Business Intelligence & Reporting

Forrester Research defines business intelligence as "A set of methodologies, processes, architectures and technologies that transform raw data into meaningful and useful information used to enable more effective strategic, tactical and operational insights and decision-making".

Organizations collect, process, store and report on enormous amounts of transactional data from their information systems such as CRM, ERP, HRM and SCM. In order to improve market share, competitive advantage and profitability, organizations are forced to analyze business activities and information surrounding their markets, competitors, customers, products, pricing, partners, suppliers and profitability. For example, they need to know their largest customers, what type and how much business that they are doing with them and how profitable they are. Organizations also need to do reporting such as dashboards, alerts, ad hoc reporting, embedded reporting and web-based reporting In addition, businesses need to do performance management including metrics/key performance indicators, scorecards, etc.

The business intelligence architecture includes several elements that Trigent and its clients need to address. Major architecture elements include:delivery such as office suites and mobile; reporting; performance management; supporting applications such as collaboration, enterprise content management, version control, QA, life-cycle management and Metadata repositories; analytics such as OLAP, predictive analytics, web analytics and statistical analysis; discovery and integration such as cleansing, SOA and EAI; and data management such as RDBMS.

Microsoft SQL Reporting Services

Trigent offers services for Microsoft's BI and SQL Reporting Services. Microsoft's SQL Server Reporting Services is a comprehensive solution that enables the creation, management and delivery of both traditional, paper-oriented reports and interactive, Web-based reports. An integrated part of the Microsoft Business Intelligence framework, Reporting Services combines the data management capabilities of SQL Server and Microsoft Windows Server with Microsoft Office System applications to deliver real-time information to support daily operations and drive tactical and operational insights and decision-making.

Microsoft's BI and reporting services offering is well integrated with SQL Server, PerformancePoint for rich GUI, OLAP engine, SharePoint Server, .NET framework, and Visual Studio, an integrated development environment.

Microsoft's SharePoint Server provides a single, integrated portal application to host a variety of business reports, related applications to perform what-if analysis, manage and share documents, and supplements your collaboration and decision making process through the ability to search through organization-wide content.