Magenic Company Blog

On Saturday, March 9, 2013, consultants from Magenic spoke and volunteered at the first SQL Saturday ever in the Philippines.

Over the next two months, March and April, Magenic data professionals will be involved in SQL Saturdays in Costa Rica and in the Philippines.

A good data warehouse is a core component of any organization’s BI infrastructure. It is used to create the cubes, reports and dashboards that deliver business value. For this reason, it is extremely important that any new data warehouse project is successfully executed, otherwise the rest of your BI infrastructure will be negatively affected.

In July of 2012, I wrote about the impact of Excel 2013 for BI users. I wanted to follow that up with more information about what you will find when you open up Excel 2013. In my original post, I highlighted the “big release” features Microsoft brought to Excel. Before we dig into some of the other cool features, let’s look at what Microsoft’s strategy is around BI for end users and visualizations.

For the second year in a row, Magenic sent multiple SQL Server professionals to the PASS Summit. Seven consultants from Magenic regional offices around the country were in attendance at the conference this year. Check out what we learned.

Of course Magenic provides many services and products for many different businesses. As an example, Steve Hughes, Business Intelligence Project Lead for Magenic, took some time to share some elements of a recent project.

This past Thursday, Magenic hosted a Business Intelligence Summit in Chicago. We had some customers, partners, and consultants present on the role that business intelligence has in their worlds. It was great to see our customers talk about how their projects were implemented and how we overcame both business and technology challenges.

On July 16, 2012, Microsoft made the Office 2013 Preview publicly available. As I worked through the install and saw the hype, I was really curious about some of the enhancements made to the business intelligence (BI) capabilities in Excel. Keep in mind that Microsoft has continually added BI components to the Excel product. Agree or disagree, this means that they have been positioning Excel as an “already installed” BI client for everyone.

For technologists, SQL Server 2012 is a treasure trove of technical goodies. There are a number of blogs describing these technical features, including the Magenic BI blog. A quick review of these blogs makes it clear that Business Intelligence (aka BI) is a major focus of SQL Server’s latest result.

A frequent question for enterprise executives is: why do I need BI? Occasionally, I have to put elaborate presentations together showing what BI is and how it fits each company. However, when it comes to financial services, and more specifically the banking industry, there are only two lines that are really needed: 1. Regulatory Reporting, 2. Risk Management.