BIScorecard Blog

Business Objects, SAP Support – Lessons Learned

One week later, and it seems the support situation at Business Objects is settling, although customers remain miffed and a handful still do not have access to support. There are lessons for customers and vendors alike from this situation, and a question of how the BI vendor will make amends to those most adversely affected.

 

For most customers, the issue of not accessing support was one primarily of inconvenience and frustration. As of mid last week, according to Business Objects, about 20% of customers lacked the ability to logon to the site to open or track existing cases. However, for some, the disruption in support service meant a delay in production implementations.

 

In speaking to Scott Bajtos, Business Objects’ Executive Vice President and Chief Satisfaction Officer, he acknowledged the migration had not gone as smoothly as expected. While some of the migration challenges were clearly planning related, it seems that the crux of the problems were twofold. First, the security for SAP’s Service Marketplace system is separate from the SAP security systems, and Business Objects underestimated the number of logons that would not be synchronized between the two. Second, the support migration was just one of several migrations Business Objects did last week to leverage the SAP infrastructure.

 

Looking ahead Bajtos said the main reasons for moving ahead aggressively with the migration to SAP’s support platform is partially cost related, but is primarily because the Service Marketplace is “light years ahead of the support capabilities Business Objects had under their previous support system.” Service Marketplace offers:

 

• an integrated knowledge management system, so that when a support case is resolved, other technicians and customers can see the resolution.
• Moderated forums, which while BOB– the user-driven forum – is an invaluable resource for Business Objects customers, the vendor never officially supported or contributed to.
• A better ability to do remote diagnostics.

 

The vision all sounds great to me, but let’s look at some of the sore points raised in the blog comments last week:

 

• Rate Increase: Support will increase to 22% of net licensing fees. While many customers are already at this rate, some customers were on a 20% rate for standard support that did not provide 24 by 7 access. The new rate gives 24X7 access. Customers will be migrated to the new rate over a 4-year period. As well, I’d like to point out that based on research done for BIScorecard, a number of BI competitors charge maintenance based on list pricing and not discounted pricing and that 22% is at the low end of the maintenance rate.

 

• Historical Cases: Historical case information will be migrated over and should be completed within the next two weeks. Customers will be able to access three years of history.

 

• SLAs: Regarding service level agreements, I continue to advocate that all enterprise BI customers negotiate this as part of their purchase agreement. While one blog commenter wrote that Business Objects was not open to this in the past, I suspect this is more of a historical BI issue and lack of customer demand (or insistence!). SLAs are less important when BI is deployed departmentally. For enterprise software (including SAP ERP) and hardware, SLAs are fairly standard. So as part of your evaluation process (see recommended process here), involve the purchasing department early in the process. If you wait to the 11^th hour, you may not be in the best bargaining position.

  

As I stated last week, I’d like to see more customers evaluate support – the quality, the costs, the capabilities - as part of BI buying. Including service level agreements in the contract would seem a natural evolution. In the meantime, I’ll be curious how Business Objects makes amends to customers for this support misstep and if indeed they can execute on their vision in this area.

 

Regards,

Cindi Howson

 

The SAP/Business Objects Support Blunder

When SAP acquired Business Objects early this year, it committed to keeping Business Objects as a separate company. As a separate company owned by SAP, it could better execute on its leadership in the BI market and remain open and agnostic to nonSAP customers and systems. Both also wanted to tap into any potential joint customers and synergies. One of those synergies is support.

 

Naturally, there are economies of scale in sharing support systems to track cases, provide searchable content, and so on. If you are a regular reader of my blog, you know that support is one of my hot buttons and one I consider to be a critical factor for evaluating BI vendors. When things go wrong with software—and they will--it’s the quality of support that is the difference between success and frustration and failure.

 

If you read the BIScorecard Summary Report (new one due out next week), then you also know that support has been Business Objects’ Achilles heal. And yet, it is one that the vendor has made significant improvements on in the last two years. The vendor’s internal metrics showed marked improvement. Anecdotally, customer feedback to me had improved and in particular, larger deployments on the Elite level plan raved about the attention and follow through.

