The BI View From Prague

While many of my peers headed to Seattle for Microsoft’s BI conference this week, I headed in the opposite direction to Prague, Czech Republic , to speak at IDC’s annual BI Roadshow.

I had never been here before, and I confess I had a degree of trepidation. While Prague today is a top business and tourist destination, the fall of communism was only 20 years ago. In fact, I was living nearby in Switzerlandduring that profound time, so the memory is not too distant as my Czech friends then wondered if it was really safe to return. Add to that the Czech’s use of a different alphabet, and perhaps you can understand my trepidation. But rest assured, my only mishap (so far) is blowing the entire room’s fuse when plugging in my flat iron (gosh, if Blackberries and laptops use universal power adaptors, why not hair appliances??!). Meanwhile, some people I spoke with lament the modernization of the country, whereas others said the changes have been too slow, particularly outside of Prague. Indeed, I’m more impressed by the Charles Bridge and Russian Stacking dolls than the local Starbucks.

But back to BI. The Czech market and the U.S. market share similarities and differences. Whereas the BI tools market is growing at about 10% overall, here it’s growing at 18% per year, according to IDC. If you read my blog regularly or read the BIScorecard Strategic Summary, you know I consider quality of support important. Interesting to me is how highly the importance of BI expertise, support, and pricing is rated here (check back later for a graphic on this). In part, this is because not all the BI vendors have an equal presence in the Czech Republic so getting help during and post implementation can be more important than specific product features. A positive effect of last year’s BI industry consolidation is that some BI vendors now have an improved presence in Central and Eastern Europe through the acquiring companies.

QlikTech gave an interesting presentation. While my vision for BI is for it to be a killer application, contributing to business success in multiple ways, QlikTech spoke of making BI more than “strategic” but also “addictive.” It’s a subtle but interesting point and made me think of this video a colleague from the Axis Group recently told me about. It is amusing, but let’s be clear – it was posted by the vendor. So while we have no way of knowing if it was a real user, I give them credit for creative marketing.

 

An interesting customer I spoke with is from a telecommunication start up MobilKom. Their competitors are huge with the likes of T-Mobile and Vodafon. They caught my attention as being one of the few attendees who described their deployment as very successful and on the road to being a killer app. They are using Oracle BI EE, but they acknowledged that while technology plays a role, what is more important is what they do with BI … the information they analyze and how it can help them beat the competition.

In that regard, the view of BI tools from Czech Republic is universally similar to the view from the U.S.!

 

Regards,

Cindi Howson

Founder, BIScorecard®, a resource for in-depth BI product reviews

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

Comments

[Giacomo Bottaro]

Cindy, are the Czechs using a different alphabet??? You had a "degree of trepidation" because Czechoslovakia (not Czech Republic) was communist, but Prague is far away from Moscow, and not all communists used to write cyrillic alphabet... Have you really been in Prague?
Regards

[Scott]

Cindi,

Yes, it is a real customer/user of QlikView. And he created it unprompted by QlikTech.