BIScorecard Blog

IDC's BI Market Shares - Will the Real Leader Please Stand

I always look forward to IDC’s annual BI market shares, awaiting to see who comes out on top and who is losing ground. I’m sure everyone noticed that they were in fact a month early this year! Call me a bean counter at-heart, but I like the irrefutable, quantifiable comparison they bring that other evaluations (including my own BI Scorecard) lack. Or so one would think.

Most product evaluations involve a degree of subjectivity, with varying definitions and opinions of what capabilities and criteria matter more. The IDC market shares, on the other hand, are cold-hard facts: what were the revenues, who’s leading, who’s growing. While such data may have been somewhat trackable on 10Ks when BI vendors were independent, it’s now largely impossible as BI is often but a small part of a larger company.  Software vendors don’t have to report their revenues by market segment, and throughout the year, we only get vague, imprecise references for how the BI business is going.  The IDC report lays out the break down by vendor.

Ah, but here-in lies the rub: it’s all a matter of which beans get counted where. As Doug Henschen has frequently written, our industry uses terms like performance management and business intelligence interchangeably, and we can never be sure if analytics are predictive or not. So when a vendor claims they are the market leader of “anything” according to IDC, you need to be clear on what exactly gets counted (in other words, study that Taxonomy on page 3). Oracle, for example, will often lay claim to being the “Business Analytics” leader that includes the relational data warehouse. As much of my focus is based on core BI tools capabilities, excluding the data warehouse plumbing, I was not surprised to again see SAP BusinessObjects as number 1, but at first blush, I was surprised to see SAS as now number 2, ahead of IBM Cognos.

But wait! It’s the taxonomy! Included in IDC’s “Business Intelligence Tools” are the statistical software too, where SAS is the leader and derives a greater portion of its revenues. If we were looking mainly at query, reporting, and analysis, then IBM Cognos remains number 2, followed by Oracle, Microsoft, and then SAS.

Beyond who’s leading which category, the growth (or lack of) is revealing. But this is where the irrefutable and the speculative begins. Keep in mind too that all of this data is based on 2008 revenues, before the more severe economic downturn. Quarterly income statements certainly would have been interesting. Still, the stronger growth by both SAP and Oracle lends some support to my opinion that business applications/ERP influence BI buying more than IT infrastructure (IBM’s growth at 5%). Or maybe it’s all a matter of which acquired sales force got integrated faster, as Microsoft continued to have strong growth. Counting those ‘beans’ has got to be difficult as the BI revenues in 2008 came from both Performance Point (dashboards) and SQL Server. But how much of the SQL Server licenses actually get included here? Meanwhile, QlikTech’s growth is strong but slower than previous years, suggesting the departmental sell might be harder hit by the economy, or weaker web and administrative features catching up to that vendor.

And if I had any doubt that advanced visualization is a hot topic, TIBCO’s Spotfire growth of 36% confirms it (coincidentally, a featured topic in our next customer webinar).

The bottom line good news is that the BI market – no matter how you slice it – grew over 10%, a rate that few other software or industry segments could claim last year.

Now, if only we all knew how to do BI right! So on that note, before you head out for your 4^th of July BBQs, be sure to take the “Successful BI Survey” here.

Regards,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

What's Your Secret to BI Success?

Two years ago, you helped me identify those factors that most make or break your BI deployment as part of research for this book. I’d like to know if anything has changed since then. Is the economy helping or hurting your BI efforts? Maybe a down economy is forcing you to work smarter, or maybe layoffs and budget cuts are putting a dent in your BI strategy.  For example, two years ago, 42% of you had standardized on a BI platform (see graphic). Did industry consolidation or the economy change that? And if so, which vendors are you standardizing on?

Take the updated survey here. As before, it’s not vendor-sponsored.

As your time is valuable and we are all strapped for cash, the first 200 respondents will be entered in a random drawing for 10 $50 gift cards. All survey respondents will receive a summary of key findings. For more insights, be sure to catch my keynote at TDWI in Orlando in November!

I look forward to hearing from you!

Regards,

Cindi Howson

 

Who Needs BI When There's Active PDF?

Information Builders kicked off its annual user conference in Nashville, TN, this week on an upbeat note to the tunes of marching band, a furry mascot, and a comedian. Yep, comedian Greg Schwem (very funny!) preceded the official keynote by President and Founder Gerry Cohen. It was a novel start to a BI conference, but with the economy struggling and some attendees having to travel here on their own dime, it was an upbeat start to a smaller than usual conference.

The most intriguing part of Cohen’s keynote was VP Daniel Ortolani’s demo of a new feature of Active Reports called Active PDF. With Active PDF, the entire range of Active Reports capabilities (sort, filter, chart) are now available from within a PDF document (see here for an example but make sure you have the latest Adobe Reader). While Information Builders’ positions Active Reports for a mobile work force, I see the value as much broader to any information consumer, including customers, suppliers and regulators who receive currently static reports and documents. For example, as a residential electricity consumer, I would love for JCP&L to send me an Active PDF e-bill so I can figure out which months our consumption flags us as a high consumption electric user. (Heck, I leave our thermostat at 78 in summer, and we even have a portion allocated to wind power! But let’s not digress). 

By a show of hands, less than 5% of Information Builders customers at the conference are using Active Reports. Whether that’s due to the product positioning or that it is an optional server-add on, I don’t know. (Customers: care to comment?) However, the vendor is offering customers a free trial license as part of its latest 7.6.9 release of WebFOCUS. The reports are water marked until the product is actually licensed, a smart way to entice customers to try the product. Enhancements to InfoAssist (see here for an in-depth product review) also made the key note. InfoAssist, released last November, is the vendor’s solution for business users, and as Cohen conceded, is an area the vendor had not previously put much emphasis on. The most noteworthy change in 7.6.9 is support for OLAP cube-browsing, including SAP BW, Oracle Hyperion Essbase, and Microsoft Analysis Services.

The customer presentations and discussions are what make going to these conferences most worth the trip. In particular, Ford Motor Company, who recently decided to standardize on WebFOCUS as part of their BI tool strategy, reflected an interesting theme I’ve encountered with several Information Builders’ customers. While business users have demanded business query tools to avoid the IT report backlog,  report chaos has sometimes ensued. This is as much a BI tool issue as an organizational challenge.  When a business query tool is deployed, IT still has an active role to play in managing shared and re-usable reports, but such changing roles is rarely considered on the road to self-service BI. Meanwhile, historically, Information Builders was criticized for being too developer- and application-centric. And yet, the ability to build a reporting application (versus a single report) is in fact a differentiator, but one the vendor seems not to emphasize. To be fair, perhaps it’s because that capability doesn’t fit neatly into an existing tool category. And of course, the value of this ability is more appealing to companies who have a centralized approach to BI and in which there is a strong IT-business relationship, minorities on both counts.  But the ability to build one reporting “application” with parameters for which data to display, how to filter the data, and the desired output, clearly is a lower cost proposition than hundreds of users developing hundreds of variations of similar reports.

Lastly, insurer Nationwide shared insights on a community service project they’ve done with the Columbus, OH school district that gives principals and teachers access to information on student data with a vision of improving graduation rates. In the two years since the reporting project started, high school graduation rates have improved from 50% to 75%.

Their story is one more example that shows BI is not only about improving business performance, but also, in making the world a better place!

Regards,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

IBM Cognos Forum: The Secrets and the Sizzle

If you are an IBM Cognos customer, you know this blog is 2 weeks after the fact. Blame the delayed posting on too much travel, or on my first having to figure out what I could and could not write about.

Non Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) are one of the trickier aspects of the analyst-vendor relationship. Vendors will share things under NDA for a number of reasons. Sometimes, it’s to gauge the reaction, and if it’s consistently negative, then maybe the vendor changes course. Often, though, the NDA is for only a week or so until an announcement has been made publicly. Those NDAs are easy to respect. The harder NDAs to respect are broader, with no deadline, and lots of exceptions. Like “anything said in this 4-hour period is NDA, unless it was about product A or Z, release N or N.1”.  And in this age of blogging and tweeting, timely and clear NDA guidelines are a must

With NDA violations, the risk to the vendor is unethical analysts who tell NDA secrets to competitors or to the market ahead of time. The risk to an analyst who breaks an NDA is, at worst, a lawsuit or more common, being black listed. Either way, not good. What I am still puzzled by is how some vendors are so open about their strategy and product developments even a year ahead of time (think Microsoft and project Gemini), whereas others are much more restrictive. SEC rules and revenue recognition are sometimes cited as reasons.

