Rehmani Consulting, Inc. offers a comprehensive set of video training content on SharePoint 2010: Reporting Services. Reporting services for SharePoint, along with Power Pivot and/or Power View for Excel, are just 3 of the tools used, extensively, by Neudesic Consulting Services as they build business intelligence (BI) systems that provide customers with very quick access to data.
We visited twice with Mr. Tom Marek, General Manager, SQL/Business Intelligence Practice for Neudesic during the SharePoint Conference, 2012, held in Las Vegas, NV in the U.S.
We are always on the lookout for how enterprise IT independent software vendors (ISVs), like Neudesic, deliver the value their customers require, to, inevitably, lower the costs of enterprise computing.
Tom Marek let us know that Neudesic meets this objective over at least two stages:
Customers approach Neudesic with some rough, general understanding of the cost benefit. They are generally aware of the comparative low cost of developing custom solutions for their organizations within the SharePoint “realm” of options, which offer several methods to extract structured data from backend repositories like SQL Server 2008 R2, or 2012. In this scenario, Tom Marek’s BI Practice Teams then use the data to create depictions of business performance (including key performance indicators, KPIs) on graphical dashboards, which are designed to provide Neudesic customers with a very quick take (green/red/blue on dial charts, etc) as to how operations are progressing at a particular moment in time.
He educated us that, a second level of palpable cost savings, then, emerges. This second stage arises as Neudesic Practice Teams collaborate with customers on the design of optimal solutions for BI requirements. These customers usually come to an understanding that Microsoft’s Pricing model, which is designed to provide larger organizations with a progressively lower per user cost than Microsoft’s competitors can offer, can be used to arrive at a delivered project cost that amounts to no more than an approximate 1/3 of the cost that competitors, like IBM’s Cognos®, would charge for the same capabilities.
We think that enterprise businesses have to be interested in these capabilities.
It should also be kept in mind that Microsoft has expanded the range of these capabilities in a way that will likely be very attractive to enterprise businesses with extensive retail location presence, and, therefore, result in greater project value, together with a lower cost of business operation. In fact, SQL Server 2012 now has spatial capabilities that permit location-specific, graphical depiction of BI data per geographical location within the same dashboards that Neudesic’s BI Practice usually delivers. SQL Server Spatial 2012 calls on Bing Maps to provide this feature.
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