The Upside Of Beta PartneringThe Upside Of Beta Partnering

Being a beta partner with a business intelligence vendor ain't bad at all.If you don't believe me, look into Hyatt Hotels' work with Hyperion. And even if you're not interested in helping a business intelligence vendor tweak their soon-to-be-released BI goodies, you might learn a thing or two from the story.

Hyatt's deployment is interesting purely as a BI case study because the hotel chain is working hard to combine financial performance management data and operational-level intelligence into a single dashboard. The ongoing effort demands some uphill integration work from Hyatt and Hyperion -- not to mention an entirely new reporting interface -- but so far, so good. Hyatt is taking the implementation incrementally, with plans to deploy the new dashboards to up to 600 users first, and to a whopping 3,000 users down the line.

With its efforts, Hyatt puts itself squarely in the front rank of companies pushing operational business intelligence -- that is, handing analytics and reporting capabilities to workers on the lower, operations level so they can make quick decisions related to their own specific business processes.

Of course, not everyone gets to be a beta partner. (I don't even know how you go about doing such a thing, to be honest -- other than hope a vendor approaches you with a proposal.) But Hyatt's story shows that working in the developmental stages with a business intelligence software maker can yield an almost custom-made BI tool for your organization.

Changing gears a bit, let me turn quickly to Windows Vista. A lot of readers have liked our article that provides a visual tour of the December pre-beta 2 release of the Microsoft operating system. If you were one of those readers, you should check out our follow-up story, Five Things You Didn't Know About Windows Vista. It'll give you lots of interesting odds and ends on the OS, including, among other things, how to get a job with Microsoft working on the system.