BI Scorecard Blog

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

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

 

 

 

 

 

SAP BusinessObjects Explorer Gets Top Billing at Sapphire

If you’ve been following Business Objects’ innovations, you know Polestar is a combination search, exploration, and visualization tool. I have described it as an  iTunes- and Google-like approach to BI. It certainly makes my “cool” list and is a product the company has demoed as part of the Cool BI course I teach at TDWI.

This morning at SAP’s Sapphire conference in Orlando, Florida, the vendor announced “Explorer”, a combination Polestar running on the Business Warehouse Accelerator (BWA). BWA is SAP’s in-memory database and appliance (see the in-memory BI feature for more info). And don’t let the “Explorer” rebranding confuse you (as it did me!):  we aren’t talking about the former SAP BEx (aka Business Explorer).

There are a couple reasons why this is a big deal.  I recently wrote in my evaluation of SAP BusinessObjects XI 3.1 that the integration between BW and BusinessObjects XI was no better than any other BI vendors who rely on the BAPI interfaces to get to BW InfoCubes. The Explorer release greatly changes that with direct access to BWA. With BWA, the level of performance and data volumes that Explorer can navigate changes drastically. Polestar alone had limitations on data volumes; Explorer with BWA really doesn’t. As well, this combination pack also leverages the BWA indexes without requiring customers to first create a universe, as the standalone Explorer (former Polestar) would require.

So customers can be up and running fast. Super fast. Beta customer Molson Coors says they were up in 1 day, with Explorer navigating 10 BW Infocubes. The largest cube is over 300 million records, and still with speed-of-thought exploration. Katrina Coyle, global information manager at Molson Coors explains that the search-like interface and corresponding speed changes the whole way people use information. Simply entering key words such as “Coors Lite marketshare” means people can spend more time asking the right questions rather than trying to find the data.

The other headline is their announcement that BWA will support non SAP BW content in a second wave. That gives SAP BusinessObjects an in-memory approach to BI that’s good for non BW customers too, whether running SAP or not.

At first blush, this announcement may sound like more of the same, as Doug Henschen blogged. Well, I wasn’t at Sapphire last year, so can’t say how this keynote and announcement differs from last year. In truth, when the vendor requested a briefing about “Explorer/Polestar”, I initially declined, thinking I had already heard about that. The differences are there but under the covers. As Doug correctly points out, some competitors have in-memory, but here too, the difference is in how the in-memory is integrated into an existing BI deployment, whereas tools like TM1 and QlikView are deployed stand-alone.

Lastly, as a newcomer to the Sapphire world and one who tends to view everything through the BI lens, I was pleasantly surprised that BI here is getting top billing. As I advise clients and debated pros and cons in last week’s TDWI class on Developing a BI Tool Strategy, BI is now a bit part in these vendors’ total revenues. For context, check out much BI can drive sales for core product lines and how those core product lines are doing, matters.  When the going gets tough, making sure BI funding (whether in R&D and support) doesn’t get cut is an important strategic consideration for BI buyers.

So while Explorer accelerated version is cool and disruptive, the attention it is getting in all the key notes means my bigger take away is that BI matters a lot in the SAP world. The vendor is viewing information holistically, from process (source systems) to insight (BI).

Regards,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

SAP BusinessObjects' BI Pricing Change

It’s April 15, tax day in the U.S. Will you be getting a refund or have to pay up? The same question applies to the new SAP BusinessObjects pricing announced today.

I have often said BI pricing is a buyer’s nightmare. No two vendors package their products the same way. Often, defining requirements and evaluating alternatives is a painful process. You would think that procuring the software is relatively easier, but it’s often not.

To that end, SAP BusinessObjects is trying to simplify their pricing model and to more closely match SAP’s ERP pricing model of engine plus users. The change only applies to enterprise BI customers. SAP BusinessObjects already has a straight forward model for SMBs who can buy individual products like Crystal and Xcelsius a la carte or the Edge Series that is all in one (production reporting, business query, dashboards) for up to 20 concurrent users.

In the new pricing scheme, enterprise customers will pay a named user license fee for one of two roles. The roles are primarily an information consumer role (called “view and explore”) and a power user authoring role (called “design and analyze”). In addition, there is a server fee that now includes all the platform services--services such as Polestar, Oracle E-Business Suite adaptors, PeopleSoft integration, Mobile and so on.

