Wednesday, May 27, 2009

BI tools, extended to the desktop

OpenSpan announces it's new tool that now enables all desktop applications to participate in the BI world. OpenSpan Events

More often than not, user desktops, where end users spend most of their time, are left out of any reporting or analytics. And yet, it is this very activity that drives most server, transactional and network activity. It could be argued, the correlation to what the end user is doing on the desktop, is a key metric that brings the big missing piece to BI reporting.

Sure, server side BI is important but imagine those BI reports showing up with detail too of the desktop applications and user activity, putting everything in context. Imagine spotting network slow-downs, or increases in transaction volume related to what users are doing within the applications on the desktop. Perhaps the users are spending more time in cloud applications that you have little control over and yet has a big impact on network performance. Perhaps a new discount or up-sell program means your users are spending 30% more time in different desktop applications than before or doing 3 mainframe searches instead of just 1. All of these things will effect the BI reporting on the server, but until now, you never really knew why,

I liken this to Google Analytics, but OpenSpan events is for any desktop application, not just web, and of course, for applications running on the desktop and for those running inside OR outside of the firewall.

Now, all user activity on the desktop, down to the click of a check box, the time an application is utilized, or even the monitoring of usage of applications you maybe didn't even know about, can be logged by OpenSpan desktop Events. There's a ton of use cases we are seeing for this and now it's here. Enjoy and feel free to comment.