January 30th, 2008
Sterna launches Business Positioning System
Sterna Technologies was one of the few enterprise products to present at Demo 08. The company introduced its Business Positioning System (BPS), which is another name for Business Performance Management (BPM) or any other variety of acronym for dashboards the improve corporate performance.
Sterna’s technology goes deep. It’s an in-memory platform with its own language for delivering real-time business and predictive analytics. BPS collects data from enterprise sources and transforms it into virtual data stores. These “business matrices” are dynamic business objects, such as quantity ordered, according to Tuval Hadas, manager of strategic consulting at Sterna. Changes to values in business matrices are reflected in the Sterna BPS dashboard in real-time.
Sterna focused a lot of its resources on the user interface, or business navigation, said Amir Chodorov, CEO of Sterna.
Users can navigate back and forth in time. In addition, Sterna BPS provides Money Surface, a way to dynamically identify potential gains or losses based on operational data, such as deviations from performance plans.
Having the capability to see how the money is flowing and to identify at a granular level the sources of profit or loss is a high value proposition. The platform also predicts future values, using statistical methods on historical data.
“Current solutions are talking to a fixed datawarehouse that has been highly cleaned, but its looking backward at static data instead of forward, said Jason Wolf, president of Sterna Americas. “Managers need to see the trends in real time, like you get GPS in real time. We use more of neural network to propagate changes in real time.”
Sterna’s team has significant experience in building sophisticated dashboards. Based in Israel, the team worked on command and control defense systems, human factors design for aircraft cockpits and artificial intelligence projects.
The Sterna BPS server can be deployed on-premise or as a hosted service. The software has a one-time $150,000 license fee and a monthly user fee of $100 per month per seat. Competitors include the business intelligence players, most of which have been gobbled up by companies like IBM, Oracle and SAP.
Dan Farber, editor-in-chief of CNET News.com, has more than 20 years of experience as an editor and journalist covering technology. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
