BI Scorecard Blog

Open Source vs. Commercial BI

It’s been a long, slow process, but I am pleased to say we have begun adding open source BI to our BI Scorecard product evaluations! 

I’ve been collaborating with open source and BI experts Jos van Dongen and Mark Madsen in this process. Jos is the founder of Tholis Consulting in the Netherlands and co-author of the recently published book Pentaho Solutions. Mark is the founder of Third Nature and a fellow instructor at TDWI.

One of the challenging aspects in evaluating open source is in assessing what is in the free, community editions versus in the premium, supported editions. So while many associate open source with “free”, how free it is really depends upon which project you are talking about. Pentaho seems to make more for free than JasperSoft and Actuate, for example. Beyond the free community editions, even the premium editions are priced significantly lower than traditional BI vendors. In 100-user deployments, the license cost is about half and in enterprise deployments, it could be 1/10. BI Scorecard customers can see more details on BI licensing in our Q2 customer webinar.

However, like many of the BI platform vendors, the robustness of the particular BI modules (business query, OLAP, dashboards, reporting) and degree of integration varies significantly. In this regard, while I can say that certain modules do compete well against commercial BI vendors, other modules are less mature.  This Pentaho evaluation highlights the suite’s strengths and weaknesses. A more detailed comparison is available to subscribers in the detailed BI Platform Scorecard.

Open source BI products should be evaluated alongside commercial BI products, but not only because they are free. Customers must first consider how well any one product meets business and technical requirements, as well as deployment and ownership costs.

 Sincerely,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

Cool BI from TDWI

I’m just back from sunny, warm, Florida, venue for TDWI’s fall conference. The brightest spot from this  conference, is that it was one of the best attended of the year. I hope it is a sign of recovery, at least in the BI world!

I had the honor of delivering the key note on Monday, with new findings on secrets to successful BI (details to follow next week), but I first wanted to share some insights from my Cool BI Course.

It is a fun course for me to teach, something I compare to a wine tasting of eight new innovations (but without the hangover!), with mini demos performed by trail-blazing vendors and some by me. So fun, but, yes, stressful too! People are most excited about advanced visualization and dashboards, with Tableau demonstrating these capabilities (in May, search and rich reportlets were higher) . To be fair, some of the results may be slanted by how well either I or the vendor explained the innovation, the benefits, and the maturity.

While SaaS got few votes here, the demo by Birst certainly gets my vote for most leading edge. In some respects, the demo went so smoothly that I suspect the complexities of what was being demoed live weren’t apparent.  Just this week, Birst announced Live Access, a new ability in Birst 4 that allows the SaaS BI layer to reach into the on-premise data and present it with the hosted data. So CEO Brad Peters demoed loading data from a local spreadsheet to the cloud, combining it with SalesForce.com data, and finally in real-time, with data from an on-premise data mart, all in a matter of minutes (he quipped my timing requirements were rather demanding, but hey, we have a class schedule to keep!).  I’ve seen SaaS BI products do the first part, even the first two parts, but never all three together. It brings a new level of flexibility to SaaS BI, and takes away the argument against SaaS BI that companies are fearful of letting go of their data.

Let me know if you too think this is pretty leading edge, or if you’ve seen other products pull data from all three environments with such ease.

Regards,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

 

 

IBM Cognos Express and the New BI Battle Ground

While much of the BI battle ground has been at the enterprise level in large companies and public agencies, market share in the small to midsized business (SMB) is shaping up to be the next battle ground.  Microsoft has largely dominated this space, with its “BI for free” included in SQL Server and Share Point,  SAP BusinessObjects has also pursued this segment  with its Edge Series. But how much this market has grown is most apparent through QlikTech QlikView in which 50-user deployments are the norm, and revenue growth has been over 40 to 80% for the last few years (BI overall has been 8 to 10%, according to most estimates).

One of the tricky things with BI for SMBs is that the IT department may be a one-person show, with limited resources and rarely the expertise to build a data warehouse or to deploy complicated BI tools.  Fast deployment time and simple administration are key. I’ll find out in a few weeks just how well the just-announced IBM Cognos Express addresses these aspects when the product will be available for trial download.

However, the product already has some differentiators that its competitors lack. Planning capabilities are part of the product. The TM1 OLAP cache is a differentiator versus SAP BusinessObjects Edge; its ability to act as a data mart makes me think of the early successes of Cognos PowerPlay, a product that has had to evolve to the enterprise. In this regard, Ben Plummer, Director of the Mid Market Business Unit, noted that one of the biggest challenges in Cognos Express will be in deciding what not to put in the product. This is where the product is also different from MicroStrategy’s free Reporting Suite approach that can grow from departmental to enterprise: Cognos Express is more squarely targeted at deployments that will never grow to more than 100 users. Which components and content can migrate to the enterprise Cognos 8 BI is not yet clear, but if you are an SMB and not a departmental BI customer, that may not be a consideration.

Beyond the product, one of the most interesting aspects to Cognos Express is that it qualifies for IBM Global Financing. In a down economy and amidst a credit crunch, offering potential customers the ability to finance their BI deployment may prove to be what makes BI possible in this growing market segment.

Regards,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

Can BI Help Battle Swine Flu?

If you have school-bound children as I do, no doubt you are reading the headlines of swine flu wondering how you, your children,  your company will battle this year’s flu season now that school is back in session.  It’s the highly contagious, seemingly unavoidable aspect of swine flu that worries me. When you own your own company, there is no such thing as “paid sick days.”

Business intelligence is helping monitor swine flu in a number of ways. Emergency Medical Associates (EMA) operates hospital emergency rooms in northern New Jersey and New York metro area. They have a relatively unique ability to collect patient data across multiple hospitals, on a daily basis, and then analyze it with SAP BusinessObjects (see graph).  (The red line refers to 3 times standard deviation, yellow is 2 times.) I have previously written about EMA in my book Successful Business Intelligence, because of the unique ways they use BI to to improve patient care and manage costs. You can catch a glimpse of how they are now using BI to identify swine flu outbreaks in this video.

At the CDC, hospitals and other centers report data on a weekly basis so there is a lag in knowing when an outbreak is occurring. That New Jersey, my home, has one of the highest pediatric death rates is alarming. But that’s all I know, and yet, I have no doubt the data could tell us so much more.

Knowing an outbreak is occurring is helpful. However, identifying the patterns in who contracted it, where, when, and the severity, would be even more helpful. This is where advanced visualization tools fit in. While much of BI lets us answer questions that we know to ask (who, where, how many), advanced visualization tools allow for more exploratory type questions such as:

·         What characteristics do these people have in common?

·         Are they football players?

·         More boys than girls showing symptoms?

·         Does Mrs. Smith’s class have more unusual absences than Mrs. Kane’s?

I wish our town, our school, or even parents like myself could ask and answer these questions. In many cases, the data is there, but without the tools in place to explore the data, it’s not actionable.

For an evaluation framework of advanced visualization tools, you can download a new BI Scorecard template here (visitor login required).  Also, I highly recommend visualization expert Stephen Few’s latest book and this article by Seth Grimes.

So while much of the country awaits the release of the new flu vaccine, I’d like to see our schools and hospitals add BI to its arsenal of tools for battling an outbreak.

Regards,

Cindi Howson,

Founder, BI Scorecard

Is the "Plus" in OBI EE Really a Plus?

There is little question that since Oracle’s acquisitions of Hyperion and earlier Siebel, the vendor has evolved to a major BI player. Its core BI revenues grew 17% last year, and it’s gone from a second tier player three years ago to now a solid number three (according to IDC figures). Its analytic applications, with prebuilt dashboards, reports, and data models for E-business Suite, PeopleSoft, Siebel and, recently introduced, J.D. Edwards are unmatched by its 3 closest competitors. While everything would sound rosy in Oracle’s BI world, two blemishes are its complex BI tool portfolio and a delay in OBI EE 11g.

 Oracle has a policy of “protect, extend, evolve,” meaning if you were on Hyperion System 9 prior to the Oracle acquisition, you can safely continue to expand your deployment on that platform. The vendor has announced lifetime support for all the Hyperion and Oracle Standard Edition BI products. In fact, the plus in OBI EE Plus includes Hyperion Interactive Reporting (formerly known as Brio) and Production Reporting (formerly known as SQR); Essbase meanwhile is a separate license (see this evaluation for clarification on modules and strengths and weaknesses). In many respects, lifetime support is great for customers who really can’t afford the cost and complexity of converting Interactive Reports to Answers (the lead ad hoc module in OBI EE) queries and reports. But are customers just delaying the inevitable? And are they wasting resources in the interim? The bigger question in my mind is why any customer would actually buy and deploy legacy technology for which better alternatives exist, from the same vendor nonetheless. While there may be some features in Interactive Reporting that do not exist in Answers, newly deploying both products seems to introduce unnecessary complexity and a higher cost of ownership. The capabilities in Production Reporting versus Publisher, meanwhile, are so vastly different that the “which module” question is a harder choice here. 

The product mix gets so confusing that some Oracle Hyperion customers have simply deferred any major BI decisions until 11g comes out. OBI EE 11g was originally slated for about now and has been delayed until early next year. A delay of six to nine months is not that big a delay in the software world, but it means it will have been two years since Siebel Analytics / OBI EE customers saw substantial enhancements. In a market in which other BI vendors seem to be on a 6 to 9-month major release cycle (which is clearly too fast for customers to absorb), it does beg the question (that Information Week editor Bob Evan’s debates here) of how much customers are getting for their maintenance fees and if 11g will have been worth the wait.

