; and like everything else in our universe, you get more when you pay more. Enterprise is truly a superlative offering – there’s probably nothing else your company would ever need. But can you afford it? If not, can you even afford the lesser “Business Intelligence” bundle, also a worthy offering? From our perspective, the costs associated with the licensing schemes are truly jaw-dropping.
Regardless of cost considerations, most prognosticators believe that SQL Server products will continue to be very successful for years to come. We agree.
In contrast, Crystal Reports – an indispensable reporting facility in the IT industry for decades – has not been evolving in a significant way. But maybe it doesn’t need to. It’s focused on doing certain things really, really well, as its legions of devoted loyalists will attest. Crystal Reports is hard to replace, and in general customers don’t want to fix what isn’t broken. Equally important: It doesn’t break the bank when you use it.
This means Crystal Reports will be around for a very long time and will continue to be a staple in many IT shops. But it also means fewer opportunities for us to add value and help SAP extend Crystal Reports beyond its traditional market segments.
What else is interesting for us? Mobile platforms, real-time or on-demand business intelligence and process automation float to the top of the list. Those areas certainly aren’t new, but the priorities certainly reflect an accelerating environment that rewards speed and the reduction of business process friction. Some of today’s requirements could not have been imagined a decade ago. “Only the strong survive” is evolving gradually to “only the fastest survive”. ChristianSteven Software has always understood this and will continue to make client businesses operate faster and more efficiently.
As part of our strategic planning process, we spent a lot of time talking to our customers and other CIOs to better understand what’s on their minds. More than anything else, their concerns will drive our future direction. Below we recap the major themes gleaned from those conversations.
only the fastest survive
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cio top PrioritiesCIOs are accountable for managing all kinds of IT-related risks pertaining to business continuity and limiting liability – it’s not just about fending off hackers, protecting privacy and other topics that enthrall the media.
Risk
If business intelligence distribution is the lifeblood of an enterprise, its absence is the equivalent of strangulation. It’s not just about producing the right stuff; it’s about getting that stuff to the right person at the right time. And the right person may very well be someone outside the boundaries of your enterprise with whom you have contractual obligations.
ChristianSteven Software’s products have always been designed from the ground up to mitigate business continuity risks. Yet our customers ask us frequently, “What will you guys do in the future to further mitigate risk?” We need and want to do more in this area.
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Security
Security is daily front page news. Our customers tell us repeatedly how important this is, so our leadership team thinks about it constantly. We understand there is no such thing as perfect security because that depends on perfect human behavior. But we have always provided facilities and mechanisms to maintain privacy, guarantee content integrity and ensure the authenticity of recipients.
We will always continue to add new capabilities to strengthen security. The IT world is evolving quickly, and we will avail ourselves of new technologies and methodologies.
Equally important: Our professional services consultants are trained to point out security gaps and weak links in client environments during consulting engagements. We don’t make money by doing this, but it’s the right
thing to do. We’ll continue to upgrade relevant security skills and knowledge for our consultants.
ROI
ROI is a tricky subject, although it’s a well-understood concept. Almost every customer talks to us about this, even after they purchase products or services from us.
We’ve come to understand that the approach to investment decisions vary widely and often depend on company size, sophistication and culture. At one end of the spectrum is a “show me the numbers” approach based on quantifiable net gains within a fixed – and sometimes arbitrary - time period (e.g. one year). At the other end of the spectrum are enterprises that use algorithms such as specialized rates of return, multiple payback periods, opportunity costs and the time value of money.
Our professional services consultants are trained to point out security gaps & weak links
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Sometimes ROI involves factors that are less tangible and harder to measure. Although counterintuitive, we’ve learned that it’s not always about money.
We realized we need to categorize ROI analysis styles to have more meaningful conversations with prospective customers. Some organizations value all quadrants of this matrix. Others focus on only one of those quadrants.
Although a majority of our customers do experience very short (months) payback times after an implementation, we need to do a better job of using our expertise to recognize prevalent client values and tailor our analyses for their needs.
Implementation Success
Some of our clients have a reoccurring nightmare: the purchase of a great software product followed by a disastrous implementation or poor support. We find it interesting that they share this fear frequently, even though they reassure us that ChristianSteven Software has been outstanding in this regard.
We strive for intimate, long term relationships with our customers to ensure that our products deliver their full value throughout their lifecycles. Superior planning, deployment, maintenance and support have always been top priorities for us because they differentiate us clearly from larger, less focused competitors.
We’ll do more to expose the value of our professional services. And we’ll do a better job of making sure existing and prospective customers understand that ChristianSteven Software will be around for a long time and continue to be a reliable partner and advisor.
Reuse
CIOs stress constantly that preserving and fully exploiting existing investments is an absolute requirement. For us, it’s always been a foundational principle. We add incremental value by extending and strengthening existing tools and solutions. We never displace anything (except, perhaps, an unwieldy homegrown report distribution process that no one knows how to maintain).
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We’ve been told repeatedly that maintaining this principle is critical as we evolve our offerings. We have no plans to change our approach.
The CIOs who run SQL Server in their companies are most vociferous on this point. They typically spend a king’s ransom to purchase and run that software. No vendor can even begin a conversation with those folks if there is any hint that any piece of an existing architecture would be displaced.
Another twist on the notion of reuse: most enterprises recognize that employees and people outside the enterprise use personal mobile devices extensively to
access company resources and information. Security managers everywhere shudder, but it’s a fact of life in all but the most rigidly managed organizations. This means business intelligence delivered by any ChristianSteven Software solution must render flawlessly on every mobile platform. Individuals and companies will not spend money to upgrade personal devices to meet any minimal technical standards required by our company (or any other company, for that matter).
Borderless Enterprise
Business processes obviously don’t stop at the boundaries of a company. Over the years we’ve been nothing short of amazed at the uses customers find for our solutions. One of them really stands out: the use of our products to deliver business intelligence and documents beyond the walls of the enterprise (e.g. customers, partners, suppliers) at a scale that cannot be matched by other solutions, including giants like Microsoft and SAP.
We received unambiguous feedback about the need to preserve existing capabilities and to augment them with additional features to increase efficiency across the borderless enterprise. And it goes without saying that these capabilities must be secure and guard privacy.
Software solutions must render flawlessly on every mobile platform
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Action for Actionable Intelligence
Reliable delivery of business intelligence is great, but integrating that process with the rest of the enterprise is even better. ChristianSteven Software solutions have always supported threshold monitoring, process automation, workflows and embedded data update capabilities as natural product extensions.
Some customers worried that our commitment to these capabilities would wane as we introduce new business intelligence distribution solutions. Or they worried that we would not focus on enhancing these capabilities in the future.
Nothing could be farther from the truth. We recognize very clearly that business intelligence by itself is worthless unless a mechanism or a person responds to it (if required). We will always strive to incorporate superior features that promote task automation and enable users to take action from within business intelligence delivery solutions.
What we need to improve is our clarity about this topic. These features are core capabilities of our solutions, not afterthoughts.
BI itself is worthless unless a mechanism or a person responds to it!
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a Bright futureFocus
We’re borrowing a phrase from Scott McNealy (“all the wood behind one arrow”) to take advantage of the burgeoning SQL Server market. We want to seize a number of interesting opportunities in that space to enhance and extend that platform. We will build on the extraordinary legacy of SQL-RD and our other solutions that have augmented SQL Server for many years. At the same time, we have no intention of abandoning or otherwise ignoring our existing products, all of which provide significant revenue streams for us.
One Solution
We’ve had a vision for some years about creating a single business intelligence distribution solution that would service all needs on the Business Intelligence Continuum, a spectrum of distribution and format possibilities for specific needs across the borderless enterprise. It will be “galactic headquarters” for the management and distribution of actionable business intelligence, while at the same time hiding complexity and offering end-users unmatched ease-of-use. We believe this engine will be nothing short of a revolution for business intelligence distribution.
our leadership team has a crisp strategic Bi Product roadmap. We’re incorporating what our customers told us; and we’re using our own vision to establish these additional guiding principles.
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Self-Service
It boils down to this: companies save money when people help themselves without assistance from others. We will help people build and schedule more reports and dashboards on their own. In effect, we want to manage the plumbing behind the wall while enabling users to turn on the business intelligence faucet without assistance.
Flexible Coupling
We’re evolving our thinking about how to best serve the borderless enterprise while minimizing risk, increasing security and playing nicely in a world where a host infrastructure can mean any number of things (some of which probably haven’t been invented yet). This means we’ll architect a solution that is coupled flexibly, agnostically and reliably to infrastructure services, data sources and applications, regardless of where it lives or where they live.
Intelligent Scaling
One of our core solution values has always been unlimited horizontal scalability. We’ll not only continue that, but we’ll make it better and easier to manage on a more robust solution.
Value Narrative
This is more about economics than technology. We want to make an obvious and compelling statement about the value of a future solution. CIOs and other IT executives should be able to look at our solution and know intuitively how and why it’s going to improve business processes and save money.
We’re very excited about the future. This is an important moment in our company’s evolution and we are confident about continuing to deliver superior value to our clients.
One of our core solution values has always been unlimited horizontal scalability
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introducing intellifront Bi™
In response to the market challenges and principles described above, we’re very pleased to announce our next-generation business intelligence distribution solution, IntelliFront BI™ (Intelligence Frontier). It represents a major leap forward in capability, ease-of-use, and cost efficiency for enterprises that have invested (or will invest) in a SQL Server portfolio. It will, in effect, supercharge Microsoft’s offerings and deliver unprecedented value for streamlining the borderless enterprise.
IntelliFront BI™ will be released in the second quarter of 2016.
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Here are a few essentials of the product:
● Designed for SQL Server.
● A single solution for the enterprise manages scheduled, on-demand, threshold-driven and triggered reports; and it has tools for non-technical users to create real-time dashboards.
● The product emphasizes self-help facilities for creating reports and dashboards while continuing to support centralized management and control over business intelligence assets.
● To ensure successful implementations, we are training our professional services organization team to be terrific business consultants as well as outstanding technologists. We feel strongly that the value of IntelliFront BI™ can be appreciated only in a full business context that takes into account its many positive impacts beyond ROI.
IntelliFront BI™ will deliver the following benefits for enterprise executives:
● A single, infinitely scalable solution for SQL Server implementations will manage all business intelligence distribution requirements for the enterprise as well as for customers, partners and suppliers. Additional software tools and custom development work will never be needed.
● IntelliFront BI™ will drastically reduce the amount of manual labor required to administer enterprise reporting while offering unmatched reliability and delivery speed.
● Immediate cost savings and streamlined business processes mean the ROI payback period will be short.
● Advanced security features and a high availability architecture substantially mitigate corporate risk.
● IntelliFront BI™ doesn’t replace existing investments. Instead, it amplifies and extends the power of SQL Server at a much lower cost than equivalent Microsoft alternatives.
We invite you join our journey to the IntelliFront BI™ era by subscribing to our blog, downloading our eBooks and perusing our website (christiansteven.com) frequently.
The Future of Intelligence
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About UsChristianSteven Software brings two decades of business intelligence expertise to the table when helping companies to define, create and implement BI solutions. We view our engagements as long term partnerships that are virtual extensions of clients’ internal capabilities. Our goal is to remain flexible and available in a relationship that can scale up or down, depending on needs.
Key Values:
● Ensure quick set up and simple use
● Minimize and eliminate repetitive tasks and manual processes
● Reduce costs and cut labor by automating business processes and reports from one application
● Improve customer satisfaction through mass personalized distribution
● Provide reliable data, and SOX Compliance, through automated report generation
● Experience a browser-based Rich Internet Application interface
● Leverage existing investments in hardware, software, email and other applications
● Sustain low training and implementation costs
● Deliver low total cost of ownership
Our customers have come to expect high standards for:
● Speed
● Convenience
● Value
● Reliability
If you’re thinking about implementing a BI Solution in your company, let’s chat. We can help you to chart a strategy that delivers solid business value and reduces costs.
Contact us today for a complimentary BI Strategy Assessment:
ChristianSteven Software LLC11020 David Taylor Dr, Suite 317Charlotte NC 28262, USA
(888) 781-8966
