BI Scorecard Blog

Top BI Trends for 2012 and a Look Back at 2011

Happy New Year! I think I am allowed to still say that until the end of January, right?

When we set new year’s resolutions in our house, we tend to tweak the list for a few weeks (figuring out what’s more wishful thinking versus realistically achievable) and then up they go, taped to the kitchen cupboard, over last year’s lists. It’s always a chuckle, sometimes an inspiration, to compare last year’s list with this year’s. So with that philosophy in mind, here is a look at the top BI trends from 2011 and what’s in store for 2012.

In-Memory

In-memory continued to take center stage in 2011, with its ability to provide speed-of-thought analysis, analytic power,on increasing amounts of data. SAP’s in-memory appliance, HANA, became generally available in June.  Oracle later announced its own in-memory appliance, Exalytics at its Oracle Open World conference in October. The appliance combines capabilities from in-memory database TimesTen with new visual discovery capabilities. It was expected to be generally available by year end, but it’s still not generally available, and Oracle has yet to provide an update on release plans. IBM Cognos released its dynamic query mode or in-memory for relational databases in fall 2011. SAS has also begun supporting in-memory as part of its industry solutions.

In the year ahead, large enterprises may gradually adopt these high-end appliances, but the majority of customers will continue to embrace more nimble in-memory solutions from vendors such as QlikTech, Microsoft (Power Pivot), and Tableau or software-only solutions such as the approach MicroStrategy and IBM Cognos uses.  In 2012, look for Microsoft to release a new version of PowerPivot with better security and support for hierarchies, capabilities lacking in the current release.

Visual Discovery

Visual discovery and in-memory are not synonymous, despite some industry confusion and that many visual discovery tools have an in-memory engine. In 2011, MicroStrategy entered this market with its Visual Insight product.  Both QlikTech and TIBCO Spotfire released new versions of their products toward the end of 2011 with slightly different areas of focus. QlikView touted collaboration and comparative analysis, while Spotfire’s latest release simplifies dashboard design, as well as improved collaboration.  

Visual discovery will be a busy segment in 2012. Tableau 7 was released this week, bringing improvements in visualizations as well as enterprise deployability. SAS (Visual Analytics Explorer), IBM Cognos, Oracle (Exalytics), and Microsoft (Crescent) have all been previewing visual discovery features to come in 2012. With BI platform vendors releasing capabilities and in some instances, bundling those capabilities in existing licenses, customers will continue to wrestle with the distinct benefits this new breed of tool provides. Customers will have to more finely assess what their requirements are and which product is most suitable—is it data mart, visual appeal, self-service with no IT involvement, or rapid time to value?

Big Data

Both in-memory and visual discovery have a role to play with big data. So too do data warehouse appliances, columnar databases, and of course, broader support for BoSQL databases such as Hadoop and Cassandra.  2011 was another busy year for acquisitions with HP acquiring Vertica (Q2 2011) and  Teradata acquiring Aster Data (Q2 2011) No doubt, some of the 2011 acquisitions were driven by 2010 moves of  IBM acquiring Netezza , and EMC acquiring Greenplum.  A number of BI tool vendors are adding support for Hadoop, including Pentaho 4, Jaspersoft 4.5, and Tableau 7 due out any day.  In addition, a new category of BI tools specifically for Hadoop seems to be emerging with start ups such as Datameer and Karmasphere. Splunk, which  helps companies collect and analyze machine-generated data, has made a number of executive appointments fueling speculation of an IPO in 2012. Along these lines, SAP BusinessObjects Event Insight was released in 2011, bringing real-time data feeds to the BI platform.

In the year ahead, expect the leading BI vendors to continue to add support for NoSQL databases. Don’t look for a silver bullet or a single approach in addressing your big data needs.

Mobile BI

All BI vendors are touting mobile BI as the next big wave. But they continue to argue about development approaches, which content on which device, and of course, where to place bets on market share. Both Apple and Android devices have steadily eroded BlackBerry’s dominance in corporations. In 2011, the much anticipated BlackBerry playbook was largely a failure, and service interruptions worsened BlackBerry’s decline. Meanwhile, some customers are still saying “who cares about Mobile BI,” failing to see value beyond executive eye-candy.

Expect the confusion and skepticism to continue in 2012. Mobile BI capabilities will continue to improve, with more BI vendors adapting their apps so that tablets support offline or airline mode, better security, and better performance. Vendors who take a Webapp only approach today will revisit this to provide customers with a better mobile experience. The waning of unlimited data plans will raise the issue of better device-based caching. BlackBerry faces an even tougher 2012. Who can rescue them?  Which BI vendor will be the first to stop developing on that platform?  I can’t help but wonder if 2012 will be the year for BlackBerry to get acquired or die a slow death. I will miss my keyboard. And will Microsoft finally make an appearance in this market?

Cloud BI

So many headlines are touting cloud as a way of reducing hardware costs and providing elasticity during peak computing times. For SMBs, cloud BI in particular provides the promise of an easier implementation time, without the worry of having to first establish a BI infrastructure. To be sure, cloud computing in general has gained acceptance with certain functional areas. Think payroll or HR or CRM with SalesForce.com. But in BI, it’s a different story. Customers are still anxious about letting go of their data. Historically, there has been trade-offs too in functionality of cloud-based BI solutions. Vendors that allow customers to leave data on premise while surfacing dashboards and reports in the cloud might be striking the right balance. Such has been the approach of Birst. In 2011, we also saw MicroStrategy enter the cloud arena. MicroSoft Azure gained momentum as a full service cloud platform, that includes BI capabilities as well as a marketplace of third-party data.SAP announced stepped up initiatives in this area, partnering with Google and now embedding HANA in the SAP BusinessObjects BI onDemand solution. YellowFin, a start up in Australia touts a mutli-tenant architecture ideal for SaaS OEM vendors. Domo (previously known as Corda) is retrenching to be more SaaS focused. Other SaaS vendors such as PivotLink and Indicee continued to gain customers.

