News & Views

October  18, 2010 from Accountancy Age – “…Despite a combined annual worldwide investment of US$60 billion in BI solutions, half of all BI projects fail according to KPMG-commissioned research from the University of Cambridge…

BI projects are often mistakenly seen as purely technology based, with ownership limited to IT specialists within the business instead of being embedded throughout the organization…”

180 View – There are other reasons given in the article and some suggestions that may be a little helpful. Things are changing fast in the Business Intelligence (BI) world. The thinking today is that BI is not just for the big companies or for the management team. It’s now BI for the masses. It is also needs to be easily consumed by all the non techies. It needs to be inexpensive to buy/rent, use and deploy. There are lots of good systems to consider – too many in fact. Our BI portal (http://www.cpm180systems.com/) has some suggestions for you. Our portal is a self-service and BI vendors and implementers can register and provide basic or detailed information about their product/company.

2010 from SearchDataManagement – “…This directory is designed to be a valuable resources for this getting started with research or evaluating vendors in the business intelligence market. Inside, you’ll find basic information about the major vendors in the business intelligence market and the products they sell. Each listing is accompanies by a short description and a long description including limited information about the functionality and product use…”

180 View – There are 26 products and 28 pages of information in the article

April 20, 2010 from Forbes – “…Cognos was one of the leading makers of business intelligence software, and IBM paid $5 billion for it. IBM wrote another check last year for $1.2 billion to add SPSS, a predictive analytics and data mining company, to what was becoming a growing family of tools for organizing data into useful information. Ashe said IBM’s services arm is also working with 4,000 consultants, getting them to promote better analytics by IBM customers.

What is behind this growth in business analytics? Ashe says it reflects a demand from customers who, after spending years creating systems to record data and transactions, want to get more mileage out of that information. Businesses want information that is more timely and useful, particularly if it can feed directly into growth and profitability…”

180 View – Just about every organization struggles with getting useful information from its ERP system. Yes there are BI tools from some of the ERP vendors but IBM is ERP agnostic.

April 8, 2010 from Toolbox for IT – “During the last several years, the pressure of commoditization and the desire of the enterprise technology conglomerates to expand into new fast-growing growth markets have led to BI market consolidation. Following a series of blockbuster acquisitions in 2007 and 2008, procurement of both BI and enterprise application systems from the same vendor is an option for many organizations looking to deploy BI. Datamonitor surveyed 100 SAP customers to understand the implications of sole-sourcing. Read the survey findings and learn the trends and behaviors associated with sole-sourcing BI from ERP vendors…”

180 View – You can tell that this article was written by IBM Cognos as it clearly shows the problems with sole-sourcing.

2010 from Info-Tech Research Group – “Business Intelligence (BI) is rapidly becoming one of the most overused terms in IT. More and more software vendors are claiming that their products have BI capabilities; a growing number of consulting firms offer BI optimization assessments. Part of the explanation for this trend is that BI as a concept involves both business processes and enabling technologies that can be implemented in a variety of ways with different levels of complexity. Enterprise decision makers need to fully understand what BI is before they can decide what to do about it…”

180 View – Good article if you’re confused about BI. The article does mention a number of BI vendors and says the following about Microsoft – “Microsoft has been making waves in the BI world with its BI product, which has evolved from its origins in Performance Point Server.” I must admit that I am confused about Microsoft’s BI strategy and looked around the net for some insight and found the following blog that might help – http://blogs.technet.com/andrew/archive/2010/04/12/microsoft-business-intelligence-without-sharepoint.aspx.

We have just launched three new portals to complement our popular ERP portal.

1. Business Intelligence / Corporate Performance Management
2. Customer Relationship Management
3. Business Process Improvement

All portals list systems and VARS as well as recent articles. The portals allow you to filter systems and the VARs that support them based on the application, size of company and distribution model (on premise or on demand).  Vendors and VARs can enter their information online after picking the portal and registering at http://www.180systems.com/portalSelection.php

March 28, 2010 from Datamation – “The business intelligence software market is shaping up as a David vs. Goliath struggle. Behemoths like Microsoft, Oracle and IBM offer feature-rich BI suites along with their many other enterprise software products. Meanwhile, pure-play vendors – such as MicroStrategy, QlikTech and Tableau – have avid followers and are competitive, especially when it comes to innovating around new features and adjusting quickly to the shifting marketplace.