So the bottom line here (besides my griping about NDAs) is that much of what I learned and got excited about at IBM Cognos Forum, I can’t yet write about.

So I will stick to the practical, the here and now, of two things in IBM Cognos 8.4 that caught my attention. First are the new metadata features: Business Glossary and Data Lineage.  With the Business Glossary, users can author business metadata in a Wiki-like page. But the best part and new in 8.4 is that a report consumer can access the glossary via a simple right-click over a particular report-column, such as “Revenue.” Some customers have countered that they aren’t interested, because they’ve standardized on a different metadata product. In this case, the new Data Lineage menu provides a good alternative, also accessed while viewing a report and right-clicking on any report column. While technical meta data may be of only moderate use to a business user, the data lineage screen also shows the business description (Many BI products expose this information only to report authors, not to report consumers and not with the degree of information shown in Cognos 8. Like the chicken-and-the-egg, few Cognos customers currently fill in that business description. Why bother, if users can’t readily get to it? The Data Lineage menu and the way it’s invoked in 8.4 makes it worth the effort! 

The second attention grabber was the dashboards. I first blogged about Cognos 8 Go! Dashboard when it was previewed at last year’s user conference. The product was officially released in November, with service pack one released last month. As I discuss in this just-published evaluation, the use of Flash is a big improvement. However, there are trade-offs versus the predominant approach of Report-Studio-style dashboards. From a competitive standpoint, many of the evaluations of leading BI platforms show dashboard capabilities have the biggest room for improvement for flashy, visually rich dashboards and that can scale to the enterprise.

 Regards,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

SAP BusinessObjects Explorer Gets Top Billing at Sapphire

If you’ve been following Business Objects’ innovations, you know Polestar is a combination search, exploration, and visualization tool. I have described it as an  iTunes- and Google-like approach to BI. It certainly makes my “cool” list and is a product the company has demoed as part of the Cool BI course I teach at TDWI.

This morning at SAP’s Sapphire conference in Orlando, Florida, the vendor announced “Explorer”, a combination Polestar running on the Business Warehouse Accelerator (BWA). BWA is SAP’s in-memory database and appliance (see the in-memory BI feature for more info). And don’t let the “Explorer” rebranding confuse you (as it did me!):  we aren’t talking about the former SAP BEx (aka Business Explorer).

There are a couple reasons why this is a big deal.  I recently wrote in my evaluation of SAP BusinessObjects XI 3.1 that the integration between BW and BusinessObjects XI was no better than any other BI vendors who rely on the BAPI interfaces to get to BW InfoCubes. The Explorer release greatly changes that with direct access to BWA. With BWA, the level of performance and data volumes that Explorer can navigate changes drastically. Polestar alone had limitations on data volumes; Explorer with BWA really doesn’t. As well, this combination pack also leverages the BWA indexes without requiring customers to first create a universe, as the standalone Explorer (former Polestar) would require.

So customers can be up and running fast. Super fast. Beta customer Molson Coors says they were up in 1 day, with Explorer navigating 10 BW Infocubes. The largest cube is over 300 million records, and still with speed-of-thought exploration. Katrina Coyle, global information manager at Molson Coors explains that the search-like interface and corresponding speed changes the whole way people use information. Simply entering key words such as “Coors Lite marketshare” means people can spend more time asking the right questions rather than trying to find the data.

The other headline is their announcement that BWA will support non SAP BW content in a second wave. That gives SAP BusinessObjects an in-memory approach to BI that’s good for non BW customers too, whether running SAP or not.

At first blush, this announcement may sound like more of the same, as Doug Henschen blogged. Well, I wasn’t at Sapphire last year, so can’t say how this keynote and announcement differs from last year. In truth, when the vendor requested a briefing about “Explorer/Polestar”, I initially declined, thinking I had already heard about that. The differences are there but under the covers. As Doug correctly points out, some competitors have in-memory, but here too, the difference is in how the in-memory is integrated into an existing BI deployment, whereas tools like TM1 and QlikView are deployed stand-alone.

