InformationWeek Stories by Cindi Howson

InformationWeek Stories by Cindi Howsonhttp://www.informationweek.comInformationWeeken-usCopyright 2012, UBM LLC.2013-05-21T09:06:00ZSAP Steps Up Visual Analytics, Mobile BISAP's renamed Lumira visual module, mobile upgrades and the Hana platform are uniting the customer experience.http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/sap-steps-up-visual-analytics-mobile-bi/240155147?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsLast week's Sapphire Conference marked my fourth since BusinessObjects was acquired by SAP in 2008, and this year's event stands out as one of the most exciting in terms of business analytics developments. Perhaps it's because the company has moved beyond three years of integration and beyond last year's apologies for SAP BusinessObjects 4.0 delays and quality issues. This year, many more customers are live on the latest products. SAP's biggest business analytics news was all about visual data discovery and mobile big data. Visual data discovery continues to be one of the hottest segments in business intelligence, as indicated by the buzz around last week's IPO by data-visualization specialist Tableau Software. SAP's big news on this front at Sapphire was the rebranding of its Visual Intelligence product as "Lumira." The name change is meant to signify a broader solution that will include Lumira Cloud, which is currently in beta and expected to be available by this summer. Lumira Cloud will allow business analysts to publish and share their visual data discoveries with other cloud users, similar to the way Dropbox users can share files and organize work groups, explained Adam Binnie, SAP's VP of Business Intelligence Solutions. Web-based exploration is one of Lumira's biggest weaknesses, as it's primarily a desktop product. [ SAP says it's time to take the leap, but are there risks? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/sap-vows-hana-is-ready-to-run-erp/240155017?itc=edit_in_body_cross">SAP Vows Hana Is Ready To Run ERP</a>. ] Compared to Tableau, QlikView, SAS Visual Analytics, and TIBCO Spotfire, SAP's product lags in Web-based exploration (see the <a href="https://www.biscorecard.com/businessintelligenceevaluations.asp">BI Scorecard</a> side-by-side comparison for more detail). With Lumira headed into the cloud, running on the SAP Hana in-memory database, I expect SAP to continue to improve to close the gap. SAP has been beating the drum on mobile applications since it acquired Sybase back in 2010. But in the analytics and BI world, SAP's capabilities have been a mixed story. The company had multiple mobile BI clients: one for BusinessObjects Explorer, the lightweight visual-data-discovery interface, and another for Web Intelligence, the business-query module. In addition, the Dashboards module (previously known as Xcelsius) used Flash and thus could only be rendered as static images on iPad and iPhone devices. Dashboard mobile viewing improved in a December 2012 release (SAP BusinessObjects Service Pack 5 / SAP Mobile 4.4) that allowed designers to render dashboards in HTML5. SAP's Mobile 5.x release, due this summer, will bring all content types into one mobile client. The interface includes navigation enhancements, similar to the Facebook left-panel interface, that make it easier to find reports by content type. There is currently limited support for content on Android devices, but SAP says this, too, will improve (as explained in <a href="http://scn.sap.com/community/mobile/businessobjects/blog">SAP's Mobile Roadmap blog</a>.) With these improvements, I expect SAP to have among the best mobile capabilities of the leading BI vendors. So SAP is executing on its strategy for visual data discovery and mobile, but customer adoption continues to be a tale of two worlds. There are the traditional SAP Business Warehouse (BW) customers, who are still heavily entrenched in using the BEx spreadsheet-style interface, a legacy product. And then there are the BusinessObjects 3.x and 4.x. customers. The combination of the two product lines is so complex that many customers feel safer simply staying put, even if they're using legacy products that lack mobile options. Customer eBay, for example, went through a major SAP ECC (ERP) implementation three years ago and initially leveraged BW with BEx. Now it uses the SAP BusinessObjects Analysis for Office interface instead of BEx. Silvia Vasquez-Lavado, head of Global Financial Systems at eBay concedes that it was painful to get the users to let go of their spreadsheets. With SAP BusinessObjects version 4, users can directly access data on centralized InfoCubes, "but we are learning with the users that it is a transition from their beloved spreadsheets to trusted information," Vasquez-Lavado said. An executive from Sigma Aldrich, a life sciences company that also favored BEx, noted that there are some things that BEx handles better than the newer Analysis for Office interface, such as calculated key figures, time slices and hierarchies. Meanwhile, a customer that recently implemented BW customer told me her consulting provider only included BEx in the implementation, so now senior management isn't sure why they need to purchase newer SAP BusinessObjects software as well. Migration challenges are to be expected in a legacy deployment, but introducing legacy tools (like BEx) in a new deployment is not in the customer's best interest. I think SAP should include SAP BusinessObjects software in any new BW deployment, but this remains one of the company's ongoing BI pricing and packaging challenges. In contrast to the confusion in the core BI product line, Hana's role is clear: it's about more than business analytics. During a panel discussion at Sapphire, an executive from Maidenform, which uses Hana as its data warehouse platform, said it's loading 1.8 billion records from point-of-sale sources, such as Target and Walmart stores, in just eight seconds. This allows the company to quickly forecast sales trends, analyses that previously took months. An eBay executive said Hana will enable the company to analyze hundreds of terabytes of data and look for currency fluctuations that will allow them to quickly change hedging strategies. Utility company CenterPoint Energy is using Hana and SAP BusinessObjects Explorer to monitor demand and track outages, reading 2.2 million smart meters every 15 minutes, for a total of up to 76 million reads per year. "We wouldn't have a big data problem if we didn't have sensors," said CenterPoint CIO Gary Hayes. "The majority of the data may be noise, but we need to manage that noise." SAP co-CEO Bill McDermott also gave one of the best keynotes, offering some very simple examples of big data analysis and bringing sports star power to the event, with "NFL Today" host James Brown, NBA deputy commissioner Adam Silver, 49ers CEO Jed York and Under Armour CEO Kevin Plank. As Plank noted, years ago, sweat-soaked cotton T-Shirts slowed players down. Today's <a href="http://www.underarmour.com/shop/us/en/armour39">quick-drying, sensor-enabled replacement for that T-Shirt</a> also captures biometric data in real-time, making every professional athlete and even casual runners contributors to the big data explosion.2013-03-12T09:29:00ZSAS Upgrades Visual Analytics AppSAS strategy for big data, cloud and mobile includes one-click deployment of analytic apps in the cloud.http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/sas-upgrades-visual-analytics-app/240150551?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsSAS has come a long way since it first set its sights on the BI market back in 2004. With Visual Analytics, the company now has a visually appealing product that combines ease of use with SAS' mathematical brain power. <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/sas-introduces-big-data-visual-analytics/232700133">Visual Analytics (VA) was first released last March</a>, leveraging in-memory processing with a new visual interface. It has since had two subsequent releases to boost the product's flexibility, dashboard design and Android support. CEO and founder Dr. James Goodnight last week demonstrated the next release of Visual Analytics 6.2, due mid year. Its forecasting abilities are a clear differentiator. A few visual data discovery products will do a simple forecast based on a moving average or linear regression, but Visual Analytics supports six different forecasting algorithms including Holt-Winters method to account for seasonality. The 6.2 release will also allow users to specify which variables to use in the forecast, as well as in simulations. For example, if an analyst is trying to forecast utility costs, they may weight variables such as demand, gas prices and temperature in the model. Allowing a user to easily specify different gas prices, for example, is as one product manager described, "what-if analysis on steroids." [ 'Easy to use' is a relative term. Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/analytics-vendors-must-make-prediction-e/240145726?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Analytics Vendors Must Make Prediction Easier, Forrester Says</a>. ] The advanced capabilities of Visual Analytics will continue to be a differentiator, according to SAS CMO Jim Davis. A preview of a new decision tree capability again showed the combination of ease of use, a beautiful interface and analytic power. SAS is clearly playing to its analytic strengths in the visual data discovery market, but its BI positioning and understanding of that segment seem less clear. SAS' current BI product, the Enterprise BI (EBI) platform, is a separate architecture, interface and set of capabilities. SAS' revenues in this segment grew only 3.2% in 2013, in contrast to most BI vendors' double-digit growth rates. SAS envisions that Visual Analytics will one day supplant the capabilities in its EBI platform, but it offered no roadmap for how to transition customers or when customers would need only VA. Currently, if a user wants to access data in the data warehouse or relational data store, they would use Web Report Studio (the business query module of EBI). VA Explorer and Designer may offer a more modern and appealing interface, but only when data has been loaded into memory on the SAS LASR Server. SAS has sometimes downplayed the importance of reporting and sometimes relegates BI to only reporting. I have often said though, that there is little point in predicting the future if decision makers don't know what's happening right now or even last week. In the advanced analytics space, SAS grew a healthy 8.8% and many of its solutions, that leverage VA and the advanced analytics, grew in double digits. SAS also elaborated on its plans in other fast-growing markets such as big data, cloud and mobile. The SAS LASR Server is the underlying platform for Visual Analytics, using in-memory processing and the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). SAS claims that its ability to process models in parallel across multiple nodes is a differentiator. It has a strategy to run alongside analytic appliances such as those from Teradata and EMC Greenplum, a smart strategy in my opinion and a contrast to some big-data players who are suggesting that the data warehouse and analytic appliances are dead. With this architecture, the data does not need to be moved out of the database, but HDFS is used for the mathematical processing. While SAS would like also to support SAP Hana, the engineering teams have not collaborated, not surprising as SAP has launched its own efforts in the advanced analytics market with SAP Predictive Analysis. While the customer portion of the summit was under non-disclosure, an early adopter of SAS High Performance Analytics said the platform allowed them to bring in more unstructured data into their models, significantly reducing the model's misclassification rate. SAS laid out plans to support the gamut of private cloud, public cloud for platform as a service and software as a service for certain applications and products that will be launched throughout 2013. CTO Keith Collins demonstrated the concept of vApps (virtual apps) where in a few short clicks, an administrator can deploy a fully configured instance of a SAS product, such as Visual Analytics, either on an on-premise virtual machine or in the Amazon Cloud. While SAS has a long history of offering its customers hosted solutions, this is the first time that SAS is committing to public cloud deployments. As a baby first step, Visual Analytics free trial version is hosted in the Amazon cloud. SAS' Mobile story was shorter on details. While the use of the iPad was demonstrated in a number of keynotes, currently iPad and Android is supported only for Visual Analytics and certain pre-built solutions. The EBI platform and Web Report Studio content is not supported directly by SAS, but instead, through a technology partnership with Roambi. The vendor currently takes a native-app approach, the right approach (for now) in my opinion. Asked about plans for an HTML5 version, Dr. Goodnight said SAS is watching the market closely but noted that Facebook tried for three years to develop an HTML5-only app and gave up. The current mobile app is good but not great, lacking some of the native gestures (annotate, pinch to zoom, sort) that competitors such as MicroStrategy and SAP have, as well as Roambi. An always refreshing part of the SAS analyst summit is how candid this privately-held company is about its performance, its views and its vision. Try to pin down a public company on how much BI revenues grew in 2013, and the answers range from evasive to inflated earnings that include consulting services. Public companies are only clear when it's clearly good news. Dr. Goodnight and CMO Davis seemed nonplussed about the less-than-stellar performance in the BI segment, suggesting maybe some of the deals gave less credit to BI and more to customer analytics. Oh, to be privately held, only beholden to customers, rather than shareholders! No wonder the likes of Dell and Heinz are going private.2013-02-14T09:06:00ZMicroStrategy Doubles Down On Mobile, Data VisualizationBusiness intelligence vendor focuses on mobile, cloud, social and visual analysis amid a tight battle with SAP, Oracle, QlikTech and Tableau.http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/microstrategy-doubles-down-on-mobile-dat/240148518?