Altius Consulting hold the following Microsoft
Partner Competencies and specialisations:
Business Intelligence Competency
- Business Intelligence Platform Specialisation
- Performance Management Specialisation
Custom Development Competency
- Application Infrastructure Development Specialisation
- Web Development Specialisation
Data Management Solutions Competency
Data Warehousing
A data warehouse is a container that brings data together from all over your organisation in to
one place. It makes it far easier to get the right information to the right people in time for
them to take action. Information from a data warehouse becomes the single, trusted version of
the truth. Data is loaded, clean and converted so that it is in the same format irrespective of
its source. This saves money as the load process and business rules are created in one place and
re-used for each report created. Building and maintaining a data warehouse centred Business
Intelligence system is far cheaper than maintaining hundreds of reports on dozens of systems.
Data Marts
A data mart provides a container for information pertinent to a particular business process or department.
It can be a subset of a data warehouse or just a smaller data warehouse. The Microsoft platform allows
you to build a cost effective, scalable and highly functional Business Intelligence solution.
SQL Server data platform for Data Warehousing
The Microsoft SQL Server data platform enables the construction and management of Data Warehouses that scale to meet
the needs of even the largest and most complex of organisations.
With the SQL Server 2008 release this data platform provides an integrated suite of products that enable you to
quickly build and manage your warehouse. This release further extends the benefits of scalability, manageability and performance.
Better business insight is provided through its deep analytical capabilities, rich visualization and collaboration, and enterprise reporting to all employees.
To learn more about using the SQL Server data platform for Data Warehousing read this data sheet.
To learn how upgrading to SQL Server 2008 can save you money read this Forrester Consulting report. Forrester found that upgrading to Microsoft’s SQL Server 2008 delivered an anticipated ROI (Return On Investment) of between 162% and 181%.
Business Intelligence
SQL Server 2008 Business Intelligence platform provides a scalable business intelligence (BI) platform optimized for data integration,
reporting, analysis and data mining, enabling organisations to deliver insight into their business where users want it.
By providing a rich, personalised user experience, more users can act on the knowledge they gain through an extensible and embeddable architecture
that is optimised for Microsoft Office interoperability. It is much more affordable to provide information right across an organisation so that many
more business users are empowered in their roles than ever before.
To learn more about Microsoft’s Business Intelligence offering with SQL Server 2008 read this data sheet.
Performance Management
Decisions made within a business are most effective when they are aligned with the company’s strategy and are seen in the context of the ‘bigger picture’ - this is the key objective of PerformancePoint Server 2007. Through a strategy-aligned cycle of monitoring, analysing and planning, PerformancePoint drives the effective execution of your strategy.
PerformancePoint helps organisations to build their plans and budgets using a familiar interface and an application that offers a low-cost, flexible way for everyone who needs to participate in planning to do so, while providing the infrastructure and control to easily reuse the critical plans on an ongoing basis.
Enterprise Data Integration and ETL
SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS) provides a high performance, scalable and extensible data integration and ETL (Extract Transform Load) platform. Development times are dramatically reduced with an easy to use and powerful visual development environment. Powerful workflow and error flow capabilities allows resilient and powerful operations. A large number of tasks or operations are available out of the box such as lookup, merge, sort and more advanced data mining and fuzzy logic based tasks. Additionally as business is complex; new tasks and scripts can be created using the powerful .net development framework.
Silverlight
Silverlight is a new web presentation technology that enables the creation of visually stunning interactive user experiences. Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of .NET-based media experiences and rich interactive applications (RIAs) for the Web. By combining vector graphics, 2D animation and streaming video and audio, Silverlight can offer an internet user experience well beyond what HTML and Dynamic HTML can offer.
Altius built the Films for Learning website for Microsoft using the Silverlight technology, click here for a case study.
Windows Sharepoint Services (WSS) 3.0
This is part of the Windows Server platform and provides a powerful, extensible and easy to use intranet, collaboration and web-based application platform.
It can be used to manage and share documents, host discussions, provide alerts, coordinate calendars and can be an excellent quick way to create a Business Intelligence Portal.
The biggest benefit is that most companies already own it! It is included in the licensing agreement for Windows Server 2003 and 2008.
SharePoint Server 2007
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS) is extends the power of WSS 3.0 and is designed as a collaboration platform providing intuitive and simple interfaces to allow your business to store corporate knowledge. It utilises powerful workflow functionality to streamline and automate business processes and increases accessibility of information through powerful search facilities.
Especially for Business Intelligence, the Report Centre provides a powerful way to share reports throughout an organisation using a central repository. Dashboards can be built providing an intuitive and visual way of communicating status and driving action. Reports, charts, KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and other metrics from disparate sources can be combined on a single web page. These reports can come from Excel, Reporting Services or PerformancePoint.
Microsoft BI Blog
