The collective industry crystal ball has pegged the BI (Business Intelligence) hot buttons for 2007 as mainstream BI, location intelligence, information governance, real-time BI on-demand and more supplier consolidation, as Microsoft, SAP and Oracle increase competitive pressures on best-of-breed suppliers.
The collective term for all of this is BI 2.0.
Most BI market players and watchers appear confident that 2007 will witness the next wave of Business Intelligence. The anticipated end result is BI going mainstream, with a dashboard on every desktop.
However, many obstacles still stand in the way of mainstream BI adoption: traditional BI platforms are costly to implement and deploy and mostly limited to specific functional areas of the business, such as finance. With many organisations still having multiple data warehouses, the promised enterprise-wide view of a "single version of truth" has eluded many.
Integrated platforms
Leading BI vendors such as Business Objects, Cognos and Hyperion are investing significant resources into re-architecting their original disparate tools and applications to form part of an integrated platform, for example: Business Objects XI, Cognos 8 and Hyperion System 9.
SAS now offers analytics directly aimed at non-technical users through WebReport Studio, and is seeing strong growth in sales of its Enterprise BI Server Platform.
At the enterprise level, both SAP and Oracle are positioning their respective NetWeaver and Fusion Middleware application integration platforms as linking BI to overall business processes. Also, during the next 12 months, Oracle's next-generation Business Intelligence suite will feature native integration with SAP's BI Warehouse and support for SAP's InfoCubes.
Another significant activity in 2007 will be the integration with enterprise search. Business Objects and Cognos were first to offer enterprise search capabilities targeting a more diverse user base, but many BI vendors are working on applications which search not only existing reports but also build reports on the fly.
Performance management
While there is still much work ahead for BI vendors before a dashboard on every desktop becomes reality, Gartner believes 2007 is the year corporate performance management (CPM) will definitely come of age.
Nigel Rayner, research VP at Gartner, is betting on Hyperion and Cognos as the CPM visionaries in 2007, but points out that neither vendor should rest on its laurels. "Both Hyperion and Cognos will be under an increasing challenge from vendors like Cartesis, OutlookSoft and SAP. SAS and Business Objects, if they really get their execution right, could also become leaders." Other challengers are Oracle PeopleSoft EPM and Infor Global Solutions, which acquired both Geac and Systems Union last year.
While not yet on the CPM radar screen, Microsoft should not be ignored. Its announcement of PerformancePoint Server 2007 made waves in the CPM market, says Rayner, even though the product isn't slated for release until mid-year.
Another key trend, according to Gartner, is the continuing convergence of BI and CPM, which could be a boon to Hyperion, Cognos, Business Objects and SAS - and a challenge for pure-play vendors.
Share