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_Authors<div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/10-cloud-computing-pioneers/240142397"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/909/01_cloud_gurus_tn.jpg" alt="10 Cloud Computing Pioneers" title="10 Cloud Computing Pioneers" class="img175" /></a> <div class="storyImageTitle">10 Cloud Computing Pioneers </div> (click image for larger view and for slideshow)</div>Mobile computing and social networking are changing the world, and they're changing business intelligence expectations in the process. As a result, BI vendor MicroStrategy has upgraded its software to help BI application developers "build compelling apps that are beautiful, agile, mobile and fast," said CEO and co-founder Michael Saylor at the company's recent user conference in Las Vegas. Mobile has been a big part of MicroStrategy's focus for at least three years, and it has been steadfast in its strategy to build native apps for iPhone, iPad and Android devices. The native-app approach differs from that of many other BI vendors who are betting on HTML 5. For now, native apps give users the best experience. In its latest release, MicroStrategy has continued to refine the online and offline performance of its mobile apps with smart caching, support for video and PDF content inside dashboards, and usage tracking of BI activities on the device. The conference highlighted high-profile uses of MicroStrategy Transaction Services, a mobile write-back capability first announced in 2011. Write-back lets users capture as well as consume information from smartphones and tablets. Dallas/Fort Worth Airport for example, is using MicroStrategy Mobile with Transaction Services to capture survey data on customer satisfaction. Interestingly, <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/flights/2013/01/31/fliers-pick-atlanta-as-nations-best-airport/1881297/">Dallas/Fort Worth</a> was recently ranked among the top airports for business travelers (while my hub, Newark, not surprisingly, ranked near the bottom). [ What does it take to run business by the numbers? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/global-cio/interviews/pg-ceo-shares-3-steps-to-analytics-drive/240148065?itc=edit_in_body_cross">P&G CEO Shares 3 Steps To Analytics-Driven Business</a>. ] MicroStrategy also used the conference to announce plans to pursue the mobile app development market with its capabilities to build mobile apps without coding. <a href="http://www.idc.com/research/viewdocsynopsis.jsp?containerId=225668&sectionId=null&elementId=null&pageType=SYNOPSIS">IDC</a> estimates the mobile app development segment will surpass $35 billion by 2014. There's plenty of competition. <a href="http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-1AYV4GM&ct=120619&st=sb">Gartner</a> currently positions Antenna and SAP (Sybase Unwired and Syclo, respectively) as leaders in this segment, with Adobe, Kony and many others as "visionaries." Visual Insight, upgraded in <a href="http://biscorecard.typepad.com/biscorecard/2012/07/microstrategy93.html">MicroStrategy's 9.3 release</a> in September, also took center stage. It's one of the best visual data discovery products I've seen from broad BI platform vendors, with significant improvements since its debut in 2011. The module is not yet on par with what's offered from data-visualization specialists such as Tableau Software, QlickTech and Tibco Spotfire -- lacking in particular flexibility and formatting -- but it has some compelling differentiators (as described in this BI Scorecard <a href="https://www.biscorecard.com/businessintelligenceevaluations.asp#MicroStrategy">side-by-side comparison</a>). First, any MicroStrategy customer who owns Report Services -- which is the majority -- gets Visual Insight for free. That's a contrast to SAP and IBM, which charge premiums for their respective Business Objects and Cognos data visualization products. Oracle charges extra for visual analysis software in that it also requires the Exalytics appliance. Further, all the existing MicroStrategy grid reports can be converted to a Visual Insight document with a single click. MicroStrategy Cloud, now in its second year, seems to be showing good momentum, with 30,000 users and 2 petabytes of data in the cloud, according to the vendor. Customer Four Seasons touted the cloud platform as providing simple deployment, something particularly important for its remote, independently owned hotels, which lack large IT departments. Customer Huntington Bank described how it is using the direct connect feature of MicroStrategy Cloud to access on-premises data in a number of relational databases. MicroStrategy pushed its social-network intelligence tools -- Wisdom, Alert and Usher, which support market segmentation, targeted promotions and identity management, respectively -- on Facebook. Saylor described the "hyper research" opportunity behind Wisdom as "an idea whose time has come." In my view, the majority of MicroStrategy customers are still trying to exploit the potential of the internal data they control, let alone what originates in the social sphere. MicroStrategy actually glossed over its big data story, in my opinion. They have a number of components, including integrations with Hadoop, with Cloudera's forthcoming Impala interface for Hadoop and, as recently announced, with SAP Hana. However, the company's positioning and strategy for big data could have been better articulated. I suspect part of the missed opportunity was due to recent changes in leadership and reorganization, with a newly appointed president, Paul Zolfaghar, and CTO, Peng Xiao. Why did MicroStrategy reorganize? That wasn't discussed at the event. The company's product line is solid, in my view, but its execution in 2012 did not keep pace with the growth of the overall BI market. Part of that shortfall might be execution, but I suspect MicroStrategy is facing tougher competition than before from SAP and Oracle on one end of the spectrum, and from QlikTech and Tableau on the other.2013-01-25T09:45:00Z7 Top Business Intelligence Trends For 2013Short list of BI hot buttons includes dashboards, self-service, mobile, in-memory, cloud, collaboration and, of course, big data.http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/7-top-business-intelligence-trends-for-2/240146994?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_Authors <div class="inlineStoryImage inlineStoryImageRight"><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/13-big-data-vendors-to-watch-in-2013/240144124"><img src="http://twimgs.com/informationweek/galleries/automated/924/BigDataLogos_tn.jpg" alt="13 Big Data Vendors To Watch In 2013" title="13 Big Data Vendors To Watch In 2013" class="img175" /></a> <div class="storyImageTitle">13 Big Data Vendors To Watch In 2013</div> (click image for larger view and for slideshow)</div> Many people seem to want to stick a sexier name on business intelligence, whether that's "business analytics" or "big data." To me, it's still business intelligence, a top-priority technology that can help companies boost revenues, improve customer service or control costs by making better, faster decisions. Whatever you want to call this still-vital category, here are my predictions for the top BI trends of 2013, along with a few looks back at highlights of 2012. 1. Dashboards Evolve, Expand You would think that there's not much room for dashboard innovation now that they're the bread-and-butter BI interface, already in use among most large and midsized companies. And yet dashboards were rated the top priority for expansion and innovation in the BI Scorecard <a href="https://www.biscorecard.com/businessintelligenceevaluations.asp#spclrept">2012 Successful BI Survey</a>. The dashboard's rise to prominence is a confluence of next-generation technology along with a recognition that BI must be aligned to business goals to be successful. [ Want more on trends in the year ahead? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/5-cloud-app-trends-to-expect-in-2013/240145319?itc=edit_in_body_cross">5 Cloud App Trends To Expect In 2013</a>. ] Access to data alone doesn't help a company improve. Next-generation dashboards keep workers focused on the right metrics and inform in a way that lets employees take preemptive action. Key features enabling such dashboards include in-memory processing, the ability for users to mash data together and to assemble their own dashboards, KPIs, faceted (filter-by-category) search, mobile, and the ability to link insight to action. With big BI platform vendors IBM, Microsoft, and SAP generally lagging the dashboard capabilities provided by specialty vendors, customers will continue to mix and match systems from different providers in 2013. Differentiated leaders include QlikTech, which supports rapid deployment and intuitive "associative" analysis, JackBe, which has strong operational dashboards, and Metric Insight, which offers top-notch KPIs. Look for all vendors in this space to continue to improve their capabilities in 2013. SAP, for example, recently released its next-generation dashboard tool, Design Studio, though data-source support is initially limited to SAP BW and the Hana in-memory database. Look for SAP to improve related mobile and data-visualization capabilities. SAP will also eventually integrate and merge its once-leading Xcelsius dashboarding product, now rebranded "Dashboards," into Design Studio. QlikTech also is expected to release a next-generation dashboarding product this year. Looking back, one important dashboard release in 2012 was Oracle Endeca Information Discovery, acquired by Oracle at the end of 2011 and adapted to run on its Exalytics appliance. Oracle classifies this product as a discovery tool, but in my view it's best positioned as a dashboard application uniquely positioned to explore unstructured data using faceted search. 2. Self-Service BI Gets Real Self-service BI continues to be a vision for many companies in which users are empowered to explore new data sets without much IT support. Visual-data-discovery tools have become synonymous with self-service BI and are growing at three times the pace of the overall BI market. Unfortunately, some vendors are too quick to attach the visual discovery moniker to their products. As I wrote in the latest <a href="https://www.biscorecard.com/businessintelligenceevaluations.asp#prosum">BI Scorecard Strategic and Product Summary report</a>, there's a continuum of self-service BI capabilities that ranges from interactive reporting to business query to visual data discovery, and yes, even to tools such as spreadsheets. My hope in 2013 is that practitioners recognize this range of self-service, and that vendors help educate rather than just jumping on whatever bandwagon has the most hype. Leading companies will make the shift to self-service BI, both to empower workers and to ensure the smartest allocation of constrained IT resources. In our Successful BI Survey, 44% of respondents say BI teams do not have adequate time, funding or resources to keep up with BI demand. With the fight for BI talent, simply hiring more people is not the solution. Instead, business users have to embrace responsibility for routine BI tasks. At the same time, IT has to let go of some of the mundane enhancement requests and focus on complex data challenges and leveraging innovations. In 2013 Tableau will release version 8 of its software, which will include browser and iPad-based authoring, a relative rarity in the visual data discovery category. Also look for improvements in other first-generation visual discovery products: -- SAS Visual Analytics Explorer, first released in February 2012, is due out with a new version that will support calculated columns, forecasting, decision trees, and maps. -- Microsoft's Power View via SharePoint (released in Q1 2012) will reemerge as an Excel add-in. -- AP Visual Intelligence, first released for Hana in March 2012, is now on a six-week release cycle, gaining support for more data sources and capabilities. 3. Mobile BI Boosts BI Adoption Just when you thought the dust had settled on the question of tablet leadership (the iPad), Microsoft released the Windows Surface and Apple missed Wall Street earnings estimates. Prime-time ads for the Surface abound! And oh, how I would love to more easily synch my Outlook calendar! Gone are the days when corporate IT can set mobile device standards. Instead, users are increasingly bringing their own devices, forcing IT (and BI vendors) to support a broad swath of smartphones and tablets. The most promising way to support diversity is to support HTML5, but the best user experience continues to be through device-native apps. Just what those apps need to support is a moving target, as user requirements evolve. For example, availability of offline data-interaction capabilities -- rare in 2011, but supported by specialty vendor RoamBI -- increased in 2012 with MicroStrategy, SAP Mobile and Oracle Mobile HD adding such capabilities. Will we see native support for Microsoft Surface in 2013, or will vendors use the HTML5 approach for this device? It's too early to tell, but I don't anticipate any broad shift. The debate about which capabilities to provide on smartphones versus tablets will continue. Mobile Device Management will remain a separate market segment, but savvy mobile BI providers and customers will integrate with these solutions so that when a device is lost or stolen, there is additional security beyond just a user name and password so that offline data can be wiped. Mobile will also continue to drive BI adoption in 2013, re-igniting executive interest and making BI more relevant to field and front-line workers. In last year's Successful BI Survey, only 11% of respondents said their firms had successfully deployed mobile BI. BI adoption at those firms stood at 39% of employees, far ahead of the industry average of 24% of employees.4. In-Memory Goes Mainstream In-memory technology saw several major releases in 2012, and that makes 2013 an opportune year for companies to implement this technology. In-memory was initially an approach leveraged by a few OLAP systems (like TM1, now part of IBM Cognos) and a few specialty vendors (like QlikTech and Tibco Spotfire). Now all leading BI platform vendors have in-memory solutions, with Oracle being the last to join the ranks with its Exalytics appliance, which runs the TimesTen in-memory database. Kicking off 2013, SAP announced the ability to run its core transactional (OLTP) applications on the Hana in-memory database. Nonetheless, debate about when to use in-memory or when to use an analytic appliance, columnar database or disk-based data warehouse will continue, driven by constraints including available expertise, analytic demands and cost. Other noteworthy 2012 in-memory announcements included: -- Microsoft Hekaton, an in-memory transaction support within SQL Server, expected in 2014 or 2015 -- IBM Cognos 10.2, which includes dynamic, in-memory cubes for relational data sources -- SAS LASR Server, which combines in-memory processing with Hadoop infrastructure for large-scale analytics and visual discovery. [ Want more on trends in the year ahead? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/enterprise-applications/5-cloud-app-trends-to-expect-in-2013/240145319?itc=edit_in_body_cross">5 Cloud App Trends To Expect In 2013</a>. ] 5. Big Data Generates Big Interest Reminiscent of the Gold Rush era, there's money to be had (and to invest) in big data, but only a few, as of yet, are striking it rich. Big data such as Web clicks, tweets, and genomic data are critical in certain industries, such as ecommerce, gaming, advertising, and healthcare. Some associate big data only with Hadoop and with the demise of the data warehouse. However, I see Hadoop and NoSQL solutions as being only a part of the architecture for handling structured and unstructured data. The traditional data warehouse, analytic appliances and BI vendors all have roles to play here. So in 2013, companies in certain industries will indeed embrace new solutions from big data startups including Datameer, Karmasphere, Platfora, and SiSense. Others will leverage big-data connectors from their existing BI tools. The majority of companies are still grappling with basic data access, so big data will continue to be just an interesting cover story. 6. Cloud Becomes Just Another Option Cloud is another area of BI that is grabbing a lot of headlines, but to date, not a lot of deployments. Cloud accounts for only 3% of total BI revenues, according to Gartner. Cloud BI would seem to fall, then, in the domain of "nice to have." But if you talk to CIOs, many would welcome the chance to outsource the problem of infrastructure maintenance and instead focus on higher-value IT investments. BI in the cloud provides that opportunity, along with flexibility to handle elastic (variable) workload demands. Security concerns were initially the biggest barrier to cloud BI deployments. There's now greater acceptance that cloud BI can be secure. The question becomes whether a cloud provider can do a better job than you can in ensuring reliability and security, though doubts were recently raised by yet another <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/cloud-computing/infrastructure/amazon-outage-scrooges-netflix-heroku/240145338">Amazon blip</a> during the make-or-break Christmas season. BI vendors have had to re-architect their products to be cloud-ready, both with multitenancy and the ability to work with data retained on premises. In 2013 we will see more POCs and trial-use of BI cloud products. Cloud will increasingly become a routine deployment option rather than a product differentiator. Oracle says it will preview a cloud-based reporting and analytics offering in the first half of the year. Also look for Pentaho to release a new, multitenant architecture. 7. Collaboration Goes Beyond Social Did you think that social networking and collaboration would just be passing fads -- or ways to share photos and look up old flames? In the midst of Hurricane Sandy, many used Facebook and Twitter to find hotel rooms, places to shower and to charge cell phones. It was a study of contrasts of those who knew how to use the technology and those who didn't -- I couldn't find Jersey Central Power & Light's Twitter handle. New Jersey Governor Christie started off with useless tweets, like "watch my live stream" -- uh, not on limited battery power. But he eventually provided more useful tweets, such as when specific communities would get power restored. I still get the sense that most vendors add collaboration without a clear vision or passion for what sharing can bring. A few BI vendors seem to get it, most notably Panorama and Lyzasoft. Some BI buyers tell me their users don't ask for these types of features, to which I recall that nobody initially asked for mobile phones, either. When I read about how, for example, United Health Group and the Mayo Clinic <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324595704578242011727443992.html">will be sharing and mining data</a> across boundaries, I think collaboration in BI has the potential to bring the best data to the best analysts. These are my predictions for the biggest trends in the year ahead. Wherever your priorities lie, enjoy the journey! Clinical, patient engagement, and consumer apps promise to re-energize healthcare. Also in the new, all-digital <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/gogreen/111212hc/?k=axxe&cid=article_axxt_os">Mobile Power</a> issue of InformationWeek Healthcare: Comparative effectiveness research taps the IT toolbox to compare treatments to determine which ones are most effective. (Free registration required.)2012-10-30T08:40:00ZBig Data Meets BI: Beyond The HypeWith Hadoop quickly gaining adoption, Cloudera, Platfora, SiSense and others are introducing new options for gaining business intelligence from this big data platform.http://www.informationweek.com/news/240012412?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsBig Data was the big news in New York last week at the sold out Strata Conference. I was lured to Strata by both the traditional vendors I cover, such as SAP, SAS, and Tableau exhibiting there, as well as by big data analytics startups 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 backing. Coming from the perspective of the established business intelligence world, here's the skinny on where big data meets BI. First, big data is more than Hadoop, the open source distributed file system capable of scaling to handle petabytes of data. Scalability is not the only appeal of Hadoop; it can also handle multi-structured data such as clickstreams, 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. [ Want more of Cindi Howson's expert BI analysis? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/oracle-exalytics-is-it-a-must-have-for-b/240008915?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Oracle Exalytics: Is It A Must-Have for BI?</a>. ] 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. That brings me to the first big announcement at the conference: <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/information-management/cloudera-debuts-real-time-hadoop-query/240009673">Cloudera Impala</a>, 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 Impala (stealth) development for nearly two years, early adopters wondered if the technology would be kept proprietary to Cloudera. Instead, Cloudera says it will release Impala 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 s using Impala over Hive, but acknowledge it's still not as fast as what users are used to in the BI world. 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 those 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 in-memory engine. Datameer announced a new <a href="http://www.datameer.com/apps">app market</a> with 30 initial free apps. Karmasphere takes a different approach, focusing on data access and query generation through Hive. It partners with Tableau for visualization. <a href="http://www.platfora.com/">Platfora</a>, currently in beta, has an appealing front end that reminds me of MicroStrategy's new Visual Insight, so 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. It was refreshing for me to see a mixture of data scientists and technologists at the Strata 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 theme 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!2012-10-11T12:34:00ZOracle Exalytics: Is It A Must-Have for BI?Oracle's latest engineered system promises better business intelligence performance and ease of deployment, but the tradeoff is in openness to third-party tools.http://www.informationweek.com/news/240008915?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsThe headlines from the main stage at last week's Oracle Open World event were all about cloud, but in the business intelligence space, the focus was on Exalytics, Oracle's in-memory engineered system for BI. Released in February, Exalytics is Oracle's latest engineered system. It leverages the TimesTen in-memory database to support fast BI analyses. The system packs 1 terabyte of RAM, 40 processing cores, and has a list price of $170,000 (not including software). Exalytics lets you cache both the metadata for Oracle BI Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) as well as the data from data warehouses and Essbase cubes into memory. Oracle customer Sodex reported at Open World that it's experiencing ten times faster performance on Essbase cubes running on Exalytics versus a conventional Essbase deployment. What's more, the results served up at high scale to 10,000 users. Exalytics integrates with Exadata, Oracle's database appliance, via a superfast Infiniband connection to allow loads from the data warehouse into the in-memory BI system. The Exalytics Summary Advisor gathers usage statistics on queries to recommend which data should be loaded into memory versus left on disk. [ Want more on Oracle's engineered system answers? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/software/business-intelligence/oracle-makes-case-for-exalytics-data-dis/232901387?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Oracle Makes Case For Exalytics, Data Discovery</a>. ] Oracle touts Exadata as the ideal solution for high-performance data warehousing, so why would anyone need Exalytics? Oracle customer Thomson Reuters reported at Open World that Exalytics has enabled the company to serve up an interactive dashboard analyzing a 10-billion-row data set--something that would not be possible without in-memory performance. Exalytics ensures performance at the BI application level by caching OBIEE metadata, whereas Exadata's performance addresses only the underlying data. Exalytics also brings advantages to OBIEE software deployments. Swedish shoe retailer NilsonGroup cited easier maintenance of OBIEE on Exalytic's optimized hardware, without the need to patch software as they previously had to on commodity hardware. With Exalytics, Oracle handles the updates at the system level behind the scenes. Oracle's approach does beg the question: should customers have to buy an engineered system to ensure a smooth deployment? One integrator I've heard from on this topic said software quality lapses in OBIEE 11g delayed project timelines by months, and he described the security integration with Oracle's WebLogic application server as "a train wreck." As OBIEE (which is based largely on Siebel Analytics, acquired in 2005) has become more integrated with the rest of the Oracle product stack, Oracle has become more dependent on its own middleware, taking a less agnostic approach than other BI vendors. Another contrast is the comparison between Exalytics and SAP's Hana. The latter offers third-party support for multiple BI vendors and multiple hardware vendors. An SAP and Oracle partner who has tested both Hana and the combination of Exadata plus Exalytics described Hana as "revolutionary and 1,000 times better" while calling the Oracle alternative "evolutionary and 10 times better." OBIEE 11.1.1.6, released in February, supports greater dashboard interactivity and improved data visualization over the previous version of OBIEE to take advantage Exalytics performance. At first glance, the finished charts look as powerful as those in competitive products, such as Tableau Software and TIBCO Spotfire. However, the OBIEE design interface is less intuitive than those mature products and there's a whole lot more complexity involved in developing dashboards in OBIEE than in the competitive products. In addition to running OBIEE and Essbase, Exalytics also runs Endeca Information Discovery software. Oracle acquired Endeca in late 2011 both for its e-commerce technology and its ability to search unstructured content, such as warranty claims and Twitter streams. The Endeca MDEX engine uses a combination of in-memory and columnar data storage. Endeca can be deployed on commodity hardware, but a system integrator speaking at Open World cited easier deployment on Exalytics. Endeca has a very nice faceted search interface that combines the search simplicity of Google with the guided navigation of e-commerce sites. It was encouraging to see this niche product touted on the Open World main stage by Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, but it was frustrating that the product was not available in the BI demo pods. I got a tweet after leaving Open World that it was being showcased in a different building, not near the rest of the BI capabilities. Too bad. The bottom line, if you are using OBIEE and hoping for high user counts or big data scale, Oracle has designed Exalytics to be part of that deployment. In my view it's still too early in Exalytics' product life to say how much customers are sacrificing openness to third-party products for the promise of performance and ease of deployment.2012-07-23T09:22:00ZMicroStrategy Bets On Visualization, BI For FacebookMicroStrategy's latest release counts on warming interest in cloud-based business intelligence and hot demand for social data analysis.http://www.informationweek.com/news/240004167?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsMicroStrategy announced a slew of improvements to its already-solid business intelligence and analytics earlier this month, and it's also innovating in the area of cloud computing and analysis of Facebook data. Probing social networks is certainly compelling to many, but as I'll explain, I have my doubts about the reliability of the data. MicroStrategy's 9.3 release, which was detailed at the company's European conference in Amsterdam earlier this month, brings significant improvements to the company's Visual Insight visual data discovery module, which was introduced last summer year. Visual data discovery is a hot segment, with products available from fast-growing vendors Tableau Software and QlikView as well as new options from BI platform vendors (IBM Cognos Insight, Microsoft Power View, SAS Visual Analytics Explorer, SAP Visual Intelligence). The first release of Visual Insight brought easy-to-create visualizations via a Web interface. Users could share visualizations via the iPad or Facebook. Lacking, though, was the ability to enrich the data with calculations or to assemble the visualizations into a business-authored dashboard. [ Want more on BI and Big Data? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/bi/240001922?