The view and explore role is relatively generous and includes the new, iTunes-Google-like Polestar as well as Live Office for Excel integration. Web Intelligence interactive users, however, fall into the “design and analyze” camp. According to Franz Aman, VP of Product Marketing, the new pricing is also intended to make it easier for customers to extend BI’s reach by lowering the cost of the view and explore role. In fact, the “view and explore” role is now included in existing SAP ERP professional user licenses.  In theory, it makes it easier for SAP customers to buy into the SAP BusinessObjects platform as they now only have to buy the BI server license.

As SAP does not publish its price list, what’s not at all clear is how sweet, or sour, a deal this is. Does the user role+server cost more than server-only did before? Or less?  I look forward to hearing from customers as they negotiate under these new pricing policies!

One change that is a clear positive: customers can now set up test and development environments at no additional charge. That should better allow customers to follow best practices for separating such environments. It’s also in contrast to some BI vendors who charge full price for such environments

Coincidentally, the theme of BI Scorecard’s next customer webinar is BI pricing (April 30^th), with a side-by-side comparison of how BI vendors package their products.  Subscribe or purchase any document to receive an exclusive invitation.

Regards,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

 

 

BI from the SAP Customer Viewpoint

I’m just back from the SAP Netweaver BI & Portals conference  in Florida last week, digesting what’s new, what’s old, what’s coming.

The SAP Insider conference is different from many of the BI conferences in that  a media company, rather than the vendor, runs the event.  I had last attended an SAP Insider conference shortly after the Business Objects acquisition was announced. Then and now, I noticed a stark contrast between the former Business Objects’ conferences and these SAP Insider ones.  I would have liked more enthusiasm and certainly less emphasis on legacy products.

The event kicked off with a keynote from Marge Breya, EVP and GM of the Intelligence Platform. Joe King bravely backed her up with 16 demos that should have drawn oohs and ahs for both the content and sheer number.  I wasn’t sure if the crowd was quiet, because it was an early start, lower attendance, or not impressed. As the day went on though, it struck me that the keynote was perhaps too visionary for where the attending SAP customers are today in terms of their BI initiatives. Many are primarily writing ABAPs for reporting. Some are using BEx with BW, but even Web Intelligence is a major leap forward for them. Those who have built a custom data warehouse and settled on an alternative BI tool strategy likely didn’t attend.

BW expert David Dixon had an enlightening session on self-service BI and governance. He described the SAP BW Accelerator as “the closest thing to a silver bullet in the BI world.” Indeed, one of the most interesting demos in the keynote was of Polestar on top of the BW Accelerator. Polestar is a combination search and visualization solution;  BW Accelerator is a combination appliance and in-memory database.  Navigating through a billion records with subsecond response times is mouth watering for any business user who has waited in the backlog of IT report requests or lamented, “why can’t BI be as easy as Google?”

Coincidentally, I recently finished testing SAP BusinessObjects XI 3.1 and released a new BIScorecard evaluation.  Based on an evaluation of over 250 detailed criteria, the vendor’s latest release re-inforces why this product is one of the strongest on the market for its business query module, the best at information delivery capabilities, but lags on the OLAP front. Beyond the product capabilities, as the conference last week reflected, some SAP customers  will follow the SAP BusinessObjects roadmap for strategic reasons. As one attendee told me, “we are married to SAP 13 times over.”

Regards,

Cindi Howson, BIScorecard

The Answer to Pervasive BI: The Fed?

“Mainstream BI”, “pervasive BI” and “BI for for the masses”  have been the rallying cry for BI vendors for nearly a decade now.  Some thought Microsoft could do it with an Excel interface. Others think Google will be part of the answer.  I am looking to the Fed.

No, it’s not that I am on the bandwagon for the stimulus being the answer to all the world’s woes. However, when President Obama first mentioned a website (recovery.gov) as a way of ensuring full disclosure for stimulus spending, I got as excited as anyone can amid this economic crisis.

My vision for recovery.gov is that it will showcase the best of BI. It will be engaging, simple, and insightful. I’m hoping for a Google-like interface where I can start with a search request such as “education spending in NJ”.  An appealing chart (rather than a dense page of numbers) will show me how the money has been spent. It will give me the necessary context, relative to other states, and to prior years. And of course I can drill down to my individual county.

