BI Scorecard Blog

Business Intelligence Meets Big Data: Beyond The Hype

Big Data took New York by storm last week to a sold out Strata Conference. Good thing the conference was the week before Hurricane Sandy!

I was lured to Strata by both the traditional vendors I cover such as SAP, SAS, and Tableau exhibiting there, as well as the big data analytics start ups such as Datameer and Karmasphere. There’s a high degree of hype around big data, but there’s also a high degree of innovation, tangible benefits, and venture capital. So coming from the BI world, here’s the skinny on where big data meets BI.

First, big data is more than Hadoop, the open source distributed file system able to scale to petabytes of data. The ability to handle high volumes of data is not the only appeal to Hadoop; it's also that it can handle unstructured data such as clicks, tweets, video, Facebook comments, sensor data, and so on. Such data is a challenge to model and store in a traditional relational database and data warehouse schema. When I first suggested to a fellow attendee that big data is more than Hadoop, he warned me such a comment might be considered blasphemous at Strata.

In the traditional BI world, technologies such as analytic appliances, columnar databases, and in-memory engines can also handle big data. It all depends on whether the challenge is volume and performance, variety and complexity, or combinations thereof.

Which brings me to the first big announcement at the conference: Cloudera Impala, a new real-time query engine for Hadoop. Cloudera is the leading provider of Hadoop software and support. It competes with Hortonworks and MapR, among others. In the last year, many BI vendors have announced support for Hadoop. Access to data in Hadoop has been through Hive, a virtual data warehouse for Hadoop that has its own query language, HiveQL. The thing is, HiveQL generates MapReduce jobs to get to the data in Hadoop. MapReduce is batch-oriented and slow, in contrast to BI which is supposed to be fast. But hey, we might be talking petabytes here, so maybe a little patience is reasonable.

Impala, in contrast to Hive, is real-time. With Cloudera leading the Impala development for the past two years, early adopters wondered if the technology would be kept proprietary to Cloudera, but instead, Cloudera says it will release it to the open source community. The first BI vendors to support Impala are MicroStrategy, Tableau, Pentaho, and QlikView. Pentaho cited a 10x query performance improvement using Impala over Hive, but acknowledge it's still not as fast as what users are used to in the BI world. On the high-end Tableau has seen up to a 100x performance improvement with dense tables of numbers, so performance improvement depends on the type and structure of the data in Hadoop.

So what’s an impatient BI user to do? This is where the rest of the big data architecture comes into play. Querying vast volumes of granular data in Hadoop via Hive may be slow, so once an initial exploration is done, BI vendors will cache the results in their technology to ensure speed-of-thought analysis. This is where solutions like SAP Hana, MicroStrategy OLAP Services (for in-memory), SAS LASR server, the Tableau Data Engine, or the QlikView in-memory engine all come into play. Startup vendor SiSense was also at Strata, showcasing its combination columnar and in-memory engine, exploring 1 terabyte of data on a simple laptop with only 8 gigabytes of RAM. With Hadoop gaining traction, there are a number of new data visualization and exploration vendors that offer access to and exploration of data in Hadoop. Isn’t that what BI vendors with Hadoop connectors do? Yes, but traditional BI vendors can also access data in a data warehouse, analytic appliance, or spreadsheet. Hadoop may or may not be part of the picture.

With the new big-data-oriented vendors, such as Datameer, Karmasphere, and Platfora, Hadoop is definitely in the picture and may be the whole picture. Datameer, for example, generates its own MapReduce jobs (not relying on Hive) and provides 40+ connectors to sources such as Salesforce, Twitter, and Google Ads that allow you to load data into Hadoop. Initial data is explored through a spreadsheet-style interface and then cached in Datameer’s own in-memory engine. At the conference, Datameer announced a new app market with 30 initial apps that are free. Karmasphere takes a different approach, focusing on data access and query generation through Hive. It partners with Tableau for visualization. Platfora, currently in beta, has an appealing front end that reminds me of MicroStrategy’s new Visual Insight. It queries Hadoop through MapReduce jobs to create what it refers to as a lens. Lenses are in-memory caches of the data sets that users can then visually explore. The product is expected to become generally available in Q1 2013.

