Neolane , a Paris-based marketing automation software vendor, formally announced its entry to the U.S. In evaluating enterprise marketing systems, I look at the five sets of capabilities: planning/budgeting; project management; content management; execution, and analysis. Neolane does provide administrative tools for users to define database columns and tables, so it’s fairly easy to add new data if there’s no place else to store it. Analytics is the final function. market last week. presence. So now the story can be told. Let’s go through these in turn. MORE >>

m forever telling people that the only reliable way to select software is to devise scenarios and test the candidate products against them. In this particular case, the requirements were quite clear: the client had a number of workers who needed a data visualization tool to improve their presentations. This mean the tool had to be extremely easy to use, because the workers wouldn’t find time for extensive training and, being just occasional users, would quickly forget most of they had learned. data visualization business intelligence software software selection MORE >>

These are exciting times in the world of analytical systems. Acquisitions by enterprise software giants have opened opportunities for smaller, more nimble alternatives. Its core is a data structure that sits somewhere between columnar – now the most common approach for analytical processing – and hierarchical indexes. For example, the first analysis might find all transactions that involve a specific product on a single date. Indexes also allow analysis across pairs that are not directly built into the data. Quantivo is part of this latest technical flowering. MORE >>

QlikTech released version 9 of its QlikView business intelligence software today. Probably the item that attracted the most advance attention is an iPhone version that supports interactive analysis; this also works for other Java Mobile clients like Blackberry. But it still marks a major step towards letting QlikView run time-critical applications such as stock trade analysis, pricing and inventory management. No one will be processing orders on QlikView (hmm, never say never), but the line between analytical and transaction databases just got that much thinner. MORE >>

Beyond the execution technology itself, these features will require substantial increase in analytical horsepower to make sense of the results. One big need is better tagging to make video more search-friendly; others are better upload and content analysis to support user-generated content. An automated approach would eliminate that by using techniques like regression analysis to derive the formulas directly from the data. Analytics. Many marketers claim they want better analysis but few have made the investment. Social Media. The second wave is just starting. MORE >>