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Big Data Analytics Challenges Old-School Business Intelligence</a>. ] MicroStrategy 9.3, due this quarter, significantly improves on Visual Insight, letting business users display multiple data sources in a dashboard-style report. More than 300 new functions are included, but emphasizing ease-of-use, the most important functions, such as rank and time series analysis, are readily accessible via quick menus. The 9.3 upgrade also offers several new chart types as well as a visual recommendation engine that suggests the charting approach for specific types of data. (Take the <a href="http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/WEB22FVXM5SAW5/?SC=IW">2012 Successful BI survey</a> to rate the importance of visual data discovery to your organization.) The improved visual data discovery capabilities got me most excited, but 9.3 also brings enhancements focused on big data, search, advanced analytics with support for open source R models, and administration. With MicroStrategy's ROLAP engine and tightly integrated in-memory cubes, data scalability has long-been a differentiator for the vendor; in 9.3, MicroStrategy adds support for Hadoop and Hive, the latter being Apache's data warehousing environment for Hadoop. MicroStrategy discussed Hadoop and Hive conceptually, but I remain skeptical of the performance of the Hive query approach and have yet to talk to any beta customers. Hadoop is a batch processing system, and as such, queries against Hadoop are inherently slower, measured in minutes or more, a stark difference from BI queries against relational and OLAP data sources that last seconds at most. A more practical approach is loading Hadoop data into an in-memory cube with the new Hadoop connector. Enterprise-grade administrative tools have also been long-standing strength for MicroStrategy. In the 9.3 release the vendor introduces System Manager, an optional interface that enables administrative tasks to be grouped and established as workflows. The workflows can be based on third-party events, such as starting an Amazon Instance. MicroStrategy cited case studies of companies that could save thousands of man hours per year in manual administration. System Manager is expected to be sold separately (a difference from Visual Insight, which is included in the Report Services license). It's reasonable that MicroStrategy charges extra for new capabilities that go above and beyond what's generally available in other BI platforms, but introducing too many a la carte options risks further confusing customers that already have trouble deciphering BI pricing and packaging options (see <a href="https://www.biscorecard.com/businessintelligenceevaluations.asp">BI Scorecard's pricing and packaging matrix.</a>) MicroStrategy released Wisdom Professional, an evolution of its BI-for-Facebook product first released last year. Wisdom Professional lets marketers and CRM users explore Facebook demographic and interest data from 12 million users who have opted in. It's an interesting product that has generated mainstream media coverage. I'm enthused that MicroStrategy is innovating in social analytics, but I confess I'm a Facebook-for-business skeptic. (Don't send me a friend request unless I've known you for at least 20 years. Try me on LinkedIn or Twitter instead.) Facebook is undoubtedly an important force shaping social behavior, consumers, and BI tools, but how to best use it for business, whether for advertising or segmentation, remains to be seen. When I talk to the younger generation, whose lives are rooted in Facebook, they tell me they lie on their pages about age, relationships, and interests. They advise each other never to "Like" a page, lest you get spammed later, and they are oh-so-astute as to which marketers make the liking worth the invasion. They may not be too concerned about privacy, but what's personal versus professional is a line they don't like marketers crossing. Knowing the customer and "stalking on Facebook" is a fine line savvy business users should consider. Cloud computing has gained acceptance in CRM, human capital management, and payroll, but there has been slower adoption in the BI world. Speaking at MicroStrategy's event, Gartner analyst Andreas Bitterer predicted that Cloud BI will account for just 3% of total BI revenues by 2013. MicroStrategy made its first foray into cloud-based BI last year, offering both Cloud Personal, a free service based primarily on Visual Insight, and Cloud Enterprise (since rebranded MicroStrategy Cloud Platform), a BI platform as a service (PaaS). MicroStrategy also announced Cloud Express in Amsterdam. It's a beta service that combines visual data discovery, dashboards, mobile BI, reporting, reports, and enterprise security, without the need to model a data warehouse. Fabrice Martin, VP of Cloud Express, did a demo in which every attendee received a customized report of their country's World Cup performance. With Cloud Express, data can be imported from flat files, spreadsheets, Salesforce.com, other cloud services, or SQL data sources. The vendor is clearly trying to ride the cloud wave with enterprise customers while also appealing to smaller companies and departments looking for fast deployment, an area in which competitors QlikTech and Tableau Software have been encroaching. MicroStrategy Mobile remains a huge emphasis for the company. CEO Michael Saylor released a new book, The Mobile Wave, and the vendor has refined its use cases for mobile, emphasizing executives, retail, and sales force. The vendor released a new ability to interactively draw on and annotate a dashboard on an iPad or iPhone while it is mirrored on Apple TV. That's a nice collaborative feature for board rooms and executive offices.2012-06-15T08:45:00ZQlikTech Buys Expressor To Nix ScriptingDeal gives QlikView business intelligence software a graphical user interface to ease and speed data loading.http://www.informationweek.com/news/240002131?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsQlikTech announced this week that it has completed the acquisition of privately-held data-integration vendor Expressor. Is this move a shift at QlikTech to expand its focus to enterprise extract, transform, and load (ETL)? I don't think so, and in meeting with Donald Farmer, VP of Product Management, and Jeff Boehm, VP of Product Marketing in New York this week, they were quick to confirm that QlikTech is not pursuing the ETL space. Instead, the deal is about metadata re-usability and data governance. One of the biggest shortcomings of QlikTech's current QlikView product is the lack of a metadata layer, and it's a drawback that has led to deals being lost to competitors such as Tableau and Tibco Spotfire. Customers have to use scripts to extract data from source systems or a data warehouse and load into QlikView's in-memory engine. Calculations (which QlikView calls expressions) are specific to each sheet within a dashboard application. So if the extraction, transformations, and calculations for a widely used measure such as "Customer Churn" change, a designer might have to change a lot of scripts and sheets. Some designers foster re-usability through shared scripts, but it's a work around. [ Want more on QlikView? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/bi/240000306?itc=edit_in_body_cross">QlikTech Promises 'Gorgeous Genius'</a>. ] The Expressor deal, the terms of which were not disclosed, gives QlikTech a graphical user interface for the data-extraction process. The company is positioning Expressor as a way of doing data modeling in process, iteratively and simultaneously building the ETL and the business application. I visited Expressor at <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/bi/240000306">QlikView's partner conference </a> earlier this year, and I was impressed by the product's ease of use. However, maintaining calculations beyond the initial data load is a challenge that QlikView must still address, one that <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/bi/231901769">Tableau </a> took steps to address in its version 7 release last fall. Tibco Spotfire, meanwhile, has had a metadata layer for years, with its Information Links. Neither competitor has the same degree of scripting and ETL capabilities that QlikView offers. That gives QlikView a leg up when accessing complex, disparate data, but it's a challenge for less sophisticated users when trying to access a single source. The Expressor acquisition is a good one for QlikTech, but the company needs also to address the following challenges: * Improving ease of use/maintenance, particularly for the designer. QlikView has been emphasizing this as a theme in <a href=" http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/bi/240000306">its next version </a>. * Inability to articulate and position its data-mart capabilities, while also allaying IT's concern about data chaos. * Lack of flexibility on when to leave data on disk or in a data warehouse versus loading into in-memory; QlikView's approach is currently all or nothing. The Expressor acquisition also will require QlikTech to address concerns about its move into the broader ETL space at its larger data-integration partner, Informatica. For a more detailed review and side-by-side comparison of QlikView to other BI tools, visit <a href="http://www.biscorecard.com/businessintelligenceevaluations.asp">BI Scorecard </a>. Be sure to take the <a href="http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/WEB22FVXM5SAW5/?SC=IW">2012 Successful BI Survey </a>, which tracks BI adoption and causes of success and failure with BI tools.2012-05-22T09:58:00ZSAP Shares Five-Point BI Improvement PlanSAP is innovating on core business intelligence, visual analysis, mobile, social, and deep analytics.http://www.informationweek.com/news/240000793?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsSAP Hana and a new visual discovery tool, Visual Intelligence, took center stage at SAPPRIRE last week. But more noteworthy to me is the fact that SAP is once again innovating in business intelligence (BI), not just integrating products. Specifically, SAP outlined plans to innovate in five areas: core BI, creative analysis, mobile, analytics, and social. Visual Intelligence is a new desktop tool that lets Hana users visually explore and manipulate data. The tool is intended for power users, a key difference from the vendor's lightweight, Web-based BusinessObjects Explorer visual discovery tool. A versionrelease of Visual Intelligence that uses Hana as the data source is generally available immediately and is included as part of the SAP BusinessObjects BI suite license. An individual, named-user-licensed release, not tied to the BI server, is planned but not yet finalized. With the Hana in-memory database in production not-quite a year, only a few hundred customers can immediately make use of Visual Intelligence. SAP CTO Vishal Sikka cited 353 Hana projects, with 145 live deployments. [ Want more on SAP's statistical analysis capabilities? Read <a href=" http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/bi/232602649?itc=edit_in_body_cross"> SAP Steps Up Commitment To Predictive Analytics</a>. ] That's just the beginning, as SAP has big plans for Hana and big plans for Visual Intelligence. SAP also announced a developer version of Hana available in the Amazon cloud, with more than 2,000 instances ready immediately. I expect this seeding approach to boost Hana's uptake. Visual Intelligence will gain wider market potential in June with the planned release of an upgrade supporting additional data sources such as Excel, flat files, and free-hand SQL (for Web Intelligence users who have been mourning the loss of that feature, I can imagine some resounding cheers!). A third release, expected by year end, will bring support for Universes, the vendor's semantic layer. I hope it will support both for newer .UNX and older .UNV files, as SAP has offered with its new predictive-analytics software. Dual support may be harder to deliver, but it certainly helps with customer uptake. Based on initial demonstrations, Visual Intelligence is ahead of some competitors on data-manipulation capabilities, automatically guessing at measures and dimensions, as well as hierarchies, such as time and geography. If the data is not clean, users can perform transformations with no scripting, a point of differentiation from QlikView. Data models can be saved back to Hana for other power users to access. It's yet to be seen how well Visual Intelligence merges multiple data sources. The breadth of visualizations--ranging from standard bar charts to newer tag clouds and trellis charts--seems to compare with some of the best-of-breed visual discovery tools such as Tableau Software and Tibco Spotfire. Lacking, though, is the ability to share discoveries while also preserving interactivity. A power user, for example, can email an image to another user, but Visual Intelligence does not yet have an ability to publish a collection of analyses as a type of dashboard or exploration view that decision-makers can then consume and interact with via an iPad or the Web. Expect these improvements to be added in the end-of-year release. SAP's improvements in dashboards and predictive analysis didn't get stage time at SAPPHIRE, but they were the topic of one-on-one briefings and booth demos. Adam Binnie, VP of Business Intelligence Solutions, and Jason Rose, VP of Business Intelligence Marketing, outlined five areas where SAP has been executing well or intends to improve its capabilities: 1. BI core: Deliver significant upgrades--steps already taken through SAP BusinessObjects 4.0 and the subsequent Feature Pack 3. 2. Creative BI: Provide fast time to value with tools like Visual Intelligence. 3. Mobile BI: Develop first for mobile users through SAP Mobile and Zen. 4. Extreme Analytics: Deliver big-data, real-time, and predictive capabilities with Hana, Sybase IQ, and Predictive Analysis. 