It was refreshing for me to see a mixture of data scientists and technologists at this conference. Both camps seem to recognize that the explosion of data along with the shortage of talent in this space is creating a perfect storm in which only the smartest will survive. Survival of the smartest has been prevalent in the recession. Some companies are still struggling to analyze sales and who’s buying what. In the big data economy, the analysis extends to who’s interested in your products, who's influencing buying decisions, and who's not even engaged, but should be!

Regards,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

 

Cool BI: Heading to the TDWI Forum in Chicago

Cool BI is about the innovations and emerging trends that promise to re-invigorate your BI initiative, making BI more appealing, more pervasive, more insightful, and actionable. That’s the hype. What’s the reality?

I conducted my first Cool BI Webinar for TDWI in April 2008. The webinar was so popular that we later offered it as an annual half day class that is often been standing-room only. At the inaugural Cool BI Forum, coming up in Chicago, May 7, my co-chair Dave Stodder and I are bringing you two full days of case studies, expert opinions, and panel discussions on these emerging trends.

In first formulating the Cool BI course content, I was motivated by two things: stories from customers that had wowed me with their bleeding-edge approaches and vendors developing cool capabilities. Some of these capabilities were only ideas in the labs of mega vendors, ideas that may or may not ever make it to market. Other solutions were from smaller vendors that have no marketing budget to tell you about their cool products. My vision for the course, and now with the forum, is to get you excited about the possibilities and make you aware of solutions from vendors you may not otherwise hear from. In addition, we offer a framework for separating the practical from the hype.

Some of the key innovations covered in the forum include:

• Visual discovery and dashboards
• Mobile BI
• In-memory computing
• Geo-spatial analysis
• Cloud BI
• Big data
• Social BI

I will share with you some perspectives on why these trends matter and what to expect at the forum.

A few years ago, if users wanted a dashboard developers had to custom code it, and the data wasn’t refreshed that frequently.  Now, mega vendors and specialty vendors alike offer packaged software that combines interactive, visual discovery, with dashboards to help decision-makers focus on the information that matters most. At the TDWI Forum in Chicago, you will hear inspiring case studies from the City of Austin, Texas Fire Department about their journey to self-service BI using QlikTech’s QlikView and from Seattle Children’s Hospital about how they improved patient care using Tableau.

Mobile BI, meanwhile, promises to bring BI to any device, anywhere, whether a smartphone or the latest iPad or Android tablets. So why aren’t more users asking for this? And what are the headaches associated with deploying? Biotech firm Life Technologies takes us on his journey of enabling mobile BI with specialty vendor RoambI while monitoring mobile capabilities from bigger BI vendors such as IBM Cognos. For mobile to succeed it has to be fast: this highlights the role of in-memory computing in mobile BI deployment, which we will hear about at the Forum. To cap off this discussion, look for the catfight – I mean, panel discussion – in which BI vendors will argue for the best approach to bringing mobile BI securely and powerfully to your deployment.

Big Data and BI in the Cloud

In some circles, big data has become synonymous with Hadoop. Does everyone need such solutions? If you think about the volume, variety, and velocity of data, the time to insight has gotten more challenging in the world of big data. Technologies such as Hadoop, in-memory, or data warehouse appliances all have a role to play in addressing the big data challenge. At the Forum, you will learn from LinkedIn on how to architect for big data and to foster an analytic culture.

Cloud BI promises to speed the time to deployment so that IT no longer has to own and maintain the BI infrastructure on the premises. It also promises easier integration with cloud data sources such as Salesforce.com and human resources services emerging in the cloud. But what about security and losing control of company data? And with recent Amazon failures, perhaps cloud BI is not ready for prime time. At the Forum, the Royal Bank of Canada will share their cloud BI journey and implementation of Birst. In addition, industry expert Steve Dine will provide insights on what works and what to watch out for with cloud BI.

This is just a glimpse of a few of the sessions we will see at the Cool BI TDWI Forum. You can preview the full agenda of case studies and expert sessions on the TDWI website  or catch this upcoming Webinar in which Dave and I discuss some key BI trends and offer some TDWI Forum highlights. We look forward to seeing you in Chicago!

Regards,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

 

MicroStrategy Offers Cloud BI

“Cloud” is on my mind, and not just because a hurricane might be hitting the North East coast for the first time in a hundred years.

