BI Scorecard Blog

IBM Neo Heats Up Competition in BI Search

By Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

I wrote last week that one of the big trends in big data was a resurgence in the use of search and natural language processing for making BI as easy as Google. Last week at IBM's annual Information on Demand conference, IBM announced project Neo, heating up competition in BI Search and cloud BI.

Neo starts with a simple search box in which users can ask a question. In this screenshot, "what is the relationship between Budget, Gross Domestic Sales, by Story type. Neo will present a list of possible data sources that can answer the question. For now, these data sources are restricted to data sets loaded to the cloud, in a DB2 columnar data store. IBM concedes that for the product to be fully embraced, Neo will need to support on-premise data sources as well, and has said that is part of the product roadmap.

Once the user selects the optimum data source, Neo generates an interactive visualization. For example, a user can refine the question by change "budget" to "units sold," for example. The visualization can also be changed to display as a trend rather than a bubble chart. In addition to the visualization, Neo generates a number of infographics (shown along the top)based on statistical algorithms that might be relevant. So even though the user didn't ask about seasonality, the data is showing there is a pattern with Fall being the best season for sales (early holiday shoppers, perhaps?).

Neo brings together a lot of intellectual property that IBM has acquired in recent years. The visualizations are powered by RAVE (Rapidly Adaptive Visualization Engine) technology and skills acquired through SPSS. The infographics are based on some of the capabilities in Analytic Catalyst, a module released in June of this year that makes advanced analytics easy for a casual business user. The natural language processing leverages Vivisimo, later rebranded Infosphere Data Explorer.

Not surprisingly, the initial demos of Neo are impressive. It's easy, visual, and powerful, for the most casual of decision makers. It could do for data what Google has done for the Internet. Today, the industry average for BI adoption is at 24% of employees, and ease of use is an oft-cited barrier to broader BI (take this year's survey to rate your BI adoption and ease of use).

What wasn't shown, though, is how the data sources get indexed and loaded to the cloud. IBM Cognos has previously tried to leverage the simplicity of search with its Go! Search interface launched in 2006. With that tool, content in PowerCubes and reports had to be indexed on a periodic schedule. Search was limited to key words, and the interface was existing reports, not nearly as visual as Neo. So Go! Search had a degree of complexity to implement, was less intuitive, appealing, and smart. Perhaps these are all reasons why it wasn't widely adopted? Just how well Neo overcomes the past limitations of Go! Search will only be known once the beta launches in January.

IBM also announced another new product, IBM Concert, that brings collaboration, workflow, and mobile together in a SaaS solution. This product is expected to be available in December. I see collaboration as still an emerging capability that customers are trying to figure out. Recognizing the influence that vendors like Facebook and Twitter have had on consumers, social and collaboration capabilities have began appearing in BI tools and enterprise apps a few years ago. SAP first launched Streamwork, then later acquired Success Factor's Jam, while Microsoft acquired Yammer, and TIBCO launched Tibbr. IBM has had strong collaboration capabilities in its Lotus Connections product, whose technology was first integrated with IBM Cognos in its version 10 release back in 2010. But I haven't found a single customer using those capabilities. Again, it's not clear if that's because it was poorly marketed and BI teams have other priorities, or if it reflects a larger, industry-wide problem. Collaboration around data today is usually offline from the data, whether via email or in meeting rooms or conference calls. So first, capturing comments in collaboration software is a change in the current work flow. Second, making comments publicly requires an analytic culture in which it's safe to voice opinions, dissentions, and to ask tough questions. Just imagine, if 30 years ago, the engineer who was worried about the Space Shuttle Challenger posted a comment in the data analysis of O-ring tests to the effect of, "the data shows we shouldn't launch. Too cold out." In those days, the engineer could barely voice a concern in whispers and only to his direct supervisor. (If you're as fascinated about that story, culture, and decision making catastrophe as I am, I'll be watching the Science Channel's documentary this Saturday). How far have we come since then? Is social something reserved more for personal and public opinion, or is it something that the industry is ready to embrace in BI?

I look forward to watching both new products enter the market!

IBM Gives Sneak Peek of Cognos’ New Visual Discovery Product

Last week at IBM’s analyst summit in Ottawa, Canada, the vendor gave an update on its BI strategy and a sneak peek of things to come in the Cognos product line.

