Megatrends of Business Intelligence

Complacency ... Enterprises seeking a competitive edge are looking toward competency centers, MDM, real-time deployments, data virtualization, workload management and operational intelligence. We help you answer six questions that will lead to innovative new BI strategies.

We came across this post that summarised changes and predictions in the BI market by intelligent enterprise.

Just when everyone thought there was general agreement on what business intelligence (BI) is "methods, tools and systems for manipulating quantitative data to build views and perform analysis for decision-making" the industry changes so much that we may again have competing definitions.

As the New Year unfolds, it would be easy to reduce what happened to the BI industry in 2007 to one colossal megatrend: consolidation. Oracle bought Hyperion Software. SAP acquired Business Objects (and a few others). And Cognos, which itself acquired Celequest in late 2006 and Applix in 2007, is in the process of being snapped up by IBM. To be sure, several important BI tool and platform players are still independent, including Actuate, Datawatch, Information Builders, MicroStrategy, Panorama and SAS. Also unchanging is the growing presence of Microsoft, not to mention that of open source BI, the domain of Pentaho and Jaspersoft. Performance management and specialized data- and text-analytics vendors still abound. Nonetheless, it feels like the industry as a whole has turned in a new direction and will never again resemble its pre-2007 self.

Could there be more consolidation in 2008? Entirely possible: If nothing else, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP are now markets unto themselves and will undoubtedly stay on the hunt to acquire software products and services that fill holes and create competitive advantages. This article explores how the consolidation trend might play out, but more importantly it presents six important megatrends in the context of questions organizations and BI practitioners must answer as they evaluate software and work to deliver on key strategies with BI.

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Operational BI: Getting the whole company using Business Intelligence

The major vendors are all making conversations about Operational BI or Pervasive BI.

Companies are trying to raise the competitive bar through improvement of many operational business processes, including customer experiences, inventory
and purchasing, systems monitoring, and business process optimisation. Organizations are attempting to increase customer loyalty, profitability, and cross-sell / upsell opportunities.

Many companies are now being pushed to deliver results despite budget constraints. This has resulted in a focus on cost and business process efficiency monitoring that will help find efficiencies and improve the bottom line.

While traditional business intelligence solutions continue to address the strategic information needs of decision makers with analysis of historical data, organizations
are starting to realize the potential of applying BI technology and approaches to more immediate information needs. The study will determine what companies are
doing to:
• Target and prioritize operational BI initiatives
• Improve customer relations, response, and performance
• Address non-customer facing operational process improvements
• Increase the availability of information for both customer-facing and other line-level knowledge
workers
• Monitor systems for opportunities to improve business performance and reduction of harmful events

The dmReview talk about "The Next Generation of Business Intelligence: Operational BI". They say ...

Operational reporting applications simply format and display the content of BTx data stores. Many business users, however, want to be able to analyze BTx data to identify potential problems and look for business trends. There are a wide variety of analysis tools available on the market. The capabilities provided by these products range from using Microsoft Excel for data analysis to advanced OLAP applications and database systems.

Operational Business Intelligence has also been labelled BI 3.0 or the next evolution of business intelligence. We recently implemented a BI solution for a client that included strategic aswell as operational Business Intelligence.

Making Business Intelligence for the masses !

I saw this video a while ago but found it on YouTube recently ...

This is Business Objects Performance Enlightenment video - let there be light.



"We are not a business intelligence company ... we are in the business of helping companies become more intelligent!"

Benefits of Strategic Data Analysis

Benefits of Strategic Data Analysis

It is very obvious that analysing your data can provide strategic benfits. But I am often asked how can I do it easily. There are a number of reasons to undertake strategic data analysis including:

economic pressures, just-in-time supply chain management, a more diverse and demanding customer base and government requirements such as Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX).

Business Intelligence (BI) tools bring information and insights to your business previously unknown and this is occurring in many other large and mid-sized organisations around the world.

Strategic data analysis benefits an organisation in many ways including:

• Providing access to statistical and other reporting tools that expose the hidden data that is driving change and growth in an organisation but is rarely measured.
  
• Providing a single point of view into diverse data through the implementation of data mining and data farming techniques.
  
• Identifying non-traditional value measurements that are often overlooked.
  
• Creating the ability to acquire pertinent data needed to make quality decisions based upon actual business trends and conditions.
  
• Providing a way to link strategic enterprise data to current and planned business activities.
  
• Providing access to competitive intelligence in order to create a competitive advantage.
  
• Tracking and measuring Key Performance Indicators.
  

Effective decision support systems depend upon management’s ability to understand an organisation’s underlying data. Key business activities including sales and marketing activities, financial and human resources management and planning, and the activities of other departments are improved when key decision makers have access to the tools necessary to perform strategic data analysis. ools to the forefront of many large and mid-sized organisations around the world.

The gap between the ability to link business performance with strategic data is being bridged by the technology delivered by Business Intelligence (BI) tool providers such as Microsoft, Oracle and Business Objects.

Recognising that different businesses have different BI needs, Microsoft offers a suite of BI tools that scale to fit the needs of both technical and non-technical users in small, mid-size and large organisations. These tools are fully compatible with its own line of database products as well as those provided by SAP and other manufacturers. ools to the forefront of many large and mid-sized organisations around the world.

Viewed more as a BI and strategic data analysis tool provider for mid-sized and large organisations, Oracle offers business intelligence and data warehousing tools including a suite of ETL, OLAP, and Data Mining software products.

Business Objects is also a key player in the strategic data analysis and BI market with their suite of tools that supports major manufacturers including Siebel, Teradata, SAP, PeopleSoft, Oracle and Informatica.

The journey to improving business performance begins with the organisations commitment to performing strategic data analysis and employing BI solutions from the industry’s leading suppliers of quality BI and strategic data analysis tools.

The benefits of Business Intelligence

The Benefits of Business Intelligence

I am often asked what can Business Intelligence do for my business. So my response is usually ...

Business Intelligence (BI) is both a management process as well as a collection of software applications and underlying technology that enables organisations to make better business decisions by exposing key metrics that drive the organisation

.

Business Intelligence is sometimes confused with Competitive Intelligence but they are not the same concepts. This is true even though BI technology does give management a methodology for getting a better grasp on the internal and external forces that are driving their organisation as well as a way to measure their organisation’s performance against the performance of their competitors.

Properly used, BI systems assist management in developing a data-based decision making model that provides more consistent results when compared to non-BI methods. Organisations that have successfully implemented BI systems have better and timelier access to customer activities, marketplace trends, supply chain issues and a host of other key performance indicators (KPIs) that are not able to be easily measured in a non-BI environment.


The Technology Behind The Business Intelligence Process

All of the data that BI systems access comes from the organisation’s data warehouse which is a specially-designed database that stores integrated data from various sources from within the organisation.

Business intelligence analysts perform data mining, which is the process of analyzing the data in the data warehouse to uncover patterns and relationships, using specialised BI tools such as Microsoft BI, Oracle BI and Business Objects BI.

Because BI needs vary among business sectors, many BI tools are highly industry-specific. Even so, most BI tools provide a similar core suite of capabilities which include executive reporting tools and a management dashboard that aggregates data and provides a high-level view of the organisation from a BI perspective.

Many organisations employ BI strategies in order to support the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) success measurement program. Unlike traditional measurements which are solely financial-based, the BSC approach measures both the financial lagging indicators as well as well as a variety of future performance indicators which are called leading measures. The BSC approach works so well because it not only provides a means for analyzing financial indicators, it also provides a way to quantify an organisation's other value drivers including its learning and growth perspective, business process perspective and its customer perspective.

Companies such as Exxon/Mobile and Cigna Insurance credit their profitability and explosive growth to implementing a BI/BSC strategy that enabled them to precisely gauge their market opportunities and position their companies to become financial and performance leaders in their market niches.

Business Intelligence is a process that works for any size organisation that is dedicated to gaining a competitive edge and raise their visibility in a crowded marketplace.

Business Intelligence - Vendor Consolidation

The OLAP report says

The BI industry has seen a wave of acquisitions since the mid 1990s, with takeovers occurring every few months. The first wave was mainly other companies who were attracted by the higher growth rates in the BI industry and preferred to buy an existing vendor rather than to develop their own product. These changes of ownership did not produce any ‘consolidation’ because there was no net reduction in the number of BI vendors or products. There was also no reduction in competition as market shares were not concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.

Year Acquirer Price Company acquired Product
2007 SAP Pilot Software PilotWorks
2007 Oracle $3.3bn Hyperion Solutions Essbase, Hyperion Planning, HFM, former Brio
2007 Business Objects €225m (~$300m) Cartesis Cartesis Finance, Planning and Analytics
2007 SAP $375m? OutlookSoft OutlookSoft 5 (formerly Everest)
2007 Cognos $339m, $306m net Applix TM1 and Executive Viewer
2007 Exact Software $51.5m Longview Solutions Khalix
2007 SAP $6.8bn Business Objects BusinessObjects, Crystal, Cartesis
2007 IBM $5bn Cognos Cognos 8, Planning, Controller, TM1
2006 Golden Gate Capital (Extensity) Geac MPC
2006 Microsoft ~$50m ProClarity Corporation ProClarity
2006 Applix $14.5m Temtec Executive Viewer
2006 Infor (Golden Gate Capital) MIS DecisionWare (including Alea)
2006 Infor (Golden Gate Capital) Extensity MPC and DecisionWare
2006 Business Objects $56m ALG EPO
2005 Cartesis INEA
2005 Business Objects $100m SRC
2005 Oracle Siebel Siebel Analytics
2004 Apax Partners Funds Cartesis Magnitude
2004 IBM Alphablox
2004 Cognos $52m Frango Controller, Consolidator
2004 Sage Group IntelligentApps
2003 Cognos $157m Adaytum e.Planning
2003 Geac $52m Comshare MPC and Decision
2003 China Development Corporation CIP Executive Suite
2003 Hyperion Solutions $142m Brio Software Intelligence
2003 Business Objects $1.2bn Crystal Decisions Analysis, Holos
2003 Systems Union $42m MIS AG DecisionWare (including Alea), onVision, Plain and DeltaMiner
2002 Open Ratings Gentia
2002 SymphonyRPM WhiteLight
2002 Pilot Software Acquisition Corporation $1.5m Pilot
2001 SPSS $94m Showcase Strategy
2001 Microsoft ~$15m Maximal Max (later renamed to Data Analyzer)
2001 IBM Informix MetaCube
2000 Business Objects $15m OLAP@Work
2000 CA Sterling EUREKA:Suite
2000 Accrue $19m Pilot Software
2000 Broadbase $10m Decision·ism Aclue
1999 Brio Technology, subsequently renamed to Brio Software $250m SQRIBE
1999 Hyperion Solutions $15.5m Sapling
1999 PwC Cartesis Carat
1999 CA Platinum Technology InfoBeacon (later renamed DecisionBase)
1999 Sterling $168m Information Advantage MyEureka!
1999 Business Objects $8m Next Action Technology AnswerSets (later renamed to Set Analyzer)
1998 Arbor Software, immediately renamed to Hyperion Solutions $600m Hyperion Software Enterprise, Pillar
1998 Information Advantage $36m IQ Software Data-Vision
1997 Platinum Equity Holdings ~$5m? Pilot Software
1997 Hummingbird Andyne PaBLO
1997 Arbor Software $6.7m AppSource WIRED for OLAP
1996 Seagate Software $84m Holistic Systems Holos
1996 Applix $11m Sinper TM1
1996 Microsoft ~$15m? Panorama relaunched as OLAP Services
1995 DecisionWorks IOC Track
1995 Oracle $100m IRI Software Express
1995 IQ Software $5.2m Soft Systems Data-Vision
1995 Informix $16.5m STG MetaCube
1995 Platinum Technology $36m Prodea Beacon
1994 Dun & Bradstreet ~$28m Pilot LightShip
1994 Speedware Info-Innov Media


I have worked with Microsoft, Business Objects (now owned by SAP) and Oracle. Some of the vendors I have never heard of but now there is a very small list of vendors.

They include:

• SAP


• Oracle


• Microsoft


• IBM

5 reasons to embrace Business Intelligence

Top 5 Reasons Every Business Should Embrace Business Intelligence

How many times has the justification or question for embarking on a BI program been reduced to cost ?

I often recommend the following ...

Escalating business costs and increased completeness are enough reasons alone to
seriously consider implementing a solid Business Intelligence program.

When Veneta Research surveyed over 400 companies on their BI expectations, the five most commonly cited reasons for embracing BI were these:

1. Improved competitiveness

BI provides an organisation with the ability to get the right information to the right people at the right time. This enables the organization to fine-tune its supply chain management and provide tighter integration and better communication between all supply chain members and partners.

2. Improved customer service

Business intelligence allows organizations to monitor and respond to changes and trends in the marketplace. BI tools also allow an organization to respond to changes in the way that customers behave and match that behavior to offerings designed to match customer needs.

3. Improved profitability

Because BI makes data accessible and displays it in meaningful ways, organisations can identify cost-cutting opportunities, gain more leverage during vendor negotiations, better manage its supply chain and identify optimal price points for its goods and services.

4. Improved revenue generation

Accessible data and improved reporting capabilities combine to provide an organization with the ability to identify new market opportunities by analyzing and responding to changing customer demographics and a variety of variable market conditions.

5. Improved capacity

With access to powerful decision-support tools comes the ability to build more accurate predictive models. This provides an organization with the ability to improve capacity planning by enabling them to switch from reactive business strategies to proactive business strategies.

There is no question that BI provides value to competitive organsations that are seeking strategic ways to support growth and profitability. Improved performance is always the # 1 motivator behind implementing and embracing a business intelligence system.

Business Intelligence Tools such as management reporting systems, management dashboards and OLAP are just some of the driving forces behind a new breed of empowered employee who is now capable of making accurate and informed business decisions that are based on known facts rather than making ill informed choices that result from having to guess at what the current state of the organisation is and what the future holds for their marketplace.

The process of implementing an effective BI program has been made much easier thanks to a plethora of next-generation tools from companies like Microsoft BI, Oracle BI and Business Objects BI.