BI Scorecard Blog

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

 

The BI Side of Oracle Open World

This is my first time attending Oracle Open World. I met it with a degree of trepidation when a colleague told me 60,000 people attend. 60,000??! The official count was 43,000, but still, that’s more than twice the size of my home town and 10 to 20 times the size of the typical BI conferences I attend.

So I was a little worried about the BI sessions and customers getting lost beneath the weight of the larger lines of Oracle’s businesses (mainly the database and operational apps), let alone how do that many people move among venues.

Rumor had it that CEO Larry Ellison would be making a big announcement related to BI during his keynote. The line to attend the keynote circled around the block, and I couldn’t help but recall the only other time I’ve stood in line like this was to see Phil Collins. So the big news that everyone knows by now is Oracle’s launch of its Exadata server, a combination hardware (built by HP) and database (Oracle) solution. The server’s entrance onto the stage was nothing short of dramatic. Ellison cited compelling statistics in Exadata’s performance improvement versus traditional hardware and Oracle deployments – generally a 16 times to 30 times performance improvement. Noteworthy to me is that while routine transactions like data warehouse updates were significantly faster, query performance seems to get the biggest boost. One early customer adopter Giant Eagle grocery chain reported queries ran 50 times faster on Exadata..  This move clearly challenges vendors Teradata and Netezza, but in this strange world of co-opetition, I’m wondering what it means to NeoView. I’ll defer to those experts who focus on BI appliances and datawarehousing.

From the BI tools side of things, I hate that these products reside in the middleware group. BI should be front-and-center-ware! Afterall, BI is the payback for all that data warehouse and middleware plumbing so I don’t quite agree with how this division is branded or organized.  But maybe I’m biased on this point.

Beyond whatever buzz a conference generates, where I had been seeing Oracle have momentum in the BI tools space is through its analytic applications, which are built on the OBI EE platform. While each of the analytic apps are in varying degrees of maturity, as OBI EE expert Jeff McQuigg from MetricSphere told me, just getting the ETL and business meta data layer for the various operational apps (E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, Seibel) gives customers a big jump start on their BI deployment. Oracle officials said their BI revenues more than doubled in the last year, and about 50% of that was driven by sales of the analytic applications. That Oracle both owns the operational apps and has an extensive portfolio of analytic apps is a significant competitive differentiator.

 

Regards,

Cindi Howson

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

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

TDWI In Las Vegas - Bigger Than Ever

This week’s TDWI conference turned out to be one of the biggest, with over 1000 attendees and another 200 executives at the BI summit.

A highlight from the Executive Summit was hearing Michael Masciandaro, BI Director at Rohm and Haas, provide practical tips on where to start with BI. He presented all the lofty goals often discussed at this conference – great data quality, robust architecture – and advocated not to start there. Instead, start with something “embarrassingly small” with a subject area or application that has no competition.

The BI 2.0 discussion gave credibility to the importance of “eye candy” in making BI appealing and improving adoption among skeptical users.  The use of Flash in MicroStrategy Enterprise Dashboards and Crystal Reports 2008 seemed to dazzle IT and business executives alike.  Mark Madsen’s demonstration of mashups was nothing short of cool. He contrasted statically displayed crime data – the normal display for most police departments – with such data more effectively integrated with Google Maps. The town spent big bucks on the less usable display whereas the mashup was put together by a passionate programmer in his spare time.

At the “BI Bake Off” course, I was once again surprised at how many attendees are doing a first time BI suite selection, roughly 40% of the 100 who took this course. Companies trying to rationalize the number of tools also take this course. Despite the reality of companies having multiple tools from multiple vendors, I was still staggered when a banking person revealed his institution had 23 different products (not multiple modules from 1 vendor, but products!).

A final question from an attendee to the vendor panel (Business Objects, Microsoft, Oracle) took me by surprise. “Given Cindi just told us where your products are weak and gave some red and yellow scores for each of you, what do you think your weak points really are?” There was a pregnant pause. I laughed, suggesting he would not get such an honest answer in a public forum. To my surprise, each vendor did respond, for the most part somewhat candidly (offline, I normally hear those red scores are ALL wrong J!). But of course, a recurring theme to the answers was “everything is fixed in the next release!”

So I leave Las Vegas , with my now smoke-scented clothes (hey, if Paris can ban smoking, why not Las Vegas ?!?!), thinking BI is not at all a mature market. Innovation continues to come from vendors big and small, and if conference attendance is any indication, the BI market remains strong.

Regards,

Cindi