Last night (Tue July 19th), I was fortunate to be able to speak to the SVForum Business Intelligence special interest group (SIG).

After introducing the audience to DASHbay, I took them through an implementation we did using our Quick Analysis practice, which leverages open source software (especially BIRT and postgresql), cloud computing (on AWS), and rapid, iterative development.

The implementation itself was a dashboard, built with BIRT in less than a week and showing metrics for account acquisition and retention. The metrics help any business track not just how well they are acquiring customers, but how well they are keeping them.

Our customer was able to get at the metrics via a URL to a server running in the cloud, set up just for them. It’s a great way to leverage cloud computing: no IT procurement costs or delays, and you only pay for it while you need it.

We talked about DASHbay’s Report Server product, which among other features, allows us to capture any useful piece of the report, and include it in any web page. It also provides permissioning and authentication, taxonomy for organizing reports, and more.

I got an excellent reception from the audience, and was pleased with the reaction and discussions afterwards. Thanks to all who attended!

If you didn’t get a chance to be there, please get in touch so we can talk to you more about our Report Server for BIRT, our Quick Analysis Service, or many custom BI and Data Analytics services. Customer Retention is one very useful application which we can provide, but our tools and techniques are applicable to most common business analysis problems.

Terry