5. Social: Capture decisions and leverage the network with tools like StreamWork. SAP promises all of these improvements with minimal disruption, which is, of course, a nice vision. But for customers currently going through a BusinessObjects 4.0 migration, reality is a bit more disruptive, particularly for customers with large Desktop Intelligence deployments. Change is disruptive, like it or not; it's more a matter of degree of disruption and the quality of the migration utilities. Elaborating on how SAP is innovating in these five areas, SAP Mobile, for example, was showcased throughout the conference. SAP can claim leadership as a mobile applications and mobile development-platform provider, but the company's mobile BI story is a mosaic, dependent on the device and the BI content. SAP has been caught up in the decline of Flash for animation (as well as the decline of RIM in mobile). SAP BusinessObjects Dashboards (formerly Xcelsius) currently relies exclusively on Flash, but SAP recently published a <a href="http://blogs.sap.com/analytics/2012/04/17/the-future-of-dashboards-strategy-and-direction/">statement of direction</a> that points toward a new product, code-named Zen, planned for release this year. Zen will bring HTML5 and long-awaited drill-down capabilities to dashboards, but initially it will only handle SAP BW and Hana content. In this regard, the first release of Zen is mainly an improvement for current SAP Web Application Designer users. SAP has committed to maintaining and enhancing Dashboards, so I was also pleased to see an HTML5 version of the product at SAPPHIRE (expected in SP5 later this year). SAP says Zen and Dashboards will eventually come together. One consultant aptly described the current mix as "the dashboard quagmire," a valid criticism. I have been critical of SAP's dashboarding products for years, so I'm also glad that SAP now has a plan to address current limitations. SAP's recently released <a href="http://biscorecard.typepad.com/biscorecard/2012/03/sap-steps-up-commitment-to-predictive-analytics.html">Predictive Analysis</a> software offers analytics based on the R statistical programming language. Hana Service Pack 4, released last week, adds native support for R algorithms. BI collaboration is supported via SAP's StreamWork interface, which was integrated with BusinessObjects 4.0 <a href="http://biscorecard.typepad.com/biscorecard/2011/10/sap-previews-next-bi-release-at-asug-conference.html">Feature Pack 3</a>, currently in (beta) ramp up release. Users can directly annotate content and view discussion threads from within the SAP BusinessObjects BI Launchpad. Working within StreamWork, users can also import reports to support a decision process. A new ability to auto update such reports from within StreamWork will be useful say for weekly planning or strategy meetings. SAP Hana Service Pack 4 added support for analyzing unstructured information, such as social data. Last year at this time, customers were waiting for SAP BusinessObjects 4.0, which was late, arriving three-years after the previous major release. One year later, there are improvements on multiple fronts, with SAP once again innovating in BI.2012-05-14T09:00:00ZQlikTech Promises 'Gorgeous Genius'The Business Intelligence vendor behind QlikView says next release will blend seductive interfaces with smart, comparative-analysis capabilities.http://www.informationweek.com/news/240000306?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsQlikTech says its next release, currently dubbed QlikView.next, will deliver movie-star good looks and the brains of a genius. These are terms not typically applied to a BI tool, but with the combination of gorgeous user interfaces and comparative analytics that speed decision-making, the vendor says QlikView will deliver. The vendor revealed plans for the release, due in 2013, at its annual conference in Miami late last month, where more than 900 partners were in attendance. Donald Farmer, VP of product management at QlikTech, laid out five themes in the next QlikView product release: gorgeous and genius, collaboration, mobile and agile, open platform, and enterprise ready. Talking about the goal of making QlikView both gorgeous and genius, Farmer likened the software to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedy_Lamar">Hedy Lamarr</a>, a classic beauty and 1940s MGM actress who also co-invented wireless communications technology. [ Want more on QlikTech's biggest competitor? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/bi/231901769?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Tableau Version 7 Challenges Old School BI</a>. ] QlikView has been winning deals based on its appealing user interface as well as its unique associative analysis capabilities, which help users readily see how data relates--or doesn't. For example, a doctor treating a patient can visualize which treatments have already been tried, as well as what hasn't been tried. These sorts of queries are difficult, if not impossible, in a SQL-only world because they require complicated techniques like double-outer joins, intersect queries, and many subqueries. Farmer outlined how Qlikview.next would further improve on analysis and speed decision-making through context, colors, and the ability to tell a story with data. QlikView 11, the current product, delivers primarily IT-developed applications and dashboards, but the demo of QlikView.next presented the concept of business-user-assembled dashboards. QlikView 11 introduced collaborative features (see my <a href="http://www.biscorecard.com/businessintelligenceevaluations.asp#qlik">BI Scorecard in-depth review</a>), but with the next release, Farmer says QlikTech wants to make collaboration more pervasive. With fast uptake of tablet devices (Apple sold 3 million units of its latest iPad in the first three days of the product's launch), it's not surprising that mobility is a key theme for QlikView.next. What was surprising, though, is that QlikTech gave a nod to Windows 8 impact on both the desktop experience and mobile, whereas most other BI vendors seem to have largely dismissed Microsoft's influence on mobile. QlikTech has grown as a company and QlikView applications have grown in scale, so QlikView.next will introduce more open API's for partners to develop applications. It was noteworthy that this was the first partner conference that included an exhibit hall for technology partners such as Panopticon, Informatica, and Expressor. The Panopiticon integration, for example, brings real-time streaming into a QlikView dashboard. Expressor and Informatica integration brings more robust data integration and ETL than currently available in QlikView. Other planned improvements to enterprise administration include better tools for IT to manage large QlikView applications. Noticeably absent from QlikTech's future product strategy were plans for cloud deployment or big-data analysis. Scalability of QlikView applications was a theme in a number of track sessions, but there was no mention of integration to big-data platforms such as Hadoop. QlikTech's partner network, with numerous resellers that account for half the company's revenue, is a competitive differentiator versus QlikTech's chief rival, Tableau Software, which only recently began developing such a network. The network is also a differentiator versus mega BI vendors that have often failed to nurture such relationships. As one partner said, "with SAP we are a pawn, and they are the king. With QlikTech [the relationship] is direct, fair, and customer centric." This marked the first time that QlikTech invited analysts to its partner conference, a reflection of both the organization's growing prominence in the BI space, but also its maturation in its ability to respond to questions and sometimes provocative criticism from analysts. In some respects the conference was also a who's who in the BI industry, as a number of industry veterans have flocked to this fast-growing vendor. There's been a brain drain at some of the larger BI companies, and QlikTech has been among the aggressive smaller vendors attracting top talent. Farmer, formerly a Microsoft executive, has participated in some of my bake-off events at TDWI (The Data Warehousing Institute), but this is the first time I have heard him deliver a keynote. I was impressed by how inspiring he was, with a rare ability to convey abstract, potentially mundane technical concepts with humor and insight.2012-05-03T08:53:00ZOracle Makes Case For Exalytics, Data DiscoveryOracle demonstrates how it optimizes queries, searches mixed data types, and "engineers" hardware to run its high-demand software.http://www.informationweek.com/news/232901387?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsExalytics, Oracle Endeca, and analytic apps were centers of attention late last month when Oracle showcased recent and upcoming products at its annual analyst conference in San Francisco. Announced in October at Oracle Open World and released in February, Exalytics is a combination appliance and in-memory solution. The in-memory engine relies on technology from TimesTen, an in-memory, columnar database that Oracle acquired in 2005 that has been used, until now, entirely in transaction processing. The Exalytics appliance can store both Essbase cubes and models from Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) in memory, boosting performance for both planning applications and existing BI apps. Oracle claims an 18X performance boost to existing BI and planning apps. An in-memory summary advisor recommends which data should be stored in-memory, based on usage statistics. I'm waiting to test drive the new release and appliance, but the in-memory summary advisor seems to be a differentiator, particularly if it is self optimizing. The integration with Exadata, via a fast InfiniBand connection, for direct access to the larger data warehouse, is another differentiator, but I'd like to see how seamlessly the data moves from Exadata to Exalytics. [ How does Exalytics stack up? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/enterprise_apps/232901262?itc=edit_in_body_cross">Hana and Exalytics: SAP's Hype Versus Oracle's FUD</a>. ] Exalytics was initially touted as both an in-memory and visual-discovery solution. To be sure, there are some new visual discovery capabilities in the latest release of OBIEE when deployed with Exalytics. In addition, Oracle now has Endeca Information Discovery in its portfolio. Oracle acquired Endeca in October, primarily for its MDEX engine. Best known for its e-commerce and e-retail search capabilities, Endeca brings the simplicity of search to BI. The Endeca software, which is not widely adopted, competes to some extent with capabilities available from QlikTech's QlikView, SAP BusinessObjects Explorer, and Information Builders Magnify. The MDEX engine is most different in its combination in-memory and columnar storage to support analysis of both structured content as well as textual, semi-structured content stored in comments, documents, and social media. Oracle's BI analytic applications have been a Trojan horse for selling OBIEE to Oracle E-business Suite, JD Edwards, and PeopleSoft customers. The analytic applications are expansive, bringing ETL, data models, dashboards and reports, and best practices to a number of functional areas (such as financial and human resources) and industries (such as retail and government). They're built on OBIEE, so customers who buy the apps must also purchase OBIEE, and thus may potentially leverage that BI platform for other BI initiatives. Oracle has continued to improve its depth of coverage in the analytic applications, most recently adding Asset Management and Manufacturing Process, as well as support for SAP data sources. The highpoint of the event was the customer panel, which, unfortunately, was under non-disclosure, meaning I can't name names of customers. This panel was one of the best I have heard in my ten years as an analyst, in part because the customers delivered genuine criticism--which you don't hear in vendor-organized panels--but also because they did it with humor. The constructive criticism made the kudos for Oracle all the more believable. One OBIEE customer who had deployed Endeca said, "Oracle bought an amazing technology. I'm not sure they yet realize how good it is." A key theme of the event, and a rallying cry for Oracle's strategy, is to simplify the IT experience to power extreme innovation. I get the rallying cry: IT can't keep pace with business demand with difficult-to-integrate and -deploy technology, but rarely has the goal of "helping IT" been inspirational to the business. I suspect part of this shift in emphasis is related to Oracle's 2010 acquisition of Sun; that hardware now accounts for almost 20% of Oracle's $35 billion in annual revenues. Not surprising then, a fair bit of the keynotes were devoted to talking about the bits and bytes of Oracle's engineered systems. There was a time in my career when I was happy to assemble servers, but as a BI expert today, I felt somewhat like the car buyer who simply wants to drive that sleek car, not dissect the engine. While hardware has not been a high-growth industry of late, the difference is that Oracle's focus is on systems that power business analytics, for which most market watchers cite double-digit growth. To that point, Oracle showcased numerous customer success stories for Exadata. As one customer put it, "we read all the glossy brochures, and [Exadata] has lived up to the hype."2012-03-15T08:07:00ZSAP Steps Up Commitment To Predictive AnalyticsSAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analysis will integrate with Hana, take on SAS and IBM SPSS modeling and analysis tools.http://www.informationweek.com/news/232602649?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsSAP last month quietly "ramped up" SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analysis. Ramp up is the vendor’s approach to releasing production software to a limited number of customers. The product is expected to be generally available later this year. Predictive analytics has become an increasingly important part of the larger business intelligence (BI) market and an area in which SAP has lagged behind chief competitors IBM and SAS. SAP currently resells and embeds analytics software sourced from SPSS, but with IBM’s acquisition of SPSS in 2009, it seemed only a matter of time before SAP would develop an alternative. SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analysis, the company's new product, has been shaped by competitive and market forces, including the momentum of open source R, in-memory and in-database processing, and the convergence of analytics with BI. Open source R: This statistical language emerged from a project initiated by academics in New Zealand in the mid 1990s. A number of vendors, including SAS, have added support for R as it has gained popularity. Information Builders WebFocus Rstat and TIBCO Spotfire S+, for example, are both based on R. SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analysis provides a graphical user interface to R. [ Want more on BI? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/bi/232500132?itc=edit_in_body_cross">6 Predictions For Business Intelligence In 2012</a>. ] SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analysis has two components: model development and execution, and data visualization. I was impressed by the number of visualizations Predictive Analysis automatically generated to identify patterns in data. To be clear, this is not a visual discovery tool for business users that competes with the likes of SAP BusinessObjects Explorer or Tableau Software. It's a tool for statisticians. In-database processing: Statisticians have typically done their analyses and model building on data that resides in flat files or in proprietary data-set formats. As data volumes have grown, database and analytic vendors have been pushing more of the processing into the database, where analyses of large data sets can be completed much more quickly. SAS was one of the first to support in-database processing, working with Teradata in 2008, and it now supports the approach in Netezza, EMC Greenplum, DB2, and AsterData databases as well. Oracle last month released Oracle Advanced Analytics, which bundles Oracle R Enterprise software and supports in-database processing of R models inside the Oracle database. Predictive Analysis pushes processing into Hana, SAP’s in-memory database, which has its own statistical function library. Mainstream analytics: There has never been a cry for mainstream analytics in the way there have been calls for democratizing business intelligence. Developing analytic models remains a task for skilled statisticians, but there have been calls for improved integration and easy consumption of model-derived data. Some BI vendors have made it easy to call on models and transparently embed the results within a dashboard or report. An example is a report that displays sales by customer, with a model-derived predictive flag to indicate the likelihood of churning. MicroStrategy was one of the first vendors to provide such seamless integration, but adoption has been slow. There has been greater demand for pre-built analytic applications, a market in which SAS is the leader and IBM is growing. SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analysis is well integrated with SAP's BI platform in that the tool can access a Universe (data model) in either the version 3 (.UNV) format or the newer version 4 (.UNX) format. The level of integration is similar to what SAP provides for SPSS software. However, there's currently no easy way to embed model results in a dashboard or report. SAP says its various analytic applications will take advantage of Predictive Analysis modeling capabilities over time. For example, the SAP Smart Meter Analytics application uses clustering and segmentation algorithms on energy consumption that could be developed and tuned in Predictive Analysis. SAP BusinessObjects Predictive Analysis is not the vendor’s first entry into advanced analytics, but it represents a bigger commitment than earlier efforts. It’s too early to say whether it will have any impact on SAS or IBM SPSS market share. However, it certainly will improve the capabilities of SAP analytic applications and it will put SAP on the short list of vendors to investigate for any customer that is new to predictive analysis. Cindi Howson is the founder of <a href=" http://www.biscorecard.com/">BI Scorecard </a>, an independent analyst firm that advises companies on BI tool strategies and offers in-depth business intelligence product reviews. 2012-01-31T08:00:00ZMicroStrategy Cloud, Social And Mobile Bets Pay OffCloud-based business intelligence services, mobile delivery options and Facebook data-analysis capabilities help drive MicroStrategy's fast growth.http://www.informationweek.com/news/232500755?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsMicroStrategy touted its social, cloud-computing and mobile business intelligence initiatives at its user conference last week and has since added proof that those bets are paying off. MicroStrategy Cloud was released in mid-2011, and over the last six months it has been refining that strategy and building out its infrastructure. I was surprised when the company decided to <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/bi/231600396">establish its own data centers</a>, in contrast to other SaaS vendors that use public cloud services such as Amazon's. MicroStrategy claims that owning the infrastructure enables it to better control performance. Steve Stone, senior vice president of MicroStrategy Cloud, reported that some of its cloud deployments boast better performance than on-premises installs. Stone knows all about customer performance expectations; he's the former CIO and a 19-year veteran of Lowes, which has some 14,000 MicroStrategy users. [ Want more on business intelligence in the year ahead? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/bi/232500132?itc=edit_in_body_cross">6 Predictions For Business Intelligence In 2012 </a>. ] MicroStrategy Cloud is a powerhouse of partnerships, with Netezza, ParAccel, and Teradata (the last announced last week) offering supporting cloud-based data warehousing and Informatica adding cloud-based data integration. MicroStrategy also lets customers leave their data on-premises. MicroStrategy Cloud Professional, announced last week, gives customers three cloud service options: personal, professional, and enterprise. <a href="http://www.biscorecard.com/businessintelligenceevaluations.asp#Microstrategy">Cloud Personal</a> is primarily MicroStrategy's Visual Insight product delivered as a cloud service. Cloud Personal is free, but it supports just a single, manually loaded data source. Cloud Professional brings workgroup management and security to the visualizations created with Visual Insight. (MicroStrategy calls them dashboards, but they really aren't dashboards: there's just one data visualization per page.) The Professional Edition also allows data to be refreshed automatically on a schedule. Cloud Enterprise is about large-scale deployments of the vendor's suite delivered as a service. MicroStrategy expects its cloud offerings to appeal to line-of-business organizations and departments that lack IT resources to install infrastructure on-premises. As a case in point, customer Enova was looking for a best-fit BI tool, not necessarily a cloud solution. A cloud deployment enabled Enova to get a fast time to value with all the breadth of the MicroStrategy BI platform. <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/thebrainyard/news/social_networking_consumer/232500412/facebook-the-database-of-wealth-and-power">MicroStrategy Social</a> garnered many of the headlines from last week's conference. The company's approach to social media is drastically different than that of other vendors. The social movement in BI has been of two flavors: collaboration and sentiment analysis. I didn't see any MicroStrategy moves to bring collaboration to its product; that's a miss in my view. MicroStrategy is not pursuing sentiment analysis either. Instead, it is focusing on using Facebook data and enabling users to merge it with customer data via MicroStrategy's Gateway product. Another product, Wisdom, allows users to do customer segmentation based on demographic data in Facebook. MicroStrategy Alert can be used to create targeted, personalized Facebook campaigns using the information discovered with Gateway. All of this is certainly bleeding edge and compelling. The big "but" comes back to the quality of the data in Facebook. (Trust me: my 13-year-old son does not have 3 wives and 7 brothers.) As a case in point, MicroStrategy shared an interesting graphic from the <a href="http://www.nj.com/super-bowl/index.ssf/2012/01/giants_pats_fans_in_marketers_crosshairs.html">New York Post</a> that used Wisdom to explore interests between Patriots and Giants fans. The favorite book for Patriots fans is Harry Potter. For Giants fans it's Diary of a Wimpy Kid. (Note: the data set is based on 4 million Facebook Wisdom users). I suspect that this finding is not true of the general fan population. I suspect, too, that younger Wisdom users have been more likely than older users to fill out their profiles and that they have more permissive security settings that allow for such data exploration. The bottom line is not that the apps are useless. Instead, I think there is big potential and clear first-mover advantage for marketers that can exploit Facebook effectively. But any initiative in this area has to be met with a high degree of skepticism. MicroStrategy has been ahead of both BI customer demand and its competitors with its mobile BI capabilities. Some vendors are struggling with mobile BI and the shift from RIM dominance to Apple iPads, but MicroStrategy was one of the first to offer native support for the iPad. BI on the iPad has been a Trojan horse for some BI initiatives, with a number of customers citing mobile deployments as the way they are getting a direct line to BI decision makers. With more than 3,000 people attending MicroStrategy's largest-ever annual conference last week, it was clear the vendor has continued to grow despite a tough economy and fierce completion from mega-vendors IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP. On Monday <a href=" http://ir.microstrategy.com/releasedetail.cfm?ReleaseID=643493">MicroStrategy released 2011 financial results</a> showing a whopping 23% increase over 2010 total revenues. Gartner estimated 2011 BI growth rates at 9%, so it's obvious that MicroStrategy is outperforming many of its BI competitors and that the innovation initiatives are paying off. Cindi Howson is the founder of <a href=" http://www.biscorecard.com/">BI Scorecard </a>, an independent analyst firm that advises companies on BI tool strategies and offers in-depth business intelligence product reviews.2011-12-19T08:30:00ZSAP Steps Up Mobile, Cloud And In-Memory CommitmentsSAP spotlights innovation, customer success and new partnerships with Google, Tableau and Tibco at its Influencer Summit.http://www.informationweek.com/news/232300706?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsAt SAP's seventh annual Influencer Summit in Boston last week, Co-CEO Jim Hagemann Snabe highlighted four areas of SAP innovation: core, mobile, cloud, and in-memory. Interesting to me is that SAP now considers the core to include business intelligence (or to use SAP's umbrella term, business analytics) as well as its well-established business applications. Mobile, cloud, and in-memory also cut across both BI and SAP's business applications. In mobile, SAP currently has a number of first-mover and competitive advantages. Sybase Unwired gives them a development platform as well as device management. SAP now has 30+ mobile applications. However, in the BI space, its solutions are mixed, depending on the device and the BI content (check out <a href="http://www.biscorecard.com/businessintelligenceevaluations.asp#prosum">BI Scorecard's latest summary scorecard</a> to see how they stack up). For example, mobile interfaces vary depending on whether they're from the SAP BusinessObjects 4.0 WebIntelligence, Crystal, Explorer or Dashboards modules. Look for this to improve in 2012, as detailed in this article about what's ahead in <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/bi/231901079?queryText=Howson">SAP BusinessObjects Feature Pack 3</a>. [ Want more coverage from last week's Influencer Summit? Read <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/enterprise_apps/232300472?itc=edit_in_body_cross">SAP: We'll Be No. 2 Database Player By 2015 </a>. ] SAP BusinessObjects was one of the first BI platform vendors to have an on-demand strategy. Day two of this summit was largely focused on cloud computing, with SAP emphasizing existing and new cloud applications, including Sales OnDemand, Sourcing OnDemand, Travel OnDemand and so on. The pending acquisition of SuccessFactors will position SAP as the number-two SaaS vendor in revenue after SalesForce.com. SuccessFactors provides services-based employee performance management applications, and it claims 15 million users and a 70% growth rate. All of this shows SAP is committed to the cloud, but here, BI was like a forgotten step-child. One exec said, "except for Business ByDesign, we didn't have cloud solutions to sell until this year." Maybe he misspoke, but it reinforced my perception that SAP BusinessObjects BI OnDemand has been more of a check-box than a fully supported BI cloud strategy. In yet another show of stepped-up commitment to cloud, Google announced it will integrate Google Apps with SAP Business ByDesign, the company's cloud-based business applications suite. Meanwhile, there is little doubt about SAP's commitment to in-memory with its Hana technology expected to power not just BI but also business applications. SAP's vision for in-memory and Hana is to redefine real-time performance. Snabe declared in-memory to be the next-generation architecture. He took a subtle dig at Oracle's use of "hybrid" (relational plus in-memory) technology in Exalytics (without explicitly naming the vendor), saying hybrids don't last. The benefits of in-memory in terms of real-time, analytic performance were backed up by a number of customer testimonials. However, remember that the number of live deployments is in the low hundreds. I suspect this is both because of the newness of the product (which was released in June), but also because of the steep price tag (I heard a quote of $5 million in one installation, but SAP doesn't publically quote pricing, so I can't confirm). SAP needs to figure out how to bring in-memory to customers with lower budgets. This may be where the cloud has a role to play, as Hana will also be the database powering BI OnDemand. One of the most interesting announcements related to Hana was planned support by third-party vendors including Tableau and Tibco Spotfire. Tableau has long had a philosophy and architecture of not requiring customers to replicate data into their in-memory engine (an option added in 2010 through Tableau Version 6). So support for SAP's Hana makes sense (check out this <a href="http://www.tableausoftware.com/about/blog/2011/12/got-sap-bw-get-tableau-15088">demo preview of Tableau running on Hana</a>). It's notable that Oracle discontinued its OEM relationship with Tableau earlier this year. Spotfire, in contrast, has typically had an extract-and-load-into-memory approach (with a drill on demand option), so I will be curious to see how this is implemented. Neither solution is, as of yet, generally available. Customer FreshDirect provided an interesting view of their journey to self-service BI. The direct-delivery grocer is using SAP's newly released Event Insight capability to track on-time delivery throughout the day. Unexpected events like United Nations meetings and Obama coming to town can disrupt deliveries throughout New York City. Event Insight alerts the company to traffic problems so it can quickly add reserve trucks to routes when delays pop up. FreshDirect routinely monitors BI usage, and if someone is not frequently using their license, it gets taken away and allocated to another user. Users author their own reports on everything from delivery performance to number of parking tickets. "If you don't have access to analytics, you're going to get squashed by your competition," says Brandon Arbiter, FreshDirect's manager of business intelligence. It was a big picture kind of summit, so I had to reflect on where SAP has been in BI and where it's going. Executive VP of Business Analytics Sanjay Poonen committed to being best of breed in BI. I couldn't help recall SAP's stance prior to the BusinessObjects acquisition, striving only to be "good enough." It's better for customers and the industry that they are now pursuing excellence. Cindi Howson is the founder of <a href=" http://www.biscorecard.com/">BI Scorecard </a>, an independent analyst firm that advises companies on BI tool strategies and offers in-depth business intelligence product reviews.2011-07-22T08:26:00ZSAP BusinessObjects Customers Await New PlatformDelays have pushed back the vendor's business intelligence suite 4.0 upgrade, but components including data services and a Microsoft Office analysis tool are finally available.http://www.informationweek.com/news/231002386?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsAt SAP's annual Sapphire user event in May, CTO Vishal Sikka claimed that BusinessObjects version 4.0 is the "best release ever." Trouble is, the general release was originally expected ahead of Sapphire but had been pushed back to June. Last week SAP acknowledged the product won't be available until next month. The delay in the business intelligence platform is significant, but SAP did, at least, release two components of version 4.0: the Data Services module (for data integration, data quality, and data profiling) and SAP Business Objects Analysis Edition for Microsoft Office, a premium alternative to SAP's venerable BEx Excel interface. SAP BusinessObjects first announced version 4.0 last <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/bi/229219471">February in New York</a> and in other cities around the world. It's a product several years in development and one that promises innovation for both the SAP Business Warehouse (BW) customer base and for non-SAP ERP customers. SAP customers have been waiting for performance improvements and better integration with BW. Long-time BusinessObjects customers have most been waiting for data federation, better graphing, workflow, and a more scalable dashboard solution. Version 4.0 officially went into ramp up last December. Ramp up is SAP's approach to releasing new software versions whereby a limited number of customers put it to the test. The software has to be deployed in production, not just in labs or downloaded for evaluation purposes. SAP makes the software generally available to all customers once certain key performance thresholds have been reached related to bug resolution and the number of successful customer deployments. Customer reaction <a href="https://blogs.sap.com/analytics/2011/07/15/update-on-bi-4-0-availability/">to the delay</a> has been decidedly mixed. Nobody wants to deploy software that isn't stable, and BusinessObjects customers have clear memories of 2003 and 1996 releases that were not stable. A delay to ensure software quality is something SAP customers have come to expect. However, one customer I spoke to complained that the repeated delays have impacted training and deployment plans that most likely will now be pushed into 2012. Customers who were planning on purchasing BI 4.0 likewise have to defer their plans, or decide to purchase and deploy on BusinessObjects XI 3.1 and upgrade later. SAP's next earning call at the end of July will be the biggest indicator of how big a deal this delay has been in terms of company performance and BI customers turning to competitors. There's always frustration when products are delayed, and the challenge becomes managing expectations. All vendors and internal BI teams should take heed. SAP has been talking about the 4.0 release since it completed the acquisition of BusinessObjects in early 2008. By those roadmaps, the 4.0 release is a full year later than expected. Customers tend to look at roadmaps with a wary eye: too much theory, too many moving parts -- time will tell. However, much of the hype around 4.0 began bubbling up with a pre-announcement at the <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/bi/228900619">ASUG conference</a> last October. Then came the worldwide launch announcement in February. No wonder the product got so little fanfare at Sapphire in May, as it still wasn't ready. A few months delay in the software industry is not that big a deal, particularly as the installed base and complexity of these products has grown. More worrying, to me, is the number of key departures from the SAP BI product team (well-known executives Marge Breya, Dave Weisbeck, and, the latest, George Mathew, have all left within the last year). I could make a similar criticism about loss of BI personnel at Microsoft, but not at IBM Cognos or Oracle. As the SAP BusinessObjects executive departures are in the middle of a major product release, it cannot be good for either customers or for the vendor. (SAP says the departures have had no impact on the product release and that other veterans -- including Sanjay Poonen, Steve Lucas, and Adam Binnie -- have shifted responsibilities to take over for the executives who have left.) You tell me: has your BI deployment or buying been effected by this delay, or are such delays par for the course? Cindi Howson is the founder of <a href=" http://www.biscorecard.com/">BI Scorecard </a>, an independent analyst firm that advises companies on BI tool strategies and offers in-depth business intelligence product reviews. 2011-06-10T12:22:00ZIBM Readies Data Visualization PlayCognos release could disrupt market dominated by specialty vendors QlikTech and Tableau.http://www.informationweek.com/news/230500231?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsVisual discovery and analysis capabilities were the most exciting developments previewed at an IBM analyst summit held last week in Ottawa, Canada. The summit provided an update on IBM's business intelligence strategy and a sneak peak at things to come in the Cognos product line. As I <a href=" http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/bi/229000780">predicted earlier this year </a>, visual exploration of data is proving to be a hot category, with Tableau Software and QlikTech growing at a breathtaking pace (the latter at 44% in the last quarter), Tibco Spotfire releasing a new version of its software, and MicroStrategy releasing a Visual Insight module. IBM Cognos looks poised to disrupt what has largely been a niche market. The company will support visual analysis in both stand-alone deployments and as an extension of the Cognos 10 platform. In-memory database Cognos TM1 will power the new visualization tool. I can't get into product names, release dates, or pricing due to nondisclosure agreements. As part of its education and marketing efforts around business analytics, IBM has released a tool for companies to assess their <a href="http://www.ibm.com/analytics/aq">Analytic Quotient</a>. It's a fairly simplistic maturity model with four levels: novice, builder, leader, master. I like IBM's categories better than those used in the <a href="http://tdwi.org/pages/assessments/benchmark-your-bi-maturity-with-tdwis-new-assessment-tool.aspx">TDWI maturity model</a> (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 it raises the awareness of the importance of BI and analytics for both strategic and operational business decisions. Few companies have yet to unleash the full potential of BI. Early indications from this year's Successful BI survey (take the survey <a href=" http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/WEB22CCAWEDUJS?Source=IW ">here</a>) 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 Analytic Quotient assessments and Cognos experiences at last week's event. "If we relied on the IT department to innovate, we'd still be playing on a Commodore," declared John Lucas, director of operations at the Cincinnati Zoo. Lucas' opinion that "IT is not wired to innovate" reflects the ongoing disconnect between business and IT. The zoo relied on a Cognos partner to implement the software. Lucas' comments drew chuckles and nods of sympathy, but I do think (hope?) this aspect of BI success is improving. Indeed, in the wake of the economic downturn, many IT departments not aligned with the business have been outsourced or severely cut. A number of customers touted improved performance and integration with TM1 as a key reason for upgrading to Cognos 10, which was released last October. The other impetus for upgrading was the product's improved user interface and workflow, supported by Business Insight and Business Insight Advanced (see my just-published, <a href=" http://www.biscorecard.com/businessintelligenceevaluations.asp#Cognos">in-depth review </a>). Business Insight is the interface for user-assembled dashboards. Business Insight Advanced combines the capabilities of Query Studio and Analysis Studio in a single interface. A few customers appearing on a panel said the upgrade went smoothly, but none of these customers had large user bases or thousands of reports to migrate. An executive at a large media company that has thousands of users decided to run Cognos 10 in parallel with its older Cognos 8 deployment for now. IBM celebrates its 100 anniversary on June 16. It wasn't part of the formal presentations last week, but one employee shared how IBM has asked its workers to mark the event: by contributing back to the community in volunteer work 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. Cindi Howson is the founder of <a href=" http://www.biscorecard.com/">BI Scorecard </a>, an independent analyst firm that advises companies on BI tool strategies and offers in-depth business intelligence product reviews.2011-05-19T13:32:00ZSAP Hana Overshadows BusinessObjects 4.0 At SapphireThe in-memory appliance and the big BI release are both set for release next month, so why is it that only Hana got the limelight and customer testimonials at this week's event?http://www.informationweek.com/news/229503410?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsAt SAP's Sapphire conference this week, business analytics dominated a large portion of the exhibit hall in a prime location. Business analytics is SAP's umbrella term that includes data warehousing, information management, and business intelligence. In years past, these topics did not get such prominent positioning at Sapphire, but I was surprised that BusinessObjects 4.0 did not get more attention during the event. Taking center stage during multiple keynotes was Hana (the SAP High-Performance Analytic Appliance), an innovation that combines in-memory processing and a columnar database on an appliance. What was just an idea at last year's conference was <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/enterprise_apps/228500082">released to rampup</a> in December. Hana customer testimonials were central to CTO Vishal Sikka's keynote, with companies from around the world and across industries touting its value, ease of deployment, and low cost of ownership. Tom Greene, CIO of Colgate-Palmolive, cited tremendous savings in time with queries going from 77 minutes to 15 seconds. A Bosch-Siemens exec described his company as a data-driven enterprise that makes decisions on facts. The home-appliance manufacturer is using Hana to study profitability by customer and product, a level of analysis that took days before but that now takes seconds on Hana. Nestle, which sells more than 1 billion consumer products per day, described how Hana lets the company analyze the granular detail, not just the summary aggregates they were previously limited to in SAP Business Warehouse (BW). Nestle's Hana implementation took only three weeks and brought a 2,000-times performance improvement over BW alone. The list of deployment scenarios went on. The keynotes brought the excitement. I learned more about SAP's product positioning through track sessions, micro forums, and one-on-one sessions. Here are three important clarifications on SAP's data warehousing products: SAP BW, despite rumors of its demise, will continue as a data warehouse solution for SAP ERP customers. BW is considered to be better suited for financial consolidations and historical aggregates. Hana is for real-time, granular-data analysis, initially for SAP ERP customers, with expansion beyond that group next year. Hana could be used as the database engine for SAP BW, posing a clear threat to a market currently dominated by Oracle. (IBM would stand to lose database share as well, but IBM is one of the Hana hardware providers.) Sybase IQ supports larger data volumes than Hana, with a lower price point, and integration with any data source. <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/info_management/228400028">Sybase IQ</a> is also more proven, with more than 3,000 installations over more than a decade, compared to a score of Hana deployments over the last few months. The lower acquisition cost for Sybase IQ makes sense given that it's a software-only product, versus the Hana appliance (but then, you'll have to add the cost of hardware for IQ). I wish SAP would publish a price list (like Oracle does!), as Sikka cited Hana running on everything from an Mac mini at the low end to a blade server with 2 terabytes of RAM and 80 cores at the high end. Surely prices will vary across that range.It wasn't discussed at Sapphire, but the other potential beneficiaries of Hana are third-party BI vendors and those customers. Hana supports both SQL and MDX query, simplifying access by third-party tools such as IBM Cognos, Oracle BIEE, and MicroStrategy. These vendors are currently forced to rely on BW's BAPI interface, which can be slow. Not surprisingly, competitive BI vendors were not invited to participate in Hana's rampup, but both IBM Cognos and MicroStrategy say they will be quickly verifying support once the product becomes generally available (and I have yet to hear from Oracle). The in-memory and real-time themes grabbed most of the attention at Sapphire, but two other top SAP priorities are mobility and collaboration. Mobility for SAP is far beyond traditional <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/bi/229403021">mobile BI initiatives</a> in that it means supporting complex business processes. The capabilities are powered largely by Sybase mobile infrastructure. Collaboration is a new breed of applications for SAP, focusing on people interactions rather than the company's historical process focus. Sales OnDemand is one of the first applications reflecting this shift, but the StreamWork collaboration platform will be central to this area of development. SAP Business Objects 4.0 was mentioned in the keynotes, but that's about it. With 100 customers in ramp up, the product is expected to become generally available in June. Sikka claimed that version 4.0 is the "best release ever," and he said BusinessObjects founder Bernard Liautaud had complemented SAP on the improvements. Sikka also declared that industry analysts are calling 4.0 the "best BI product," but he went on to rephrase "the largest market share" product (a big difference from "best product," but a nuance conveniently lost in the Twitter world). I suspect you won't get any industry analysts backing up Sikka's initial claim without qualifications, although the market share claim is correct. I wanted to see <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/bi/229219471">SAP BusinessObjects 4.0</a> testimonials, ideally from customers who have gone through an upgrade. There were none. I remain in the skeptic's corner that customers will rush to embrace this new version. Taking advantage of the product's many sought-after improvements also brings a learning curve in design and administration. I'm still assessing just how steep that curve is. On a side-note, I bumped into specialty vendor Roambi at Sapphire. The company has just released a cool new Roambi Flow product that lets business users publish magazine-style reports that can include charts, articles, and video all from an iPad. In a world of mega BI vendors, this startup is certainly differentiating itself and innovating in exciting ways. Have you taken the <a href="http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/WEB22CCAWEDUJS?Source=IW">2011 Successful BI Survey</a> yet? There's still time to rate your BI adoption, success, and vendor usage. Participants will receive summary highlights of the report. Cindi Howson is the founder of <a href=" http://www.biscorecard.com/">BI Scorecard </a>, an independent analyst firm that advises companies on BI tool strategies and offers in-depth business intelligence product reviews. Want to improve effectiveness and reduce costs by becoming a more social business? This webcast from InformationWeek and BrainYard can help. It happens May 18.