InetSoft BI Webcast: CEO Joins a Discussion of Business Intelligence Integration with Business Processes

InetSoft’s Luke Liang participated in eBizQ's Business Intelligence in Action Podcast series

Beth Gold-Bernstein (Chair of BI in Action Conference): Welcome, everyone, to the eBizQ Business Intelligence in Action Podcast series. I am Beth Gold-Bernstein, chair of the BI in Action virtual conference which will be held June 20th and 21st. As a preview to the conference, and as part of our ongoing BI in Action series, we are talking with five vendors today about business intelligence integration into business processes or BPM tools.

With us today are Luke Liang, CEO and co-founder of InetSoft, Maria Ross, corporate marketing director of Savvion, Lothar Schubert, Director of SAP Netweaver Solution Marketing, Jim Hare, VP of Product Marketing and Business Development at Cognos, and Mark Andrews, Program Director of Data Warehousing for IBM. Welcome, all, and thank you for joining us today.

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First we are going to allow each of our participants in the panel today to tell us a little bit about how they view this emerging trend of the integration of business intelligence into business processes. I’d like to start to start the conversation off with Luke Liang, CEO and co-founder of InetSoft Technology, an innovative provider of business intelligence software delivering dashboard, visual analysis, and reporting. Welcome, Luke.

Luke Liang (CEO, InetSoft Technology): Thank you for having us here. We definitely see the emerging trend of the integration of business intelligence with business processes. As a firm, InetSoft focuses on operational business intelligence. This particular branch of business intelligence has a lot to do with business processes because this is essentially about business planning and execution.

When we talk about operational people, we are talking about sales, marketing, everybody who is involved in delivering business execution. In our experience we have heard from our customers, a business intelligence system is no longer a stand alone application for analyzing performance in the rear-view mirror. They want to look forward and be able to take action.

That is where we have put a lot of focus and been delivering BI solutions. The recent trend we have noticed is that people are no longer viewing those information needs as individual activities. They want to share information. They want it integrated into business processes. They want to collaborate. All of these needs point to a tighter integration between the business applications and the business operations.

From a technology level, a lot also has to be done to achieve those business goals. So the standard open technologies have become more important in this scenario. We have seen customers who want to share the BI platform, not only the data and methodologies, and go beyond single-sign on levels of integration, and really have a collaboration environment so the end users can explore information. They can collaborate and really drive the whole business process.

Recently we have had a new product come out which focuses on business visualization. That actually embeds the two most important components we have heard customers asking for. The first is the ability to explore their data. Then second is the ability to collaborate. So they want to use visualization tools to visually explore the data, and then pass on the visualizations to the proper users. This will enable the triggering of the correct decisions and actions that the business needs to take.

This really turns corporate data into actionable information, or “business intelligence.”

Gold-Bernstein: Thank you, Luke. Now, I’d like to turn it over to Maria Ross, corporate marketing director of Savvion. Welcome, Maria.

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