Vendors big and small are trying to make “Cloud” a household world. For the most part, such hype seems to be falling flat. Microsoft’s commercials touting “To The Cloud” are generally met with puzzled looks by anyone outside of IT.  (As if moving to the cloud were the end game!) A survey by TDWI last year, found that only 9% of BI professionals were “very familiar” with Cloud BI. (Share your thoughts on Cloud BI in this survey.) If so few professionals understand the promises and the pitfalls of cloud BI, we have a long way to go before it becomes a commonly considered option in deploying BI.

Cloud BI is exciting for its promise of faster deployment, lower entry costs, and elastic scalability. To date, cloud BI efforts have blended purpose-built software with cloud infrastructure. Solutions like PivotLink, Birst, and Indicee all have their own application layers. Customers buy these solutions for both the  front-end capabilities and for their Software-as-a-Service approach. SAP BusinessObjects BI onDemand is a little bit different in that it supports sharing of documents created in Xcelsius and Crystal Reports, but is not as robust as the on-premise SAP BusinessObjects suite. Meanwhile, MicroStrategy Cloud promises to be as easy to get up and running as current SaaS offerings, but with all the BI robustness in its traditional on-premise solution.

In the BI world, one of the biggest pain points for companies just beginning to deliver BI is the initial deployment. For the most part, BI software is painful to install and configure. Configuring BI for thousands of users and for extranet deployments requires specialist skills that are not required on an ongoing basis. Expertise in designing data models and authoring reports and dashboards, on the other hand, are skills to invest in and needed on an ongoing basis. With a Cloud BI environment, the vendor provides the infrastructure and the software. Customers pay to use the service on a monthly or yearly basis. The work and expertise seems more smartly divided; but concerns about security, loss of control, and general lack of knowledge abound.

MicroStrategy has taken a different approach than current BI SaaS offerings on a number of points. First, it is using its own data centers, whereas SaaS BI startups tend to rely on the Amazon Cloud. MicroStrategy says for now it will own the infrastructure to be able to control performance.  The data centers are powered by Cisco, NetApp, and Dell hardware.  The vendor will invested $100 million in the data center infrastructure over the next three years. As MicroStrategy has long been known for its enterprise capabilities and data scalability, I can understand why the company wants to keep a tight rein on its Cloud offering. However, I question if managing data centers moves too far beyond the company’s core competency.

MicroStrategy also is blending its cloud approach allowing customers either to keep their data on-premise (and use the cloud only for the MicroStrategy application layer) or to load the data into the cloud. This addresses one of the biggest fears about cloud: who controls the data. Few other SaaS BI vendors allow such a hybrid approach, although Birst was one of the first to introduce it back in 2009. With the full-cloud implementation, MicroStrategy has partnered with IBM Netezza for the BI appliance, ParAccel for the columnar data base, and Informatica for ETL capabilities. I would imagine small to mid size businesses as well as departments who lack their own IT resources would find this latter approach to cloud BI appealing.

In an era of SaaS vendors who tout their multi-tenant architecture as being “SaaS ready,” I am concerned that MicroStrategy is not multitenant. In the post-mortem on one-time SaaS vendor Lucid Era, its single tenant architecture (and higher costs to maintain) was cited as one of the reasons for failure. Architects can get religious in their arguments for and against. The “for” multitenant arguments: multiple clients on a single hardware, shared-everything infrastructure makes it easier and cheaper for the SaaS-vendor  to maintain the environment,. The “against” arguments: customers want to customize their own environments and fear sharing anything. MicroStrategy Cloud will be using virtualization, with multiple companies on the same hardware, but each in their own virtual environment.

For any SaaS solution, the question continues to be: what’s the cost/benefit analysis? Is SaaS more expensive over time than if the solution were deployed on-premise?  MicroStrategy presented a cost/benefit analysis for 200 users over 5 years(see graphic, reprinted with permission), with over $1 Million in savings. The product was released only last month, so it’s too early to tell what the real-world case studies will show.  

I will be curious to see what the uptake is, and also, where: will it be small to midsized businesses who lack IT resources, or will it be in departments in enterprise companies who are looking for faster deployment options?

What is your level of interest in cloud BI? Take the 10-minute survey here.

 Regards,

Cindi Howson, Bi Scorecard

Managing the Mayhem of Mobile BI & QlikTech's New Approach

In-memory and dashboard vendor QlikTech did an about face on its mobile BI strategy last month: one of the first BI vendors to natively support iPad and Android devices, QlikTech is now taking a device- agnostic approach, relying instead on the browser.

QlikTech isn’t the only vendor avoiding native mobile apps, with Information Builders and LogiXML sticking to their more browser-oriented approach. There are, however, some notable differences, and indeed, QlikTech is one of the few to have changed its mobile strategy.

Then there are other BI vendors, such as MicroStrategy and specialty vendor RoamBI who have native apps for Apple and BlackBerry devices. SAP BusinessObjects takes a similar approach but with their dashboards relying on Flash (which Apple does not support), the question with SAP becomes not only which device and which approach, but also, what content. IBM Cognos uses an app approach for BlackBerry’s and a browser approach for Apple, for now. Actuate also uses an app approach. Tibco Spotfire offers a native iPad app as well.

Why the difference and what should a customer do?

The tantalizing vision for browser-based Mobile BI is that it works on all devices. That’s great for vendors who don’t want to develop device-specific apps when tablet and smartphone vendors are still battling for market leadership. As Howard Dresner, author of a study on Mobile BI said, “It’s in the interest of the vendors to write the code once.” It’s also a help to customers who lack smartphone and tablet standards. The other appealing aspect is that nobody wants to develop reports and dashboards for every device.

That’s the vision. Reality, though, is quite different.

What’s good for vendors is not always best for customers. Currently device-specific apps promise a richer user experience, with faster performance via device-based caching. In theory, an HTML5-based solution could take advantage of smartphone features like location awareness and device-based caching, but they don’t necessarily do this. QlikView 10 mobile, for example, does not. Instead, it has optimized its current AJAX viewer to be touch-aware. This certainly means that an iPad user gets the full QlikView experience of searching, filtering, changing the chart display, and so on. I could not, however, use the iPad gestures to enlarge a chart, and the chart quality was not as rich as BI products that use native apps.  Performance was at the mercy of my network.  In part, this has as much to do with QlikView’s architecture as with its browser-based approach.

Information Builders mobile, for example, leverages the vendor’s Active Report technology along with an optimized WebApp based on HTML5. Active Reports provides users with interactivity while caching data locally for offline use and better performance.

As for the whole theory of not having to redesign reports for particular devices, i think it's currently a false hope. Tablets and smartphones have such drastically different screen sizes that report authors have to take that into consideration. Ideally, mobile BI apps (or optimized webApps) will sense the device and re-render the same report for that device, but again, that direction is still a work in progress for most BI products.

The arguments for and against browser versus device-specific apps will continue to rage (see last year’s blog). Greater adoption and use of HTML5, which supports device-based caching and location awareness will add intensity to the debate.  It’s too soon to tell, though, how well mobile BI WebApps that use HTML5 will compare to native apps. Independent analyst Mike Ferguson who  will be speaking on Mobile BI at TDWI Munich, says, “HTML 5 is not as effective as a native app for exploiting the device cache,” due to the smaller size of the cache and how its managed.

With the technology in a state of flux, here are my recommendations for managing Mobile BI:

• Agree on which devices are more important in your company. I won’t even say “set a standard” because the tablet market in particular is changing too rapidly
• Know what approach your vendor uses today, for which devices, and what their strategy is for the future
• Evaluate functional differences between a general browser client, optimized WebApp client, and native app. In all cases, focus on the information consumer role, not the author.
• Be aware of development and redesign efforts for rendering content on specific devices
• Be prepared for change.
• Make Mobile BI a priority. Just because there is change and risks with Mobile BI, it’s not a reason to delay or ignore it.

Have you taken this year’s Successful BI Survey yet? Tell us how important Mobile BI is to your BI success here.

For QlikView customers, to take advantage of this new mobile approach, you need to upgrade to QlikView 10. QlikView has stated it will continue to support the current device-specific apps for those customers who have deployed them.  For more information on QlikView 10, purchase our in depth product review here.  

Sincerely,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

Big Themes in BI for 2011

There is nothing like a fresh snowfall and a new year to reflect on the hot topics in BI for 2011. Here is my list of the five most important trends for the year ahead.

1.     Advanced visualization and dashboards become mainstream

Last year, QlikTech went public, Tableau Software revamped their product, and IBM Cognos released their second generation dashboard solution, dubbed “Business Insight.” Advanced visualization and discovery tools continues to garner significant interest because of their ease of use, visual appeal, and ability to speed the time to insight amid vast amounts of data. The challenge for companies is in understanding when technologies overlap and the degree that they are converging. Should you look for these capabilities from your BI platform vendor or from a specialty vendor?

