Anything You Would Like To Know About Your Business?

Congratulations to Craig, Joe, Liam and Jenny having just completed their annual accreditation courses on sales, and technical to secure our continued Partnership status with QlikView, the Business Intelligence specialists.  We are finding that Business Intelligence is a hot topic for many businesses across lots of industries at the moment as they try to unlock their data to make accurate, timely and informed decisions.

Many reporting tools force you to produce multiple reports and drill-down on data in a highly regimented fashion.

QlikView allows you to get straight to the point by working in a very similar way to the human mind does even allowing you to ask the last question first if that’s what you want.

Whilst at the intensive courses QlikTech took the opportunity to inform us all about their new features and enhancements that they will be delivering in version 10.  Version 10 is due for release at 10.10am on the 10/10/10.

The key enhancements include:-

Performance:- With its in-memory methodology V9 was already impressively quick; during a bench test it displayed results for 2.5 million rows in 95 seconds.  In v10 this waiting time is slashed to just 13 seconds.  Without getting too techie, QlikView achieves this using parallel loads, this means it utilises all available processing cores unlike most of the competitors who would typically only utilise a single processor.  This business intelligence tool really lets you see the full value of the money you invested in your big powerful servers, and when you think that Intel use QlikView to beta test their processors, that kind of says it all!!

Efficiency:-  If your dashboard contains several dials, graphs and charts it will load the results partially, with the fastest report being displayed first.  This means that the users can start to analyse data immediately rather than waiting for the full set of results.

Security:- Previously permissions were defined on a per report basis; the administrators can now apply these across a range of reports rather than one at a time.

Bulk cosmetic changes:- If you change your branding or wish to change your template to align with your corporate image as per the security settings mentioned above you can now do this on bulk rather than one at a time.

Reporting Analytics:- Management can review which users run which reports, when they run them and where they choose to drill down.  Reviewing this information helps you to decide what your Management team are interested in and where it is worth investing your time to get future reports developed so that decisions makers are in the best possible position to make the right choices.

Searching:- Qlikview has Google style search capabilities.  This is easier to show than describe but it is extremely powerful.  If for example you were searching your sales history and you have the capability to simple search by sales rep, before doing so, you can insert some criteria into the free text search box, such as North 2010, the clever software would recognise that you are only interested in transactions that have happened during 2010 where the customers are based in the North and on this selection would reduce the number of sales reps available in the search criteria to only those names that match your search.

If you would like to know more about Business Intelligence or QlikView V10, please email customerservice@atlasbiz.com or telephone our customer services team on 0333 666 3330.  We would be more than happy to email you some informative PDF brochures or alternatively we can organise a “Seeing Is Believing” meeting.

Virtual Desktops, Holidays, Blue Oceans and Citrix

With summer well and truly drawing to a close and Autumn winds of change heading our way, Company Secretary Daphne Butler takes a moment to reflect on the chance for holidays and the Blue Oceans being aimed for in the business arena.



You could be forgiven for thinking that virtual desktops, holidays, blue oceans and Citrix have little in common, but, as so often, there is more to it than initially meets the eye.

In this rapacious, unpredictable recession year, I’ve only managed to squeeze a bare couple of weeks away, and even that was time-sliced with business meetings on the outbound and return journeys.

Blissfully rested, we waved goodbye to a small town in northern France on a sunny Monday morning; a contrast that could not have been more poignant when Dover greeted us with sullen seas, grey skies and persistent rain. We were headed, flanked by bumper-to-bumper mostly articulated lorries, for an overnight stop in Beaconsfield and the Citrix Partner event the following day in nearby Chalfont St Giles.

The Citrix HQ building is enviable, set in Chalfont Park and shielded from the persistent traffic noise of the busy south-east by banks of trees and a golf course. Inside it is as serene and well-managed as a discrete five-star hotel. After coffee we were ushered into a small cinema-style lecture theatre and then followed a couple of fascinating hours (plus by way of a bonus a masterclass in how to present a client event).

In a nutshell, Citrix have made a Business Software step-change, and alongside XenApp, their server hosted applications software, have released XenDesktop which serves the entire desktop to each client machine, in fact it can serve different desktops depending on the requirements of the client user. Clever n’est-ce pas?

To achieve this Citrix identified the following business drivers:

• The tough economic climate is driving cost reduction
• Security is imperative to protect intellectual property and data on the move
• Increasing trend to a distributed workforce accessing company systems using a wide range of static and mobile devices
• The traditional desktop model is insecure, inflexible and hard to manage
• Increasing migration to Windows 7 operating system and 64 bit ushering in new application versions

Installation of Citrix Xendesktop addresses all of these drivers, and AtlasBusiness are eager to help you achieve successful adoption. The success indicators for hosted virtual desktop worldwide are huge with the market predicted to surpass $65 billion in 2013.

What might you ask has all this to do with blue oceans – since we have only mentioned grey ones up till now?

Blue Ocean Strategy is to be found in a book of the same name by Professors Chan Kim and Renee Maugorgne. It has been translated into more than 40 languages; is taught as the major strategy at leading business schools; has sold more than 2 million copies.

The book proposes a business strategy for success based on the following logic:

• Industry condition can be shaped
• Create a quantum leap in buyer value to dominate the market
• Go for the mass of buyers and willingly let some existing customers go. Think in terms of embracing key customer value commonalities
• Think free from a company’s existing assets and capabilities. Ask, what if we start anew?
• Think in terms of buyers’ solution even if that transcends the industry. Seek to solve buyers’ major bottlenecks/chief compromises in using the products/services of the industry.

Maybe someone somewhere at Citrix took it to heart!

For more information about Business IT Solutions visit http://www.blueoceanstrategy.com/; http://www.citrix.com/; http://www.atlasbiz.com/

Telephone 0333 666 330

Or Email customerservice@atlasbiz.com

Not just any Financial Statement

We appreciate in most circumstances a Business Financial Statement is nothing to get excited about.... in fact I’ve heard comments along the lines of “I would rather read the Yellow Pages”. But we believe a bit like the Carlsberg adverts “Carlsberg don’t write Management Reports but if they did it would probably be the best Financial Report in the World” or the Marks and Spencer advert “not just any Financial Report, Marks and Spencer Financial Report” we believe our Chairman’s annual statement makes our report somewhat of an exception to the rule.

We’re pleased to announce that the next thrilling chapter of the Atlas Financial Statements has been submitted to the powers that be at Companies House. Over the years we have received a lot of feedback from people who have enjoyed reading the frank and witty writing style of our Group Managing Director in his Chairman’s report. We have Directors from companies whose projects were completed many years ago who still continue to keep a close eye and eagerly await John Butler’s next release. Who can forget John’s scathing attacks on the HMRC over their approach to R&D.

His Atlas Business Group of Companies plc report for year ended 31 December 2009 doesn’t disappoint. Just one of the paragraphs in his introduction includes comments about the Watford Gap, Quantitative Squeezing, Isambard Brunel and guillotines! I might be wrong but I suspect this could be a World’s first where these topics have all been referenced in the same paragraph in any document never mind a Financial Statement. If you didn’t already know John you would be forgiven in wondering what all of this has to do with a Systems Integration company, but John delivers this and brings it all together in his own unique way. I don’t want to spoil your reading but other highlights to wet your appetite include references to the Andrew Marr show, the England versus Slovenia World Cup match and the 2012 London Olympics!

In brief the report has a happy ending highlighting a 50% revenue increase for the 12 months January to December 2009 versus the same period in 2008, as well as a slight 5% improvement in our gross margin. John does however warn that there are numerous external circumstances that could affect all UK businesses and how we perform over the next 12 months, not least Mr Osborne’s budget and the risk of a double dip recession.

What are you waiting for?? Take a look at the report now!!  http://www.atlasbiz.com/docs/A027Dated2009consaccounts.pdf