Business Intelligence
A great deal of innovation in the business intelligence industry, in the past, will culminate with the emergence of players who will dominate the industry for years to come. The winners will be companies which are able to reduce the latencies in data gathering, analysis and decision making. Since information for decision making requires multi-dimensional data, users have to be able to aggregate information from diverse sources; the information should include not only quantitative information but also qualitative information such as conversations, notes, images and videos. The patterns in the data have to be discerned and understood as quickly as possible so that action in taken before an opportunity is lost.
Feedback from customers provides clinching evidence that ease of integration is the most valued attribute for customers. Inter-linked transaction systems allow companies to aggregate data from their CRM, SCM, production and financial systems. All this data has to be free from errors and the definitions have to be consistent across all sources. The extraction of patterns of data is aided by machine learning systems and comprehended quickly if it is vividly visualized. Decision making and its implementation involves the broad majority of employees in a company who need to be able to compare their data with agreed standards of performance before they can take action. All employees have to be able to share the same data and access in user friendly form. In order to take action, the processes of companies have to be flexible enough to respond to situations as they happen.
The winners among vendors will have exceptional capability in implementation of large projects pulling together capabilities in reporting and querying, multidimensional analysis, analytics, data management, visualization and business process management. Pure play business intelligence vendors, such as Cognos, Business Objects, Hyperion, as much as ERP vendors like Oracle/Siebel, IBM and advanced analytics players, such as SAS and SPSS, and upstarts like Qliktech are all looking to provide suites of business intelligence functionalities. While pure play vendors have an edge in consolidating products, the ERP players have accumulated competence in integration of applications, business processes and data, the advanced analytics group of vendors has strengths in enhancing the value of data by drawing insights for decision making while upstarts continue to tap disruptive new technologies.
Enterprise scale business intelligence suites are the preferred flavor in the business community eager to reduce complexity and costs. Pure Play business intelligence vendors have responded to competition from ERP companies by tightly integrating their products. They are also agnostic about the databases and applications and are more inclined to use service-oriented architecture to be able to access any source of data on their network. BusinessObjects, for example, has integrated its Crystal Enterprise and BusinessObjects products as a single suite which can be operated with a common set of administrative tools thereby lowering the costs of installation. In addition, users are able to take advantage of the composite of business intelligence functions including reporting, ad hoc queries, OLAP and dashboards. Cognos 8 has unified its OLAP (PowerPlay), Visualizer, Metrics Manager and NoticeCast, into the services-oriented architecture that under grids its operational reporting tool ReportNet in a web based environment. In addition, Cognos has improved access to data from the entire enterprise as a result of integration with its DecisionStream ETL tool which can now be managed by ReportNet. As a result of the partnership with Composite software, Cognos 8 users have the ability to query data from any database such as Oracle, DB2, etc.
On the other hand, database and ERP vendors such as Oracle, Teradata and IBM are consolidating their products by integrating the business intelligence functions into their databases which considerably lowers the latencies in the transfer of data for analytical purposes. Microsoft bundles its online analytic processing (OLAP) with SQL Server and has added data mining and a reporting server. Oracle’s10g database incorporates several of the routine business intelligence functions into its database. SAP, Oracle, Siebel and Microsoft all offer products with automated business processes; an update on a table triggers processes within the database, sets applications and business processes in motion, causes updates in other databases, initiates communication with users, and even trigger remote procedures in external systems. A tight integration of Siebel Analytics package into its CRM applications helps to steer workflow and receive real-time information.
All this is much harder with pure play business intelligence vendors who have to partner or make risky acquisitions to achieve the same objective. These capabilities are important to lower the latencies between the time a decision is taken and relevant actions are executed.
The other major advantage the traditional ERP and database vendors have to offer are their platforms that support the broad range of functions such as composite applications, business processes and data integration technologies. In the web services and SOA environment, platforms are particularly useful to join myriad services. Within an SOA framework like Project Fusion of Oracle or mySAP of SAP, Microsoft’s SQL Server 2005, diversity of functionalities can be incorporated rendering business intelligence packages irrelevant.