Business Intelligence & Warehousing User Group Meeting
Berlin - 25th October 2005

Minutes

IDUG hosted a Special Meeting of the BI & Warehousing User Group within the International DB2 User Group Europe Conference which also gave access for the participants to visit the Conference Solutions Centre. The demo area included all aspects of DB2.

Colin Taylor, SWG Team Pre Sales Manager of IBM’s Business Intelligence and Warehousing and also IBM’s Liasion to International DB2 User Group (IDUG) and Guide Share Europe (GSE). Colin, acting Chairman for this meeting introduced himself and thanked the attendees for their support. He explained his enthusiasm for User Groups, and how they are beneficial to all involved Customers, Business Partners and IBM.

Jacqueline Bloemen of Beks Consulting & Peter Clausen, Principle Solution Specialist at Cognos presented a Customer solution using Cognos 8 with DB2 Cube Views. Jacqueline gave a brief overview of their CPM solution and Peter demoed the Cognos 8 product.
This presentation was warmly received and stimulated much discussion.
Attachment: BI UG Cognos 8 & DB2.pdf

Holger Kollenbroich of Bayer, Germany - presented eXIP - eXecutive Interactve Portal. Holger explained the creation of this Management Information System they had developed based on Portals and used within Bayer to provide Executive Management with BI.
Holger demonstrated the effectiveness and value of web deployed BI for Senior Management.
Attachment: Präsentation eXIP (05).pdf

Jim Lyon, IBM’s Industry Solutions Specialist. Jim has worked in the Financial Services Sector for some years now and presented on the evolution of IBM’s Industry and Financial Data Models. Following this presentation there was some discussion of the combined value of the Industry Solutions with DB2 and Cube Views - as presented by Jacqueline & Peter.
Attachment: Industry Solutions.pdf

Simon Woodcock, IBM’s Consultant BI Specialist told some Customer stories including a UK eMail Service Provider, the growth of the company from 2003 and the re-architecture necessary for the future of the business. A second example he gave was of Sprint PCS, a major telecommunications company in the USA. Simon explained his involvement in loading more data than he’s experienced before and the use of BCU in the latest solutions. (BCU was covered in more detail in Simon’s second presentation). The scale of the installations discussed by Simon aroused much interest.
Attachment: Cust exp SW.pdf

Martin Pozdilek, MF Servis, works for a Services Company in the Chez Republic in which they support Business Solutions. Martin gave an overview of a large chemical company to which they gave a solution to their customer’s problem and reducing their report time from one day to minutes! It was clear to all that Martin had a very happy customer.
No Attachment:

Jared Yabanci, IBM Techncial Sales in Germany explained the importance of Data Integration & Data Quality. He also overviewed the architecture within Quality Stage and an additional Article is attached. The audience appreciated a very comprehensive presentation.
Attachment: Enterprise Data Integration.pdf & Probabilistic algorithm.pdf

Simon Woodcock gave an update from our last meeting on BCU. Progress has been made on The Balanced Configuration Unit since then, both on AIX and the new Linux Version. All could see the value of this approach to simplifying the acquisition and implementation of a Datawarehouse. Colin agreed to look into ways that IBM could better support users in taking this up.
Attachment: BCU Update.pdf

George Baklarz, IBM WW Sales & DB2 Distributed Support. George gave a DB2 UDB Technology Update and covered XML, Easier Maintenance, partitioning, more security, SQL features and database design. There was some lively discussion about the details of specific capabilities and the timescale for development.
Attachment: DW-DB2-Trends.pdf

Colin Taylor closed the meeting thanking all the participants for attending and their interaction during the sessions and the breaks.