The inaugural issue of BI Trends & Strategies offers sound advice to help you in ensuring your organization is on track to keep up with the rapidly changing landscape of BI and analytics. In this issue, readers will learn about a big data definition and the impact it will have on BI and data warehousing, agile development methodology and more. 

This e-book, packed with four expert articles, highlights SAP's solution to sales order management, offering insight into its CRM, ERP and supply chain management components. Read these insightful articles now to learn about this option's strengths and weaknesses, how to properly define the sales process and so much more. 

Between 25% and 50% of most companies’ revenue goes toward purchasing goods and services, so the ability to keep these costs down is paramount. Applying strategic sourcing methodologies to pinpoint spend categories and select qualified suppliers allows organizations to reduce expenses and positively impact the bottom line. 

In the cover story of the April 2012 issue of Storage magazine, Lauren Whitehouse outlines best practices for cloud backup integration and the various methods for doing so. Also included in this issue are articles regarding virtual server management, storage for big data, the rising cost of disk drives and more. 

This article covers the top 10 tools available to help make virtualization management easier. 

The following analysis provides a comparative price analysis of four leading CRM solutions for midmarketorganizations. Forrester Research defines midmarket organizations as any organization with revenues of lessthan $1 billion and/or fewer than 1,000 employees. 

If you're a small or mid-sized business thinking about virtualization, particularly in the world of Microsoft, it makes sense to upgrade your database servers as well. This article explains why to upgrade and provides several examples of companies that have successfully made the move. 

Effective negotiations and management of telecom contracts can have a measurable impact on a business’ financial performance. 

Unplanned business disruptions come at a high cost.  In an emergency situation, desktop virtualization enables displaced workers to continue working from home, on any device – a tablet, a rented laptop, an old PC or a device they just purchased. Discover why desktop virtualization is a vital element of business continuity planning. 

<p>Many organizations are eager to enjoy all the benefits virtualization offers, such as high availability and cost-savings, but transitioning is no easy task. Read this white paper to learn how to manage the various aspects of successfully implementing virtualization and review tools that can help you get the most from your project.</p> 

In this article, Kaplan, of Harvard Business School, and Norton, founder and director of the Palladium Group, explain how to effectively manage both strategy and operations by linking them tightly in a closed-loop management system, which comprises five stages. 

This latest issue of Storage magazine offers an in-depth exploration of the latest trends and technologies in storage today. 

Benchmarking, or the analysis of operational costs, productivity, and service levels in a comparative context of market standards, is a firmly established management tool.