 

All of that fell apart last week when SAP abruptly switched Business Objects customers to the SAP support site. Customers were supposed to get new logon IDs, but many didn’t and still haven’t. Critical cases that were opened before the switch are currently missing from the SAP support system, and the Business Objects support system is no longer accessible to customers. Business Objects support engineers, meanwhile, are telling customers they will suspend critical cases that haven’t been updated. Duh. How can customers update them without access to either the old or new system?

 

This blunder is beyond comprehension and smacks of both poor planning and inadequate testing.

 

The issues will no doubt eventually get fixed, but it does not bode well for the quality of support either continuing to improve or being any better under SAP’s direction. My recommendation to existing customers – other than patience – is to test your new logon ID when received and escalate issues rapidly and loudly. For prospects, remember to evaluate support as part of your selection process.

 

 

Cindi Howson, Founder, BIScorecard

Author: Successful Business Intelligence: Secrets to Making BI a Killer App

Author: Business Objects XI (R2): The Complete Reference

New Tools, New Rules

BIScorecard just posted an evaluation of QlikTech’s QlikView, and I confess, this review has befuddled me more than others.

 

The challenge with new and emerging technologies is in trying to figure out where they fit and whether or not they really are that different. So I find myself thinking about cars and bikes and QlikTech.

 

When cars first came on the scene, bike enthusiasts were disgusted with those smoke- spewing machines that suddenly stopped working when cars ran out of gas (interesting that bikes are making a comeback in some cities). Sometimes innovations call for new evaluation criteria – with bikes and cars, features like pedals and gears simply don’t translate against miles per gallon. So does “in-memory” BI make criteria like SQL-generation less relevant? Why do you need a data warehouse at all if you can load a full Terabyte of data in-memory?

 

In talking with QlikTech customers, all enthusiastically declare they have waited years for this level of empowerment from either their central IT group or from other BI tools they’ve tried. Some of their comments are similar to those of Excel users who later (and still) suffer the consequences of spreadmart chaos. Other comments are reminiscent of early MOLAP (Oracle Hyperion Essbase, IBM Cognos PowerPlay, Microsoft Analysis Services) tool users who could build interactive data marts without IT’s involvement.

 

So is QlikView really all that different or is it just a re-incarnation of personal and departmental analysis tools? I think the answer lies somewhere in the middle. Their best “feature” is the rapid implementation time, without as much data chaos as spreadsheets and with more flexibility than traditional MOLAP tools. Sometimes speed-to-insight trumps a perfectly architected data warehouse and broad BI solution.

 

By the way, QlikView is not the only product that does not neatly compare to a single module within a BI platform. Tools like TIBCO Spotfire and Business Objects’ recently released Polestar face similar challenges with product positioning. Even advanced visualization tools such as Tableau, Advizor Solutions, and Corda sometimes struggle with articulating where they fit in the BI spectrum.

  

I welcome your thoughts about these products and how they fit into your total BI strategy.

 

Regards,

Cindi Howson

 

 

Cognos gets "Flashier"

Close to 4000 customers and partners convened in Las Vegas last week for the annual Cognos Forum, making it Cognos’ largest conference ever.

While some time was given to synergies with IBM’s product line, more air time was devoted to what’s new in Cognos 8.3, the performance management products, and previews of what’s coming. (Oh, and remember my disbelief in an earlier blog of both Cognos and Business Objects being shrink wrapped with DB2? Well, apparently the disbelief was warranted as the Business Objects OEM never materialized.)

In terms of cool factor, a future interactive viewer capability was the flashiest--literally, as it leverages Adobe Flash to provide this appealing interface. Cognos is not the first BI vendor to leverage Flash, and lack of interactivity has been a competitive weakness.