My envisioned recovery.gov will not only provide the monitoring capabilities, but also facilitate insight to action by giving me contact details for whom to appeal to when I think the spending looks unfair, wasteful, or just plain wrong.

Am I visioning too much? Maybe. But I hope the best BI tool vendors and consultancies are aggressively vying for this opportunity. Many eyes will be on recovery.gov, and I can well imagine the marketing bang a “Powered by BI Vendor X” could bring if this site and application are well designed. Of course, if it’s boring, static, and a flop, then the Fed will be in the same situation as many organizations struggling with BI adoption.

Back to the present: I head to Las Vegas this weekend for TDWI’s Winter Conference. The “BI Bake Off” course I facilitate includes Microsoft, SAP BusinessObjects, and MicroStrategy in this round. I expect to get glimpses of some of their latest versions as well as chance to pose the tough questions, “how much of recent downsizing is in the BI business? ... What does Microsoft's change of strategy on performance management mean to BI and to other vendors? ...” The upside to this down economy is that my airfare is an all time low of only $250, 1/3 of the normal price. With travel costs so low, I hope you are taking the opportunity to fulfill your New Year’s resolutions of “investing in you!”

Regards,

Cindi Howson

Business Objects, SAP Support – Lessons Learned

One week later, and it seems the support situation at Business Objects is settling, although customers remain miffed and a handful still do not have access to support. There are lessons for customers and vendors alike from this situation, and a question of how the BI vendor will make amends to those most adversely affected.

 

For most customers, the issue of not accessing support was one primarily of inconvenience and frustration. As of mid last week, according to Business Objects, about 20% of customers lacked the ability to logon to the site to open or track existing cases. However, for some, the disruption in support service meant a delay in production implementations.

 

In speaking to Scott Bajtos, Business Objects’ Executive Vice President and Chief Satisfaction Officer, he acknowledged the migration had not gone as smoothly as expected. While some of the migration challenges were clearly planning related, it seems that the crux of the problems were twofold. First, the security for SAP’s Service Marketplace system is separate from the SAP security systems, and Business Objects underestimated the number of logons that would not be synchronized between the two. Second, the support migration was just one of several migrations Business Objects did last week to leverage the SAP infrastructure.

 

Looking ahead Bajtos said the main reasons for moving ahead aggressively with the migration to SAP’s support platform is partially cost related, but is primarily because the Service Marketplace is “light years ahead of the support capabilities Business Objects had under their previous support system.” Service Marketplace offers:

 

• an integrated knowledge management system, so that when a support case is resolved, other technicians and customers can see the resolution.
• Moderated forums, which while BOB– the user-driven forum – is an invaluable resource for Business Objects customers, the vendor never officially supported or contributed to.
• A better ability to do remote diagnostics.

 

The vision all sounds great to me, but let’s look at some of the sore points raised in the blog comments last week:

 

• Rate Increase: Support will increase to 22% of net licensing fees. While many customers are already at this rate, some customers were on a 20% rate for standard support that did not provide 24 by 7 access. The new rate gives 24X7 access. Customers will be migrated to the new rate over a 4-year period. As well, I’d like to point out that based on research done for BIScorecard, a number of BI competitors charge maintenance based on list pricing and not discounted pricing and that 22% is at the low end of the maintenance rate.

 

• Historical Cases: Historical case information will be migrated over and should be completed within the next two weeks. Customers will be able to access three years of history.

 

• SLAs: Regarding service level agreements, I continue to advocate that all enterprise BI customers negotiate this as part of their purchase agreement. While one blog commenter wrote that Business Objects was not open to this in the past, I suspect this is more of a historical BI issue and lack of customer demand (or insistence!). SLAs are less important when BI is deployed departmentally. For enterprise software (including SAP ERP) and hardware, SLAs are fairly standard. So as part of your evaluation process (see recommended process here), involve the purchasing department early in the process. If you wait to the 11^th hour, you may not be in the best bargaining position.

  

As I stated last week, I’d like to see more customers evaluate support – the quality, the costs, the capabilities - as part of BI buying. Including service level agreements in the contract would seem a natural evolution. In the meantime, I’ll be curious how Business Objects makes amends to customers for this support misstep and if indeed they can execute on their vision in this area.

 

Regards,

Cindi Howson

 

The SAP/Business Objects Support Blunder

When SAP acquired Business Objects early this year, it committed to keeping Business Objects as a separate company. As a separate company owned by SAP, it could better execute on its leadership in the BI market and remain open and agnostic to nonSAP customers and systems. Both also wanted to tap into any potential joint customers and synergies. One of those synergies is support.

 

Naturally, there are economies of scale in sharing support systems to track cases, provide searchable content, and so on. If you are a regular reader of my blog, you know that support is one of my hot buttons and one I consider to be a critical factor for evaluating BI vendors. When things go wrong with software—and they will--it’s the quality of support that is the difference between success and frustration and failure.

 

If you read the BIScorecard Summary Report (new one due out next week), then you also know that support has been Business Objects’ Achilles heal. And yet, it is one that the vendor has made significant improvements on in the last two years. The vendor’s internal metrics showed marked improvement. Anecdotally, customer feedback to me had improved and in particular, larger deployments on the Elite level plan raved about the attention and follow through.

 

All of that fell apart last week when SAP abruptly switched Business Objects customers to the SAP support site. Customers were supposed to get new logon IDs, but many didn’t and still haven’t. Critical cases that were opened before the switch are currently missing from the SAP support system, and the Business Objects support system is no longer accessible to customers. Business Objects support engineers, meanwhile, are telling customers they will suspend critical cases that haven’t been updated. Duh. How can customers update them without access to either the old or new system?

 

This blunder is beyond comprehension and smacks of both poor planning and inadequate testing.

 

The issues will no doubt eventually get fixed, but it does not bode well for the quality of support either continuing to improve or being any better under SAP’s direction. My recommendation to existing customers – other than patience – is to test your new logon ID when received and escalate issues rapidly and loudly. For prospects, remember to evaluate support as part of your selection process.

 

 

Cindi Howson, Founder, BIScorecard

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

Author: Business Objects XI (R2): The Complete Reference

Crystal Shines ... For Some

Last November, Business Objects officially released Crystal Reports 2008. To date, it’s been the product’s flashiest release in recent years … and I do mean that literally--one of the most noteworthy enhancements is the ability to embed Flash files within a report. The use of Flash brings reports to life in a way that make them more like mini applications – rich, interactive, and visually appealing. The Flash files can be built in a report developer’s tool of choice, but the tightest integration is with the company’s dashboard product Xcelsius.

The other enhancement is the ability to view reports over the Web and interactively sort and filter the data cached within the report. The parameters refresh the display without re-executing a query and thus straining the database, a weakness in some competitive products and in earlier versions of Crystal Reports.

There is the inevitable ‘BUT’ and that is in the product’s timing and dependencies. In order for enterprise customers to take advantage of the best features in Crystal Reports 2008, they need to be on XI 3.0, due out this quarter. In some realms, a five month lag in platform support may not be considered long. My complaint is that this dependency was not clearly communicated in any of the product launches, so it seems to me a case of the vendor building demand in a way that IT can’t deliver on. (Note: these same dependency issues exist in the Edge Series for medium-sized businesses and in on-demand offerings, Crystal Reports.com. Support for these platforms will be added at some point later in the year). Upgrading any server environment will take customers months longer than when XI 3.0 actually ships and is an altogether different scenario than simply upgrading a report developer’s software. Business Objects says that the majority of the Crystal Reports user base are individual developers, not enterprise customers, and to be fair, developers could build a custom Web app to take advantage of the new capabilities.

With the acquisition by SAP now complete, it comes as no surprise that Crystal Reports is positioned as the future of reporting (supplanting BEx Report Designer, released in mid 2006 as a replacement to the formerly OEMd Crystal Reports). Here’s the catch again: a trial version of Crystal Reports 2008 for SAP will only be available in the second half of 2008. Such report developers need to think carefully about whether they are better investing time and skills in BEx Report Designer or, I would suggest, investing in an earlier version of Crystal Reports.

No wonder it’s called eye-candy—for some, you can look but not eat it! For a detailed product review, see the updated evaluation on BIScorecard.

Cindi Howson, Founder, BIScorecard, a web-site for in-depth BI product reviews

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

Author: Business Objects XI (R2): The Complete Reference

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