This supplement is an independent publication from Raconteur Media December 1 2009
BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
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ompanies with good busi-ness intelligence saw the re-cession coming long before it was officially declared Cand good systems may allow them to tell when it ends. But for the technol-ogy companies selling business intelli-gence systems, recession is a reason for companies to buy their technology, not an excuse to postpone purchasing. Business intelligence – BI – allows different data sources to be sliced, diced and mixed to produce real-time analysis of everything from different teams’ productivity to different prod-ucts’ margins in colourful graphics with instant alerts on budget varianc-es, late orders or critical ratios. Anthony Dent, chief executive ofDynistics, a specialist UK firm whose screen-based dashboards display these visual pictures, says: “In a recession, eve-ryone’s interested in doing more with less and if we can provide a tool that gives everybody information – not just at board level – it encourages greater re-sponsibility among employees. They can act more quickly: it’s a virtuous circle.”The ability of BI to boost business will be a key selling message during 2010. At a different end of the corpo-rate scale from Dent, Microsoft’s busi-ness division president, Stephen Elop, says: “It’s clearly a turbulent time eco-nomically all over the world, but that’s when it’s most useful. You have more and more people who have to make intelligent decisions. Our expectation is that there is going to be a real in-crease in demand for the broad appli-cations of BI within businesses.” Customers are increasingly finding new uses for BI systems – from shop-floor workers monitoring production progress, to hospitals analysing recov-ery rates to lawyers displaying case de-tails - but recession is itself creating new markets. SAS, which describes itself as the largest independent vendor, reports a 28 per cent increase in sales of risk-management solutions, for instance, Ahead smart
Richard Northedge on trends for 2010 and the impact of mega-vendorswhile Dynistics is allowing companies to monitor carbon dioxide emissions to meet environmental standards. Gartner, which researches the industry and rates the vendors, reckons BI usage will double in five years with suppliers struggling to meet the demand. But if the market is expanding, so are the suppliers. The mega-vendors that dominate the sec-tor have been growing vigorously, Oracle purchasing Hyperion, IBM acquiring Cognos, Microsoft buying DATAllegro, and French software group Business Ob-jects being taken over last year by Germa-ny’s SAP for $6.8 billion. Now they must make those purchases pay and these big suppliers are aggressively competing with each other to win new customers. Higher intelligence Organisations are realising that decision-makers at all levels require access to timely information. page 6In association withThe result of this expansion is that Oracle and SAP have adopted vertical models, supplying a service that ex-tends from hardware through software to data warehousing while the other mega-vendors seek horizontal breadth. But there are customer criticisms ofboth strategies, not least that they are based on IT rather than applications.Software suppliers such as QlikTech and Dynistics believe their future is based on the flexibility of being compat-ible with vendors like Microsoft without being tied to a single system. Dent ar-gues many mega-vendors produce BI tools that fail to take a holistic approach that can bring together different systems and says: “For us, the visual representa-tion, and making it able to connect to any form of data, is key.”Gartner concedes competition and consolidation will favour the mega-vendors over the pure-play suppliers but admits some customers are resist-ing relying on a single supplier for all their BI needs. Purchasers can use their negotiating power to strike good deals when choosing between the big vendors, but once they select a supplier they are locked – practically, if not legally – into long-term relationships for future trans-actions. Users are learning to balance the savings from moving to a cheaper system with the costs of switching. However, the key developments in BI are to take data analysis away solely from Social software From Facebook to Twitter, social media is changing the way BI data is disseminated and consumed. page 8IT departments and put it onto business users’ desks. By 2012, Gartner forecasts that 40 per cent of BI budgets will be held by the business units benefiting from it. The smaller vendors hope to gain from that devolved decision mak-ing because add-on software packages are cheap enough to come from annual budgets rather than capital expenditure allocations and can pay for themselves within the year. QlikTech says: “With business condi-tions shifting by the hour, agility has never been more critical. Organisations that empower their decision-makers with powerful, affordable and simple to use analysis will be the ones that thrive in the current environment.” In-deed, QlikTech is offering a completely free personal edition of their business intelligence software QlikView 9, avail-able for download from their website.Microsoft has long been execut-ing an objective of “bringing BI to the masses”. It has developed new products such as the “Madison” facility, being rolled out in 2010, that uses technology acquired with DATAllegro and allows thousands of users simultaneously to access hundreds of terabytes of data; “Project Kilimanjaro” for handling large data sources, and the new SQL Server PowerPivot tool (formerly codenamed “Project Gemini”) that will enable more business users to create their own BI applications. It has also built BI func-tionality into its pervasive Microsoft SharePoint Server product making Mi-crosoft the first vendor to bring together Unified Communications, Business Intelligence, Enterprise Content Man-agement, Collaboration and Enterprise Search onto a single platform. But Elop is insistent that in the future, such tools must be usable by staff at all levels. “If you know how to use Word or Excel,” he says. “Then you’ll be able to use our BI. The more employees who have access to busi-ness data, the greater a company’s ability to anticipate changes.”Performance-directed culture We talk to the ‘father of business intelli-gence’, Howard Dresner, on how to use BI to outperform the competition. page 12