Intelligent Enterprise

The Hyatt Regency Chicago is sold out and the ballrooms, breakout sessions and exhibit hall are seeing heavy, heavy traffic here on the first day of the Gartner BI Summit. I would say it's standing room only, but nor are there lots of empty seats available. This conference is clearly well past the hype cycle and rising on Gartner's proverbial "slope of enlightenment" phase of market maturity."

If you read our "Summit Preview" there weren't a lot of surprises in Conference Chair Bill Hostmann's opening keynote, but he did share some new market analysis that he didn't talk about in that Q&A; interview. Hostmann said things like ETL, reporting, query and analysis and even data mining are well past the hype cycle and are moving up on the "plateau of productivity." Corporate performance management and business application data warehouses are just coming out of the "trough of disillusionment" whereas things like dashboards are just heading into the trough.

"A lot of people got excited about dashboards and scorecards -- kind of like a get-rich-quick scheme," said Hostmann. "Now they're asking, 'do these really help me manage my business and are they tied to our overall strategy.'"

Cresting the "peak of inflated expectations" are data warehousing appliances, while still ascending that slope are technologies including SOA-Enabled BI, business activity monitoring, text mining, master data management and in-memory analytics.

Hostmann was somewhat dismissive of open-source BI , saying the term is becoming "kind of like the word 'organic' in the grocery business. "It's starting to lose its meaning, with some 'open-source' vendors demanding licensing fees," he explained. "Open source is promising, but the business models and products haven't kept up with the commercial products." Seth Grimes is onto the analysts on this front, and I'm guessing Hostmann's comments will draw at least a few comments.

Hostmann put forward at least two predictions. First, he said that by 2009, some 60 percent of organizations will start shifting their attention from just managing structured data in data ware houses to adding unstructured information -- as in content management, search, XML, taxonomies and ontologies. What he's talking about is the "information management" view being cultivated by IBM, Oracle and others providing information infrastructure.

Second, Hostmann said current Gartner surveys show that buyers are still interested in best-of-breed BI, but raising more than a few vendor eyebrows, he predicted that by 2010, "good enough" technologies offered in single, low-priced bundle -- from the likes of Microsoft, Oracle and SAP -- will claim the lion's share of the BI market.

"Heterogeneity is still going to rule the enterprise way beyond 2010," later commented Keith Gile, former Forrester analyst and now a senior advisor to Business Objects. "'Good enough' is not good enough for Business Objects or its customers."