It was a busy day today here in beautiful and warm Phoenix Arizona as the 2008 Datawatch User Conference got underway (after a nice reception poolside last night).

Chief Marketing Officer John Kitchen led the welcome address. He discussed the new look of the Datawatch web site, which was introduced last week, which includes the new logo. Mr. Kitchen introduced the President and CEO, Mr. Ken Bero, who provided a recap of the last year, and quick summary of the company’s goals and vision for the immediate future.

Mr. Kitchen resumed his discussion, highlighting the advantages of transformations and the pros and cons of Business Intelligence (BI) and Content Management systems, with an emphasis on how adopting a business oriented approach helps leverage existing reports for fast results. He talked about how most BI users are managers; not executives or high end analysts, and how the difficulties in generating BI-related information often lead to wasted time and resources.  Datawatch clearly sees that there continue to be opportunities in assisting business people with mining static reports as opposed to the new “pervasive” or “ubiquitous” BI often discussed lately.

To this end, he announced that a new product will be offered, namely “Monarch BI Server”. While this will be an entry level report management tool which will offer web-based analysis and distribution features, further details are still forthcoming. They expect that this product will be used by departments with a limited number of users, with lesser requirements than those who would be using enterprise-level solutions.

After the general assembly, I gave my presentation on “Developing and Using a KPI Database for Reporting”. This entailed a fully automated execution of data extraction with Monarch, with the end product being an Excel dashboard/scorecard combination, and an Access database which can be used for ad-hoc reporting, each of contained data from several fiscal periods across many topics for developing Key Performance Indicators.

I received very positive feedback from both my fellow users, and from the Datawatch staff themselves. I look forward to repeating the session on Wednesday for another group.

I spent the remainder of the day attending sessions led by other users. I really enjoyed once again seeing how other users are using Monarch and other Datawatch products to help manage their businesses.

Patty Stoddard of Elizabeth City State University demonstrated how she satisfied an auditor’s request for a particular report layout, based on a report used in their current accounting system, for data extracted from their previous system which didn’t offer a report with the same layout.

Trent Richardson of Professional Management Group discussed how using Monarch and Data Pump enables him to create tools with which to both monitor the performance of his staff and simultaneously motivate them, which in turn improves his company’s results for their clients. Good stuff.

Joe Salvatore of Cizer Software Corporation ran through how using Monarch, Data Pump and Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services work together to create robust data warehouse, combining various data sources with the goal of generating top quality data. It was a fascinating session.

Bryan Wiederspohn of Seattle Children’s Hospital walked us through how his use of calculated fields and a large number of filters helped to combine and compare multiple data sources. It was apparent how this pretty enormous undertaking was really beneficial to the organization.

The last session I attended today was hosted by Gina Krieger of Checker Distributors. The session included overviews of many Monarch models, each of which made the most of calculated fields, filters, and project exports. It certainly seems that Monarch has a role in almost every aspect of the management of the operation.

It was a fun day seeing how so many people are genuinely enjoying themselves in their work as they excel with Monarch. I can’t wait for tomorrow!