Frequently Asked Questions

Data Warehouses and Data Marts

Data marts are generally specialized subsets of data warehouses that are built to serve a single user community or business function.

Data warehouses are most often built to aggregate corporate data that supports many user communities within the organization.

Management of a data warehouse is normally data-oriented, but data mart management can focus more on work and information flow around a group of use cases within a business function.

Channel Partner Marketing Effectiveness

Any business that sells to distributors, installers, dealers, or other resellers is engaged in channel marketing - selling into a sales channel.

Typically a channel manager establishes a distribution channel and recruits channel partners, builds a sales lead management system to distribute sales leads, tracks lead acceptance by the marketing partners, and follows deal registration and channel partner sales.

To track channel sales results, the channel manager can use analytical tools to measure marketing channel partner performance and overall effectiveness of the channel marketing sales program.

With channel marketing effectiveness analytics on hand, the channel manager can make better channel partner recruiting and training decisions, build a partner community that is more responsive to channel opportunities, and increase ROI on channel marketing sales. Measurement of channel marketing effectiveness provides for greater sales, increased sales, and better overall ROI.

Blackstone & Cullen Application Development

Blackstone & Cullen has development experience with Microsoft, Oracle, and other technologies for collaborative portal development, web application development, and data warehouse development. Recent projects ave used Visual Studio Team System 2005, Visual Studio .NET 2005, SQL Server 2005, BizTalk Server 2006, Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, Microsoft Office 2007, Enterprise Project Management 2007, Windows Vista, Cross Platform Integration Technologies - Oracle, DB2, DB400, Sybase, Java.

Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence (BI) is the discipline with supporting technology and best practices under which a business collects, integrates, analyzes, and utilizes market behavior and business operations information to improve the efficiency, responsiveness, and profitability of the business. BI answers the questions like

• What"s going on in our markets?
• What are we doing about it?
• What can we do to improve our ROI?

Companies build Data Warehouses to gather all available market and corporate operational data. Companies also build Data Marts to provide specialized subsets of this data for user communities within the company. Data Marts provide a more task-oriented interface to the data, better suited to operational use by individual divisions or departments.

Business Intelligence technologies support reporting, OLAP, analytics, executive dashboards, balanced scorecards, data mining, corporate performance management, and predictive analysis.