Where Cognos has been able to edge ahead of the competition has been in the integration of BI with performance management. Because the acquisitions by competitors SAP/Business Objects and Oracle/Hyperion both introduced overlapping products, Cognos can now correctly argue that its integration between BI and performance management is one of the deepest.

However, just how important the convergence of BI and Performance Management is continues to be debatable. While at the TDWI conference earlier in the week, nobody in the Evaluating BI Tools course reported they were simultaneously evaluating performance management solutions. This is despite the CFO being the executive level sponsor for a number of the attendee’s BI initiative. Even the survey in the Successful BI book showed 17% pursuing joint projects. Why is this? Are the vendor strategies still so far ahead of customer realities? Or is it perhaps that it’s as Seth Grimes would say, a type of “selection bias:” you need BI to do performance management, but you don’t necessarily need scorecards and planning tools to do business intelligence?

Regards,

Cindi Howson

Founder, BIScorecard

BI Goes Green(er)!

While many tout BI as a way of boosting profits, BI is increasingly going green as a way to promote sustainability and good corporate citizenship.

Under full disclosure here, I am thrilled that green is gaining ground! I am green, very green. Admittedly, I was not always so passionate about these topics. However, living in Switzerland for eight years forever changed my view of garbage. Indeed the Swiss have “garbage” police who will check your trash to ensure you are recycling and fine you if you’re not recycling (I wish they’d visit NJ for a week!). As trash bags are expensive ($10 a bag, if I recall correctly), manufacturers package their consumer products frugally. You can buy milk and fabric softener in something like a ziploc bag, which creates less trash than big plastic cartons. For companies who don’t package their goods so wisely, shoppers unwrap things at the supermarket and let the store deal with the unwanted packaging.

There have been glimpses of a few BI vendors going green for several years now. Three years ago, Hyperion began offering employees a $5000 discount to buy fuel-efficient cars. While Oracle did not continue that program post acquisition, it has been recognized for some of its environmental efforts.

This past fall, at the Business Objects user conference, citing its vision to raise awareness of green issues, the vendor distributed refillable water bottles to attendees instead of the disposable ones usually provided during conference breaks.

(What a novel idea! I so much liked this idea that it inspired me to give family members these cool SIGG water bottles for Christmas, complete with an explanation of how we toss 38 billion empty bottles in the trash each year, not to mention the 462 million gallons of oil to ship the bottles).

That some BI vendors are trying to be good corporate citizens is one way to measure a vendor’s greenness. However, an emerging and more profound aspect is in how BI software can be used to implement and monitor sustainability efforts.

Prima Consulting in Australia is one of the first BI companies I’ve stumbled across to offer an ERP-agnostic scorecard to help customers manage their CO₂ emissions. Their solution, Sustainability SCO₂RECARD was released late last year and is built on Microsoft PerformancePoint and Microsoft BI. They initially developed the application to help Australian companies meet legislative requirements to reduce green house gas emissions, but customers are finding that reducing energy costs and eliminating waste can also improve profitability.

This week, SAS announced a new application, SAS for Sustainability Management. It uses the BI platform and performance management applications to provide companies with a way of measuring sustainability goals and performance against them. Leveraging the vendor’s predictive analytic capabilities, customers can also model changes in energy consumption or emissions to see how it affects sustainability goals. As a green BI vendor, SAS has been considering building a solar energy farms at its headquarters.

The green influence on BI is still in its early days with most of the activity seemingly focused on reducing data center energy consumption. As you partner with a BI vendor, consider how good a corporate citizen they are and whether they are providing solutions to help you with your company’s own efforts to go green.

As a way of raising everyone's awareness on the facets of green BI, I also encourage vendors to list their green policies and BI applications here.

Regards,

Cindi

Founder, BIScorecard, a web-site for in-depth BI product reviews

Author: Successful Business Intelligence: Secrets to Making BI a Killer App

Is BI a Commodity

I was recently at a SAS event in which Jim Davis, their Chief Marketing Officer, described the commoditization of BI. He described their sales efforts for these applications as low and the price sensitivity as high.

