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

 

 

Comments

[Pierre Leroux]

Hello Cindi.
I have attended your Cool BI: The Latest Innovations course on Tuesday afternoon. Thank you, it was excellent. I too was a little surprised by how low BI SAAS scored in your poll despite a very solid but somewhat rushed demo by Birst. Perhaps enterprises are too busy (giving the economic conditions) trying to squeeze the most of existing BI investments to even pay attention to the on-premise / in-the-cloud debate. In a year from now, I am confident we will see a different picture and a stronger SAAS uptake.
Out of the three demos, Tableau did a very impressive demo and I am not surprised that Advanced Visualizations scored so high.

[Cindi Howson]

Hi, Pierre, thank you for your comment and for attending the course! I think you are correct about some of the reason for lack of interest in SaaS – sometimes putting out fires takes priority over rethinking ways of doing BI. I also think that some innovations simply take time for the market to understand the value and limitations. SaaS in BI is still very much early days, whereas in CRM and content management, for example, it’s more mature. The same can be said of advanced visualization – these products have been around for years. But it seems they are only just now gaining acceptance and momentum beyond niche users.

Regards,
Cindi