Business Intelligence Software Vendors
Agile enterprises need business intelligence to improve their sensory perceptions; the ability to gauge reality, to view their resource flows and alacrity to remain on top of events. Business intelligence vendors are increasingly conscious that customers hate to be hobbled by their sunk costs in Information Technology. Instead, customers want to be able to rejig their existing technologies to adapt in fluid situations. Information needs to flow unimpeded by clunky technologies. Technology inadvertently has often, in the past, become a millstone instead of a lubricant of change. Customers are increasingly looking for technologies that read the pulse of their business activity and funnel information to all their employees who can communicate and collaborate and act in time to respond to events.
The concerted effort that customers are making to lower latencies in data collection and decision making is best illustrated by the effort investment banks are making to speed up the processes to refresh their data that influences their decisions on portfolio management. They are looking to receive information directly from the exchanges, option trading exchanges and ECNs so that they can weigh the impact of events on any of the securities that they hold in their portfolios. Automatic trading tools enable traders to complete the calculus of risk and return when they buy or sell securities and need to evaluate the impact of major changes such as prices and interest rates. Their information architecture has to be so constructed that it can tap market data from a variety of servers, with their own data formats, and convert them into a single format and move the data, aided by middleware, to the enterprise data infrastructure.
In the past, information systems were tenuously linked to the levers that companies could use to act as situations changed. Increasingly, enterprises are looking to integrate decision making processes and business processes so that the lag time between the receipt of information and the response is minimized. They want to build in the rules for predictable responses to known problems so that human resources can be reallocated to attend to more knotty problems. Where human intervention is required, companies want to be able to quickly visualize a situation and size up a problem before they act.
Above all, the best decisions happen when all the related information is brought to bear on a course of action. In addition, decision-makers want to simulate alternative scenarios, visualize them before they take their decisions.
The business intelligence industry is still evolving and the jury is still out on who is eventually going to win. Clearly, established players with experience in implementing large size deals in the enterprise software industry have the best chance to integrate several technologies required to gather information, analyze data and communicate decisions. Business intelligence projects also require consulting services that are so necessary for successful implementations of especially the operational applications.