Intelligent Enterprise

While many tout BI as a way of boosting profits, BI is increasingly going green as a way to promote sustainability and good corporate citizenship.

Under full disclosure here, I am thrilled that green is gaining ground! I am green, very green. Admittedly, I was not always so passionate about these topics. However, living in Switzerland for eight years forever changed my view of garbage. Indeed the Swiss have "garbage police" who will check your trash to ensure you are recycling and fine you if you're not recycling (I wish they'd visit NJ for a week!). As trash bags are expensive in Switzerland ($10 a bag, if I recall correctly), manufacturers package their consumer products frugally. You can buy milk and fabric softener in something like a ziploc bag, which creates less trash than big plastic cartons. For companies that don't package their goods so wisely, shoppers unwrap things at the supermarket and let the store deal with the unwanted packaging.

I was recently at a SAS event in which Jim Davis, their Chief Marketing Officer, talked about the commoditization of BI. He described their sales efforts for these applications as low and the price sensitivity as high.

I gasped (silently of course), thinking of the many customers I speak to and work with who spend months evaluating software, sending vendors painfully detailed RFIs, and diligently conducting proof of concepts. Some of these customers already own BI tools or will evaluate tools despite what's being offered to them for free.

Last November, Business Objects officially released Crystal Reports 2008. It's the product's flashiest release in recent years — and I do mean that literally. One of the most noteworthy enhancements is the ability to embed Flash files within a report. The use of Flash brings reports to life in a way that make them more like mini applications — rich, interactive, and visually appealing. The Flash files can be built in a report developer's tool of choice, but the tightest integration is with the company's dashboard product Xcelsius.

The other enhancement is the ability to view reports over the Web and interactively sort and filter the data cached within the report. The parameters refresh the display without reexecuting a query and thus straining the database, a weakness in some competitive products and in earlier versions of Crystal Reports. There is the inevitable 'BUT' and that is in the product's timing and dependencies.

This week's TDWI World Conference turned out to be one of the biggest, with more than 1,000 attendees and another 200 executives at the BI summit.

A highlight from the Executive Summit was hearing Michael Masciandaro, BI Director at Rohm and Haas, provide practical tips on where to start with BI. He presented all the lofty goals often discussed at this conference — great data quality, robust architecture — and advocated not to start there. Instead, start with something "embarrassingly small," with a subject area or application that has no competition.

With IBM's acquisition of Cognos completed last week, the merged companies were quick to tout their joint product offerings and future plans at a press/analyst conference yesterday. Given IBM's role as both a data warehouse platform and a services power house, the acquisition clearly impacts existing partnerships in which IBM moves from partner to competitor. The question in this new landscape: who wins, who loses?

Last week Cognos announced the release of Cognos 8.3, its flagship business intelligence platform. The latest release includes a number of improvements both for end users and administrators. Although it is a point release, I'd venture to say it's the biggest since Cognos 8 first shipped in November 2005. Here's my take on highlights and gaps…

Were the holidays only two weeks ago? They seem a distant memory with so many BI headlines this week alone. SAP and Business Objects announced a number of joint bundles, Cognos launched 8.3, and MicroStrategy kicked off its annual user conference in Miami. The frenetic pace of BI continues in 2008.

Data Quality expert Larry English (catch his keynote address at the next TDWI) has claimed data quality is the second biggest threat to human kind, after global warming. When I first read this statement, I thought it was hyperbole, meant to engage readers. But English makes some compelling arguments. Yesterday's cover story in USA Today is yet one more case to support Larry's dire claim: data quality problems threaten this year's presidential election process.

I have a home office, so when someone pulled up in a Budget rental truck, my first thought was, "Wrong house. We're not moving." Much to my surprise, it was the FedEx delivery person. How brilliant is that?

I'm told blogs are supposed to be short and sweet. So my long- winded blog on BI industry consolidation turned into, well, an article — longer, carefully considered, supporting graphs and all. While all this vendor activity fuels the gossip and speculation among analysts, journalists, and vendors, some customers have been decidedly unfazed. Does it help them fix their data quality problems? Nope. Executive level buy-in. No way. Improve the business-IT partnership. Sadly, no, here too.

And then there were none... as in, no major pure-play BI/Performance Management vendors nor BI-agnostic database vendors following IBM's announcement to acquire Cognos.

The acquisition came as little surprise with many industry watchers speculating already last year that IBM would acquire Cognos. In a conference call this morning, neither Cognos nor IBM executives, however, would say the timing of the acquisition had anything to do with the recent SAP-Business Objects deal, or Oracle-Hyperion, or Microsoft's release of Performance Point (is there an elephant in the room?). Instead, Steve Mills, vice president of IBM’s Software Group, said the timing centered on IBM's ability to execute such a sizable acquisition and in response to changing market dynamics with more customers wanting an end-to-end solution. Rob Ashe, CEO of Cognos, said that the acquisition was merely a matter of taking a long-standing partnership to the next level.

I had to chuckle at Doug Henschen's blog on the confusing terminology on business intelligence and performance management. We in IT seem to use whatever term will generate the most buzz and to heck with whatever confusion ensues. "Analytics" is yet another term in which vendors use it to mean different things and we all interpret it differently.

In a recent conversation with SAS, we seemed to be talking at cross purposes. The SAS executives kept using the term "analytics" when really what they were referring to was predictive analytics. My incorrect interpretation was that they were talking about general data analysis. Given that predictive analytics is one of SAS biggest differentiators, misinterpretation is not good, kind of like a genericized trademark.

Just back from both SAP's Reporting and Analytics conference and Business Objects' Insight conference, both of which were coincidentally in Orlando, Fla., this year.

SAP only recently (as in the last six months, not only last two weeks) was added to my radar. It seemed to me that the Netweaver BI 7.0 release (June 2006) was a marked improvement over the earlier versions. As well, the number of customers telling me they had made the strategic decision to use SAP's BI platform has been on an upswing. So in planning travel schedules, it was unfortunate that both vendors had their conferences the same week but fortuitous they were in the same town.

An interesting difference between the two events: SAP's comments on the pending acquisition? Zero. Comments at the Business Objects event? A lot (see below).

It looks like this time the rumor mill got it right as SAP announced its friendly take over of Business Objects, to the tune of 4.8 billion Euros or $6.8 billion. It makes it the priciest BI/Performance Management deals of the year.

Business Objects CEO John Schwarz did say that the rumors were wrong about the company being shopped around and instead SAP had approached Business Objects. The agreement to be acquired does indicate a change of course for Business Objects, which previously stated its intent to remain a pure-play vendor. With the deal valued at more than five times revenue, the price must have been right. Add to that an SAP-Business Objects combination makes a formidable competitor versus Oracle-Hyperion and Microsoft.

I wasn't going to comment on the rumors about Business Objects looking to be acquired, because it seems to be one that resurfaces every few months and yet, everyone seems to keep asking me about it. If the rumor is true, it runs counter to all the positioning the vendor has been doing since Oracle acquired Hyperion. Business Object's positioning has been to emphasize the need for an independent, pure-play vendor that has no allegiance to a particular database or ERP system.

So if they are in the market to be acquired, what does that suggest about their stated strategy: oops, change in direction?

Is your BI deployment departmental or enterprisewide? That alone is a strong indicator of how successful a deployment you will have. Given that about half of BI deployments are departmental, I can't help but think of the "Tragedy of the Commons," which involves a conflict over resources between individual interests and the common good.

This concept has been used to describe a number of social and economic problems in which an individual's gain comes at the expense of the group. Herdsmen, for example, who have to share pasture for sheep, will continue to add sheep to the property when the products from the sheep (wool or meat) exceed the cost in degrading the common pasture. Global warming problems have been explained by the tragedy of the commons in that individual countries and people don't inherently want to cut emissions or drive smaller cars, not wanting to trade national or personal sacrifices for the greater good of the world.

With all the performance management acquisitions in the spring, Cognos was noticeably quiet. Fueling an already active market, Cognos announced this morning its intent to acquire Applix, makers of TM1 OLAP, planning, and performance management solutions.

While Applix may have ranked at the bottom of IDC’s BI market share report, the vendor has been one of the fastest growing and has a stronger position in the performance management market segment. The acquisition will almost double Cognos’ number of performance management customers.

TM1 in fact used to be the underlying engine for Hyperion Planning, prior to Essbase. TM1 gives Cognos an in-memory OLAP engine with write-back and an open API, things Cognos PowerPlay lacked. In addition to the sweet purchase price — the deal brings Applix share holders ($339 million or about 5 times sales) — the good news for Applix customers is that they will no longer have to turn to another BI vendor for relational and production reporting.

Just back from vacation in France and was wowed by something unexpected — BI for waiters! (though the wine impressed me too).

When the waiter showed up to take our order, he wielded a kind of pen-computing/Palm device, not a pad of paper. I had never seen this before — at least not in NYC-area restaurants. At my enthusiasm, the waiter proudly declared "C'est nouveau!"… "it's new!"

Imagine the possibilities: When I order mousse au chocolat and it's sold out, the waiter can proactively recommend an available alternative – crème brulee (not escargot).

As BI becomes a mission-critical business application, it's increasingly important to partner with a BI vendor that understands your business and has a vested interest in ensuring your success. Why is it, then, that some BI vendors still have a hit-and-run sales approach?

As coincidence would have it, on a long plane journey from San Francisco back to New Jersey, I met a very important BI customer wedged in the middle seat next to me. It's a rare experience that a casual acquaintance shares my passion for this space, so I only too happily shared some research from my upcoming book and BIScorecard. As part of the BIScorecard strategic criteria, I include quality of customer account management and technical support.

This particular customer pays his BI vendor more than $400,000 in annual maintenance fees. Sounds like an important customer, right? Yet his last account rep lasted two weeks, and it has been years since anyone has taken much of an interest in their efforts — other than just to sell more software.

While much of the BI market has been busy expanding its solution breadth – acquiring or developing performance management capabilities – one vendor that has stayed focus exclusively on the BI front-end has been MicroStrategy. Only time will tell if its strategy will pay off, but CEO Michael Saylor has long maintained that there is still a lot of work to be done in the traditional BI space, to solve some of the harder BI problems.

One of those hard problems is impact analysis and regression testing. When someone makes a change any where in the BI lifecycle, say a physical field in the data warehouse, identifying affected reports is often guesswork. A handful of BI vendors do "okay" in telling you which reports are impacted (see BIScorecard, architecture criteria for detailed scores); for most others, the reports will out and out break.

Last week, I had the opportunity to participate in Technology Transfer's annual data warehouse and BI summit in Rome, Italy.

It's been about 11 years since I've been to Italy and this was my first work-related trip there. So I was a little nervous – does the Italian market care about the same issues as the U.S. market? Do they face the same challenges?

I find the recent press on operational BI an interesting resurfacing of events.

A few years ago, operational BI was a hot topic. With EII technologies that allowed BI tools to tap directly into source systems, some wondered if it was the demise of data warehousing as we knew it. (It wasn't.) Analytic applications share a similar story with operational BI, as many vendors initially jumped on this band wagon and later retrenched, either exiting this market entirely or rethinking their strategy.

I really shouldn't call it a "BI Bake Off," because the demos are tightly scripted to maximize educational value and enable everyone to win. At TDWI in Boston last week, attendees of the course Evaluating BI Toolsets got to see Business Objects, MicroStrategy, and Oracle demo head-to-head, using the same data set and on topics attendees consider the most important buying criteria. (If you want to see Cognos, Microsoft, and SAS head-to-head, come to TDWI in San Diego in August).

If a user conference is a barometer for market leadership, then Microsoft's first ever BI conference clearly shows they are in the top tier. More than 2,500 attendees have gathered here in Seattle to learn and share tips on Microsoft BI as a data warehouse platform, provider of BI front-end tools, and soon, performance management (due late summer).

