Birst renovates pricing scheme

On-demand BI vendor Birst says it's now offering the option of concurrent user pricing, a licensing model few BI providers use because it can limit the amount of money they make compared to typical 'named user' pricing, reports Business Week.

Under the concurrent user model, customers pay for the total number of seats they want to have available for Birst's software at any given time. If all the seats are being used, additional workers have to wait until one opens up.

This model can result in big savings for companies that want to give many employees access to BI tools, but only once in a while.

CSE Healthcare Systems has partnered with health IT consultants, Apira, to develop a business intelligence platform within RiO, states E-health Insider.

The new product, which is named Acumen, will be developed by CSE and implemented by Apira. CSE already provides the community and mental health product RiO to the NHS, through London and South local service provider BT.

The companies say that once the product is fully developed it will combine data from multiple sources to support NHS policy and business agendas.

What started as an experimental predictive crime-prevention initiative in 2005 is now a proven programme that's about to get a big boost with new data and new forms of analysis, reveals Intelligent Enterprise.

IBM announced this week that the Memphis Police Department is enhancing a predictive-analytics-based 'Blue Crush' (criminal reduction utilising statistical history) programme by adding public call data to the information it analyses to thwart crime before it occurs.

Introduced five years ago by the University of Memphis Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, the Blue Crush programme started with analysis of historical data on gun crimes committed in North Memphis. Using predictive analytics software from SPSS (which was acquired last year by IBM), the university modelled patterns of crime and shared the results with area law enforcement agencies.