Business Intelligence

How intelligent is your business? How far you and your staff know the source of your profits? Where can you get the information for analysis purposes? The most important thing is how you can get this intelligence in the rapid-growing business world.

In brief, Business Intelligence can be defined as an application or technology to capture, store, analyze, and control the access to data to gain a perspective that can be leveraged to help the company make a better business decision.

Business Intelligence itself consists of the following technology: data warehouse, decision support systems, data mart, and data mining.

Why is it needed?

All businesses face ever-changing challenges from the environment, such as new competitions, deregulations, mergers and acquisitions, and global competitions from the Internet.

Due to the exponential growth of operational data in the enterprise, such as transactional data from the ATM, checking accounts and point-of-sales, or data from the reservation systems, phone transactions, and the Internet, we need a technology to manipulate those data in a cost-effective manner for the purpose of segmentation, strategic analysis, consumer demography management, product buying history, cross-selling, service requests, marketing campaigns, Internet experiences, and other online transactions.

Business Intelligence transforms those data — which are useless at first — into actionable information to support strategic business decisions.

Corporate consciousness regarding the value of information now rises exponentially. Knowledge really is power. If a company gets a competitive advantage in the knowledge side, it will survive. Besides, it will become more manageable.

Our Solutions

Plasmedia provides Business Intelligence solutions from Microsoft, which are specifically designed for the financial and manufacturing industries. This solution runs on Microsoft Windows Server 2003 64-bit Edition and Microsoft SQL Server 2000 or 2005 64-bit Enterprise Edition. Using this 64-bit technology, faster performance and high scalability is possible.

The 64-bit Windows Server and SQL Server can work optimally using 64-bit Intel Itanium server, because of the freedom from the 4 GB maximum memory barrier that limits the 32-bit technology. In this way, SQL Server is able to run complex queries on huge data sets without losing speed of performance.

Therefore, Plasmedia offers the Microsoft Business Intelligence solutions together with the HP Itanium 2 Integrity Server 64-bit.

The offered solutions are as follows:

• Sales and Marketing
  Powerful tools to help understand the customers' needs and respond to new market opportunities. Microsoft Business Intelligence allows a marketing analyst understand the effect of a pricing policy or promotion, accurately aim a specific consumer segment, analyze consumer buying patterns to support cross-selling, etc.
• Product Development
  Microsoft Business Intelligence provides access to customer, market, and supplier data to support the cost-benefit analysis of the features and materials.
• Operations
  Microsoft Business Intelligence enables performance analysis of all operational process: quality control, inventory management, production planning.
• Finance
  Microsoft Business Intelligence provides direct access to real-time data to help financial analysis such as budgeting and forecasting.
• Customer Service
  By using Microsoft Business Intelligence tools, the company is able to accurately determine which customers giving the most profits and defend it by assessing the values of individual customers.
• Supplier Relations
  From supplier data, you can do performance analysis of the suppliers easily.
• Risk Management
  Microsoft Business Intelligence tools also provides analysis functions and risk statistics to help the risk management process. For example, an insurance company can use the predictive model that includes risk measures such as number of claims, claim frequency, and loss ratios to identify the risk profiles of various customer segments.
• Business Scorecard
  Microsoft Business Intelligence tools along with SharePoint Portal helps the top management users monitor company development and make strategic decisions.

Technical Specifications

Hardware

• Itanium 2 Integrity Server – RX2600
• Processor: Intel Itanium 2 (up to 2 processors)
• Clock Speed: 1.3Ghz
• Cache: L1 32KB, L2 256KB, L3 3MB
• Hard drive: 32GB Ultra SCSI, 15 Krpm (up to 438GB)
• Memory: 2GB, PC2100 ECC DDR266A SDRAM (up to 24GB)
• Networking: 10/100/1GB Ethernet, 2 network adapters
• DVD ROM

Software

• Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition (64-bit)
• Microsoft SQL Server 2000/2005 Enterprise Edition (64-bit)
• BI Applications: Microsoft Office Excel 2003/XP, SharePoint, Data Analyzer, BI Portal