BI Scorecard Blog

SAP Releases Visual Intelligence, Innovates in BI

SAP HANA and a new visual discovery tool Visual Intelligence took center stage at Sapphire this week. But more noteworthy to me is the trend that SAP is once again innovating in BI, not just integrating.

Visual Intelligence is the vendor’s new desktop tool that allows HANA users to visually explore and manipulate data. The tool is positioned for power users, a key difference from the vendor’s lightweight, Web-based visual discovery tool Explorer. Visual Intelligence using HANA as the data source is GA as of this week and is included as part of the SAP BusinessObjects BI suite license. An individual named user license not tied to the BI server is planned but not yet finalized. With HANA in production not-quite a year, that means only a few hundred customers can immediately deploy Visual Intelligence. CTO Dr. Vishal Sikka cited 353 HANA customers, with 145 live HANA deployments.

But this is just the beginning, both because SAP has big plans for HANA and big plans for Visual Intelligence. This week, SAP also announced a developer version of HANA in the Amazon cloud, with over 2000 instances ready immediately. I expect this seeding approach to help HANA’s uptake.

For Visual Intelligence, a subsequent release due in June will support additional data sources such as flat file, free hand SQL (for Web Intelligence users who have been mourning the loss of that feature, I can imagine some resounding cheers!), and Excel data sources. A third release, expected by year end, will bring support for universes, the vendor’s semantic layer. I hope there is support both for the newer .UNX and older .UNV files, as they have done with their new predictive solution. While such dual support may be harder for the vendor to deliver, it certainly helps with customer uptake.

Based on initial demonstrations, Visual Intelligence is strong on its data manipulation capabilities, automatically guessing at measures and dimensions, as well as hierarchies such as time and geography. If the data is not clean, users can perform transformations with no scripting, a point of differentiation from QlikView. The models can be saved back to HANA for other power users to access. I have not yet seen how well Visual Intelligence merges multiple data sources together.

The breadth of visualizations – ranging from standard bar charts to newer tag clouds and trellis charts – seems to compare with some of the best of breed visual discovery tools such as Tableau and TIBCO Spotfire. Lacking, though, is the ability to share discoveries while also preserving the interactivity. A power user, can for example, email an image to another user, but there is not an ability to publish a collection of analyses as a type of dashboard or exploration view that decision-makers can then consume and interact with via an iPad or Web. Expect these improvements to be a theme of the end-of-year release.

While Visual Intelligence took to the main stage, improvements in dashboards and predictive were the themes of one-on-one briefings and booth demos.

Adam Binnie, GM & VP of Business Intelligence Solutions, and Jason Rose, VP of Business Intelligence Marketing, outlined the key drivers for SAP to maintain its BI leadership and improve its capabilities:

1. BI core: SAP BusinessObjects 4.0 and the subsequent Feature Pack 3
2. Creative BI: provide fast time to value for both line of business and IT (Visual Intelligence)
3. Mobile BI: develop first for mobile users and expand BI to untapped users (SAP Mobile & Zen)
4. Extreme Analytics: Big data, real time, predictive (Hana, IQ, Predictive Analysis)
5. Social:  capture the decision, leverage the network. (Streamwork)

Binnie promises all of this Innovation with minimal disruption. That’s a nice vision, of course, but for those customers currently going through a 4.0 migration, I’d suggest reality is a bit more disruptive, particularly for those customers with large Desktop Intelligence deployments. Change is disruptive, like it or not; it’s more a matter of degree of disruption and the quality of the migration utilities.

