Your SpotOn the IBM Cognos Edge

In case you missed it this week, Esri announced the acquistion of SpotOn Systems.  I wanted to share my thoughts on this news; what it means for our customers, the SpotOn team, and the Geographic BI / Location Analytics journey we've been on.

Short version of the story: this is fantastic news on all fronts.  As everyone knows, I don't tend to tell short stories...

One of our great customers actually published the letter we sent them on the acquistion.  For our mapping customers, this acquisition is fantastic news.  The Esri investment is a signal that the leader in mapping and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) is very serious about the spatial-enablement of IBM Cognos business intelligence.  To this end, there will be immediate investment in the Vantage technology.  Purchasing will become easier - less moving pieces; and the technical and support depth just increased dramatically.  All very imporant considerations.

To the SpotOn team, this is a tremendous validation of the solution that they developed and built, marketed and sold.  And along with working with the best and the brightest in the GIS space, the team seems to be very excited about adding personnel and equipment - it seems their old GM was a bit of a "scrooge"... 

I've been getting a lot of the "so what are you going to do now?" questions. For the past three years our mission has been to map-enable BI reports for IBM Cognos customers.  Rather than this being a handing off of the torch, this move is a "doubling down" of the mandate.  The SpotOn team will form the core of a Location Analytics group within Esri.  The mutual expectation is that we will see dramatically accelerated success, with more and more IBM Cognos customers seeking to address the "missing analytic".

Let me know what yout think, or if you have any questions.  I look forward to hearing from you.

co

We conducted a webinar yesterday, all about authoring map-enabled reports in IBM Cognos BI. This was the third installment in our weekly GBI-1 webinar series and one on which we have received a lot of positive feedback from several who attended.

As I watched the webinar recording we posted on our web site, and in fact during the event itself, I noted something that I believe makes SpotOn's offering pretty unique among geospatial BI vendors.

That something is: it took me about the same amount of time to show how to use the powerful features of the session's map-enabled report as it did to create it.

In less than 15 minutes, I took a basic BI report, and enhanced it with a map that provided a rich visualization of (in this particular case) key insurance measures like sales revenue, claims, and TIV (Total Insured Value). Think about that: less than 15 minutes to build a report that brings entire new avenues of analysis to the fingertips of business analysts, users, managers, and executives.

It's what I often refer to as the "secret sauce" of SpotOn Vantage Maps. Not only can we show you GBI reports and the value they deliver, but we can also show you the absolutely minimal effort required to build them.

More sauce, anyone?

 - dk

It's been nearly a couple of weeks since we've made an entry in our poor neglected blog.

There's a pretty good reason for that.

In the past few weeks, we've seen absolutely unprecedented interest in Geospatial Business Intelligence, and that means we are very busy responding to more RFPs than we ever have. Seems an awful lot of people really do want GIS capabilities integrated into their IBM Cognos BI environments. Who knew?

Well, actually, we did.

As an ISV in the enterprise software space, we are constantly challenged by prospective clients to prove value:

“What’s the ROI for my business?”  

We face the same challenge as the BI and Data Visualization vendors, the "Field of Dreams" syndrome: build it and they will come... 

“Spatial presentation of your Cognos data provides additional insight and understanding.”  

While true, it is the same flavor of a story heard often times before.

Let me tell you a different story, one with a tangible ROI. 

IBM recently brought us into a sales opportunity in the retail sector. The prospective client had IBM Cognos BI and were including maps in sales and marketing reports. The challenge was the existing map-integration process involved a GIS analyst spinning up the appropriate map view for each report; each time that report was to be run. The entire creation process was approximately 2 hours per report each time. As such, these reports were only run on a monthly basis.

Cue the SpotOn entrance... [da dada da!]

We got involved in the bigger IBM POC, installing SpotOn Vantage onsite and assisting the onsite folks with the development of spatially-enabled Cognos reports.

The result? The prospect’s project team is impressed; CIO is brought in for a “show and tell”. CIO is impressed; business and CMO are brought in for a demonstration. Elapsed time from the initial telephone call with SpotOn: one week.

CMO is “blown away” (we’ve been told) but dubious. He loves the dynamic maps inside the report - pan and zoom versus the static map images - and the bi-directional interactivity between map and report objects.

“How many days did your developers spend building this?”, is the challenge.  

"The report author did this in a couple of hours from scratch - no code.”

Once past the disbelief, the implications were impressive:

• Elimination of the two hours per report, per execution. [there’s the tangible ROI in case you missed it]
• “Anytime” report execution - the ability to press a button and have the map-enabled report available on the most recent sales data rather than the monthly lag.
• Spatial interrogation and analysis in conjunction with the business analytics.

We’re just a small piece in a larger puzzle, but there is nothing like a little ROI to put a smile on everybody’s faces.

What’s the real value of combining business intelligence (BI) and geospatial information services (GIS)?

The vast majority of customers who come to us already know the answer (and that’s why they come knocking on the door), but for those who don’t know the answer we start having that ever-popular ROI discussion (return on investment).

Our ROI discussions are not strictly about the value of BI reports. Nor are they just about the value of maps.

The discussions are about getting users to actually use the reports and maps that are given to them. The result, and inherent ROI, is increased user adoption of all that expensive technology. Oh yeah, and the users make better business decisions too.

How much better are their business decisions?

The New York Times recently reported that researchers are finally quantifying how much better data driven decisions are.

The end figure is 5 to 6%. Those who use data to make decisions increase output and productivity by 5 to 6%. In an organization with only 500 people using BI effectively, this could add up to somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 business days worth of additional bandwidth and productivity... every single working day.

Imagine the potential results if business users could actually use the full range of software tools effectively.

We get a lot of requests to implement geospatial  functionality that just isn’t part of the existing BI paradigm.  Here are just two examples of what is cooking up in the labs at SpotOn.

Distance – how about the ability to draw a line on a map and having the system provide you with the distance of the line you drew?

Area – how about drawing a polygon on a map and having the system provide you with the area within the polygon?

These examples of simple with powerful geospatial functionality are helping to drive better business decisions for analysts.  In our opinion, that’s what Geospatial Business Intelligence is all about.

All this, and more, in the upcoming release of SpotOn Vantage!

Looks like the beginnings of a beautiful relationship! 

If you're in the Netherlands October 13th, be sure to checkout the CUGNL Netwerkborrel: "Cognos, haal eruit wat erin zit"  ("Cognos, pull out the barrel" according to Google Translate).  That Motio stuff looks interesting too!

Can't make it?  Check out the new SpotOn GIS Europe NL LinkedIn Group or the very fine emergo website.

Looking forward to spending time with emergo and their clients in the Netherlands the week of September 27th.

Goed  everybody!

... just might be the winning combination!

SpotOn recently played a major role in a big European IBM Cognos win with a significant client. 

It was a competitive bid and according to the customer we won because of two main factors:

1. Commitment – despite busy schedules we hopped on a plane, flew 7+ hours, spent 30+ hours with the prospect discussing technology, implementation, ad hoc BI-Spatial analysis, and more.  The following week our team knocked together "blow you away" prototypes tailored to the prospect's business.
2. Integration – we demonstrated the best business intelligence (BI) and ESRI integration the prospect had seen.

This exciting news turned out to be the front edge of the avalanche - with two additional Vantage wins inside of an eight day span!  It seems that the GBI message is starting to be heard.

And now, we're off to execute.  Next stop, NSW Australia!

co

We keep getting into these BI-GIS conversations, and it is sometime hard to know if we are acting as a "GBI translator", or just annoying people.  I suspect it's quite often the latter, but at least people remember us, right..?

A while back we were kindly asked to participate in a Proof of Technology session with a large insurance company.  Our topic was the technical integration of Cognos BI and Esri ArqGIS.  I kicked off the discussion with the suggestion that upon presentation of their geospatial reporting requirements, the BI vendor would propose a company dashboard targeted to 10,000 users that happened to include a map.  The GIS perspective would be an insanely rich and powerful location-based risk analysis application that would could be leveraged by a handful of GIS  analysts.

Two radically different solutions from the same set of requirements, and the right answer is likely between the two.  This got head nods and chuckles from the client, fairly  muted responses from the other vendors.

The crux of the issue is the hammer and nail analogy, your going to see the world through the perspective and strength of your solution. If you boil both BI and GIS solutions down to their essence, they are both simply information systems presenting business insight to users. 

Time to add the handsaw to the toolbox and start giving organizations the information they want and need.

PS; we haven't been invited back to another Proof of Technology since…

Hello all,

Apologies, it has been a while since our last update in the GBI blog - the marketing department keeps reminding that October was a long time ago.  Seems we (probably I) have been too busy with our "SpotOn Vantage World Tour 2009-10".  Rock On! (enterprise software style).

Highlights from the past 6 months:

• Webinar: Introduction to GBI
• IBM Information on Demand (IOD) Conference in Las Vegas
• Awarding of the IBM CTO Innovation award at IOD
• Sponsoring of IBM Cognos Performance Events:
  • Washington DC; Toronto; Los Angeles; Boston; Chicago
• Speaking at the ESRI Canada User Conference (see related post re: when the audience know more...)
• Newly minted ESRI Partnership: Developer and Reseller
• Webinar: Integrating Maps into IBM Cognos
• Exhibiting with IBM at the ESRI Federal Conference in DC
• Gold Sponsor of the IBM Cognos Federal Forum in DC
• Attending the ESRI Business Partner Conference in Palm Springs (see picture)

"Seriously, I'm at a conference... I told you these GIS guys are different!"

We've had whirlwind trips to Europe, and more trips to Redlands, CA than you can shake a stick at.  We have new people in the virtual shop, a newly minted partner tearing up the UK, and our good friend Freddy is about to light up another corner of Europe (stay tuned).

Most importantly, we've delivered - and are delivering, at an accelerated pace - on the promise of achieving a complete information perspective with our customers.  Bridging the geographic and the business dimensions to deliver the complete picture.

And boy, have we learned a bunch along the way!  Looking forward to sharing. 

co