The BI Cloud

An interesting article from computerworld.com.

Pentaho, a popular open source BI company, is offering it’s wares via the Amazon EC2 cloud.

There has been much talk about software as a service, and this adds to the momentum that is rapidly building up.

SAP Business Objects have also been toying with cloud services; their ondemand.com site offers a number of their applications via the cloud.

Panorama offer a similar BI service via their collaboration with Google.

The are obvious benefits to using a cloud to host your BI, most notably the hardware and maintenance cost saving. However, I suspect that the issue of moving potentially sensitive data into a third party host might be putting many companies off. It will be interesting to see how this pans out.

A handy Xclesius addin

As a fan of Edward Tufte’s sparklines, I was pleased to see the sparkline functionality built into an addin for Xcelsius 2008.

This sparkline tool is one of a number of new graphical tools built into a package called XComponents. Based on Flex/Flash technology, the addin is easily installed into your Xcelsius 2008 application.

I can’t find any information regarding the licencing of this addin or support, although an email address is provided if you want further information. I have installed it on my own machine purely to have a play.

These tools appear to have been around for a few months now, and the feedback is positive. If you are looking to add a bit more visual impact to your Xcelsius demos, it might be worth giving it a look.

11/03/09 Update: Details regarding licencing of this addin can be found in the comments section of this post. Thanks Donald.

Searching for a hot fix or service pack

Are you stuggling to locate a Hot Fix or Service Pack for your SAP Business Objects software?

If so, take a look at the following SAP Software Download search site.

As far as I can tell, only Xcelsius and Crystal Report hot fixes are listed here. For Enterprise products, you should be able to find them via ESD.