To elaborate on how SAP is innovating in these five areas, SAP Mobile, for example, was showcased throughout the conference. While SAP executives may be able to claim leadership in mobile as a business application and development platform, the company’s story for Mobile BI is a mosaic, dependent on the device and the BI content. SAP has been caught in the market dynamics of the decline of Flash for animation as well as RIM in the mobile market. Meanwhile, SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards (aka Xcelsius) relies exclusively on Flash, and what was breakthrough technology in 2005, has become a burden today. In this regard, SAP recently published a statement of direction for its dashboard strategy, with a new product, code-named Zen planned for release this year. Zen will bring HTML5 and long-awaited drill down to dashboards, but initially is for BW content only. SAP has committed to maintaining and enhancing Dashboards (aka Xcelsius) so I was also pleased to see an HTML5 version of Dashboards at the pods, expected in SP5, also later this year. Zen and Dashboards are expected to come together, eventually. One consultant aptly described it the” dashboard quagmire,” a valid comment. However, as I have been critical of SAP’s dashboard product with low scores in the BI Scorecard for years (seemingly going against the grain), I am also glad that SAP now has a plan to address the limitations and seems well on its way.

I previously wrote about SAP’s new Predictive Analysis solution, and in addition, HANA SP4, released last week adds support for R algorithms to run natively.

As I previously wrote about Feature Pack 3, currently in ramp up, support for collaboration via StreamWork integration is noteworthy. Users can directly annotate content and view discussion threads from within the SAP BusinessObjects BI Launchpad. If a user is working within StreamWork, they can also import reports to support a decision process. A new ability to auto update such reports from within StreamWork will be useful say for a weekly planning or strategy meeting. Beyond StreamWork, SAP Hana SP4 also includes support for unstructured data, ideal for analyzing social data.

Last year at this time, customers were waiting for SAP BusinessObjects 4.0, late, and three-years since a major release. One year later, there seemed to be improvements on multiple fronts with SAP once again innovating in BI.

And in case you are wondering, no I didn't stay for the Van Halen concert, which I heard was amazing. Seems I only make to Bieber and Swift concerts these days. Now if Barry White were still with us, or Gordon Lightfoot still touring, I'd have to adjust my travel schedule.

Regards,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

QlikTech Shares Future Product Plans for QlikView

Last week, at its annual partner summit in Miami Beach, Florida, QlikTech laid out its themes for its future product release, currently dubbed QlikView.next.

Over 900 partners were in attendance at the vendor’s annual conference. It is however, the first time that QlikTech invited key analysts to the event, a reflection of both the organization’s growing prominence in the BI space, but also, the vendor’s maturing organization in its ability to respond to requests for information and constructive criticism.

In some respects, the conference was also a who’s who in the BI industry as a number of long-time industry veteran’s have flocked to this fast-growing vendor, in part a reflection of the brain drain at other companies, and in part a reflection of QlikTech’s attracting top talent in the BI space.

Donald Farmer, formerly of Microsoft and now VP of Product Management at QlikTech laid out five themes in the next QlikView product release: gorgeous and genius, collaboration, mobile and agile, open platform, and enterprise ready. While I have worked with Donald in his past role at Microsoft and he’s participated in some TDWI bake-offs, it’s the first time I have heard him deliver a keynote. I was impressed by how inspiring he was, with a rare ability to convey abstract, potentially mundane technical concepts with humor and insight.  For example, in talking about the goal of making QlikView both gorgeous and genius (terms not typically applied to a BI tool), he compared QlikView to Hedy Lamarr, a classic beauty and MGM actress who also invented wireless communications technology.

While QlikView 11 is primarily IT-developed applications and dashboards, the demo of QlikView.next had a greater concept of business-user assembled dashboards. QlikView 11 introduced collaborative features (see the BI Scorecard in-depth review) but QlikTech wants to make collaboration more pervasive in the next release.

With the ongoing uptake in tablet devices (Apple sold 3 million iPad3s in the first three days of that product launch), it’s not surprising that mobility is a key theme for the next release. What was surprising, though, is that QlikTech gave a nod to Windows 8 impact on both the desktop experience and mobile, whereas most other BI vendors seem to have largely dismissed Microsoft’s influence on mobile.

As QlikTech has grown as a company and QlikView applications have grown in scale, QlikView.next will bring more open API’s for partners to develop applications. It was noteworthy that this was the first partner conference that included an exhibit hall of technology partners such as Panopticon and Expressor. The Panopiticon integration, for example, brings real-time streaming into a QlikView dashboard. The Expressor and Informatica integration brings data integration and more robust ETL than what is currently available in the QlikView scripts.  Other planned improvements to enterprise administration include better tools for IT to manage large QlikView applications.

Noticeably absent from QlikTech’s future product strategy were plans for cloud or big-data, at least in terms of Hadoop integration—scalability of QlikView applications was a theme in a number of track sessions.

QlikTech’s partner network, with numerous resellers that account for half the company’s revenues, is a competitive differentiator versus chief competitor Tableau, who only recently began focusing on growing such a network. It also is a differentiator versus mega BI vendors who have often failed to nurture such relationships, particularly post industry consolidation. As one partner said at this conference, “with SAP we are a pawn, and they are the king. With QlikTech it’s (the relationship is) direct, fair, and customer centric.”

 

Oracle Showcases Data Discovery, Commits to Public Cloud

Last week, Oracle showcased recent and upcoming products at its annual analyst conference in San Francisco.

In the BI space, the biggest announcements were around Exalytics, Oracle Endeca Information Discovery, analytic apps, and a commitment to public cloud. Exalytics, announced at World in October, became generally available in February. Exalytics is a combination appliance and in-memory solution. The in-memory engine relies on technology from TimesTen, an in-memory, columnar database that Oracle acquired in 2005 used more in transaction processing. Exalytics can store both Essbase cubes and models from OBI EE in memory, boosting performance for both planning applications and existing BI apps. Oracle claims an 18x performance boost to existing BI and planning apps. An in-memory summary advisor recommends which data should best be stored in-memory based on usage statistics. I am still waiting to test drive the new release and appliance, but the in-memory summary advisor seems to be a unique differentiator, particularly if it is self optimizing. The integration with Exadata via a fast InfiniBand connection for direct access to the larger data warehouse is another differentiator, but I’d like to see how seamlessly the data moves from Exadata to Exalytics.

Exalytics was initially touted as both an in-memory and visual discovery solution. To be sure, there are some new visual discovery capabilities in the latest release of OBI EE when deployed with Exalytics, but in addition, Oracle now has Endeca Information Discovery in its portfolio. Oracle acquired Endeca in October 2011, primarily for its MDEX engine. Endeca is most widely known for its e-commerce capabilities and the faceted search to such e-tailers as ebags. Endeca brings the simplicity of search to BI, a capability not widely adopted but possible with competitive solutions such as QlikView, SAP BusinessObjects Explorer, and Information Builders Magnify. Where the MDEX engine is most different is its combination in-memory and columnar storage to support analysis of both structured content as well as textual, semi-structured content stored in comments, documents, and social media. Oracle’s plans for integrating Endeca with OBI EE were shared under non disclosure.

The BI analytic applications has been one of Oracle’s Trojan horses for selling OBI EE into Oracle E-business Suite, J.D. Edwards, and the PeopleSoft customer base. The analytic applications are expansive, bringing ETL, data models, dashboards and reports, and best practices to a number of functional areas and industries. The biggest competition here is in the build-it-yourself approach or for EBS customers, Noetix Analytics (acquired from Jaros in 2009). Oracle has continued to improve its depth of coverage in the analytic applications, most recently adding Asset Management and Manufacturing Process, as well as support for SAP data sources.

Executive Vice President Thomas Kurian shared details of Oracle’s plans for public cloud. The only thing I can share at this point is that the public cloud solution will be available this summer, but what’s in and out is also under NDA.  So stay tuned!

The highpoint of the event was the customer panel, which unfortunately was also under non disclosure. This panel was one of the best I have heard in my ten years as an analyst, in part because they delivered their criticism of Oracle with humor … and that they were critical at all. However, it was their constructive criticism that made the kudos all the more believable. As one OBI EE customer who had also deployed Endeca said, “Oracle bought an amazing technology (Endeca). I’m not sure they yet realize how good it is.”

A key theme of the event and a rallying cry for Oracle’s strategy is to simplify the IT experience to power extreme innovation. I “get” the rallying cry:  IT can’t keep pace with business demand with difficult-to-integrate and -deploy technology, but rarely has the goal of “helping IT” been inspirational to the business.

I suspect part of this shift in emphasis is related to Oracle’s 2010 acquisition of Sun Systems, and that hardware now accounts for almost 20% of its $35 billion in annual revenues. Not surprising then, a fair bit of the keynotes were devoted to talking bits and bytes of its engineered systems. There was a time in my career when I was happy to assemble servers, but as a BI expert today, I felt somewhat like the car buyer who simply wants to drive that sleek car, not dissect the engine. While servers and hardware has not been a high-growth industry of late, the difference is that Oracle’s focus is on systems that power business analytics, for which most market watchers cite double-digit growth. To that point, Oracle show cased customer after customer success story for Exadata. As one customer said, “we read all the glossy brochures (on Exadata). The product has lived up to the hype.”

 Sincerely,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

 

 

Cool BI: Heading to the TDWI Forum in Chicago

Cool BI is about the innovations and emerging trends that promise to re-invigorate your BI initiative, making BI more appealing, more pervasive, more insightful, and actionable. That’s the hype. What’s the reality?

I conducted my first Cool BI Webinar for TDWI in April 2008. The webinar was so popular that we later offered it as an annual half day class that is often been standing-room only. At the inaugural Cool BI Forum, coming up in Chicago, May 7, my co-chair Dave Stodder and I are bringing you two full days of case studies, expert opinions, and panel discussions on these emerging trends.

In first formulating the Cool BI course content, I was motivated by two things: stories from customers that had wowed me with their bleeding-edge approaches and vendors developing cool capabilities. Some of these capabilities were only ideas in the labs of mega vendors, ideas that may or may not ever make it to market. Other solutions were from smaller vendors that have no marketing budget to tell you about their cool products. My vision for the course, and now with the forum, is to get you excited about the possibilities and make you aware of solutions from vendors you may not otherwise hear from. In addition, we offer a framework for separating the practical from the hype.

Some of the key innovations covered in the forum include:

• Visual discovery and dashboards
• Mobile BI
• In-memory computing
• Geo-spatial analysis
• Cloud BI
• Big data
• Social BI

I will share with you some perspectives on why these trends matter and what to expect at the forum.

A few years ago, if users wanted a dashboard developers had to custom code it, and the data wasn’t refreshed that frequently.  Now, mega vendors and specialty vendors alike offer packaged software that combines interactive, visual discovery, with dashboards to help decision-makers focus on the information that matters most. At the TDWI Forum in Chicago, you will hear inspiring case studies from the City of Austin, Texas Fire Department about their journey to self-service BI using QlikTech’s QlikView and from Seattle Children’s Hospital about how they improved patient care using Tableau.

Mobile BI, meanwhile, promises to bring BI to any device, anywhere, whether a smartphone or the latest iPad or Android tablets. So why aren’t more users asking for this? And what are the headaches associated with deploying? Biotech firm Life Technologies takes us on his journey of enabling mobile BI with specialty vendor RoambI while monitoring mobile capabilities from bigger BI vendors such as IBM Cognos. For mobile to succeed it has to be fast: this highlights the role of in-memory computing in mobile BI deployment, which we will hear about at the Forum. To cap off this discussion, look for the catfight – I mean, panel discussion – in which BI vendors will argue for the best approach to bringing mobile BI securely and powerfully to your deployment.

Big Data and BI in the Cloud

In some circles, big data has become synonymous with Hadoop. Does everyone need such solutions? If you think about the volume, variety, and velocity of data, the time to insight has gotten more challenging in the world of big data. Technologies such as Hadoop, in-memory, or data warehouse appliances all have a role to play in addressing the big data challenge. At the Forum, you will learn from LinkedIn on how to architect for big data and to foster an analytic culture.

Cloud BI promises to speed the time to deployment so that IT no longer has to own and maintain the BI infrastructure on the premises. It also promises easier integration with cloud data sources such as Salesforce.com and human resources services emerging in the cloud. But what about security and losing control of company data? And with recent Amazon failures, perhaps cloud BI is not ready for prime time. At the Forum, the Royal Bank of Canada will share their cloud BI journey and implementation of Birst. In addition, industry expert Steve Dine will provide insights on what works and what to watch out for with cloud BI.

This is just a glimpse of a few of the sessions we will see at the Cool BI TDWI Forum. You can preview the full agenda of case studies and expert sessions on the TDWI website  or catch this upcoming Webinar in which Dave and I discuss some key BI trends and offer some TDWI Forum highlights. We look forward to seeing you in Chicago!

Regards,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

 

SAP Steps Up Commitment to Predictive Analytics

Last month SAP quietly released a new interface to ramp up: SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analysis. Ramp up is the vendor’s approach to releasing production software to a limited number of customers. The product is expected to be generally available later this year.

Predictive analytics has become an increasingly important part of the business analytics market and an area in which SAP has lagged behind chief competitors Oracle, IBM, and SAS.  SAP currently OEMs capabilities from SPSS, and with IBM’s acquisition of SPSS in 2009, it seemed only a matter of time before SAP would develop an alternative solution. Competitive and market forces have shaped SAP’s latest endeavor, including the momentum of open source R, in-memory and in-database processing, and the convergence of analytics with business intelligence

Open Source R: R is an open source project initiated by academics in New Zealand in the mid 1990s. It is a statistical language without a graphical user interface. A number of vendors, including SAS, have been adding support for R. For example,  Information Builders WebFOCUS Rstat and  TIBCO Spotfire S+ leverage R. SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analysis provides a graphical user interface to R.

There are two aspects to SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analysis, one is the model development and execution, the other is the visualization to identify patterns in the data. I was impressed by the number of visualizations Predictive Analysis automatically generated to show patterns in the data. To be clear, this is not a visual discovery tool for business users that competes with the likes of Explorer or Tableau. It is a tool for statisticians. But I suspect this integrted visualization capability will prove to be a differentiator.

In-data base processing: Historically, statisticians have worked on offline data files—whether SAS datasets or flat files--to analyze their data and build models. With increasing volumes of data, database and analytic vendors have been pushing more of the processing into the database. SAS for example, was one of the first to push the processing into Teradata in 2008, and now supports  in-database processing with Netezza, EMC Greenplum, DB2, and AsterData . Last month Oracle released Oracle Advanced Analytics that bundles Oracle R Enterprise, providing support for R models to be processed in the Oracle database. With the new SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analysis, processing can be pushed into Hana, the vendor’s new in-memory appliance that includes its own statistical function library.

Mainstream Analytics?: There has never been a rallying cry for mainstream analytics that there has been for business intelligence. Instead, the cry has been for greater integration and ease of consumption of analytic models.  Developing the models remains a task for skilled statisticians. In this regard, some BI vendors have simplified the ease in which a model can be called from a dashboard or report, with the results of the model transparently embedded. An example is a report that displays sales by customer, with a flag to indicate likelihood of churning. MicroStrategy was one of the first to provide such seamless integration but its adoption has been slow.

There has been greater momentum for analytics to be embedded in pre-built analytic applications, and this is an area where SAS solutions are market leaders but in which IBM has been growing.

With the SAP Predictive Analysis, there is nice integration with the BI platform in that the tool can access a universe, either the version 3 format (.UNV) or the new version 4 format (.UNX). This is a similar level of integration in the capabilities SAP currently OEMs from SPSS. However, there currently is no easy way to embed model results in a dashboard or report. SAP expects various analytic applications to take advantage of the new capability over time. For example, the SAP Smart Meter Analytics uses clustering and segmentation algorithms on energy consumption.

SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analysis is not the vendor’s first entry into the advanced analytics space, but it does seem to be a higher level of commitment to the market than earlier efforts. It’s too early to say if this will have any impact on either SAS’ or SPSS’ share in this space. However, it certainly will improve the capabilities of the analytic applications and will make SAP a natural addition to any customer’s short list new to predictive analysis.

Regards,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

MicroStrategy Mobile, Cloud, and Social Bets Pay Off

MicroStrategy touted its mobile, cloud, and social business intelligence initiatives at its user conference last week and offered proof that those initiatives are paying off.