Microsoft's rallying cry is "BI for Everyone." While "BI for the masses" borders on cliché (and I'm glad they wordsmithed their mantra), Microsoft most differs from other BI vendors on two points. First, is removing price as a barrier for wider adoption. As a case in point, the price of once independent ProClarity has been slashed from $800 to $200 per user under Microsoft's ownership. Even with price cuts, Microsoft says revenues for this product line has increased.

Whenever I disagree with someone smart, I automatically assume I must be wrong and seek to understand why. So it really bothered me that Doug Henschen was so certain that customers are driving demand for BI/PM convergence in this blog. It also doesn't sit too well with me that the vendors are clearly pursuing this strategy, while I'm saying I'm only seeing a handful of customers buying into it.

Let me clarify though:

A BI solution that delivers measurable business benefit and thus improves business performance is the goal for most BI deployments. I strongly disagree with Applix's CEO Plummer's comment "BI has always offered a historical perspective, but the insight hasn't been actionable." As one customer recently explained to me, "we saw an immediate lift in sales the week we deployed our BI solution." Why? Because the BI team went to great lengths to understand the business drivers and to deliver information that allowed all front-line workers to affect those drivers. Note: Applix is not the only vendor to try to pidgeon-hole BI as backward-looking and inactionable.

When Business Objects first acquired SRC software in Q3 2005, some industry and financial experts wondered, "why SRC, a little known budgeting, planning, and financial consolidation vendor … why not a stronger performance management player such as Cartesis or OutlookSoft?"

Fast forward 18 months and Business Objects did exactly that, announcing late Sunday night its intent to acquire Cartesis.

I want to highlight a piece of recent news from CIO Insight: women are leaving IT. There are no studies as to why this is happening, only the fact that it is. Fortunately, for women in BI, it looks like our role in this segment of IT remains steady at 28 percent, although our pay is falling, according to just released research from TDWI.

Compared to other IT sectors, BI leadership seems to be wonderfully represented by females, particularly in industry thought leadership.

As Dave Stodder writes in a recent feature story, BI penetration remains relatively low in most organization, at about 20 percent of employees. Yet what we did find in a survey last summer, is that for companies that consider their BI deployment "successful," BI usage is much higher.

The BI industry has long been rife with companies suing one another. Most recently, Hyperion and HyperRoll squabbled about patent infringements, finally agreeing to become partners. Business Objects and MicroStrategy kept counter suing each other over a period of five years, with both parties ultimately declaring victory and neither having to pay one another. Last week, Oracle joined the cacophony by filing claim against SAP.

Stranded travelers and lost luggage are daily news items of late. Outraged passengers, grounded on the tarmac for hours, are demanding a Passenger Bill of Rights. Airlines, BI can rescue you!

As James May, head of ATA wrote in a USA Today editorial, the best punishment for airlines with bad service records is natural economic forces -- let customers fly better-managed airlines. In reality, customers don't know which airlines are better managed as we have so little information about airline performance and even less about things like lost baggage rates.

So much for rumors! This morning, Oracle announced its intent to acquire Hyperion Solutions … not Business Objects as the rumor mill previously suggested. With performance management and BI slowly converging and arch competitor Microsoft about to release a complete product set, it's a smart but aggressive move on Oracle's part. For Hyperion, I only hope that the best people and products don't get lost in the shuffle.

At this week's TDWI Executive Summit, CIOs and IT leaders cast their votes on what BI innovation would have the biggest business impact in the next few years. The most highly ranked item: predictive analytics.

Given the perceived value of predictive analytics, why does it seem to have had such lack luster success to date? Like most things, I suspect the answer is part cultural and part technological. Creating predictive models takes some sophisticated skill sets and software. Most companies have specialists doing such analyses, yet often, the results of the analyses stay largely in the hands of the specialists. Recent innovations are changing this.

One thing is clear: When you have four Intelligent Enterprise bloggers blogging on a similar topic, it's important! My fear though, in looking at Web site logs, is that we're not yet grabbing your attention on just how important this topic is.

"Search and BI" sounds boring. "Structured and unstructured content" is too conceptual to get you excited. Will the "Googlization of BI" grab your attention? "Seven feet of snow coming your way!"? (Okay, NJ is getting only a puny 12 inches, just enough to make me dread flying tomorrow.)