Lastly, as a newcomer to the Sapphire world and one who tends to view everything through the BI lens, I was pleasantly surprised that BI here is getting top billing. As I advise clients and debated pros and cons in last week’s TDWI class on Developing a BI Tool Strategy, BI is now a bit part in these vendors’ total revenues. For context, check out much BI can drive sales for core product lines and how those core product lines are doing, matters.  When the going gets tough, making sure BI funding (whether in R&D and support) doesn’t get cut is an important strategic consideration for BI buyers.

So while Explorer accelerated version is cool and disruptive, the attention it is getting in all the key notes means my bigger take away is that BI matters a lot in the SAP world. The vendor is viewing information holistically, from process (source systems) to insight (BI).

Regards,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

Free MicroStrategy 9 ... Can You Believe It?

When MicroStrategy first floated the idea of a free version of their software several months ago, my gut reaction was not positive. I kept looking for the catch. I also was imagining the inevitable competitive FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) that ensues in a cut throat market place. “The product is so weak, so hard, so niche, they have to give it away.”

So far, I can’t find the catch. Given the product capabilities, migration path, and support, it seems like a deal too good to be true.

Other vendors have touted their products as “free” and have experienced mixed degrees of success. Oracle has sometimes included Discoverer and Reports (now referred to as the standard edition) for free with the RDBMS; the newest OBI Enterprise Edition, however, is not free and is notably more robust.  Microsoft BI is often considered  “free”, assuming you’ve bought SQL Server and SharePoint.  I would counter, then, that those products are low-priced but not free.  Clearly, Microsoft has had a successful seeding strategy that explains the rapid adoption of Analysis Services (for OLAP) and Reporting Services (for production reporting).  Open source BI is also “free”, but lacks support and maintenance, unless you pay.  It’s also not yet clear that they compare in capabilities to commercial software.  (Look for some upcoming evaluations this year where we hope to answer that question.)

The free version of MicroStrategy, called Reporting Suite, is for up to 100 users and includes online support and training. Some of the more attractive products like the dashboards and the new in-memory option are not included for all users in this starter bundle.  But the appealing aspect to this deal is that it provides customers with an easy entrée into BI, without that entrée being a total throw away. If customers later want to add dashboards or multi-source, for example, they don’t have to start over or migrate to a new product as is often the case with many departmental BI tools.

BI licensing is only one part of BI’s total cost of ownership (TCO). While it is usually the smallest piece in TCO, it is an out- of- pocket expense that companies would like to minimize in the economic downturn.  MicroStrategy’s Reporting Suite saves that expense.

A valid concern with this deal is that MicroStrategy will make up for the “free” by overcharging later, when customers are hooked and want to add options. Indeed, MicroStrategy has alienated customers in the past with its aggressive, sometimes inflexible, pricing tactics. But over the last 2-3 years, the company seems to have recognized those tactics back fired and has modified its pricing accordingly. The BI landscape is also significantly different from that of 3 years ago;  the vendor knows it has to be more creative about even getting invited to a BI selection when usually one of the big 4 vendors already has a relationship.

This latest move seems like an attractive option for both departments and smaller businesses with limited BI budgets. For companies that know their BI deployment will evolve into something bigger, I recommend continuing to follow a BI selection process (see this  report for a methodology). As part of that process, compare the full range of capabilities and the total cost for your requirements, regardless if you start out with a free version.

So with this deal, it seems good as well as true.  But of course, let me know if you find whatever catch I’m overlooking!

Regards,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

SAP BusinessObjects' BI Pricing Change

It’s April 15, tax day in the U.S. Will you be getting a refund or have to pay up? The same question applies to the new SAP BusinessObjects pricing announced today.

I have often said BI pricing is a buyer’s nightmare. No two vendors package their products the same way. Often, defining requirements and evaluating alternatives is a painful process. You would think that procuring the software is relatively easier, but it’s often not.

