In the previous Industry Insight, I laid the foundations of the business intelligence (BI) sector and identified market drivers. Now it is time to discuss vendors and their influence.
Recent talk has been how good it is that the big vendors are on the acquisition trail and how wonderful it will be for business, because it will have a fully integrated platform to service all needs.
I thought we were entering the golden age of interoperability?
Everything will talk to everything else. The IT guys had the integration pain in the old world, and business used Microsoft Excel as the enterprise data integration tool. But that was all meant to fall away with the open platforms on the brochure?
It's doubtful business ever cared about a single platform: it needed a single version of the truth and access to information, but it trusted the IT guys, who were convinced this was the right way because all the big vendors and analysts said it was.
After all, big vendors don't actually pay analysts to uncover this well-known truth, do they?
Tunnel vision?
The annual BI Survey states that the most successful deployments are those that have chosen the right tool for the job. So what is the vendors' vision? One size fits all? Will SAP, Microsoft, Oracle and IBM digest their recent acquisitions and turn them into coherent enterprise decision support platforms? Probably, with significant difficulty, over time.
The only thing we don't have is time. The vision of a single platform and a single toolset that does everything is as distant a dream now as it was five years ago. Interoperability has increased, but all acquired BI companies quickly fall behind the curve. They milk the pipeline to bring in the numbers as the acquisition deals are negotiated; can the R&D and marketing investment and then spend the next two years grappling with corporate muppetdom and not solving the problems of their market sector.
The entrepreneurial and visionary developers who created the product invariably leave and start a new business. The opportunity to lead the sector is gone and does not return. There is value in the extended solution stack, but nowhere near the perceived value.
For instance, Microsoft's saving grace is the reluctance of users to move away from Excel.
Behind the curve
So the big vendors fall behind the curve, but still service the needs of many. The new niche specialists flourish and lead the sector, so the market will look like the market of old.
The vision of a single platform and a single toolset that does everything is as distant a dream now as it was five years ago.
Keith Jones is MD of Harvey Jones.
What is new? Well, not much. In-memory BI has arrived, but it has always been here. The price of RAM has come down, but so what? That is hardware. Is it a market driver? No, it does not support a business process. It is an enabler, and can add value to the stack, and reduce time to value.
Technology can't solve the problem. But the fact that it can produce results quickly is exciting. MicroStrategy has in-memory ROLAP, QlikView has it, Microsoft has Gemini coming. Wonderful new technology, going to solve all of our problems and BI will become easy. Sound familiar? This is the silver bullet that will work because the last four silver bullets turned out to be duds?
Decision process
It all comes back to supporting the decision process. Technology can't do this; it is a process and technology sits behind layers of logic and business rules users have to get through and apply. Business value comes from understanding business rules and automating processes and providing one version of the truth, so the base need has not changed. The basic value drivers of build once, use many must apply.
Vendors will offer an integrated PowerPoint deck. All vendors can now do most of the job. There are various technologies - in-memory, data warehouse, OLAP, relational reporting. They all have their place.
What will change is that the tools will start to effectively abstract the business from this 'stuff' in the back-end they don't need to know about. The analytics/dashboarding/reporting/scorecarding worlds will merge - a single effective user interface that does it all will emerge.
Defining the 'intelligence' part of BI should include reference to the person doing the buying. If you keep on buying tools and they keep on failing and not telling the truth, the bad news is you need to get a mirror to find the problem.
Avoid the mistakes of the past and using the build once, use many approach. Most businesses are in the build many, use once cycle, or at best the build many, use many cycle, and this is the first cycle to break.
So, technology vendors can offer technology that reduces this portion of the deployment cycle. The technology can't drive the people and process part, which is the tricky bit.
* In the next Industry Insight, I will look at what I mean when I talk about "one version of the truth".
* Keith Jones is MD of Harvey Jones.
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