The pure-play vendors, for instance, have aggressively pioneered interactive data visualization features, while also more readily adopting open-source software and the SaaS model. They also tend to garner higher “satisfaction” ratings in independent surveys polling customers.

That said, the Davids in this battle have a long way to go. The top five BI vendors control about 75% of the market, according to research and projections from IDC and Gartner.

The top five vendors below are ranked in terms of market share. The remaining five are ranked by the extremely unscientific measure of how likely I think they are to challenge the leaders…”

180 View – We bet you won’t guess the top 2 vendors.

January 29, 2010 from Gartner – “The market in 2009 was defined by the David and Goliathian struggle that occurred between resilient BI pure-play vendors and ostensibly omnipotent megavendors. The frenzy caused by major BI platform market consolidation in 2007 and 2008 gave way to a postacquisition hangover in 2009 in which megavendors’ customers reported greater overall dissatisfaction due, in large part, to the often messy postacquisition “digestion” process. Yet, despite megavendor acquisition “growing pains,” stack-centric buying led by applications and information infrastructure dominated BI platform investment decisions in 2009 with the top five vendors controlling 75% of the market. At the same time, however, based on the research conducted for this report and interactions with Gartner customers over the year, there is significant, if not euphoric, satisfaction with, and accelerated interest in, pure-play BI platforms. This is particularly true for smaller, innovative vendors filling needs left unmet by the larger vendors…”

180 View – If you went to Gartner’s website and tried to purchase this document, it would cost US$1,995.00.  I am not sure why this one was available at no charge. Gartner is a good starting point in the identification of products to consider, but I would not base decisions on it. Gartner’s research as per their website includes but is not limited to:

• Vendor briefings
• Surveys
• Vendor-provided references
• Industry contacts
• Client interviews
• Public sources, such as U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings, articles, speeches and published papers
• Input from Gartner analysts

It’s not based on hands on work or demonstrations but mostly on information provided from the vendor or clients that were hand-picked by the vendor. As well, vendors pay Gartner for their analysis. My suggestion is to do your homework and not to rely on the pundits.

December 2009 from CAmagazine and written by Michael Burns – “Welcome to this year’s survey on business intelligence and corporate performance management. We received 12 responses from BI/CPM vendors, up from 10 last year…”

November 2009 from Newcomp Solutions – “Business intelligence (BI) is a tech-based tool that allows decision makers process information to gain insights that drive enterprise performance. However, the path from information to knowledge is not always linear. Typically, a series of steps, including collection, organization, evaluation, and transformation precede the data analysis and reporting that provide insight.

Issues relating to data access – the so-called ETL components – have significant implications for practically every phase of a BI project. ETL stands for extraction, transformation, and loading of data. The implementation of ETL depends on factors such the type of data, number of data sources, data volume, and the preferred mode of data transportation. This article highlights ETL in the context of a BI project…”

180 View – Newcomp makes good points about BI that are often overlooked when considering a BI solution. For example, “The data extraction method may be full or incremental. The full extraction method means that all currently available data are pulled completely from the source systems… The incremental method involves the extraction of only the portion of data that has changed since a marked historical period of event.” We have seen users avoid using BI when they only have the full method as it takes too long to process.

September 14, 2009 from InternetNews – “There’s a big gulf between what’s often barely better than consumer grade software offered to small businesses and the massive packages, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars or even several million, offered to large enterprises.

