Since its launch on a Windows platform in 1987, Microsoft Excel has gradually become omnipresent on business desktop environments. It is widely used in businesses of all sizes for data management, analysis and reporting. In a way, it can be considered the first Business Intelligence (BI) software product mass marketed.
Almost since its launch, Excel’s position in the market has been challenged by various products with advanced data integration and analysis functionality. Together, they formed the basis of the today’s BI market, by going through several successive phases:
1987-1996 Formation – initial product launches
1996-2005 Growth – product maturity and market formation
2005-2010 Consolidation – by various mergers and acquisitions involving the major software producers in the world.
A useful resource for assessing the market of Business Intelligence (BI) Platforms is The 2010 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms, released on 29 January 2010, by Gartner. The report provides a comprehensive evaluation of the main software vendors for the BI platforms, as well as defining the BI market and its trends. An eagerly expected publication in BI circles, this year’s report was authored by four Gartner analysts: Rita L. Sallam (ex Oracle), Bill Hostmann (ex IBM – Informix), James Richardson (ex Hyperion, now Oracle) and Andreas Bitterer (ex IBM).
When assessing the outcomes of various marketing promotional initiatives, careful attention should be paid to the very “law” of sales, that is: total sales equals baseline sales plus incremental sales from marketing.
In two previous posts we have presented how information technology solutions can shape the world of sport. By gathering and analyzing the most important bits of data, the Castrol Index and Ranking system presents both specialists and fans of football and cricket with a unique dataset and user experience. Hundreds of statistics and rankings about players and teams performance during games or even entire competitions are now available at a “touch of a button”.
A sales pipeline or a sales funnel refers to the multiple stages in customer interactions. Below we suggest a simple approach to illustrating a sales pipeline, suggesting three stages along with the AIDA approach for each of them:
