BI Scorecard Blog

On Thanksgiving

I am somewhat old school in keeping work and personal worlds totally separate.

So on Thanksgiving, I hope you will allow me a bit of a departure from my regular blog topics. Is it cliché to say I am truly thankful for my family and friends? If you have ever attended one of my BI bake offs, you can imagine that I am an equally scary mother when I grill my children ahead of a school test. So when I’m shouting about school work, messy rooms, running late, devouring junk food, or whatever, ultimately, I am in awe of my children who are hard working, respectful, and kind. On the important stuff, they are perfect. They and my husband put up with a lot of crazy work travel and help bear the burden of running my own business.

So on that note, I am also most thankful to my customers, readers, webinar viewers, and course attendees. Many of you so willingly share your stories, your insights, and your frustrations. I am constantly inspired by what you have achieved with business intelligence in each of your fields, and by what you still hope to achieve. That you allow me to play a part in your BI journey is what motivates me to find those best practices and to discover those finer points about the BI tools. Without your business, BI Scorecard would not exist.

I am grateful to our two employees, Michelle and Scott, for allowing me the time to focus on creating new content and serving customers. Thank you, Diane, for giving us a Web presence, and Stephen for providing design support for seven years now.

My work at TDWI, Intelligent Enterprise, B-Eye Network, and McGraw Hill has introduced me to so many bright people. My colleagues in the industry set such a high bar, that they challenge me to do still more (and also willingly share their insights!). These firms give me a voice to help more organizations. They also nitpick over my writing and speaking to make it more interesting and less gibberish! Thank you.

Finally, the vendors! I know the analyst-vendor role can be a difficult one, but ultimately, we share a common goal of better serving customers. I want your product to be the right choice for that customer so they can be successful with BI, and I want your products to improve continually. We may butt heads, have a wary eye of distrust, and even shout in this process. I am thankful you so willingly educate me about your products and future plans. Thank you for answering all my questions in painstaking detail.  Together, we will one day get to smarter, more pervasive BI!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Sincerely,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

P.S., and if you want my secret to mashed potatoes, it's Yukon Gold, warm milk, melted butter (just in case you thought I only know about BI :) )

SAP and Microsoft Get Cozier on Performance Management

I hadn’t even had my first cup of coffee when this press release caught my attention.

SAP announced that Microsoft supports SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation (BPC, formerly known as OutlookSoft) as a preferred solution and are identifying joint marketing initiatives.

The press release is carefully worded. It’s “a” preferred solution, not “the” preferred solution. There was not a similar announcement from Microsoft. However, any hint that Microsoft will recommend this product to their installed customer base over other products will certainly help SAP’s market share in the performance management segment.  It also will make it more challenging for competitors Oracle Hyperion and IBM Cognos in the Microsoft customer base. 

It makes sense that Microsoft would prefer SAP BusinessObjects’ product over others in that it runs on the Microsoft platform and leverages Microsoft SQL Server and Analysis Services, whereas competitive products rely on their own multidimensional databases.  Last January, Microsoft announced it was discontinuing the planning module of Performance Point, leaving a gap in its product portfolio.

Beyond the competitive aspects, the announcement is good news for existing BPC customers who were nervous about SAP’s continued support of the Microsoft platform. Following SAP’s acquisition of OutlookSoft , SAP released BPC for the NetWeaver platform and has been working to get versions for the two platforms at parity. SAP has repeatedly said it will continue to support versions on both platforms, one for SAP customers on NetWeaver, and one for any customers on Microsoft. This latest announcement reinforces its pursuit of the performance management market beyond the SAP ERP/ECC/business apps customer base.

Regards,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

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