So in 2012, the discussion will shift from “cloud versus on-premise” to “what to put in the cloud.” BI products that are mutli-tenant will have a leg up for enterprise customers who want a combination of approaches and for SMB customers who want to go fully to a cloud solution.

Social, Collaborative BI

Social media continues to be the new software and marketing battle ground. Google launched Google+ as an alternative to Facebook, hitting 50 million users within three months. Facebook has exceeded 800 million users, and even the Republican Presidential debates are now intertwined with Facebook. So what does this have to do with BI? As a way of working, user driven content without IT as the gatekeeper is increasingly assumed. Collaboration capabilities continue to cross into BI, but ahead of customer demand. Lyzasoft, one of the specialty vendors in the space, had a major new product release but is still trying to find its footing. Meanwhile, QlikTech, TIBCO Spotfire, and Panorama released new versions with collaborative capabilities. Information Builders added support for SalesForce Chatter and SAP StreamWork.

So vendors are innovating, but are customers adopting? There is no doubt that Microsoft SharePoint 2010 has been a successful portal product. But try to find customers who are using the collaborative capabilities around BI and decision making (if you are out there, please contact me or post a comment here). Ditto for Cognos 10 and the Lotus Connect integration as well as OBI EE Web Center.

In 2012, a few early adopters will be the ones to reap the benefits of collaborative BI both within corporate boundaries and beyond. Already there have been some compelling case studies particularly in healthcare  on how collaboration has saved companies millions, while also improving care. In terms of product highlights, look for SAP Streamwork and SAP BusinessObjects to be better integrated in their feature pack 3 release, due in the first half of 2012.

BI Beyond the Technology

Vendors can innovate, but of course it takes more than software for BI to be successful. Already with the economy limping to recovery, BI talent is tight. As pent-up demand for BI spending is released, expect this problem to be exacerbated. Companies would be wise to invest in developing BI expertise internally as it will be hard to recruit talent. Universities need to continue to expand their programs in creating data analysts.

While the BI market is poised for a banner year in 2012, it’s the European economy and the instability in the Middle East that might disrupt more than just BI.

So how did we do in predicting last year’s BI themes? Dashboards did indeed become mainstream, but not yet visual discovery tools. The rest of my predictions seem to have been on the money, although big data and cloud were more high profile than I predicted. If only my New Year’s resolutions were equally good! Yoga once a month was more like once a quarter (as I wrote the same in 2012, forgot that was even a 2011 resolution). And after three years of the same resolution "to curse less" with little success, I have now abandoned even trying, which my children (now full-fledged teenagers) find funny.

Happy New Year,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

SAP Commits To Cloud, Beefs Up Mobile And In-Memory Options

At SAP’s seventh annual influencer summit in Boston last week, Co-CEO Jim Hagemann-Snabe highlighted four areas of SAP innovation: core, mobile, cloud, and in-memory. Interesting to me is that SAP now considers the core to include business intelligence (or to use SAP’s umbrella term, business analytics) as well as its well-established business applications.

Mobile, cloud, and in-memory also cut across both BI and SAP’s business applications.  In mobile, SAP currently has a number of first-mover and competitive advantages. Sybase Unwired gives them a development platform as well as device management. SAP now has 30+ mobile applications. However, in the BI space, its solutions are mixed (check out BI Scorecard's  latest summary scorecard here to see how they stack up), depending on the device and the BI content. For example, mobile interfaces vary depending on whether they're from the SAP BusinessObjects 4.0 WebIntelligence, Crystal, Explorer, Dashboards.  Look for this to improve in 2012 (with more detail in this article about what's ahead in SAP BusinessObjects Feature Pack 3).

For cloud, SAP BusinessObjects was one of the first BI platform vendors to have an on-demand strategy. Day two of this summit was largely focused on cloud computing, with SAP emphasizing existing and new cloud applications, including  Sales OnDemand, Sourcing OnDemand , Travel OnDemand and so on.  The  pending acquisition of SuccessFactors will position SAP as the numbertwo SaaS vendor in revenue after SalesForce.com. SuccessFactors provides employee performance management capabilities in the cloud, with 15 million users and a 70% growth rate.

All of this shows SAP is committed to the cloud, but here, BI was like a forgotten step-child. One exec said, “except for Business ByDesign, we didn’t have cloud solutions to sell until this year.” Maybe he misspoke, but it reinforced my perception that BI OnDemand has been more of a check-box than a fully supported BI cloud strategy. In yet another show of stepped-up commitment to cloud, Google announced it will integrate Google Apps with SAP Business ByDesign, the company’s cloud-based business applications suite.

Meanwhile, there is little doubt about SAP’s commitment to in-memory with its Hana technology expected to power not just BI but also business applications. SAP’s vision for in-memory and Hana is to redefine real time. Snabe declared in-memory as the next-generation architecture. He took a subtle dig at Oracle’s (not explicitly naming the vendor) use of "hybrid" technology (relational plus in-memory) in Exalytics, saying hybrids don’t last. 

The benefits of in-memory in terms of real-time, analytic complexity, and performance were backed up by a number of customer testimonials. However, we have to remember that the number of live deployments are probably in the low hundreds. I suspect this is both because of the newness of the product (GA’d in June this year), but also the steep cost for customer to acquire. SAP claims lower long-term ownership costs compared to traditional BW and relational deployments but upfront expenses can be an obstacle. SAP needs to figure out how to bring in-memory to customers with lower budgets. This may be where Hana in the cloud has a role to play or competitors such as QlikTech will continue to expand. Hana will also be the database powering BI On Demand.

One of the most interesting announcements in this area was planned support by third-party vendors including  Tableau and Tibco Spotfire. Tableau has long had a philosophy and architecture of not requiring customers to replicate data into their in-memory engine (an option added in 2010 through Tableau Version 6). So support for SAP’s HANA makes sense. It’s a notable contrast to Oracle, which discontinued its OEM relationship with Tableau earlier this year.  You can preview a demo of Tableau running on  Hana here. Spotfire, in contrast, has typically had an extract-and-load-into-memory approach (with  a drill on demand option), so I will be curious to see how this is implemented. Neither solution is, as of yet, generally available.

Customer FreshDirect provided an interesting view of their journey to self-service BI. They are using SAP's newly released Event Insight to track on-time delivery during the day. Unexpected events like Obama coming to town can certainly disrupt their deliveries throughout New York City. Event Insight alerts them to issues and enables them to quickly add reserve trucks to routes when delays pop up.

FreshDirect routinely monitors BI usage and if someone is not frequently using their license, it gets taken away and allocated to another user. Users author their own reports on everything from delivery performance to number of parking tickets. “If you don’t have access to analytics, you’re going to get squashed by your competition, ” says Brandon Arbiter, FreshDirect's manager of business intelligence.

It was a big picture kind of summit, so I had to reflect on where SAP has been in BI and where it’s going. Executive VP of Business Analytics Sanjay Poonen committed to being best of breed in BI. I couldn’t help recall SAP’s stance prior to the BusinessObjects acquisition, striving only to be "good enough." It’s better for customers and the industry that they are now pursuing excellence.

Sincerely,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

 

Impactful BI Remains Elusive for Many

Business intelligence is mission critical for most businesses. In a difficult economy and competitive business environment, it's survival of the smartest, often powered by BI. Demand for BI experts and software shows robust growth. Despite these positive signs, BI adoption has been flat, and most companies never tap the full potential of BI.

According to our just published 2011 Successful BI Survey, only a small minority are very successful (26%) with significant business impact (34%). The majority of BI projects though are stuck in the middle, not quite realizing the vision of improved revenues, exceptional customer service, and increased operating efficiency, all supported by business intelligence.

On the bright side, success rates and impact have improved versus the last time we ran the survey in 2009. If I look at the challenges, though, adoption has been stubbornly flat at 25% of employees. On average, customers say BI usage should be roughly double this rate. This suggests that many who would benefit from BI don’t have access, either for budget reasons, reliance on gut feel decision-making, or static spreadmarts. I thought for sure 2011 would be the break out year for pervasive BI, in part driven by more engaging, easier to use tools, lower costs, easier deployments, and of course, the iPad. I was wrong. Should I hold my breath for next year?

More successful companies do report higher BI adoption rates, so maybe adoption is a lagging indicator. Companies continue to cite untapped potential, and BI spending shows signs of improvement. But one of the biggest challenges is in constrained resources. There is more demand for BI than IT can keep pace, yet IT is slow to transition to the role of enabler versus gatekeeper. In some cases, it’s the business people who would rather fall back on the ease of a prebuilt report, ideally landing on their desk or email inbox. Old habits die slowly. Companies that have given business users a bigger role in BI, more aligned with the goals of the business, have a higher rate of BI contributing to business performance.

Of the myriad of BI tool modules that help provide self service BI, dashboards have shown the most rapid adoption, now ranked second (business query is ranked first) for the most successfully deployed BI module.

When we first starting surveying companies on how they manage their BI tool portfolio, only a few had a predominant BI standard. Today a full 69% of companies have BI standards, either across the enterprise (54%) or by department or line of business (15%). Standardization, though, should never be viewed as a one-size-fits all approach to BI. It’s about managing those investments to lower support costs and keep people focused on deriving insights via BI, not the fancy bells and whistles of BI.  A sizeable portion of customers plan to increase their spending with current BI standard vendors, and a majority plan to increase the number of users.  However, this year’s survey shows shifts in vendor’s customers prefer to standardize on. The survey results also dispel the notion that up and coming vendors like Tableau and QlikTech are only for SMBs or departments.

As with previous years’ surveys, this survey is not sponsored by vendors so we can ask detailed questions on tool usage and satisfaction with full objectivity. This year’s survey had over 600 respondents. The table of contents and executive summary can be previewed here.

Regards,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

 

Tableau Launches Version 7, Challenges Old School BI

Tableau rocked Las Vegas last week at its annual user conference, with over 1400 attending. This double the number attending the prior year, a reflection of the company’s rapid growth and enthusiasm for its “rapid-fire analytics.”

CEO and co-founder Christian Chabot kicked off the conference with a keynote that both inspired attendees and summarily bashed traditional BI.  He described the predominant form of business intelligence as “heavy, complicated, inflexible, slow moving, expensive. Data could be saving the day but it isn’t.” He challenged companies to free themselves of the “shackles of old school BI and to seize the opportunity to bring data out of the dark cellar to improve people’s lives.”

I had to chuckle at such boldly leveled criticism. Sometimes BI is complicated because the data is such a mess. That’s not the fault of the BI platform vendors, and it’s a problem that can plague a Tableau implementation as well. But part of Tableau’s appeal and reason for exceptional growth is both the ease in which it can be deployed, but also, the rapid time to build visualizations and dashboards with little to no training and no assistance from IT. Tableau does make BI beautiful and fun, no doubt influenced in part by chief scientist and co-founder Pat Hanrahan, an early employee at Pixar with Steve Jobs.

If you’ve read my book Successful Business Intelligence: Secrets to Making BI a Killer App or heard me speak on themes from it, then you know that I too have said BI can make the world a better place. So I was most inspired by Chabot’s discussion of how Seattle Children’s Hospital is using Tableau to improve care and reduce costs.  Seeing a picture of Chabot in the operating room reflected this CEO’s desire to understand first hand where Tableau is making a difference. You can listen to their story here. In talking to Seattle Children's, I also liked that the Tableau evangelist, a business person, also insisted that the IT people tour the operating room so they could better understand the impact the dashboards were having. It would have been better, of course, if the IT people asked for the tour themselves, but maybe that kind of initiative from IT is still too much wishful thinking on my part.

A key theme to the conference was Tableau 7, now in beta and expected to become generally available within 90 days. Reflecting a culture that cares about its employees, Tableau flew all its 300 plus employees to Las Vegas so they too could learn from customers. Seven engineers, dubbed the magnificent seven, took to the main stage to share highlights of the next release. I can’t think of another  conference that so bravely put the brains behind the products in a keynote rather than a manager or marketing VP. It could have been a flop, but these people were amusing, smart, and above all, passionate about their work. Software engineer Iain Heath showed the improved mapping feature in Tableau that can interpret inconsistent country names. In looking at something labeled, “Britain,” he quipped, “is Britain no longer Great?” (I am married to an Englishman, in case you didn’t know.)

One of the biggest improvements in version 7 is the ability to centrally share the Tableau Data Engine while allowing multiple worksheets, created by multiple authors to leverage it. In the past, data and presentation were more tightly tied together. This new approach allows the engine to act as a kind of data mart. It also allows an author to create and share the meta data layer, with or without storing the data. This will be an important differentiator versus QlikTech.

In launching Tableau 7, a fun theme of the conference party was the Seven Wonders of the World. Can you name them (skip to the end to see the answers)? I liked the wine tasting in Italy, but rushed through the cigar smoke in Brazil. Kudos to the designer of the "Seven Wonders Passport," one of those many loyal employees I got to meet.

This was the first Tableau conference I had ever attended, even though I’ve been evaluating Tableau since 2007. The energy and focus reminded me of BI conferences before all the industry consolidation. I look forward to putting the new release through its paces!

Regards,

Cindi Howson, www.BIScorecard.com

The Seven Wonders of the World (in no particular order)

Great Wall of China

Petra in Jordan

Christ the Redeemer in Brazil

Machu Picchu in Peru

Chichen Itza in Mexico

Colosseum in Italy

Taj Mahal in India

Oracle Buys Endeca: What Does It Mean for BI

Last week, Oracle announced its intent to buy privately held Endeca. The deal is expected to close by the end of the year. Financial details were not disclosed.

Endeca was founded in 1999 and is most known for its e-commerce business, providing faceted search to many storefronts.  Shopping for shirts? Enter “shirts” and get a list of possibilities that can be refined by brand, color, gender and so on. Faceted search provides the navigation and filtering; general search relies on simple key word matching, or in some cases, synonym translation.  Most of the company’s 600 customers and $100 million in revenues come from this side of the business.

However, we recently added Endeca to our “Noteworthy Vendors” in the BI Scorecard Strategic and Product Summary report for its extension into BI with the launch of the Latitude product in 2010. Latitude combines faceted search capabilities with dashboard delivery to bring both traditional data warehouse content together with textual or unstructured content. Indexes to multiple data sources are created in its own columnar database, the MDEX engine. Endeca Latitude is sometimes evaluated along with SAP BusinessObjects Explorer and QlikView because of their search paradigms, but it is unique in its ability to handle textual data. As an example, in the accompanying screen shot, a warranty dashboard provides an overview of claims for various car types. Analysis of textual data allows a wordle graphic to show that the majority of claims involve a “warning light.” Via the left pane, a user could search for data with those key words, or could use the faceted search to filter data by odometer reading, part number, or supplier.

In talking about the acquisition, Oracle VP Thomas Kurian said, “We see Endeca MDEX as a fantastic engine helping us in every segment we are in.”   Oracle expects Endeca to be a key part of its big data strategy, integrated with Oracle’s e-commerce applicaations, and integrated with OBI EE. Steve Papa, CEO of Endeca said “We will bring Endeca DNA into the Oracle organization. How far we can take it is only limited by our imagination.”

When I asked Kurian to comment on the potential overlap with Endeca given Latitude has its own front end, he presented three approaches that Oracle will support.

1. OBI EE with Answers as the front-end will support the MDEX engine as a data source.
2. A line of business could implement Latitude as an agile BI solution. This clearly has become a widening hole in Oracle’s BI approach as OBI EE has only gotten harder to implement with dependences on Oracle Fusion middleware and all data needs to be well-modeled up front.
3. The user interface could be built in Latitude and embedded in an OBI EE Answers report or dashboard. It’s this last use case that I think could converge overtime. While Oracle added some search capabilities in 11g last year (based on Oracle Enterprise Search), it is only on indexed keywords and is a separate installation. There is no faceted navigation that would be a good enhancement to OBI EE.

Kurian says the integration and assimiliation of Endeca would be a matter of months. That sounds overly optimistic, in my opinion, at least for the first and third use cases. But I am hoping Oracle will prove me wrong.

Purely coincidentally, you can learn more about Endeca and see it in action at my TDWI Cool BI course, November 1^st in Orlando, FL.

 Regards,

Cindi Howson, www.biscorecard.com

 

SAP BusinessObjects Previews Next BI Release at ASUG Conference

Many SAP BusinessObjects customers are still sizing up the 4.0 release of the vendor's business intelligence suite, just released last month. At last week's ASUG (Americas SAP User Group) conference in Florida, Steve Lucas, SAP's senior vice president and general manager business analytics, gave those customers more to think about, detailing a BI 4.0 Feature Pack 3 upgrade due out in the first half of 2012.

The biggest improvements in Feature Pack 3 (formerly known as 4.1) will include advances in mobile BI, analytic views, and collaborative BI by way of SAP's Streamwork tool. Here's a peek inside those expected upgrades along with a summary of the key new capabilities of last month's big 4.0 release.

• Mobility, mobility, mobility: With SAP's acquisition of Sybase, the vendor has access to technology that most other BI vendors lack. One of the biggest concerns with mobility is security. With Feature Pack 3, SAP BusinessObjects products will be prewired with Afaria, security controls from the Sybase Unwired platform that support mobile device management capabilities such as authentication and remote wipe. 

The feature pack will also bring significant improvement to the SAP BusinessObjects native iPad apps in terms of interactivity and user experience. However, looking at some of the offerings from partner vendors exhibiting at ASUG, the solutions from RoamBI, Antivia, and  Exxova were pretty compelling, and they are available today. Right now, SAP BusinessObjects' mobile story is a complicated puzzle depending on the device and content. Dashboards, for example, rely on Flash, which is not supported by Apple on the iPad. Content, security capabilities, and device support all seem to improve in the next release.

• Analytic Views: Analytics views are an extension of SAP BusinessObjects Explorer, the combination search and basic visual discovery tool. With analytic views, users can create individual visualizations and save them into a briefing book. Explorer will also be usable offline in the next release.
• Collaborative BI: SAP Streamwork is SAP's collaboration tool. Feature Pack 3 will provide better integration with BI content. While viewing a report, for example, someone can initiate a threaded discussion or action within Streamwork.

You can watch the keynotes here, after registering. The 4.0 release did get some attention during ASUG's keynotes and, certainly, in the track sessions. Herein lies the problem with a later-than-expected release: all the excitement around 4.0 was largely experienced around the launch last February. Lucas cited the product's ramp up as one of the most successful ever, with 400 live deployments and 4,000 downloads (though few customers with live 4.0 deployments presented at ASUG, so I'd love to hear from you!).

Given that 4.0 only reached general availability in September, many customers are still trying to understand this version. Do they now wait for Feature Pack 3 or immediately implement 4.0? SAP is recommending customers upgrade now, but in my opinion, they should decide their upgrade plan based on which functionality is most important. (see the SAP blog for release plan details). There are dozens of improvements in 4.0 but the biggest ones are:

• Multisource universes: An administrator can build a universe (the vendor's term for a data model) drawing on multiple relational data sources. This has been a big competitive weakness in SAP BusinessObjects when compared to Oracle, IBM Cognos, and MicroStrategy. I've tested this capability in 4.0 and feel that other products still seem to have a more robust approach. Nonetheless, this is still a big improvement for SAP BusinessObjects customers.
• Direct SAP BICS Connectivity: The 4.0 release lets SAP Business Warehouse (BW) customers access BEx queries directly via the BICS (Business Intelligence Consumer Services) layer, a proprietary communication interface for BW, using either Web Intelligence, Dashboard Designer, or Crystal Reports. Going through the BICS layer provides better performance than the APIs previously used. There had been talk of SAP BW being supported as a data source in the universe, but that does not appear to be the case. (I have received conflicting information from SAP on this point, so I'm awaiting clarification.)
• Dashboard Improvements: Xcelsius has been rebranded as Dashboards in 4.0. In earlier releases, designers had to use Live Office or Query as a Web Service to bring data into the design tool. Now designers can invoke the query panel directly from the dashboard designer, streamlining the data flows and design process. The vendor has made additional performance improvements as well, with a separate server process to cache results.

I have discussed other improvements in 4.0 in previous blogs or for BI Scorecard subscribers here.

Beyond the product roadmap, an ongoing discussion among BusinessObjects customers is the role of ASUG and regional user groups: should they join ASUG or not. ASUG was formed 20 years ago by SAP applications customers. When SAP acquired Business Objects, it also gained a number of self-running user groups. It seemed a natural evolution for those user groups to fold into ASUG. But the customer bases are different, and it's a tough sell for previously autonomous groups to now be told there is an additional layer of communication with the vendor. The idea behind ASUG is to bring influence in numbers--organized numbers--but also to provide content in the form of mentors, webinars, training, and knowledge bases.  

Some user groups have joined ASUG. Others have not. The idea of paying for membershipseems to go against the grain. Membership to ASUG for BusinessObjects customers is currently free, a temporary gesture that has been extended for another year. User groups worry that independent contractors and smaller companies will ultimately be disenfranchised when the fee waivers end. It was noteworthy that roughly 80% of the 1,200 attendees at this year's conference were not SAP customers before the acquisition, dispelling concerns that the ASUG group is only focused on SAP applications customers.

That ASUG even holds a BusinessObjects conference is a benefit to members and non members alike. While BI is a big part of SAP's Sapphire conference, it is but one of many tracks. Sapphire itself can be rather overwhelming, particularly for a customer who only buys BI from SAP.

One session that was packed at ASUG was a panel on using social media for influence and leadership, and that I was honored to participate on. BusinessObjects Board  Forum founder Dave Rathbun, SAP executive Timo Elliott, WNBA star and Olympiad Lisa Leslie, public relations expert Mary Erangey, and analyst Bruce Richardson were my fellow panelists. Everyone had some useful recommendations, and sometimes humorous experiences with Twitter and blogging.

Elliott suggested being quotable without "feeding the trolls." In other words, don't spew just the negative tweets that grab attention but not necessarily credibility or value. I liked Leslie's  advice to remember we are always a role model and that we wear multiple hats: she can just as soon chat up Charles Barclay as pep talk new moms.  

With that advice, I have added a new twitter handle. If you want to follow my BI tweets, follow me on @BIScorecard. If you are interested in juggling work and motherhood tweets (in a largely man's world!), follow @BI_Lady.

Regards,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

 

Oracle Announces Exalytics for In-Memory, Visual BI

At Oracle Open World this week, Oracle announced Exalytics, a new appliance that further boosts this vendor’s BI capabilities. The product is currently in beta and is expected to be generally available by the end of the year.

Exalytics is a combination hardware, software solution that brings in-memory and visual discovery into the OBI EE 11g product line. It is the latest addition to Oracle’s expanding engineered systems that includes Exadata for transaction processing and data warehouse and Exalogic for the middle tier application server. In previous blogs and product reviews, I’ve been critical of Oracle’s lack of innovation and lackluster commitment to in-memory. The Exalytics solution addresses both criticisms.

Oracle acquired TimesTen in 2005, an in-memory database used predominantly for transaction processing. Support for TimesTen as a data source was added to OBI EE 11g last August 2010, but Oracle gave the impression it was more check-mark to having in-memory for BI, not a deeper integration. Oracle argued that in-memory is not the only way to boost performance. There’s Exadata (for example)! It is true that for speed-of-thought analysis, there are multiple ways to achieve performance, and in-memory is just one approach. However, it’s an important one, both more flexible than say indexes and cheaper than SSD; with SAP releasing HANA (an in-memory appliance) and the rapid growth of vendors such as QlikTech and Tableau, Oracle has been lagging in this area.

With the Exalytics appliance, TimesTen has been enhanced for columnar compression, additional analytic functions such as WHEN, RANK, and tuned for analytic queries such as subqueries. There is a new adaptive in-memory cache and summary advisory to determine what should go in memory and what is better left on disk. An administrator can override the advisor’s selections. Both the business meta data layer from OBI EE as well as selected data sets are loaded into memory. Similar to HANA but in stark contrast to QlikTech, Exalytics can be queried with straight SQL. Another differentiator to Exalytics is that Essbase has also been optimized for in-memory, allowing for better performance in planning and forecasting applications. From a hardware point of view, the appliance has 1 TB of DRAM, running on four Intel Xeon E7-4800 processors.

In Oracle’s own testing, the vendor has cited 20 times faster performance than current OBI EE implementations. One beta customer cited 100 times better performance in some drill paths. One of the vendor’s smartest moves is ensuring that Exalytics complements rather than competes with Exadata. The Exalytics system plugs into Exadata via two InfiniBand ports. This approach also addresses customers concerns of what to do when all the data doesn’t fit into memory.

In addition to in-memory, the upcoming release includes visual discovery capabilities. Previously, Oracle OEM’d Tableau, an agreement established by Hyperion prior to that acquisition. The agreement was discontinued earlier this year.  Exalytics includes things like micro charts and trellis charts (also known as small multiples). There is a new “Presentation Suggestion Engine” that will also recommend a visualization based on the data, no doubt an idea taken from Tableau’s “Show Me” feature. All of this is a vast improvement for current customers and for the Oracle’s BI positioning.

However, based on an early demo of the controlled beta, I don’t think it’s a slam dunk to beat more nimble competitors. Slow them, perhaps. Beat them, I’m not convinced. The rise of visual discovery tools has as much to do with the visual appeal and rapid time to insight of the products as with their ease of deployment. While Exalytics may solve some issues with ease of deployment and performance tuning, the enterprise architecture of OBI EE and its dependence on Fusion middleware components makes it less attractive to lines of business and SMBs. As well, there are some things that competitive products do better, for example in Tableau and Tibco Spotfire, it’s the powerful auto filters and data brushing that Exalytics does not appear to address. In QlikTech, the set analysis and faceted search are better. (For more details and comparisons on how visual discovery vendors compare, refer to the recently updated BI Scorecard Product and Vendor Summary here.)

Further, it seems that the new visualization capabilities are tied to the Exalytics appliance. This can be a tough sell for customers who have already invested in OBI EE software and were not otherwise planning hardware expenses. While I understand that the interactive, visual experience would be less powerful if the environment were slow, I’d like to see Oracle offer some of the software improvements as part of the standard OBI EE upgrade. MicroStrategy, for example, recently released Visual Insight as part of its Report Service license, a module most customers have already invested in.

Beyond these criticisms, that Oracle is releasing a major new appliance, with powerful visual and in-memory capabilities only one year after OBI EE 11g was released, seems to show that Oracle is serious about in-memory and more capable of delivering BI innovation. I look forward to putting the new product to the test, and to hearing more about pricing and packaging.

Regards,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard 

MicroStrategy Offers Cloud BI

“Cloud” is on my mind, and not just because a hurricane might be hitting the North East coast for the first time in a hundred years.

Vendors big and small are trying to make “Cloud” a household world. For the most part, such hype seems to be falling flat. Microsoft’s commercials touting “To The Cloud” are generally met with puzzled looks by anyone outside of IT.  (As if moving to the cloud were the end game!) A survey by TDWI last year, found that only 9% of BI professionals were “very familiar” with Cloud BI. (Share your thoughts on Cloud BI in this survey.) If so few professionals understand the promises and the pitfalls of cloud BI, we have a long way to go before it becomes a commonly considered option in deploying BI.

Cloud BI is exciting for its promise of faster deployment, lower entry costs, and elastic scalability. To date, cloud BI efforts have blended purpose-built software with cloud infrastructure. Solutions like PivotLink, Birst, and Indicee all have their own application layers. Customers buy these solutions for both the  front-end capabilities and for their Software-as-a-Service approach. SAP BusinessObjects BI onDemand is a little bit different in that it supports sharing of documents created in Xcelsius and Crystal Reports, but is not as robust as the on-premise SAP BusinessObjects suite. Meanwhile, MicroStrategy Cloud promises to be as easy to get up and running as current SaaS offerings, but with all the BI robustness in its traditional on-premise solution.

In the BI world, one of the biggest pain points for companies just beginning to deliver BI is the initial deployment. For the most part, BI software is painful to install and configure. Configuring BI for thousands of users and for extranet deployments requires specialist skills that are not required on an ongoing basis. Expertise in designing data models and authoring reports and dashboards, on the other hand, are skills to invest in and needed on an ongoing basis. With a Cloud BI environment, the vendor provides the infrastructure and the software. Customers pay to use the service on a monthly or yearly basis. The work and expertise seems more smartly divided; but concerns about security, loss of control, and general lack of knowledge abound.

MicroStrategy has taken a different approach than current BI SaaS offerings on a number of points. First, it is using its own data centers, whereas SaaS BI startups tend to rely on the Amazon Cloud. MicroStrategy says for now it will own the infrastructure to be able to control performance.  The data centers are powered by Cisco, NetApp, and Dell hardware.  The vendor will invested $100 million in the data center infrastructure over the next three years. As MicroStrategy has long been known for its enterprise capabilities and data scalability, I can understand why the company wants to keep a tight rein on its Cloud offering. However, I question if managing data centers moves too far beyond the company’s core competency.

MicroStrategy also is blending its cloud approach allowing customers either to keep their data on-premise (and use the cloud only for the MicroStrategy application layer) or to load the data into the cloud. This addresses one of the biggest fears about cloud: who controls the data. Few other SaaS BI vendors allow such a hybrid approach, although Birst was one of the first to introduce it back in 2009. With the full-cloud implementation, MicroStrategy has partnered with IBM Netezza for the BI appliance, ParAccel for the columnar data base, and Informatica for ETL capabilities. I would imagine small to mid size businesses as well as departments who lack their own IT resources would find this latter approach to cloud BI appealing.

In an era of SaaS vendors who tout their multi-tenant architecture as being “SaaS ready,” I am concerned that MicroStrategy is not multitenant. In the post-mortem on one-time SaaS vendor Lucid Era, its single tenant architecture (and higher costs to maintain) was cited as one of the reasons for failure. Architects can get religious in their arguments for and against. The “for” multitenant arguments: multiple clients on a single hardware, shared-everything infrastructure makes it easier and cheaper for the SaaS-vendor  to maintain the environment,. The “against” arguments: customers want to customize their own environments and fear sharing anything. MicroStrategy Cloud will be using virtualization, with multiple companies on the same hardware, but each in their own virtual environment.

For any SaaS solution, the question continues to be: what’s the cost/benefit analysis? Is SaaS more expensive over time than if the solution were deployed on-premise?  MicroStrategy presented a cost/benefit analysis for 200 users over 5 years(see graphic, reprinted with permission), with over $1 Million in savings. The product was released only last month, so it’s too early to tell what the real-world case studies will show.  

I will be curious to see what the uptake is, and also, where: will it be small to midsized businesses who lack IT resources, or will it be in departments in enterprise companies who are looking for faster deployment options?

What is your level of interest in cloud BI? Take the 10-minute survey here.

 Regards,

Cindi Howson, Bi Scorecard

Next Week at TDWI: BI Platform Bake-Off

Next week at TDWI in San Diego, I’ll be facilitating the 2011 BI Bake Off with IBM Cognos, Microsoft, and SAP Business Objects. With all three vendors recently releasing major new versions of their BI platforms, the bake off will be the usual exciting, nerve wracking, and enlightening session.

I conducted the first BI bake off at TDWI back in 2005, at a time when few companies had BI standards, and the market was highly fragmented.

Today, the BI platform market is more mature. The market has evolved into mega vendors that have BI platforms, numerous smaller vendors that focus predominantly on BI platforms, and dozens of specialty vendors that focus on a single segment within the BI space.  With greater market segmentation, it might seem that BI buying has gotten easier, but it hasn’t. Smart companies make BI investments wisely, and yet business users often demand the newest innovations, regardless of who is touting them.

Most large companies now have a BI platform standard. Even though customers have made an initial investment, these companies continue to evaluate solutions, because:

• Vendors constantly release new versions, begging the question if it is better to upgrade or to make a switch.
• Customers are looking for opportunities to lower licensing costs.
• Some are not satisfied with support from the incumbent vendor.
• They were acquired or merged with another company, with a different BI standard.
• They’ve outgrown the capabilities of the product initially purchased.
• Budgets tightened in 2009 and 2010 have loosened. There’s pent up demand to expand BI capabilities.

For small and mid-sized companies, BI may be a new endeavor. They’ve outgrown their fixed, operational reporting solution and need something more robust. For many of these companies, BI platform breadth may be less important than ease of deployment and time to value.

When I conducted the first BI Bake Off, I kicked the session off with dry-ice emitting smoke, a bow to the smoke-and-mirrors in many vendor demonstrations. I promised attendees that we would try to cut through that smoke, with a candid look at side-by-side differences.Sadly, I have had to abandon the smoke as it violated the hotel’s fire code (killjoy, right?).

 In the first few bake-offs, I also thought it would be sufficient to politely stand when a vendor’s time was up (I told them in the agenda they would have only six minutes, surely they would stop talking, wouldn't they?). Well, I learned that I needed something more akin to a gong, or at least a timer, as vendors will take as much air time as possible. Six years later, and it still feels rude to beep someone mid sentence, but it certainly makes for a fairer session. The more seasoned vendor participants now know never to run over time.

In the bake off, I give vendors a carefully scripted demo of the most critical features and differentiators that customers often look for.  Attendees then vote on which product best met their requirements for that capability. Everyone knows that it is indeed just a demo and that a real-world test may yield different results. Still, what is clear is that the TDWI attendees are a sophisticated audience, equally tolerant and unforgiving. Attendees give high marks to vendors who candidly say “we don’t do that out of the box, but let me show a work around.” Conversely, one vendor who started with a marketing video was unilaterally panned, thank goodness with lack of votes, and not out-and-out booing.

Surprizing to me is when a vendor sells their product short. I’ve tested all of them, so I know their strengths and weaknesses.  As the goal is strictly education – but some fun in the process – I do point out when a demo just didn’t go well or when I disagree with something a vendor said. I have sometimes chalked up these incidents to a vendor’s not being prepared (another thing attendees are unforgiving about), but frankly, I also think it’s that all the product lines have gotten more complex. While the marketing folks may be able to articulate product differences well, it is often the technical consultant who knows the product nuances. Hence, many vendors now bring two participants to the bake off.

For companies large and small alike, an ongoing challenge in managing your BI tool portfolio is in knowing when to standardize and when to mix and match. Standardization has the lure of lower cost of ownership, better support for business users, and integration across modules. That’s the lure; reality varies vendor to vendor. And yet, there are dozens of emerging vendors bringing often-times superior functionality than what may be available from a BI platform vendor. This is true of dashboards, visual discovery, mobile, search, and SaaS offerings, to name a few.

To help companies better evaluate these specialty solutions, in the last year, we have added detailed scores on BI Scorecard for a number of specialty products and vendors . At TDWI, we introduced the Dashboard Bake Off in February 2011. This class is a deeper dive on an increasingly important module; BI platform vendors and specialty vendors compete side-by-side on dashboard capabilities.  Dashboards are also part of the BI platform bake off in August. We also give vendors a chance to showcase something cool and innovative that most differentiates them. It’s the one topic the vendor chooses; the rest of the scripted demos are topics I and the attendees choose.

With Cognos previewing their new visualization product in the labs and Microsoft whispering about project Crescent, I suspect visualization may be what these two vendors showcase during the “cool topic.” With SAP being one of the few vendors to natively supporting the BlackBerry Playbook, perhaps they will choose Mobile BI for their cool topic … but there has been a fair bit of noise about collaboration as well, so we’ll see.

While the BI Bake Off provides side-by-side product insights for three vendors, the other goal of the course is to help companies improve their own selection and bake off process.

To make the most of your software evaluation:

• Define your requirements and prioritize them, differentiating between near and long-term needs
• Understand the trade-offs between a solution from a single-vendor and pursuing a predominant standard
• Get educated about BI pricing and packaging early on.
• Ask vendors to follow scripted, not canned, demos
• Gather feedback from a broad constituent of BI stake holders
• Recognize that requirements change over time as users and software capabilities evolve. Never assume your BI tool strategy will stand still.

 Making smart software investments and managing your BI tool portfolio is important to BI success. But as I often say, ultimately the question of which tool is less important than how you use your BI tools.

Regards,

Cindi Howson

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SAP BusinessObjects BI 4.0 Delayed

At Sapphire this year, CTO Vishal Sikka claimed that version 4.0 is the “best release ever of Business Objects.” The GA was initially thought to be ahead of Sapphire in May, then pushed out to June, and now August. The delay was announced in a company blog post last week.

While the delay in the BI product is the most important, two other products in the 4.0 launch have become generally available. The Data Services module and SAP BusinessObjects Analysis, Edition for Microsoft Office, both GA’d last week. SAP BusinessObjects Analysis, edition for Microsoft Office is a premium alternative for the well-established BEx Excel interface. BEx continues to be supported, though.

SAP BusinessObjects launched the next release of their flagship product earlier this year in February in New York and cities around the world. It is a product several years in development and one that promises innovation for both the SAP BW customer base, but for the non SAP ERP customers as well. SAP customers have been waiting for performance improvements and better integration with BW. Long-time Business Objects customers have most been waiting for data federation, better graphing, workflow, and a more scalable dashboard solution.

The product officially went into ramp up last December. Ramp up is SAP’s approach to releasing new software versions in which a limited number of customers deploy production quality software. The software has to be deployed in production, not just in labs or downloaded for evaluation purposes. SAP will make the software generally available (GA) to all customers once certain KPIs have been reached, related to bug resolution and number of customers deployed.

Customer reaction to the delay has been decidedly mixed. Nobody wants to deploy software that isn’t stable, and BusinessObjects customers have clear memories of version 6 (2003) and version 4 before that (1996), releases that were not stable. (In case you are wondering how the vendor got back to a version 4, 15 years later after the original 4.0 was released:  Version 11 of the product was renamed XI to also stand for eXtreme Insight. The new numbering was adopted when the BusinessObjects BI platform took on the Crystal Enterprise architecture which would have been Crystal Enterprise  version 11. So the product was renumbered, XI Release 1, Release 2, and so on. The XI has been dropped from the branding, but in theory it is XI Release 4.)

In this regard, a delay to ensure software quality is something SAP customers have come to expect. However, one customer complained that the repeated delays have impacted their training and deployment plans that most likely will now be pushed into 2012. Customers who were planning on purchasing BI 4.0 likewise have to defer their plans, or decide to purchase and deploy on XI 3.1, then upgrade later.  SAP’s next earning call at the end of July will be the biggest indicator of how big a deal this delay has been.  The frustration then is about communication and managing expectations, a page all vendors and internal BI teams should take heed from. SAP has been talking about the 4.0 release since it completed its acquisition of Business Objects in early 2008. By those roadmap accounts, the GA is a year later than expected. Customers tend to look at roadmaps with a wary eye: too much theory, too many moving parts; time will tell. However, much of the hype for 4.0 began bubbling at the ASUG conference last October 2010, then the world wide launch in February 2011. No wonder, then, that it got little fanfare at Sapphire this year, as the product still wasn’t ready.

A few months delay in the software industry is not that big a deal, particularly as the installed base and complexity of these products has grown. More worrying to me is the number of key departures from the SAP BI product team (Marge Breya, Dave Weisbeck, and the latest George Mathew). I could make a similar criticism about loss of BI personnel at Microsoft, but not of IBM Cognos or Oracle. As the SAP BusinessObjects departures are in the middle of a major product release, it cannot be good for either customers or for the vendor. SAP says the departures have had no impact on the product release and other BI veterans have shifted responsibilities (Sanjay Poonen, Steve Lucas and Adam Binnie).

You tell me: has your BI deployment or buying been effected by this delay or are such delays par for the course?

Regards,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard