About 5 years ago, I was interviewing Santi Becerra, creator of Xcelsius and then a development VP at Tableau working on AI, at an IBIS conference. I asked him the question, “Where do you see Business Intelligence 5 years from today?”.  His answer was something along the lines of people …

Last month I saw the amazing new Disney Hercules Musical in London’s West End. This has always been my favorite Disney cartoon, partly because my two youngest kids must have watched the original cartoon a thousand times so I know all the songs. The live musical version did not disappoint …

One of my favorite Business Intelligence stories is from a fleet vehicle management company who use BI extensively to help identify anomalies in fleet vehicle costs and behavior. In one of their analyses, they identified a driver who had 12 oil changes on his vehicle in 12 months – literally …

There were so many highlights at the IBIS 2025 BusinessObjects Conference this year, it’s hard to know where to begin.  I saw a Gila Monster at the resort on the first day after we arrived, and I had not seen one of these rare beauties in over 30 years! That …

Many years ago, I had a customer who was a non-profit organization run by a religious order of monks. They prided themselves on being quite self-sufficient for their IT needs that were handled by some of the monks themselves. However, we supported the operating system and software that they used …

I recently attended a conference where there was a presentation about training methods, particularly for organizations.  The presenter put up a slide explaining that on-line training through self-instruction or watching videos was not really successful. They said one university had done a study looking at the brain patterns of people …

The big news last month was the release of the next version of BusinessObjects, known as BI 2025. In addition, it marks the beginning of a new cadence of future BO software releases coming every two years and named after the year that it will be release in – BI …

On a recent trip to see the Polar bears in Churchill, Manitoba, Canada (something to add to your bucket list), we took a side trip to go mushing with sled dogs. This was an amazing experience and apart from the exhilarating ride itself, I was totally fascinated by how these …

It was cold and rainy in Paris, France this week but there was high energy and excitement around the SAP Paris Labs as partners from all over the world attended a 2-day workshop on the up coming new BusinessObjects release, BI 2025. While we have all been getting comfortable with …

BusinessObjects had another great year in 2024. Many organizations who planned to replace BusinessObjects decided to keep it and, in some cases, added licenses or re-purchased it again! While Microsoft PowerBI continued to eat into the Tableau base, BusinessObjects beat them both hands-down for operational and BI reporting. That was …