I gasped (silently of course), thinking of the many customers I speak to and work with who spend months evaluating software, sending vendors painfully detailed RFIs, and diligently conducting proof of concepts. Some of these customers already own BI tools or will evaluate tools despite what’s being offered to them for free.

So at first I thought SAS’ comments were in isolation and only relative to their efforts to sell analytic applications (which do command a higher price and take more sales efforts.) But then I saw another reference to commoditization of BI in a CIO magazine. And someone referred to this commoditization as a fact at a seminar I recently taught.

Is my head in the sand here? Or are forces at work to give buyers the wrong impression?

A commodity is anything for which there is supply but without much differentiation. Without a differentiation, vendors are forced to compete mainly on price, putting pressure on margins.

So is that where we are today?

In terms of differentiation, the strategies that several vendors are pursuing are quite similar. Several are pursuing end-to-end BI from ERP to ETL to BI tools, analytic applications, and performance management. Note though, that IBM/Cognos doesn’t compete in the ERP space. SAP/Business Objects doesn’t compete in the RDBMS space. Some vendors such as SAS, MicroStrategy, Information Builders, and Qliktech take a more narrow focus of BI. So there are strategic differences.

In terms of product capabilities for BI tools, on the surface all of the vendors now offer a broad spectrum of solutions that include reporting, business query, OLAP, Office integration, and dashboards. Several years ago, vendors competed in only a single segment of the BI spectrum, so indeed, on the surface, the spectrum of offerings seems similar. But this is where the difference ends. None of the vendors are great at all these modules. Instead, they continue to have their strengths and weaknesses in specific modules. Add emerging capabilities such as BI search, mobile BI, rich reportlets, as well as integration with advanced visualization and predictive analytics and the products differ still more.

Price is a slightly different story. Operating margins have declined somewhat in recent years, but not drastically. Microsoft’s increased presence in the BI market helps drive prices downward. Software heavy weights Oracle, SAP, and IBM may further affect BI pricing as these vendors can more readily bundle BI with bigger ticket items, whether the operational apps or the database, but that’s not yet happening. BI needs to become more affordable for it to become more pervasive. Vendors, however, are not yet competing on price alone as they would with something that has been commoditized. Customers continue to be willing to pay a premium for better or unique product capabilities.

So where is this commoditization perception coming from? Perhaps it’s a prediction for the future. Or perhaps some vendors want you to think BI is commodity so you’ll buy from whoever already has a foothold in your company.

I’d welcome your comments on how important price has been in your BI buying … and how well you think the vendors are articulating their differentiators.

Sincerely,

Cindi Howson, Founder,

BIScorecard, a web-site for in-depth BI product reviews

Author: Successful Business Intelligence: Secrets to Making BI a Killer App

Crystal Shines ... For Some

Last November, Business Objects officially released Crystal Reports 2008. To date, it’s been the product’s flashiest release in recent years … and I do mean that literally--one of the most noteworthy enhancements is the ability to embed Flash files within a report. The use of Flash brings reports to life in a way that make them more like mini applications – rich, interactive, and visually appealing. The Flash files can be built in a report developer’s tool of choice, but the tightest integration is with the company’s dashboard product Xcelsius.

The other enhancement is the ability to view reports over the Web and interactively sort and filter the data cached within the report. The parameters refresh the display without re-executing a query and thus straining the database, a weakness in some competitive products and in earlier versions of Crystal Reports.

There is the inevitable ‘BUT’ and that is in the product’s timing and dependencies. In order for enterprise customers to take advantage of the best features in Crystal Reports 2008, they need to be on XI 3.0, due out this quarter. In some realms, a five month lag in platform support may not be considered long. My complaint is that this dependency was not clearly communicated in any of the product launches, so it seems to me a case of the vendor building demand in a way that IT can’t deliver on. (Note: these same dependency issues exist in the Edge Series for medium-sized businesses and in on-demand offerings, Crystal Reports.com. Support for these platforms will be added at some point later in the year). Upgrading any server environment will take customers months longer than when XI 3.0 actually ships and is an altogether different scenario than simply upgrading a report developer’s software. Business Objects says that the majority of the Crystal Reports user base are individual developers, not enterprise customers, and to be fair, developers could build a custom Web app to take advantage of the new capabilities.

With the acquisition by SAP now complete, it comes as no surprise that Crystal Reports is positioned as the future of reporting (supplanting BEx Report Designer, released in mid 2006 as a replacement to the formerly OEMd Crystal Reports). Here’s the catch again: a trial version of Crystal Reports 2008 for SAP will only be available in the second half of 2008. Such report developers need to think carefully about whether they are better investing time and skills in BEx Report Designer or, I would suggest, investing in an earlier version of Crystal Reports.

No wonder it’s called eye-candy—for some, you can look but not eat it! For a detailed product review, see the updated evaluation on BIScorecard.

Cindi Howson, Founder, BIScorecard, a web-site for in-depth BI product reviews

Author: Successful Business Intelligence: Secrets to Making BI a Killer App

Author: Business Objects XI (R2): The Complete Reference

TDWI In Las Vegas - Bigger Than Ever

This week’s TDWI conference turned out to be one of the biggest, with over 1000 attendees and another 200 executives at the BI summit.

A highlight from the Executive Summit was hearing Michael Masciandaro, BI Director at Rohm and Haas, provide practical tips on where to start with BI. He presented all the lofty goals often discussed at this conference – great data quality, robust architecture – and advocated not to start there. Instead, start with something “embarrassingly small” with a subject area or application that has no competition.

The BI 2.0 discussion gave credibility to the importance of “eye candy” in making BI appealing and improving adoption among skeptical users.  The use of Flash in MicroStrategy Enterprise Dashboards and Crystal Reports 2008 seemed to dazzle IT and business executives alike.  Mark Madsen’s demonstration of mashups was nothing short of cool. He contrasted statically displayed crime data – the normal display for most police departments – with such data more effectively integrated with Google Maps. The town spent big bucks on the less usable display whereas the mashup was put together by a passionate programmer in his spare time.

At the “BI Bake Off” course, I was once again surprised at how many attendees are doing a first time BI suite selection, roughly 40% of the 100 who took this course. Companies trying to rationalize the number of tools also take this course. Despite the reality of companies having multiple tools from multiple vendors, I was still staggered when a banking person revealed his institution had 23 different products (not multiple modules from 1 vendor, but products!).

A final question from an attendee to the vendor panel (Business Objects, Microsoft, Oracle) took me by surprise. “Given Cindi just told us where your products are weak and gave some red and yellow scores for each of you, what do you think your weak points really are?” There was a pregnant pause. I laughed, suggesting he would not get such an honest answer in a public forum. To my surprise, each vendor did respond, for the most part somewhat candidly (offline, I normally hear those red scores are ALL wrong J!). But of course, a recurring theme to the answers was “everything is fixed in the next release!”

So I leave Las Vegas , with my now smoke-scented clothes (hey, if Paris can ban smoking, why not Las Vegas ?!?!), thinking BI is not at all a mature market. Innovation continues to come from vendors big and small, and if conference attendance is any indication, the BI market remains strong.

Regards,

Cindi

Big Blue's BI in a Box

With IBM’s acquisition of Cognos completed last week, the merged companies were quick to tout their joint product offerings and future plans.

Given IBM’s role as both a data warehouse platform and a services power house, the acquisition clearly impacts existing partnerships in which IBM moves from partner to competitor. The question in this new landscape: who wins, who loses?

Prior to its Cognos acquisition, IBM was a relatively BI-agnostic vendor, unlike other data warehouse platform vendors Oracle and Microsoft who offer their own BI platforms.  However, late last year, IBM signed an OEM agreement with Business Objects to provide a BusinessObjects XI starter edition as part of its DB2 Warehouse. As well, as part of its iSeries platform, positioned for medium-sized businesses, IBM began reselling Information Builders WebFOCUS.

Today, IBM officials announced several new product bundles in which Cognos BI will now be bundled with IBM’s InfoSphere Warehouse; customers who buy Cognos BI will also get limited license of InfoSphere Warehouse.

What does this mean for the Business Objects and Information Builders OEM deals? Nothing, say IBM officials. IBM will continue to provide whatever customers want and as a services company, they pride themselves in supporting heterogeneous environments. Sounds good in theory, but is that pie-in-the-sky optimism or will these OEMs die a slow death?

Here’s why I think these relationships will remain solid in the near term:

- As for the Information Builders deal, WebFOCUS runs natively on the iSeries, and Cognos 8 does not, at least not today.

- In terms of market share, DB2 as a data warehouse platform is a close second to Oracle (according to IDC). Microsoft remains third but is growing significantly faster, and its bundling and enhanced BI tools have accelerated that growth. Bundling both BusinessObjects XI and Cognos 8 with new DB2 Warehouse sales seems like a brilliant way to seed the market. Organizationally, BI or Cognos remains a segment separate from Data Management (although both are under the Information Management umbrella).

- Lastly, the services business accounts for more than half of IBM’s total revenues ($48.3 of $91.4 billion in 2006). Unless services people start getting compensated for pushing one product over another, no way would IBM jeopardize this high-margin segment.

Of course, with any “limited” license OEM, customers should also understand what’s been scaled down – is it only the number of users who specific product capabilities? Meanwhile, I just can’t wait to see big blue’s new BI in a box, with both the Cognos 8 and BusinessObjects XI CDs jointly shrink wrapped. What a novel birthday present that would be!

Regards,

Cindi

Cognos 8.3 - the Good, the Bad, the Reality

Last week Cognos announced the release of Cognos 8.3, its flagship business intelligence platform.

The latest release includes a number of improvements both for end users and administrators. Although it is a point release, I’d venture to say it’s the biggest since Cognos 8 first shipped in November 2005.

The new Personal Alerts has the best work flow I’ve seen for such business alerts. The Express Authoring mode is intended to better meet the needs of power users, a user segment in which the current Report Studio is too complex and Query Studio too basic. While this mode is a step in the right direction, lack of charting abilities and limitations in types of data sources (they must be dimensionally modeled) seem to introduce other holes that will force some users to revert to Report Studio.

Administrative features rarely generate as much excitement as the end user modules, but here, Cognos has made great strides. Initially in Cognos 8, administrators had no way of seeing which users had open sessions. As many BI customers move from departmental BI to enterprise, such administrative features are a must-have and that several leading BI products lack. Cognos 8.3 fills this gap, also allowing administrators to reprioritize sessions or interrupt them. The new Upgrade Manager is also something anyone migrating from ReportNet or earlier 8.x versions to the latest release will welcome, as a way of regression testing reports.

On that note, though, the reality is that customer adoption of the Series 8 product line has been surprisingly low. Cognos estimates that about 10% of its customers have migrated, whereas an additional 20 to 25% plan to deploy new applications with Cognos 8. In some respects, Cognos has made it easy for customers to stay with Impromptu and PowerPlay (Series 7 products) with the promise of continued enhancements. I can’t help but wonder if IBM will maintain that same commitment. While maintenance of legacy products might be good for customer loyalty, there is little catalyst for customers to switch to a platform, even though there are significant innovations and an integrated platform provides a lower cost of ownership over Series 7. A double whammy is that the migration tools to get from Series 7 to Cognos 8 have been rather lack luster (Upgrade Manager is for Series 8.x to 8.3 only).

In this regard, while the 8.3 improvements help strengthen Cognos competitive position for new BI customers, existing customers seem slow to embrace them. I’d welcome your thoughts on why this adoption has been relatively slow.

For a more detailed review of the product’s strengths and weaknesses, see the latest BIScorecard® Cognos Overview report.

Regards,

Cindi