At first blush, Business Objects' midmarket announcement seemed to me more of the same strategy they've been talking about for the last few years: to pursue both the enterprise BI segment as well as the SMB segment. The difference is in the details, though, and this latest announcement shows a much higher degree of activity and focus.

In the enterprise BI space, it's a bit of a cat fight for market share, with Business Objects, Cognos, Hyperion and MicroStrategy continuing to claw at each other. In the SMB space, the market is much more fragmented. While Microsoft certainly wins for brand recognition, there are dozens of other niche players including QlikTech, Celequest (acquired by Cognos last month), and Dimensional Insight to name a few. Business Objects officials concede the biggest competitor in the SMB space is limited BI awareness. Rarely will you see BI discussed in SMB-focused magazines (Inc, Entrepreneur, Fortune Small Business). Many SMBs still think that reports – any reports – out of accounting systems are just fine.

It might seem odd that a technology analyst and evaluator like myself does not whole-heartedly embrace all the latest technical innovations. In some respects, I'm a laggard. As an example, let's take the recent decision by CMP to cease the print version of Intelligent Enterprise. In many respects, I like the online experience of Intelligent Enterprise: I can readily search for reviews, articles and the like, as opposed to saving every last issue for the past five years (okay, I do that too -- packrat and laggard is a bad combination). I can also readily see how often someone reads one of my articles and clicks through to BIScorecard, something not possible with the print magazine and a capability every writer and advertiser wants.

Dashboards are the face of BI for a very important user constituency: managers and executives. Given the importance of this aspect of a total BI solution, it came as little surprise to me that Cognos nabbed Celequest, a small player with a powerful dashboard solution.

Until now, Cognos' own dashboard solution has been limited to that of a single Report Studio document. While Cognos 8 brought some improved visualizations embedded in Report Studio documents, it misses the mark for one essential dashboard requirement: multiple data sources. While it's possible to address multiple data sources at a higher level in Cognos 8 Framework Manager (the business meta data layer), this approach makes the current dashboard solution less nimble and forces the Framework Manager model to be more complex.

The Internet has raised the bar for BI expectations. We want to click a report and get an answer now. Complex query? Millions of records? Full table scan? Those are details that users really don’t care about. Gone are the days of users being thankful for a weekly print out (conveniently scheduled during non peak processing periods). Gone, too, are the days when users were willing to click on a report only to stare at an hour glass for more than a few seconds, let alone minutes or hours.

It’s clear why user expectations continue to rise: people can view stock prices in near-real time, voting results, sport scores, even traffic. So it would seem perfectly reasonable that corporate data access should be equally instantaneous.

Here is another sure-fire way to make BI an everyday office tool: standardize on a BI suite that has all the goodies (OLAP, reporting, query, dashboards) optimized for your different user groups yet reduces the cost of ownership.

A fair few nay sayers out there continue to grumble that the latest versions of BI suites are a not at all integrated. Not true! You can read about the finer points of integration in the BIScorecard BI Suite Integration report along with analyses of each vendor, but the bottom line is that the latest releases are miles ahead of what were previously disparate products. Here are just a few examples:

In my last blog, I asked you to think about how you can take your BI deployment to 110 percent of your employees. Part of what will get you there is technology dependent. The other part is business relevance.

In building a BI application or individual report, business and IT engage in a clumsy dance of users defining their requirements and IT interpreting those requirements. If the business doesn’t ask for something, they don’t get it. So users will over ask, and IT will do a data dump, overwhelming the business users. It's not a pretty waltz and is something more akin to Ben Stiller’s salsa attempt in Along Came Polly.

Yes, I too have finally caved to the blogging phenomenon, and although blogging and discipline are somewhat incongruous, I fear I will give blog readers yet another diversion to real work if I don’t stick to some sort of schedule. So look for blogs from me each week or as industry events unfold.

What’s on my mind this week? I want you to start thinking about BI on steroids –- the innovations that will take BI to the point of becoming a must-have office tool for 110 percent of employees. These are not just the technical innovations, but also innovations in how you think about BI and view information processes.