Visual discovery and analysis was the most exciting new development in the labs. As I wrote in the 2011 BI predictions article, visual exploration of data is proving to be one of the hottest categories this year, with Tableau and QlikTech growing at a breath- taking pace, Tibco Spotfire releasing a new version, and MicroStrategy releasing Visual Insight.  IBM Cognos looks poised to disrupt what has largely been a niche market, bringing visual analysis to both stand-alone deployments and as an extension to the Cognos BI 10 platform.  In-memory database Cognos TM1 will be the power behind the new visualization tool. I am not permitted to mention release dates and pricing.

As part of its education and marketing of business analytics, IBM also talked about a new tool for companies  to assess their Analytic Quotient or AQ.  It’s a fairly simplistic maturity model with four levels: novice, builder, leader, master. I like IBM’s categories better than the more robust TDWI maturity model (does anyone want to be called an “infant” or “teenager”?), but the TDWI maturity model is more comprehensive. The real value in IBM’s model is that this mega vendor continues to raise the awareness of the importance of analytics for both strategic and operational business decisions. It’s clear to see that few companies have yet to unleash the full potential of BI. Early indications of this year’s Successful BI survey (take the survey here) again show that only a minority of companies say BI has delivered significant business impact, whether in terms of boosting revenue, controlling costs, or streamlining operations.

Six customers shared their AQ assessments and Cognos experiences. Reflecting the ongoing disconnect between business and IT, John Lucas, director of operations at the Cincinnati Zoo declared, “if we relied on the IT department to innovate, we’d still be playing on a Commodore. IT is not wired to innovate.” Instead, they relied on a Cognos partner to implement Cognos. While his comments drew chuckles and nods of sympathetic understanding, I do think (hope?) this aspect of BI success is improving. Indeed, in the wake of the economic down turn, many of those IT departments not aligned with the business have been outsourced or severely cut.

A number of customers touted the improved performance and integration with TM1 as a key reason for upgrading to Cognos 10, released last October. The other oft-cited reason for upgrading to Cognos 10 was the improved user interface and work flow, brought about by Business Insight and Business Insight Advanced (see our just-published in-depth review here).  Business Insight is the interface for user-assembled dashboards while Business Insight Advanced combines the capabilities of Query Studio and Analysis Studio in a single interface. The customers on this panel said the upgrade went smoothly, but these customers did not have large user bases or 1000s of reports to migrate.  One large media company with 1000s of users has decided to run Cognos 10 in parallel to their Cognos 8 deployment for now.

IBM celebrates its 100^th anniversary this month on June 15^th. While not part of the formal presentations, one employee shared how IBM has asked its workers to mark the event: by contributing back to the community in volunteer work on that day. Employees can recruit workers to help at their favorite charity or service organization. It seems a positive way that IBM can not only build a “smarter planet,” but a better one.

Regards,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard 

 

Cognos 10 BI is Impressive at IoD

I was at IBM’s Information on Demand (IoD) and Cognos Business Analytics Forum this week in Las Vegas where Cognos launched its next generation BI platform: IBM Cognos 10 BI.

The product became generally available earlier this month and has been in beta with 100 customers for several months.

There is a lot of new and improved packed into IBM Cognos 10 BI, including in-memory, better dashboards, disconnected dashboards, and personal data sources. (BI Scorecard subscribers can access a more in depth review here next week.) Some of these improvements bring the vendor to a stronger competitive position in the BI market place, but one aspect has the potential to be a significant competitive differentiator: collaboration.

“Collaboration meets BI” is one of those features I talk about in my cool BI classes at TDWI. It’s definitely an emerging trend, which means there’s hype, there’s confusion, but with this, ultimately value.  To date, collaboration aspects of BI have been limited to cell comments at a minimum, user-driven rankings and discussions at best. For the most part, niche vendors such as Lyza and Antivia have been ahead of industry heavy weights on collaboration.  In the last year, some BI vendors have been innovating in this area, such as SAP StreamWork, Oracle BI EE 11g integration with WebCenter,  and Information Builders collaboration in their Performance Management Framework. But IBM Cognos 10 BI hits the ball out of the park by embedding a free license of Lotus Connections and installed with IBM Cognos 10 BI.

Much of what was demoed around this capability centered on users adding comments to reports and dashboards or to individual metrics. From within the BI environment, these comments can be easily searched, along with report meta data, as Go! Search is more integrated in IBM Cognos 10 BI.  In theory, though, it is the ability for users to collaborate around a task, with supporting BI dashboards, wikis, blogs, instant messages, and emails, where I see the biggest potential. To take a recent headline grabber: imagine the BP oil spill, before the spill. Reportedly, data from the well’s pressure gauges revealed a problem. But those concerns were expressed in offline emails, not tied to the data.  The integration between BI and collaboration seems further along in Cognos 10 BI than in competitive offerings.

If that’s too bleeding edge for your organization, then there is the bread-and-butter,  but new, Active Report (not to be confused with Information Builders well established Active Reports … why do vendors name different things the same?!). IBM Cognos 10 BI Active Reports are disconnected dashboards in an MHT file, most comparable to MicroStrategy’s Enterprise Dashboards. For long-time Cognos customers, the disconnected capabilities are long-awaited and powerful. Authors build these reports in Report Studio via a new template and interactive controls. Personalized content can be bursted to individual recipients.

Perhaps the best news for customers is the reported ease of upgrading. One beta customer ran the upgrade last week in less than 30 minutes, converting over 40,000 reports and 3500 users, trouble free. That’s a far cry from the difficult upgrades in early releases.

Regards, 

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

 

 

 

 

IBM Cognos Express and the New BI Battle Ground

While much of the BI battle ground has been at the enterprise level in large companies and public agencies, market share in the small to midsized business (SMB) is shaping up to be the next battle ground.  Microsoft has largely dominated this space, with its “BI for free” included in SQL Server and Share Point,  SAP BusinessObjects has also pursued this segment  with its Edge Series. But how much this market has grown is most apparent through QlikTech QlikView in which 50-user deployments are the norm, and revenue growth has been over 40 to 80% for the last few years (BI overall has been 8 to 10%, according to most estimates).

One of the tricky things with BI for SMBs is that the IT department may be a one-person show, with limited resources and rarely the expertise to build a data warehouse or to deploy complicated BI tools.  Fast deployment time and simple administration are key. I’ll find out in a few weeks just how well the just-announced IBM Cognos Express addresses these aspects when the product will be available for trial download.

However, the product already has some differentiators that its competitors lack. Planning capabilities are part of the product. The TM1 OLAP cache is a differentiator versus SAP BusinessObjects Edge; its ability to act as a data mart makes me think of the early successes of Cognos PowerPlay, a product that has had to evolve to the enterprise. In this regard, Ben Plummer, Director of the Mid Market Business Unit, noted that one of the biggest challenges in Cognos Express will be in deciding what not to put in the product. This is where the product is also different from MicroStrategy’s free Reporting Suite approach that can grow from departmental to enterprise: Cognos Express is more squarely targeted at deployments that will never grow to more than 100 users. Which components and content can migrate to the enterprise Cognos 8 BI is not yet clear, but if you are an SMB and not a departmental BI customer, that may not be a consideration.

Beyond the product, one of the most interesting aspects to Cognos Express is that it qualifies for IBM Global Financing. In a down economy and amidst a credit crunch, offering potential customers the ability to finance their BI deployment may prove to be what makes BI possible in this growing market segment.

Regards,

Cindi Howson, 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

 

 

 

 

 

IBM Cognos Forum: The Secrets and the Sizzle

If you are an IBM Cognos customer, you know this blog is 2 weeks after the fact. Blame the delayed posting on too much travel, or on my first having to figure out what I could and could not write about.

Non Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) are one of the trickier aspects of the analyst-vendor relationship. Vendors will share things under NDA for a number of reasons. Sometimes, it’s to gauge the reaction, and if it’s consistently negative, then maybe the vendor changes course. Often, though, the NDA is for only a week or so until an announcement has been made publicly. Those NDAs are easy to respect. The harder NDAs to respect are broader, with no deadline, and lots of exceptions. Like “anything said in this 4-hour period is NDA, unless it was about product A or Z, release N or N.1”.  And in this age of blogging and tweeting, timely and clear NDA guidelines are a must

With NDA violations, the risk to the vendor is unethical analysts who tell NDA secrets to competitors or to the market ahead of time. The risk to an analyst who breaks an NDA is, at worst, a lawsuit or more common, being black listed. Either way, not good. What I am still puzzled by is how some vendors are so open about their strategy and product developments even a year ahead of time (think Microsoft and project Gemini), whereas others are much more restrictive. SEC rules and revenue recognition are sometimes cited as reasons.

So the bottom line here (besides my griping about NDAs) is that much of what I learned and got excited about at IBM Cognos Forum, I can’t yet write about.

So I will stick to the practical, the here and now, of two things in IBM Cognos 8.4 that caught my attention. First are the new metadata features: Business Glossary and Data Lineage.  With the Business Glossary, users can author business metadata in a Wiki-like page. But the best part and new in 8.4 is that a report consumer can access the glossary via a simple right-click over a particular report-column, such as “Revenue.” Some customers have countered that they aren’t interested, because they’ve standardized on a different metadata product. In this case, the new Data Lineage menu provides a good alternative, also accessed while viewing a report and right-clicking on any report column. While technical meta data may be of only moderate use to a business user, the data lineage screen also shows the business description (Many BI products expose this information only to report authors, not to report consumers and not with the degree of information shown in Cognos 8. Like the chicken-and-the-egg, few Cognos customers currently fill in that business description. Why bother, if users can’t readily get to it? The Data Lineage menu and the way it’s invoked in 8.4 makes it worth the effort! 

The second attention grabber was the dashboards. I first blogged about Cognos 8 Go! Dashboard when it was previewed at last year’s user conference. The product was officially released in November, with service pack one released last month. As I discuss in this just-published evaluation, the use of Flash is a big improvement. However, there are trade-offs versus the predominant approach of Report-Studio-style dashboards. From a competitive standpoint, many of the evaluations of leading BI platforms show dashboard capabilities have the biggest room for improvement for flashy, visually rich dashboards and that can scale to the enterprise.

 Regards,

Cindi Howson, BI Scorecard

Cognos gets "Flashier"

Close to 4000 customers and partners convened in Las Vegas last week for the annual Cognos Forum, making it Cognos’ largest conference ever.

While some time was given to synergies with IBM’s product line, more air time was devoted to what’s new in Cognos 8.3, the performance management products, and previews of what’s coming. (Oh, and remember my disbelief in an earlier blog of both Cognos and Business Objects being shrink wrapped with DB2? Well, apparently the disbelief was warranted as the Business Objects OEM never materialized.)

In terms of cool factor, a future interactive viewer capability was the flashiest--literally, as it leverages Adobe Flash to provide this appealing interface. Cognos is not the first BI vendor to leverage Flash, and lack of interactivity has been a competitive weakness.

Where Cognos has been able to edge ahead of the competition has been in the integration of BI with performance management. Because the acquisitions by competitors SAP/Business Objects and Oracle/Hyperion both introduced overlapping products, Cognos can now correctly argue that its integration between BI and performance management is one of the deepest.

However, just how important the convergence of BI and Performance Management is continues to be debatable. While at the TDWI conference earlier in the week, nobody in the Evaluating BI Tools course reported they were simultaneously evaluating performance management solutions. This is despite the CFO being the executive level sponsor for a number of the attendee’s BI initiative. Even the survey in the Successful BI book showed 17% pursuing joint projects. Why is this? Are the vendor strategies still so far ahead of customer realities? Or is it perhaps that it’s as Seth Grimes would say, a type of “selection bias:” you need BI to do performance management, but you don’t necessarily need scorecards and planning tools to do business intelligence?

Regards,

Cindi Howson

Founder, BIScorecard

Big Blue's BI in a Box

With IBM’s acquisition of Cognos completed last week, the merged companies were quick to tout their joint product offerings and future plans.

Given IBM’s role as both a data warehouse platform and a services power house, the acquisition clearly impacts existing partnerships in which IBM moves from partner to competitor. The question in this new landscape: who wins, who loses?

Prior to its Cognos acquisition, IBM was a relatively BI-agnostic vendor, unlike other data warehouse platform vendors Oracle and Microsoft who offer their own BI platforms.  However, late last year, IBM signed an OEM agreement with Business Objects to provide a BusinessObjects XI starter edition as part of its DB2 Warehouse. As well, as part of its iSeries platform, positioned for medium-sized businesses, IBM began reselling Information Builders WebFOCUS.

Today, IBM officials announced several new product bundles in which Cognos BI will now be bundled with IBM’s InfoSphere Warehouse; customers who buy Cognos BI will also get limited license of InfoSphere Warehouse.

What does this mean for the Business Objects and Information Builders OEM deals? Nothing, say IBM officials. IBM will continue to provide whatever customers want and as a services company, they pride themselves in supporting heterogeneous environments. Sounds good in theory, but is that pie-in-the-sky optimism or will these OEMs die a slow death?

Here’s why I think these relationships will remain solid in the near term:

- As for the Information Builders deal, WebFOCUS runs natively on the iSeries, and Cognos 8 does not, at least not today.

- In terms of market share, DB2 as a data warehouse platform is a close second to Oracle (according to IDC). Microsoft remains third but is growing significantly faster, and its bundling and enhanced BI tools have accelerated that growth. Bundling both BusinessObjects XI and Cognos 8 with new DB2 Warehouse sales seems like a brilliant way to seed the market. Organizationally, BI or Cognos remains a segment separate from Data Management (although both are under the Information Management umbrella).

- Lastly, the services business accounts for more than half of IBM’s total revenues ($48.3 of $91.4 billion in 2006). Unless services people start getting compensated for pushing one product over another, no way would IBM jeopardize this high-margin segment.

Of course, with any “limited” license OEM, customers should also understand what’s been scaled down – is it only the number of users who specific product capabilities? Meanwhile, I just can’t wait to see big blue’s new BI in a box, with both the Cognos 8 and BusinessObjects XI CDs jointly shrink wrapped. What a novel birthday present that would be!

Regards,

Cindi

Cognos 8.3 - the Good, the Bad, the Reality

Last week Cognos announced the release of Cognos 8.3, its flagship business intelligence platform.

The latest release includes a number of improvements both for end users and administrators. Although it is a point release, I’d venture to say it’s the biggest since Cognos 8 first shipped in November 2005.

The new Personal Alerts has the best work flow I’ve seen for such business alerts. The Express Authoring mode is intended to better meet the needs of power users, a user segment in which the current Report Studio is too complex and Query Studio too basic. While this mode is a step in the right direction, lack of charting abilities and limitations in types of data sources (they must be dimensionally modeled) seem to introduce other holes that will force some users to revert to Report Studio.

Administrative features rarely generate as much excitement as the end user modules, but here, Cognos has made great strides. Initially in Cognos 8, administrators had no way of seeing which users had open sessions. As many BI customers move from departmental BI to enterprise, such administrative features are a must-have and that several leading BI products lack. Cognos 8.3 fills this gap, also allowing administrators to reprioritize sessions or interrupt them. The new Upgrade Manager is also something anyone migrating from ReportNet or earlier 8.x versions to the latest release will welcome, as a way of regression testing reports.

On that note, though, the reality is that customer adoption of the Series 8 product line has been surprisingly low. Cognos estimates that about 10% of its customers have migrated, whereas an additional 20 to 25% plan to deploy new applications with Cognos 8. In some respects, Cognos has made it easy for customers to stay with Impromptu and PowerPlay (Series 7 products) with the promise of continued enhancements. I can’t help but wonder if IBM will maintain that same commitment. While maintenance of legacy products might be good for customer loyalty, there is little catalyst for customers to switch to a platform, even though there are significant innovations and an integrated platform provides a lower cost of ownership over Series 7. A double whammy is that the migration tools to get from Series 7 to Cognos 8 have been rather lack luster (Upgrade Manager is for Series 8.x to 8.3 only).

In this regard, while the 8.3 improvements help strengthen Cognos competitive position for new BI customers, existing customers seem slow to embrace them. I’d welcome your thoughts on why this adoption has been relatively slow.

For a more detailed review of the product’s strengths and weaknesses, see the latest BIScorecard® Cognos Overview report.

Regards,

Cindi