MicroStrategy has been ahead of the mobile BI market, both in terms of customer demand and BI competitors. While many companies are struggling with mobile BI and the shift from RIM dominance to Apple iPads, MicroStrategy was one of the first to have native support for the iPad. BI on the iPad has been a Trojan horse for some BI initiatives, with a number of customers citing mobile as the way they are getting a more direct line to BI decision makers.

MicroStrategy Cloud was released mid 2011, and after only six months in production, the vendor has continued to refine its strategy and build out its infrastructure. I was surprised that MicroStrategy decided to establish its own data centers, in contrast to other SaaS solutions that use public cloud services such as Amazon. MicroStrategy claims that owning the cloud infrastructure enables it to better control performance. Steve Stone, senior vice president of MicroStrategy Cloud, claims that in some cases cloud deployments boast better performance tha on-premise installs. Stone knows all about customer expectations for performance; the former CIO and 19-year veteran of Lowes had 14,000 MicroStrategy users.

MicroStrategy Cloud is a powerhouse of BI partnerships, with Netezza, ParAccel, and Teradata (announced last week) offering cloud-based data warehousing and Informatica adding cloud-based data integration. MicroStrategy also allows customers to leave their data on-premises, and the vendor’s well-established ROLAP engine has always pushed more of the processing to the database than many competing BI products.

MicroStrategy Cloud Professional, announced last week, gives customers three flavors of Cloud: personal, professional, and enterprise. Cloud Personal is primarily MicroStrategy's Visual Insight product (reviewed in-depth here) in the cloud. Cloud Personal is free, but it supports just a single, manually loaded data source. Cloud Professional brings workgroup management and security to the visualizations created with Visual Insight. (MicroStrategy calls them dashboards, but they really aren’t dashboards: there's a  just one data visualization per page). The Professional Edition also allows data to be refreshed automatically on a schedule.

MicroStrategy expects its cloud offerings to appeal to lines of business and departments that lack IT resources to install infrastructure on-premises. As a case in point, customer Enova was looking for the best-fit BI tool, not necessarily a cloud solution. A cloud deployment enabled Enova to get a fast time to value, with all the breadth of the MicroStrategy BI platform.

MicroStrategy Social garnered many of the headlines at the conference. The vendor’s approach to social media is drastically different than others.  Social movement in the BI industry has been of two flavors: collaboration and sentiment analysis.  For example, I didn’t see any moves to bring collaboration to the product, a miss in my view. MicroStrategy is not pursuing sentiment analysis either. Instead, they are focusing on using Facebook data and enabling customers to merge it with their internal customer data via their Gateway product. Another product, Wisdom, allows customers to do customer segmentation based on demographic data in Facebook. MicroStrategy  Alert  can be used to create targeted, personalized Facebook campaigns using the information discovered with Gateway.

All of this is certainly bleeding edge and compelling. The big “but” comes back to the data quality in Facebook. (Trust me: my 13-year-old son does not have 3 wives and 7 brothers.) As a case in point, MicroStrategy shared an interesting graphic from the New York Post that used Wisdom to explore interests between Patriots and Giants fans. The favorite book for Patriots fans is Harry Potter. For Giants fans it is Diary of a Wimpy Kid. (Note: the data set  is based on 4 million Facebook Wisdom users). I suspect this finding is not true of the general fan population. I suspect, too, that younger Wisdom users have been more likely than older users to fill out their profile interests, and that they have the more permissive security settings that allow for such data exploration.

The bottom line with all this is not that the apps are useless. Instead, I think there is big potential and clear first-mover advantage for those marketers who exploit Facebook effectively. But any initiative in this area has to be met with a high degree of skepticism.

With more than 3,000 people attending its largest annual conference ever, it was clear this vendor has continued to grow despite a tough economy and fierce completion from mega vendors. Just after the conference, MicroStrategy released  2011 financial results showing a whopping 23% increase over 2010 total revenues.  As Gartner estimated 2011 BI growth rates at 9%, it’s clear MicroStrategy is outperforming many of its BI competitors and that the seeds of innovation MicroStrategy has been planting are paying off.

Regards,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

 

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