Key Drivers for Business Intelligence Making the Move to the Cloud

Cloud based Business Intelligence (BI) is widespread today and is being used by many organizations globally. It is a revolutionary concept of delivering business intelligence capabilities “as service” using cloud based architecture that comes at a lower cost yet faster deployment & flexibility. Software as a Service (SaaS) BI is also being used by many small and medium sized enterprises who seek to speed up their businesses with BI and analytics tools.

According to a recent 2012 Wisdom of Crowds Cloud Business Intelligence Market Study of 859 respondents, there is a current strong investment in cloud based BI and growing interest in tapping into the cloud’s benefits; while a Gartner survey throws the fact that almost one-third of the BI platform users surveyed (27 percent, to be exact) are using or planning to use the cloud / SaaS model to expand their business intelligence capabilities in the next 12 months. These statistics strongly suggest that cloud based BI implementation is on an upswing among organizations.

On the other hand, past few years has seen not as much of BI adoption in the public cloud when compared to other applications. Business managers in some organizations fail to see the value of cloud. But this might not always be the reason behind delay in adopting cloud BI. Simply put, it might even be issues related to data integration, visualization and security in cloud BI as these are some considerations frequently cited when moving on cloud. While the market is still confused about the Cloud and SaaS offerings, understanding why businesses adopt cloud for BI might help make wise decisions.

According to a recent research by Gartner, there are three major drivers for cloud BI adoption among organizations which are as follows:

Time Saving

Cloud based BI is deployed faster and provides insights and value in lucrative ways. It comes much adaptable for those enterprises whose IT expenditure runs on inadequate budget or higher workload.

Cost Concerns

Companies that seek Business Intelligence to save long-term operational expenses must go with cloud BI. These solutions might not be cheaper when compared to on-premise non-cloud models and might need huge capital investments; however on a long term, they help organizations in reducing operational costs, IT support expenses and much more.

Expertise Backing

If there is any lack of IT expertise in business that needs assistance in managing BI and analytic systems, companies may choose third-party BI apps on cloud that come along with cloud and tech-savvy professionals who can help deal with skill shortage issues.

Many small organizations in the current scenario perform their work on cloud and develop their business sooner, which consecutively becomes a huge threat to larger organizations. With major advantages that cloud BI has to offer, we can see that many companies will implement cloud BI strategies to make comprehensive analysis. Businesses already using cloud BI must come forward and share their experience along with upbeat and negative feedback naming process efficiency, effectiveness and advantages gained compared to competitors and other benefits.

In the end, are you planning to take your current business intelligence and analytics on cloud? If yes, what’s your consideration for implementing cloud BI?

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RMS - What’s More in Store for Retailers?

Retail management is one of the brightest and most potential industries today, dependent on a variety of aspects—the nature of retailing, product, business environment, customer relationships and more. People expect a more proactive and intuitive shopping experience from retailers, be it online or offline in stores. With online shopping gaining huge momentum in current market, there is a stiff competition among retailers worldwide to attract and retain customers by understanding their varied requirements and personalizing every transaction. Thus increasing the store revenue by improving their rate of customer attraction, conversion and retention are critical challenges posed to retailers.

Retail Management System (RMS) comes as the right solution to retailers that manage both the front-end customer transactions and back-end store operations of a retail business. RMS is a highly sophisticated business management solution for retailers to boost their sales and take business to subsequent levels.

A basic understanding of the retail business is enough to realize that supply chain can make or break companies. Retail management system is a powerful and flexible platform designed for retailers to effectively manage their day-to-day transactions. It helps straddles the entire logistics, accounting, marketing, supply chain also enabling inventory planning at all stocking centers, redistribution centers, vendor sites and points of sale. This in turn enhances business performance and also helps in providing essential insights for making accurate demand and replenishment projections; the net result—more efficient use of resources and higher profitability.

Following are some advanced features of RMS that will help run business more effectively:

Efficient Inventory Tracking

Retail management system provides you with an advantage of raising a well-built inventory system, one that helps you in restocking or dropping critical items as per customer requirements. The system provides an easy access to goods for customers and employees and offers the product price, colour, size, brand details. Tailor made features are available like sale status, pre-labelling status, easy to import items, backorders and more. Thus RMS helps with an easy to use application, eliminating manual entry of data into your accounting software and other applications for report generation and this increases productivity.

Measuring Business Performance

Retail management system helps to store data and generate reports to analyze the data. The system provides custom-made reports as per your unique requirements which help in assessing stock management, business performance, and in business planning. Thus once you configure custom reporting feature in the system to retrieve personalized reports, performance of business is analyzed for an improved planning.

Improving Demand Forecast

Retail businesses run on various promotional offers & trends that vary depending on different seasons. Accordingly retail inventory system helps in making decisions along with a little human expertise. They help you in running your business as per customers’ requirement by predicting accurately the need for various products as per the season.

Analyzing Shortages of Stocks

A retail management system keeps an eye on the stock available in store and the status of shipments to arrive which holds a strong impact on store sales and otherwise will lead to low sales. If products are not available in store at the right time or do not meet the customer’s requirement it may lead to poor customer relationship which affects your customer retention rate. Retail management system clearly lists out and sends alert message to the concerned supervisor about stock availability in the store thus helping retailers maintain the stock in handy.

Distressed Stock in Inventory

Most of the grocery and edible products in the retail industry come with a limited period of time to use. RMS will list out exhaustible products in the inventory that will decompose in nearby expiry date and thus products can be sold soon at the normal price or with special offers before it expires. This helps retailers in avoiding loss from distressed stock and thus saves on your store revenue.

Reducing Cost

Retail management system helps in reducing costs by optimizing order levels, supply patterns and replenishment cycles. RMS minimizes the labour costs by mapping staff to focus on managing and selling products more effectively. This helps in the optimal utilization of resources in store and increasing business productivity and sales.

eCommerce Integration

Integrating your retail management system with online store helps your retail business perform better both online & offline and increase your profits. By integrating, RMS helps retailers manage their transactions on a centralized system where they can easily maintain and improve both online and offline functioning to build strong customer relations.

RMS software synchronizes the products from RMS to online web store seamlessly. It is easy to upload product details to your online store and you can download orders to local system, which in-turn helps you to increase more business with same products and same resources.

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Tips For Successful SharePoint Adoption and Security

SharePoint is the fastest growing product of Microsoft, widespread and used by many of the fortune 500 companies. SharePoint is a tremendous tool with a wide range of capabilities. It addresses high level business analysis to identify problems and opportunities helping businesses improve content collaboration and increase access to business intelligence. It also ensures that strong data security, compliance and auditing processes are all in place. Merely deploying and making it available cannot assure its successful adoption throughout the organization. While its implementation in the corporate world has increased, getting users to adopt SharePoint and sustaining it securely can be challenging. Here are few tips which will help you increase SharePoint adoption in your organization to garner its business benefits.

Analyze Your Requirements

Before deploying SharePoint, it is imperative to look at your company’s objectives, initiatives and goals because SharePoint has a lot of features to suit your specific business requirements. Also look into the current application usability, process and people involved; issues related to them and how SharePoint can fix them for you.

Designed Architecture

Knowing more about SharePoint architecture and how templates can be designed well which involves many content types and navigation, is more important to make your SharePoint environment rich and user-friendly. Many organizations build web pages without proper planning and don’t think of end user accessibility for updating their content. Designing your architecture with proper flow will build an easy access to end users who can take full advantage of all available features. Thus innovative planning and designing of architecture to hold all new features and support your requirements helps users provide quality output.

Plan Your Deployment as per Critical Needs

Rather than installing the complete set of features in SharePoint application to end users, it is better to install critical features as per your specific needs. In general some of the most common features that are needed include document sharing, managing sales, intranets, business intelligence and custom applications accessed through dashboards.

Being Proactive is a Key Strategy

In addition to planning and designing your architecture as per the current business requirements, you also need to proactively think and design template for future requirements and capabilities. Proactive design will help with end user needs for better and lasting system usability.

Your First Run—Start Slowly

It is always better not to do multiple things at once. Start slowly, and devise your deployment gradually over time. For example, you can initially target to a particular group of people or capabilities, focusing on specific issues that people face like managing sales, accounting, business planning or sharing of spreadsheets.

Customize End User Training

Most companies feel that SharePoint is easy to understand and use while in reality it is tricky for the users without proper training. Although there are a lot of training institutes, books, DVDs, online courses and many other ready-made materials available, they usually don’t guide you properly for custom-built features available in your SharePoint application. Companies need to focus on proper business-specific training to their employees on SharePoint before they start using it. Guiding users with how SharePoint can benefit them and how easily it can be accessed will motivate them to embrace the change. Creating few training documents, notes, PPTs of most commonly used tasks and features will all help end users understand the application better.

Security via Permissions Levels

SharePoint security comes via various default levels of permissions. These permission levels are the base of security that can be assigned to groups. Instead of sharing them with individuals, it is better to share them with groups first and later in each group you can add users to make sure about each of their permission levels before providing.

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Key Factors To Consider When Moving to Cloud

The technology market world-wide is migrating to Cloud Computing where many organizations host and run most of their applications on cloud infrastructure. Cloud computing is a means to utilize the cloud infrastructure or any cloud hosted software by subscription or pay-per-use service.

If you are migrating your applications to a public or private cloud, as always cloud solution providers may promise you—easy and fast deployment, high-end security, lower cost and more. But at this juncture, it is of utmost importance to be aware of the critical factors to be considered while migrating to cloud beyond all the marketing proclamations.

Integration Issues with Cloud Computing

It is imperative for companies to think about the Integration going in, while deciding to embrace a SaaS based application or PaaS model for any of your software requirement. Integration plays a vital role when companies depend on more than one application for their business process, necessitating a smooth flow of data across them. With issues in integration, the very purpose of employing the application is left unmet.

Therefore before deciding on a cloud vendor, make sure you gain an in-depth understanding about the integration process and issues, to handle them effectively even before starting to migrate which will make the whole course smooth.

Hidden Costs Revelation

Cloud computing helps enterprises save money on software purchases or licences. With cost structure in the form of subscription fees, enterprises can evade huge investments on infrastructure and pay per usage. However before migrating your application to cloud it is essential to look at your monthly and yearly package options along with the many aspects like number of subscriptions, services, bandwidth limitations, one-time migration costs, integration costs, offers, and support and exit charges. Also understand the complete pricing model for version upgrades, increase in database, number of users, data storage, back-ups, features, etc.

Keep an eye on your package regularly for its limitations like data storage, bandwidth usage, back-ups, data base size, etc., which in-turn helps you manage your charges well. Finally, look for ways to increase the ROI and success metrics of the application.

Cloud Security: Who’s Responsible?

Security is one of the top concerns for companies and end users leveraging from cloud. Cloud vendors must ideally provide reliable services with security at multiple layers—data, application, infrastructure and end user. Cloud security issues are more complex for users who do not hold zero responsibility.

According to a recent survey conducted by Ponemon Institute on the Security of Cloud Computing Providers, both customers and providers seldom take the responsibilities for data security on cloud. In fact, most of the providers believe that it is customer’s responsibility to secure their data—which is unfair. While both the parties point out each other for data infringement, in reality, both are equally responsible if data is hacked.

It is important that customers take necessary actions for data security, without feeling that cloud solution will handle security concerns on its own. Hence you can check with the vendors as to what they offer for data protection while in addition protecting your data with secure passwords for data access and constantly updating them.

Will Cloud Computing Lead to Privacy Obliteration?

Cloud computing brings numerous benefits to enterprises. However most of us hardly know what is the case behind the scene when it comes to privacy of your data and personal information which is on cloud. The privacy of your data majorly depends on the type of cloud that you choose.

If for example, the cloud application works on an advertising revenue model, your personal information is bound to be grabbed. Vendors will protect your data when you pay for using the applications like business emailing, news portals, software applications, etc and hence choose your vendor keeping your data security in mind.

Speed of Data Restoration—Disaster Recovery

Cloud network goes down at any point of time; but what really matters is how swiftly they recover from a disaster and how their infrastructure is designed for such a downtime recovery. Very few cloud providers unveil the metrics data of uptime and illustrate reports of their past. You can ask providers about their past experiences on disasters, maintenance schedules and their customer’s feedback which will all provide you with a holistic idea of their service. Some of the leading vendors like Saleforce.com publish statistics on a public web page.

In some cases data will be lost when cloud network is down, where it is highly impossible to recover the lost data. Data back-up is the only best way for data recovery which can solve data protection issues on the cloud and also help to restore data quickly when you need it. Organizations need to check the performance data reports of previous issues for reference. You should not only depend on the cloud solution or providers for data restore, but it’s better to take data back-up every time it’s been updated.

Switching Vendors on the Cloud

If you have hosted your application with one vendor and decide to migrate to another, it is not usually easy and with cloud it’s often appalling. Organizations should know how easy or hard it is to get the data out from their existing cloud and move it to another cloud. In some cases this goes hand in hand with integration and you need to be aware of data migration across the cloud solutions. You also need to check the strengths, weaknesses, costs, security features and performance capabilities of the other vendor. Test the performance of the new cloud soon after everything is set and migration is in full swing.

Enabling Green Cloud Computing

As we see a massive growth in industrialization, there is a growing need for resources to run systems or machines. Data centers enabling cloud computing are power-hungry consuming several megawatts of power to run server farms and air-conditioners. And according to a survey conducted by Greenpeace report, nearly $450 billion dollars are spent on new data center facilities. This automatically leads to a huge impact on our environment.

However, a research by Microsoft suggests, big energy reductions from cloud helps businesses by moving on-premise business applications to cloud which can reduce their power consumption & carbon emission by 30%. Even large data centers like Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc. can use piped Columbia River water to cool down the servers. So make sure that your cloud vendor holds Greenpeace scorecard if you are an environment friendly organization.

Along with the above mentioned critical factors, feel free to comprehend all your queries and requirements whatsoever with the cloud vendors before making your final decision.

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