For dashboards, the answer depends on who your BI platform vendor is. Vendors such as Oracle and MicroStrategy have the most robust, appealing, and integrated dashboard solutions (feel free to disagree with me here, but as always, my conclusions are from hands-on testing of hundreds of criteria). This is not to say that other vendors haven’t made strides in their latest releases, but these two vendors are furthest along.

If, however, you are looking for an advanced visualization product with dashboard capabilities, the better products remain with specialty vendors. A few of the leading BI platform vendors have some exciting products in development in this area.

Beyond these tools, businesses will continue to struggle to decide who owns them and who should develop related content: business or IT? First dashboard attempts will look more like glitzy pin ball machines, but as people gain experience and expertise, these types of tools become the most useful component of BI.

2.     Mobile BI gets recharged

Mobile BI didn’t even make my top trends last year, so one could say its appearance this year is quite a leap. Also in my cool BI class I teach at TDWI, this innovation rarely gets top nod. However, few could have foreseen the wild adoption of Apple’s iPad. The wider screen real estate and sheer beauty this tablet brings to BI is reason to take stock of your mobile BI strategy. What devices will you support, and what is your vendor’s strategy? Vendor capabilities here remind me of my living room New Year’s Eve morning: unclear, fragmented, and all over the place. Support for devices, content, consumer ability, and native versus browser support vary widely. MicroStrategy’s mobile BI solution is the most broad, robust, and includes support for iPads as well as Blackberrys. QlikTech and Actuate also are further ahead than some of the larger platform vendors. Niche vendor RoamBI who supports content from multiple BI vendors is worth investigating.  For companies who fail to consider mobile BI’s potential and the limitations, their mobile BI strategy will be forced into reactionary mode, risking security breaches, mixed devices, and inconsistent support.

3.     Facebook gives BI more than a facelift

Facebook hit 500 million users mid 2010, a community now larger than the population of the U.S. and Canada combined. It’s changing the way a generation interacts with each other, lobbies, advertises, complains, and thinks. It’s impossible for it not to impact BI. Social networking brings new data sources for analysis. It also brings new demands for how users respond to insights from data, and that is never in isolation.

To date, a report may be viewed as part of a task or decision-making process. Any discussion around the report is typically off-line. Key decisions from the insight are made verbally or shared via email or in documents, sometimes held in a document management system.

Envision a Facebook influence on BI: decision-makers bring together the right people virtually; users themselves control the flow and content instead of a central IT group who secures the data and subsequent analyses. Tasks, comments, opinions, and even new sets of data and analyses are brought together seamlessly. Sounds too futuristic? Initially some vendors offered annotations to BI content, such as Information Builders Performance Management Framework and Dundas Dashboards. Moving far beyond just a portal technology, consider the new collaboration capabilities in Microsoft SharePoint 2010 integrated with their BI products. Beyond SharePoint, Outlook 2007 has collaboration features that SAS has been quick to leverage. Demonstrating further social networking’s influence, last year SAP launched StreamWork (but without BI content), Oracle BI EE 11g included support for Web Center (someone should rename this product, seriously), and IBM Cognos 10 shipped with Lotus Connection. While the BI heavy weights are making inroads here, niche vendor Lyzasoft seems to have gotten the “user-directed” aspect most right.

So we’ve seen some innovation here, but the convergence with BI is still very young.

4.     The economy rebounds … stretching BI teams further

The economy shows signs of recovering. Companies who weren’t using BI to work smarter are no longer with us. BI budgets are once again expanding. The challenge is to continue to spend wisely, but also, to keep up with insatiable user demand. Central BI can’t handle it all. Bringing BI to the masses also means balancing what to handle centrally and enterprise-side, and when to let users do their own thing. It’s not always a matter of departmental BI being a throw-away or stand-alone application. Sometimes, it’s a matter of intelligently separating responsibilities. SAP BusinessObjects 4.0 has an interesting approach to its meta data development that allows for this. eThority also seems to nicely blend enterprise class with departmental control.

If a shrinking economy helped spur open source adoption, what will a recovering economy do? I would argue that open source’s growth is not primarily because it’s free; it’s because it’s open, allowing for easier embedability. Such aspects are more important to ISVs and others who build industry-focused applications which in itself is a sizable market. For open source to compete more squarely with closed-source commercial BI, their products must continue to improve; some are strong in one or two core areas, but not across the BI spectrum. Beyond the U.S. market, open source is also attractive for governments and foreign companies who don’t want such critical assets to be powered entirely by U.S. software makers.

5. Will new releases be upgrade fever or flu?

Major new software releases mean powerful new capabilities, as long as the upgrade process is seamless. Painful migrations can leave IT resources strained with testing, bug resolution, and redesign. The top four BI vendors have all had major new product releases in 2010. Customers who have been burned with painful migrations in the past will not rush to adopt the latest version. In some cases, it will be a time to assess the cost of upgrading with the cost of switching preferred vendors.

It’s been interesting to see how both IBM Cognos and SAP BusinessObjects have a “co-existence” strategy in their latest releases: leave old content as is, running on the new platform. That approach is fine as a transition strategy but the proof point will be in how easy and quick a full transition is.

In-memory and more

So what about all the other things I wrote about last year: in-memory, cloud, BI for SMBs, culture, and predictive analytics? All these areas continue to be critical, and I continue to be both impressed and overwhelmed by the degree of innovation and success from smaller vendors in the BI space.  My five picks above are those things that I think will garner the most attention, generate the most activity, and cause the most disruption in 2011. If I added a sixth item, it would be continued growth of in-memory analytics. In-memory proved to be one of the biggest BI technology themes in 2010 (think Microsoft’s PowerPivot and SAP’s HANA) and will be a capability that many companies will implement this year, whether as part of visual discovery and dashboards (item 1), insatiable user demand (item 4), or instantaneous response time that mobile requires(item 2). It seems, though, that while in-memory is a cornerstone to some vendors’ BI strategy, others are more reticent. Will they continue to have a wait- and-see approach, or will they advocate greater focus on other technologies for fast, big data BI such as appliances, indexing, various caching, and columnar databases?

As I look at last year’s post at this time, my BI predictions seemed fairly accurate. If only, now, it carried over to football! Anyone want to place bets on the Packers this weekend? They are one game further than last year, and that’s got to be a good omen, right?

Happy New Year!

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

 

 

Tableau 6.0 and Cool BI at TDWI

At TDWI this month in my Cool BI class, Tableau Software previewed its just-released 6.0 version. This may prove to be one of the company’s biggest releases and one that heightens the competition with QlikTech, TIBCO Spotfire, and Microsoft PowerPivot.

As I wrote in a recent in-depth review of Tableau, this visual discovery tool is one of the easiest to use. For customers with a well-designed data warehouse or data mart, Tableau Software nicely leverages the power of the underlying database, whether relational, OLAP, or columnar. This approach was in stark contrast to QlikTech QlikView’s and Tibco Spotfire’s approach of bringing all the data into memory. Replicating the data can has its advantages and disadvantages. With Tableau 6.0, customers seem to now get the best of both worlds with the new Data Engine. Tableau’s Data Engine promises to leverage the source database when necessary or to bring portions of the data into memory when that offers the better performance. New support for Windows 64-bit improves the product’s scalability.

The other major improvement is in the ability to handle multiple data sources, a capability referred to as Data Blending. This was one of the oft-cited reasons why customers would choose other products over Tableau. With Data Blending, an end user can drag and drop new data sources onto a visualization. As long as the dimension names are conformed, the tool will automatically create the joins.

In the Cool BI class, it was interesting to see so many users who have heard of Tableau but only a few who actually used it. I suspect these latest enhancements will change that.

At the end of the class, I once again asked the 50 or so attendees to vote on their top 3 innovations out of the 8 we reviewed. Dashboards and advanced visualization once again topped the list of priorities for innovations attendees most want to pursue. But here’s the rub: BI users would like these capabilities to be in one tool and currently, it’s a fragmented market. Some advanced visualization products can be used to create dashboards but not all;  and not all dashboards support visual discovery.

Predictive analytics came out second. In discussing the integration of BI with predictive analytics, SAS demoed its new Rapid Predictive Modeler.  The third highest priority was a split between BI Search, with Endeca demoing its solution, and in-memory analytics, a capability gaining momentum across the industry.

I wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving this week and safe travels! I’m thankful for having an amazing job that connects me to so many wonderful customers, readers, colleagues, and vendors with cool products! To my family and friends, thank you … for everything.

Best wishes,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

www.BIScorecard.com

 

SAS’ Answer to Pervasive BI: Microsoft Outlook

I was recently at the SAS BI User Connect Conference in which select customers convene at SAS headquarters to share solutions, struggles, and to learn about new product capabilities.

One of the improvements that I was most excited about is a new version of the SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office (AMO) that now has tight integration with Outlook. As an office tool, Email is more widely used than Excel, and SAS appears to be ahead of the market in leveraging Outlook as a way of making BI more pervasive, particularly for casual users. As I discuss in this Ease of Use in BI report, Email is rated significantly easier to use than BI tools, and easier-to-use BI tools boast a 10% higher adoption rate than BI usage overall.

Some BI vendors do support scheduled reports to be sent to Email. SAS, however, takes the integration several steps further. First, the Email client is used as a navigation tool to access all reports and dashboards. Folders on the SAS BI Server automatically appear as folders in Outlook. Then, from within Outlook, users can view, refresh, or send a report to another person. Security is maintained by the SAS BI Server. There is a nifty gadget pane that lets users quickly view their most important business indicators.   The SAS AMO is included as part of the BI Server license.

In comparing SAS’s Email integration with other BI vendors, only SAP’s Duet, released in Q2 2006, seems to come close. That product, however, has had limited adoption with customers citing high licensing costs and transition concerns with BEx. Duet also goes beyond reporting to include transaction capabilities from within Outlook.

Surprizing to me and to SAS customers who attended the event, though, is that this “little”-known enhancement became available in August. SAS says they plan a marketing launch next month. The timing was more that the client-side upgrade shipped last month in which the new Rapid Predictive Modeler got all the attention. SAS customers were unanimous in their enthusiasm for the Outlook integration.

What do you think? If your BI vendor had direct access to the BI Server from Outlook, how would that affect your BI adoption? Who’s using SAP’s Duet?

For a sneak peak of SAS’ enhancement and other cool innovations in BI, catch my next Cool BI course at TDWI in Orlando.

 Regards,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

 

 

 

 

Who Needs a Browser When You Have an App?

 My blog a few weeks ago on MicroStrategy’s Mobile BI launch spurred an offline debate that deserves some open consideration, and well, further debate.

One reader asked me why I did not mention Pentaho’s support of the iPhone since they were one of the first to support it. My distinction is that they didn’t have a purpose-built app. What Pentaho provided was extensions that allowed Pentaho’s BI Server to be accessed via the iPhone Safari browser. If I were talking about all vendors who have a web-based mobile BI strategy, there are others I would add to the list, such as Information Builders, Jaspersoft, perhaps IBM Cognos, (but as they have an app approach for Blackberry, I suspect the app approach for iPhone is just a matter of time).

So what’s the distinction or the big deal?

In the mid 90s, delivering BI via a browser was a major step for the industry toward making BI more accessible and scalable. Just as BI vendors had to rethink what capabilities they provide via a browser versus via a desktop app, so too will vendors have to rethink what they deliver via a smartphone app … or not.

Accessing BI content via a smartphone browser may offer some advantages in terms of full Web-BI capabilities and device support. But it poses a number of challenges including sub optimal screen rendering, slow response time for both functionality and data, inaccessibility when the signal is weak, and so on.

Purpose-built smartphone apps offer a number of advantages over browser-based smartphone access. Some of these include faster response time, device-based caching, optimal rendering for the correct screen size, leveraging of built in GPS capabilities, bar code reading, and so on.  And while my preference is for the app approach, please note, this is strictly a matter of opinion.  A similar architectural debate applies to production- style reporting, with certain vendors advocating browser-based BI authoring for all BI content, whereas others don’t. There are pros and cons in either philosophy.

The issue, of course, is what capabilities get put into the iPhone/iPad BI app and what gets left out (and which approach to take for which device!). The ability to design a new report on an iPhone may not be an oft-requested requirement, but users would certainly want view, sort, filter, refresh, and answer prompt capabilities. How about “send to” and “save locally” options? These are the design issues that vendors and customers alike face in deciding which way to deploy mobile BI … and when.  I think of some of my colleagues who refuse to use, for example, the e-Trade iPhone app because it’s too limiting compared to the web-based version. Conversely, trying to use a smartphone browser for Facebook is painful compared to the app, on either the BlackBerry or the iPhone. In testing the few BI tools that have an iPad/iphone BI app, there certainly are differences in capabilities among all the vendors.

I welcome vendors and customers alike to share their opinions on what approach they prefer and why: smartphone browser or purpose-built smartphone app, and if the latter, what features are most important for mobile BI.

Thanks to Lon Amick for challenging my views on this!

Regards,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

 

 

 

 

MicroStrategy Launches Mobile in New York

MicroStrategy officially launched MicroStrategy Mobile in New York yesterday.

It might seem odd that it’s a major launch, given that the vendor has had a mobile solution for three years now. What’s different about this, though, is that they are the first major BI platform vendor to market with native support for both iPhone and iPads and broad, interactive BI content. (To be precise, Oracle released an iPhone app last year, but with limited content- more is due in 11g shortly;  SAP shipped an iPhone app for SAP BusinessObjects Explorer last month; QlikView supports iPhone and iPad; Actuate BIRT supports both).

When MicroStrategy first briefed me on their product, they shared some customer survey data about how the iPhone and iPad were becoming more important to corporate customers than the BlackBerry. I didn’t believe them, in part because mobile BI has historically gotten such a low rating in my Cool BI classes but also because of market share reports that still show RIM leading by a wide margin. However, that was before the iPad was released, bringing greater screen realestate and defining a new market segment. Indeed, the talk and interest at this event was iPhone/iPad oriented. One long-time customer who has been using MicroStrategy on BlackBerry for years expects that device to be phased out as employees upgrade their smartphones. He noted that particularly in Asia, the iPhone was preferred (clearly AT&T’s exclusive contract in the U.S. affects such market penetration here).

VHA and Novation is an early adopter of the new MicroStrategy Mobile for iPhone with its PriceLynx app. The web version of the app has allowed hospitals to save millions of dollars by better understanding supply prices and costs. Extending the app to the iPhone only took a few days, said Guillermo Ramas, VP of Product Development at Novation, mainly to optimize the rendering on a smaller screen. The same BI content in MicroStrategy Web is rendered and interactive on the iPhone. Ramas said deploying on mobile will now be a standard part of their product development process.

As an indication of MicroStrategy’s belief that the iPad and mobile BI is revolutionary, the company is equipping its sales force with iPads, replacing Windows-based notebooks. To encourage existing and new customers to try MicroStrategy Mobile, the company is offering a free 25-user version.

The greater utility of smartphones, along with more robust mobile BI apps, means mobile BI will have as profound an  impact on the BI market as the Internet initially had on business intelligence.

Regards,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

Mainstream BI or Mainstream Predictive Analytics?

We talk about “mainstream BI” that continues to be more vision than reality, but how about mainstream analytics?  This week visualization and analytics vendor TIBCO Spotfire is one step closer to making that a reality with its 3.1 release.

Statistical analysis and predictive analytics requires expertise in both the data and statistical methods. Consuming the results of such analyses, however, does not. So imagine an expert who creates a model that optimizes which customer is most likely to respond to a marketing campaign. The process of determining which factors (such as age, gender, income, and customer tenure) most predict likelihood to respond is something the expert normally does. So the expert runs the model, refines the model for maximum response rates, and ultimately gives a list to the marketing department of which customers are their best targets.

In Spotfire 3.1, there are two new aspects that make predictive analytics more accessible to the final decision-makers (in this example, the marketing department). First, are parameters that allow a business user to select the variables that go into the model. So maybe, age really doesn’t provide the best likelihood to respond. Maybe, instead, it’s education level. Via a simple parameter drop down, a business user can choose which factors they’d like to use as input to the model.

Second, the business user can see the results of the model via an intuitive dashboard from within Spotifire. The R engine is still processing the model behind the scenes, but the results don’t stay off to the side as is often the case today.

A few vendors have tried at least to facilitate the consumption of the results of models, with varying ease and effectiveness. SAS in the way it can surface stored processes in Web Report Studio would be one example. MicroStrategy’s optional Data Mining Services would be another.  And yet, neither is particularly widely adopted, partly for complexity and partly for licensing reasons. A few weeks ago, SAS previewed a new product that would be a big enhancement to the concept of “mainstream predictive analytics,” but details are under NDA.

So while “mainstream BI” may still be more of a vision, this release of Spotfire brings “mainstream predictive analytics” one step closer to reality.

Sincerely,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard