It is imperative for ISVs and SMBs to know their customers well. The time is ripe to build technology products by leveraging business intelligence. Business intelligence (BI) offers a deeper understanding of customers and their changing preferences. BI offers a set of tools that monitor, track, and record solution usage patterns, performance and behaviour. For example, the supply chain application provides information about various parameters related to procurement, inventory, and ware-house management. By applying business intelligence, Organization can monitor and analyse customers buying patterns based on inventory data.

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How Business Intelligence (BI) Solution
helps Independent Software Vendors
(ISVs) gain insights into their customers

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Introduction
It is imperative for ISVs and SMBs to know their customers well. The time is ripe to build technology products by
leveraging business intelligence. Business intelligence (BI) offers a deeper understanding of customers and their
changing preferences. BI offers a set of tools that monitor, track, and record solution usage patterns,
performance and behaviour. For example, the supply chain application provides information about various
parameters related to procurement, inventory, and ware-house management. By applying business intelligence,
Organization can monitor and analyse customers buying patterns based on inventory data.
Another good example will be an application used by ten different organizations. By adopting BI, the ISVs can
clearly evaluate and understa d ho the appli atio is utilized y differe t orga izatio s .
ISVs/SMBs cannot grow at their own pace. Most of them today compete with bigger counterparts. Competitive
environments demand ISVs to be on stealth mode. ISVs aim to continuously introduce/enhance products
through constant innovation. Therefore ISVs/SMBs need to anticipate, what customers want before they
k o . Business intelligence tools perfectly aid in predicting and forecasting, the kind of applications/products
required by customers.
How ISVs are gaining Insights into their customers??
Organizations today need to instantly make effective business decisions. Essentially, key business decisions drive
product development and marketing strategies across organizations. But there is a whole lot of business data to
report, evaluate and predict. With a whole lot of information I.E unstructured, uncleansed, repeated and
disparate, it takes years to make an effective decision. And organizations definitely do not want move forward at
such pace.
Business intelligence provides an architecture/technology that delivers clear, concise, and complete information
in a structured manner. The information is represented in terms of dashboards, data visualizations, graphs and
reports.
For example, if ISV wants to introduce an enhancement in its product. Considering the enhancement is
applicable to only few features in the product. At first, from massive amount of customer data, the BI tool
extracts and scrutinizes information related to those few features. Then BI tool generates graphs and data
charts, based on information gathered. These graphs and charts reflect usage patterns of required features and
its parameters behaviour.
By evaluating the graphs and charts, the organizations can effortlessly decide the functionalities and design
aspects of the enhancement. The end result will be an enhancement that is built based on customer usage
patterns. Further ISVs can customize reports, graphs and charts to gain in-depth insights.

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BI tool also offer highly comprehensive and customizable dashboards. Decision makers can glance at dashboards
to understand product performance and its usage statistics. Dashboards consist of data visualizations in terms of
Key Performance Indicators (KPI), graphs, heat maps, and charts. With real-time update from BI tools,
dashboards offer instant information and day-to-day monitoring.
Data is the new product. In 2015, we will see data services become a mainstream aspect of product offerings, as
Do you a t data ser i es ith that? e o es a fa iliar refrai , says Forrester.
(Reference: http://www.forbes.com/sites/gilpress/2014/11/24/forrester-top-it-predictions-for-2015/)
When any of the workflow KPI turns red, it requires immediate attention. The administrator maps the colour
code to the information received from one of the organizations. Thereafter, the issue causing the workflow KPI
to go red is investigated. Business intelligence also provides in-depth i sights of the issue i ter s of What,
Whe a d Ho .
Another example would be of new product launch. When ISVs introduce a new product, they need to strategize
and have a product roadmap. Business intelligence helps to strategize by delivering insights about prospective
customers, where to find them, and their requirements. This happens when Business intelligence is integrated
with predictive internet tools. It gathers prospective customer data from their multiple web and social media
searches for similar products. And the business intelligence helps ISVs know about sites where similar products
are being advertised and searched. Further BI provides information about geographies and different customer
segments looking forward to related products.
ITCube BI container
BI Container is a dashboard configuration and delivery tool. ITCube BI container renders highly informative
dashboards. BI container takes the effort away from BI analyst of manually creating dashboards. Rather allows
them to solely focus on analysis and monitoring. The dashboard engine renders the dashboard with configurable
parameters. The configurable parameters are stored in XML file which can be customized according to
customer. Based on RBAC, the administrator can define the levels of data access for each user.
Colour code Indicator
Healthy
Needs Monitoring
Needs immediate attention

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BI container: Highlights
 Reduces dashboard development and maintenance cost by simplifying and speeding the entire dashboard
development cycle.
 The BI container offers the option of generating enhanced dashboards through minimal customer coding.
 Dundas Visualization tool to render configurable dashboards.
 I tegrated ith Mi rosoft’s ““A“ ser er to re der o figura le dash oards.
 The standard interface allows export of dashboard to office tools like Excel and Power Point.
Business Intelligence Benefits for ISVs
 Track, monitor and understand sales performance and market penetration of products at a more granular
level.
 Align Business strategy and organization road map based on customer trends.
 Develop products/applications based on latest emerging trends and customer adoption patterns.
 Monitor KPIs and establish metrics with respect to specific product/applications.
 With precise business information, empower employees to be key decision makers.
 Eliminate manual data entry and manipulation for BI with well integrated BI systems.
 Effortlessly generate required reports. Efficiently analyse, forecast and predict the business outcomes.
 Gain deeper insights about customer usage patterns and behaviours.
 Boost productivity and agile development practices.

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Business Intelligence: Empowering to do more
BI is going to have a lion market share soon. From government organizations to large multinationals, all of them
will adopt BI to drive business decisions, capture different market segments, to know their customers, and
mostly to keep reinventing themselves.
Initially BI was adopted only in the finance department of organizations. But with data and predictive analytics,
BI adoption has seen a surge in departments such as sales, operations, procurement, and management of the
organizations. This is driving key business decisions. Some have completely integrated BI across various
departments of the organizations.
Departments adopting BI between 2008 and 2013
(Reference: http://barc-research.com/bi-survey/mobile-business-intelligence-not-so-hot-as-adoption-slows-in-2013/)
Business Intelligence empowers agile business environments. BI supplies the right information at the right time.
Information condensed into precise visualizations and charts help decision makers to easily understand
statistical information. It helps ISVs gain greater visibility into their customers. To know more about ITCube BI
offerings, visit www.itcube.net