With any of this, the bigger issue is not which BI tool, but rather, what business problems you are solving with it. So on that note, if you haven’t yet taken our successful BI survey, don’t forget to share your insights here.

 Regards,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

IBM to Acquire SPSS ... and Announces New Analytics System

Yesterday IBM announced its intent to acquire the advanced analytics vendor SPSS for $1.2 billion.

The acquisition fills what had been a void in IBM’s business intelligence capabilities and is a further expansion of its Information on Demand portfolio, with $10 billion in acquisitions over the past several years.

Predictive analytics has been a hot topic for years but one in which there seems to be little consensus on how to bring it from the back room to the front lines.  It’s clear that building good predictive models requires a high degree of expertise and is not something that will become main stream any time soon.  However, incorporating the results of those models into every day decisions that even the most novice of information users can consume and act upon has become the holy grail. So what does that mean – store everything in the database? Execute at run time and surface in a report?

Not surprisingly, SAS has made the most inroads here by both pushing analytics into the database for faster execution and based on larger data volumes, but also, surfacing the results in standard reports in its BI platform.  Of leading BI vendors, Microsoft and MicroStrategy also have good solutions that surface results in either Excel 2007 or a MicroStrategy report, respectively.  (see the BI Scorecard Summary report for more information.)

Interestingly, SAP BusinessObjects began shipping an OEMd version of SPSS last spring. The SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Workbench allows the BusinessObjects universe to act as a data source to Clementine modelers. It will be interesting to see if this agreement remains in place following the acquisition’s close. The challenge of course is that beyond SAS and SPSS, the predictive analytics space is predominantly smaller players.  

Amidst this announcement, IBM says it was purely coincidental timing that many press and analysts were at their R&D offices attending a briefing on their new “Smart Analytics System” (due out in September) and “Smart Analytics Optimizer” (due out in Q4). The Smart Analytics System is more than an appliance, including the hardware, software, and services optimized for a particular BI deployment, or as IBM calls it “analytic workload”, whether predictive or not. IBM guarantees a 50% lower cost of ownership versus the current approach of buying and deploying components a la carte. A lower cost of ownership and faster deployment time is of course appealing. However, it seemed odd to me that the first versions of the systems only include Cognos as an option, not a standard component. Same applies to ETL capabilities. In this regard, while the vision is enticing, I can’t help but remain skeptical customers will continue to have the degree of flexibility they currently have. 

Or has the market gotten to the point that time to value and lower cost of ownership trump flexibility and the desire to mix and match components?

Regards,

Cindi Howson

 

 

 

 

 

Move Over American Idol: It's the BI Bake Off!

Standard procedure in BI tool selections are bake offs. Customers will give vendors a list of oh, 100 to 200 requirements, and vendors must prove they can support those requirements.  Only a lucky few will make it to the final round of 2 to 3 vendors who move onto a proof of concept stage. It’s a grueling process for customers and vendors alike, as fraught with tension and subtleties as the Idol elimination process.

You might argue that BI requirements are much more objective than music performances, where taste in music is very subjective. In some cases this is true. For example, support for Linux is a clear yes/no. However, support for “multiple data sources” is open to interpretation, with all vendors responding “yes”, but no two supporting it in precisely the same way.  Ensuring a consistent understanding of requirements among all key stake holders is key to ensuring a successful selection process. So as part of the course I teach at TDWI, we start first with those definitions. Only after this discussion do we launch into the bake off in the afternoon.

Beyond consistent definitions, scoring vendors is particularly important for those requirements that are either subjective (ease of use and interface appeal , for example) or where definitions are subject to misinterpretation.  Getting those scores immediately following a demo is critical in ensuring users don’t forget what they saw, or worse, mix up vendors and products. 

New for the next class (August 4th in San Diego if you can make it!) is a really nifty voting tool from Poll Everywhere.  So just as Idol fans can text their favorite contestant, course attendees will be able to text which vendor best fulfilled a particular requirement. What’s really cool is that the results are dynamically displayed as the votes come in. You can try a preview here :  so just for fun, text in your favorite summer drink (lemonade, icedtea, beer, wine, marg for margarita) to 99503. (Note: if you are trying this from outside the U.S., you may only be able to vote via the web, a limitation of my account, not the software).

I suspect the voting will be an enlightening addition to the class for attendees and vendors alike! It could also be a good complement to the traditional paper voting process we’ve used with customers. I’d welcome your experience on how you have captured scores and feedback during your own bake offs!

Regards,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

 

 

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