To that end, SAP BusinessObjects is trying to simplify their pricing model and to more closely match SAP’s ERP pricing model of engine plus users. The change only applies to enterprise BI customers. SAP BusinessObjects already has a straight forward model for SMBs who can buy individual products like Crystal and Xcelsius a la carte or the Edge Series that is all in one (production reporting, business query, dashboards) for up to 20 concurrent users.

In the new pricing scheme, enterprise customers will pay a named user license fee for one of two roles. The roles are primarily an information consumer role (called “view and explore”) and a power user authoring role (called “design and analyze”). In addition, there is a server fee that now includes all the platform services--services such as Polestar, Oracle E-Business Suite adaptors, PeopleSoft integration, Mobile and so on.

The view and explore role is relatively generous and includes the new, iTunes-Google-like Polestar as well as Live Office for Excel integration. Web Intelligence interactive users, however, fall into the “design and analyze” camp. According to Franz Aman, VP of Product Marketing, the new pricing is also intended to make it easier for customers to extend BI’s reach by lowering the cost of the view and explore role. In fact, the “view and explore” role is now included in existing SAP ERP professional user licenses.  In theory, it makes it easier for SAP customers to buy into the SAP BusinessObjects platform as they now only have to buy the BI server license.

As SAP does not publish its price list, what’s not at all clear is how sweet, or sour, a deal this is. Does the user role+server cost more than server-only did before? Or less?  I look forward to hearing from customers as they negotiate under these new pricing policies!

One change that is a clear positive: customers can now set up test and development environments at no additional charge. That should better allow customers to follow best practices for separating such environments. It’s also in contrast to some BI vendors who charge full price for such environments

Coincidentally, the theme of BI Scorecard’s next customer webinar is BI pricing (April 30^th), with a side-by-side comparison of how BI vendors package their products.  Subscribe or purchase any document to receive an exclusive invitation.

Regards,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

 

 

BI from the SAP Customer Viewpoint

I’m just back from the SAP Netweaver BI & Portals conference  in Florida last week, digesting what’s new, what’s old, what’s coming.

The SAP Insider conference is different from many of the BI conferences in that  a media company, rather than the vendor, runs the event.  I had last attended an SAP Insider conference shortly after the Business Objects acquisition was announced. Then and now, I noticed a stark contrast between the former Business Objects’ conferences and these SAP Insider ones.  I would have liked more enthusiasm and certainly less emphasis on legacy products.

The event kicked off with a keynote from Marge Breya, EVP and GM of the Intelligence Platform. Joe King bravely backed her up with 16 demos that should have drawn oohs and ahs for both the content and sheer number.  I wasn’t sure if the crowd was quiet, because it was an early start, lower attendance, or not impressed. As the day went on though, it struck me that the keynote was perhaps too visionary for where the attending SAP customers are today in terms of their BI initiatives. Many are primarily writing ABAPs for reporting. Some are using BEx with BW, but even Web Intelligence is a major leap forward for them. Those who have built a custom data warehouse and settled on an alternative BI tool strategy likely didn’t attend.

BW expert David Dixon had an enlightening session on self-service BI and governance. He described the SAP BW Accelerator as “the closest thing to a silver bullet in the BI world.” Indeed, one of the most interesting demos in the keynote was of Polestar on top of the BW Accelerator. Polestar is a combination search and visualization solution;  BW Accelerator is a combination appliance and in-memory database.  Navigating through a billion records with subsecond response times is mouth watering for any business user who has waited in the backlog of IT report requests or lamented, “why can’t BI be as easy as Google?”

Coincidentally, I recently finished testing SAP BusinessObjects XI 3.1 and released a new BIScorecard evaluation.  Based on an evaluation of over 250 detailed criteria, the vendor’s latest release re-inforces why this product is one of the strongest on the market for its business query module, the best at information delivery capabilities, but lags on the OLAP front. Beyond the product capabilities, as the conference last week reflected, some SAP customers  will follow the SAP BusinessObjects roadmap for strategic reasons. As one attendee told me, “we are married to SAP 13 times over.”

Regards,

Cindi Howson, BIScorecard

On Self-service BI and European Soccer

  You know that I am a big football fan, Packers in particular, because of my son, but everything I know about soccer (aka European football), I have learned from my English husband.

What does this have to do with BI? Information Builders just launched this cool new soccer dashboard of the 2009 Champions League. As I wrote about rich reportlets in this Cool BI article, such an interactive report is what most users envision for self service BI. Users don’t want “ad hoc” as in staring at a blank screen with 1000 possible data elements to choose from.  No. Most information consumers want to interact with an existing report or dashboard as a starting point.  Self-service  BI means users don’t  have to go to IT for a relatively simple enhancement request to get a sort, filter, chart, new calculation added to the report.

The soccer dashboard uses Information Builder’s Active Reports, an optional module first launched in 2006.  Based on a combination of Java Script and XML (AJAX), users can save this file locally and still have a high degree of interactivity while disconnected. To launch, click the link “launch the full report.”    So to sort the data, you click the down arrow on each column. Want to know who has the most fouls? It’s Atletico Madrid. This sort option is not something a programmer had to explicitly add to a report definition or user interface. Instead, it’s automatically available when the report is saved or rendered as AJAX output in the   same way you would save as PDF.

A bigger question of course is whether or not these fouls are worth it. Does aggression on the field result in more goals? With Active Reports, you can readily create a scatter plot (Fig3) by right-clicking on the Foul column. The chart shows there is a “slight” relationship between higher number of fouls and goals-scored. Unfortunately, the hover over only shows the coordinates of 5 goals to 21 fouls. It would be better if the hover displayed that this is from the German team of Bayern.  I think you would agree, though, that this level of interactivity is a big improvement over some web-based BI tools that seem to only automate former paper-based reports or that would require users to go into a sophisticated design environment. For the record, while Information Builders was one of the first to provide such robust interactivity using AJAX, some other  vendors now have varying degrees of rich reportlets via Flash. Information Builders supports both AJAX and Flash output.

Sadly, so far the Brits are not looking too good in this. But we are only a few weeks into the tournament, and as our favorite Leeds United never makes it to this level anyway, I guess I should focus only on the BI aspects of this app! So for a more in-depth review of Information Builders’ BI capabilities, check out the BIScorecard Information Builder's Overvew report.

Regards,

Cindi Howson, BIScorecard

The Answer to Pervasive BI: The Fed?

“Mainstream BI”, “pervasive BI” and “BI for for the masses”  have been the rallying cry for BI vendors for nearly a decade now.  Some thought Microsoft could do it with an Excel interface. Others think Google will be part of the answer.  I am looking to the Fed.

No, it’s not that I am on the bandwagon for the stimulus being the answer to all the world’s woes. However, when President Obama first mentioned a website (recovery.gov) as a way of ensuring full disclosure for stimulus spending, I got as excited as anyone can amid this economic crisis.

My vision for recovery.gov is that it will showcase the best of BI. It will be engaging, simple, and insightful. I’m hoping for a Google-like interface where I can start with a search request such as “education spending in NJ”.  An appealing chart (rather than a dense page of numbers) will show me how the money has been spent. It will give me the necessary context, relative to other states, and to prior years. And of course I can drill down to my individual county.

My envisioned recovery.gov will not only provide the monitoring capabilities, but also facilitate insight to action by giving me contact details for whom to appeal to when I think the spending looks unfair, wasteful, or just plain wrong.

Am I visioning too much? Maybe. But I hope the best BI tool vendors and consultancies are aggressively vying for this opportunity. Many eyes will be on recovery.gov, and I can well imagine the marketing bang a “Powered by BI Vendor X” could bring if this site and application are well designed. Of course, if it’s boring, static, and a flop, then the Fed will be in the same situation as many organizations struggling with BI adoption.

Back to the present: I head to Las Vegas this weekend for TDWI’s Winter Conference. The “BI Bake Off” course I facilitate includes Microsoft, SAP BusinessObjects, and MicroStrategy in this round. I expect to get glimpses of some of their latest versions as well as chance to pose the tough questions, “how much of recent downsizing is in the BI business? ... What does Microsoft's change of strategy on performance management mean to BI and to other vendors? ...” The upside to this down economy is that my airfare is an all time low of only $250, 1/3 of the normal price. With travel costs so low, I hope you are taking the opportunity to fulfill your New Year’s resolutions of “investing in you!”

Regards,

Cindi Howson