Into that gap, IBM is pitching Cognos Express, a streamlined version of its business analytics software designed to be easier to use, easier to deploy, and the right price for companies with between 100 and 1,000 employees…”

180 View – I (Michael Burns) recently heard a business intelligence (BI) representative from Microsoft say that the company aims to provide BI to the masses. I recently also heard something similar from a new start-up called Indicee that looks interesting. Most companies struggle with turning all their data into information useful to make decisions (what we call business intelligence). It remains to be seen whether the new crop of tools will solve the problem, but it does seem like the vendors are making progress.

September 2009 from CAmagazine and written by Mark Canes – “…Michael Burns, a CA and CAmagazine columnist, writes frequently about BI. He states that some mid-range ERP systems are adding dashboards that are configurable, with drill downs, frequently at little or no additional cost. Burns says he is seeing more affordable on-line query and browser-based tools emerging.

But is this being effectively communicated? If the perception among those in the IT industry is that the cost of technology is no longer a barrier to BI for the SME, that view is not necessarily shared by end users. Beth Crawford, CMA, controller for Toppits Foods Ltd. in Vaughan, Ont., has been working on a project to implement a comprehensive BI solution for some time. “It’s hard to find a cost-effective platform that is affordable now, but that you can grow with,” she says…”

180 View – Mark is a good writer as well as extremely knowledgeable about IT. He is also president of Blue Link, a developer of ERP solutions for SMEs. Mark writes about Business Intelligence with no bias for any product including his own software. Mark is someone that I respect for his knowledge and integrity.

September 2009 from CAmagazine – “…Many companies fail to include critical evaluation functionality that takes into consideration key business process requirements (for Corporate Performance Management systems:

• the ability to produce real-time reporting at select points in a business process while scaling the solution to a broad user base; this applies to operational reporting, management reporting and the budgeting process;
• the ability to handle large data volumes or data models in a cost-effective manner that meets both end user and IT needs;
• the ability to meet a planner’s real-time modelling cycle time (from input of drivers to output of key performance indicators and metrics);
• the ability to meet the data access security requirements of your organization’s end users in a cost-effective manner; and
• the ability to produce high-quality financial and management information through built-in preventive and detective data integrity controls…”

180 View – Business Intelligence must be a hot topic. There were two good articles about it in CAmagazine this month. This article agrees with Mark Cane’s article (“Business intelligence for the SME”) in that it’s a “struggle for companies to turn the huge amounts of data they produce into the sort of information that is useful at the right time.” This article also includes discussion of Corporate Performance Management (CPM) systems and the quote above adds some good points to consider in the selection of a CPM system that are often not considered.

August 20, 2009 from InfoWorld – “IBM’s recently announced plans to buy SPSS, maker of specialized analytics software, will result in a wave of further consolidation in the space, according to a new Forrester Research report. “IBM’s acquisition of SPSS marks an industry tipping point. In the advanced analytics segment, the deal is having the same impact that IBM’s Cognos buy had on the BI market,” Forrester said.

Advanced analytics software goes beyond the reports and dashboard capabilities of traditional BI (business intelligence) tools, helping users answer questions about future events and explore “what-if” scenarios, as well as pull together and analyze unstructured information from a variety of sources, the report said.

While Oracle, SAP, and other platform companies already have some of these capabilities in their portfolios, IBM’s SPSS bid has competitors scrambling for a response, according to Forrester…”

180 View – This article is interesting as it distinguished between business intelligence and analytics. If you are confused by all these terms, you’re not alone. Many vendors might call analytics as described above to be found in a forecasting tool. Others would include it in Business Intelligence and others in Corporate Performance Management. We define Business Intelligence as the transformation of data into information useful to make decisions so we would not distinguish between them. Marketing people are always coming up with new terms to take existing technology and rebranding it to make it sound like they have got something new.

Analyzing unstructured information is mentioned as part of analytics. We think that organizations have enough trouble making sense of structured data and have trouble imagining much business intelligence in unstructured data other than being easily able to find data based on keywords.

Finally we wonder how IBM will be able to incorporate SPSS into their product line. They already have 4 different (but integrated) products. It will be a challenge for IBM to pitch their 5 systems against one unified solution.