<a href="https://www.techwebonlineevents.com/ars/eventregistration.do?mode=eventreg&F=1003151&K=MAA4">Find out more</a>. (Free registration required.) 2011-05-09T09:54:00ZManage The Mayhem Of Mobile BISome business intelligence vendors rely on device-native mobile apps while others count on browser-based viewing of reports and dashboards. Here are the tradeoffs of each approach.http://www.informationweek.com/news/229403021?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsIn-memory analysis and dashboard software vendor QlikTech did an about face on its mobile business intelligence 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 browser-based viewing. QlikTech isn't the only vendor avoiding native apps, it seems. Information Builders and LogiXML, for example, also take browser-oriented approaches. MicroStrategy and specialty vendor RoamBI, in contrast, have native apps for Apple and BlackBerry devices. SAP BusinessObjects has native apps, too, but given that this vendor's dashboards rely on Flash (which Apple does not support), the question for SAP customers is not only which device to choose but also what content needs to go mobile? IBM Cognos uses an app for BlackBerry and the browser for Apple, for now. Actuate uses an app, and Tibco Spotfire has a native iPad app as well. Why the differences and which approach should customers adopt? The tantalizing vision for browser-based Mobile BI is that, with help from the latest standards like HTML5, it will work on all devices. That will be great for vendors, who don't want to develop device-specific apps, particularly when tablet and smartphone vendors are still battling for market leadership. "It's in the interest of the vendors to write the code once," notes analyst Howard Dresner, author of a recent <a href=" http://www.mobile-bi-study.com/">study on Mobile BI</a>. The browser-based approach also helps customers that have not standardized on particular smartphones or tablets. The other appeal of the approach is that it doesn't require redevelopment: nobody wants to recreate reports and dashboards for every device. That's the vision. Reality, though, is quite different. As it stands today, device-specific apps deliver a richer user experience than mobile Web browsing, with faster performance via device-based caching. In theory HTML5 can take advantage of smartphone features like location awareness and local cache, but vendors have yet to exploit these emerging capabilities. QlikView 10 mobile, for example, does not. Instead, it has optimized its current AJAX viewer to be touch-aware. This ensures that iPad users get the full QlikView experience of searching, filtering, changing the chart display, and so on. In testing the device with QlikView, I found I could not use the iPad gestures to zoom a chart, and the chart quality was not as rich as I've seen with 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 taking a browser-based approach. On the upside, the new QlikView app offered the rich searching, filtering and charting functionality mentioned above, and that may be ideal for a tablet user. With Mobile BI, vendors are still contemplating what users want to do beyond simple viewing. I suspect the answer will differ for smartphone versus tablet users. Information Builders mobile approach uses the vendor's Active Technology along with a Web app. Active Reports are interactive because they cache data locally for offline use and better performance than you'd experience accessing data online. The arguments for and against browser and device-specific apps will <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/bi/228900297">continue to rage</a>. Greater adoption and use of HTML5, which supports device-based caching and location awareness, will intensify the debate. It's too soon to tell, though, how well mobile BI Web apps that use HTML5 will compare to native apps. "HTML 5 is not as effective as a native app for exploiting the device cache," says independent analyst <a href="http://www.intelligentbusiness.biz/">Mike Ferguson</a>, who will discuss Mobile BI at the upcoming <a href="https://www.tdwi.eu/nc/en/events/conferences/tdwi-2011-munich.html?tx_fhconference_pi1_conference_view%5Bshow%5D=online_program&tx_fhconference_pi1_conference_view%5Bsession%5D=472">TDWI Munich</a> event. With the technology in a state of flux, here are my recommendations for managing Mobile BI:<dir> 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, which devices it supports, and what the strategy is for the future. Evaluate functional differences between a general browser client, optimized Web app client, and native app. In all cases, focus on the needs of the information-consumer, not the author. Be aware of development and redesign efforts for rendering content on specific devices. Be prepared for changes in which devices users want supported, how BI vendors deliver capabilities, and in ways mobile BI is used. Make Mobile BI a priority. Just because there is change and risk with Mobile BI, it's not a reason to delay or ignore it.</dir> Have you taken this year's <a href="http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/WEB22CCAWEDUJS?Source=IW">Successful BI Survey</a>? If not, <a href="http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/WEB22CCAWEDUJS?Source=IW">take the survey</a> to tell us how important Mobile BI is to your success. More information on QlikView 10 is available in this BI Scorecard <a href=" http://www.biscorecard.com/businessintelligenceevaluations.asp#qlik">in-depth product review</a>. Cindi Howson is the founder of <a href=" http://www.biscorecard.com/">BI Scorecard </a>, an independent analyst firm that advises companies on BI tool strategies and offers in-depth business intelligence product reviews.2011-04-11T08:36:00ZMake Peace In The BI-Versus-Excel BattleManagers fear Microsoft Excel undermines business intelligence, but sometimes, it's the best solution in a fast-paced business environment. Here's how to support spreadsheets without sacrificing data integrity.http://www.informationweek.com/news/229401300?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsI would have thought that by now business intelligence tools and Microsoft Excel would be happily coexisting. In some cases they are, but a larger number of Excel users, managers, and BI professionals simply seem battle weary. This week at TDWI in Washington, DC, I taught an updated course on "BI & Excel: Friends or Foes?" I last taught this course four years ago. I learned my first lesson about BI and spreadsheets the hard way back in the early 1990s. At the time I was the project manager for a reporting system based on a custom transaction system. Typical of many IT projects, I gathered business-user requirements, went away for a couple months (at least it wasn't a year!), and we developed some parameterized reports on the mainframe. The final solution was flexible, interactive, and exactly what the business users asked for. We launched the new reporting app in a training class I had personally developed and was thrilled to be teaching. We were only half an hour into the class, when the power user in the group, Frank, declared, "I don't want any of this. I just want all my data in Excel." Frank was the statistician in the group -- the trusted analyst. Normally, he and I were on the same side. We would swap notes on how to tweak Lotus macros or how to extract data from mainframe sources. But he basically just told me I had wasted months of effort and that what my team had built was crap. The business managers in the room liked the reports, but they relied on Frank for all things data. Frank had planted a seed of doubt in their minds that our whole approach was wrong. Frank had become my foe. I tried not to get teary-eyed (hey, I was in my 20s!) and decided to cancel the rest of the class. Frank felt fixed reports constrained him. He needed flexibility. For the managers in the group, who were not yet proficient in spreadsheets, the mainframe-based reporting system might have been fine. But Frank could make any data looking prettier in Excel, with better formatting, colors, charts, and so on. Even though that lesson about the role of spreadsheets in BI was learned 20 years ago, BI leaders, managers, and Excel gurus continue to grapple with BI and Excel's coexistence. At the start of this week's class, about a third of the attendees agreed with the suggestion that Excel and BI are friends; Excel helps improve decision-making and fulfills the vision for business intelligence. "I'm on the friend side because I know if I treat Excel as a foe, I will lose," said one attendee. "It's easier to embrace your enemy and gain trust and creditability." The remaining two thirds felt that BI and Excel are foes: too many spreadmarts (some in the hundreds of megabytes) and multiple versions of the truth undermine the BI team's efforts to provide a single version of the truth. One attendee who started the day thinking spreadsheets were the enemy later said the class had changed her view.To fully appreciate Excel's role in BI, start by understanding why users love their spreadsheets. Sometimes it may be personal and job security. Knowledge is power, and being the designated source of data is an enticing role. Beyond job security, there are a number of valid reasons that Excel plays a powerful role in business intelligence, such as:<dir> Familiar user interface - Attendees acknowledged that Excel is the preferred interface for power users, but managers and front line workers prefer dashboards and easier- to- use tools (they were wowed by SAS's Email integration) Ability to tweak a report, whether to sort, filter, pivot, or remove a column Extensive formula library Access to multiple data sources - Excel's ability to combine data from multiple data sources is a must-have requirement for many types of analyses Ability to "massage" the data - Few attendees said they use Excel for data cleansing, but several people spoke of changing group roll ups. Ideal prototyping environment where users themselves can build applications.</dir> For any given requirement, assess whether Excel is the best solution or if the BI tool would be better. For example, newer version of BI software allow users to filter, sort, and interact with a report via a browser. Habits are sometimes hard to change, and if users don't know about these capabilities, they will fall back to what they have done for years (click that Export button). The multiple-data-source issue is probably the biggest challenge. BI teams don't like personal or departmental data to be accessed from a central business view and certainly not from within the data warehouse. Excel is ideally suited for joining data from multiple data sources for a one-off analysis. The scalability improvements with the PowerPivot feature in Excel 2010 make it even more suitable. However, for recurring analyses that require joining data from disparate systems, multi-source becomes a problem for the entire organization. The BI team has to recognize this or they risk being less relevant and the cause of spreadsheet chaos. Don't back business users into a corner. Most BI platforms now offer an Excel add-in that supports data integrity while giving users their data in the familiar Excel interface. It surprized me, though, how few attendees were either aware of or using these add-ins. Why aren't add-ins being used? In some cases, it's performance and licensing problems. In other cases it seemed to be lack of awareness. There also seemed to be a degree of fear: BI teams shy away from Excel because they've been burned in the past. My recommendation is to recognize Excel as part of the BI environment. Manage the spreadsheets, whether via SharePoint, a content management system, or the BI portal. Consider carefully when it's appropriate to use Excel versus the BI tool; and in all cases, make available add-ins part of your BI tool portfolio. By the end of the morning, attendees were more positive, with two thirds agreeing that Excel and BI can be friends. The remaining third are still wary. Where do you stand? Cindi Howson is the founder of <a href=" http://www.biscorecard.com/">BI Scorecard </a>, an independent analyst firm that advises companies on BI tool strategies and offers in-depth business intelligence product reviews.2011-03-24T15:37:00ZBusiness Intelligence Goes Mainstream At info360The biggest event in content management and records management adds BI to the topic list. http://www.informationweek.com/news/229400243?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsThis week I presented at the new BI track as part of <a href="http://www.aiimexpo.com/conference-tracks/aiim-2011-bi-summit">info360 conference</a> in Washington, DC. It's an interesting addition to this long-established conference, and further evidence of BI going mainstream. Info360 draws ten thousand information management professionals and has historically focused on content, knowledge, and records management. There are, for example, specific SharePoint and Oracle Enterprise Content Management tracks. Another hot topic was managing social media content. The new BI track had a host of expert speakers including Boris Evelson from Forrester on pervasive BI, Colin White on mobile, Mike Ferguson on cloud and Mark Madsen on social media. There were speakers from industry including representatives of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Financial_Stability">Office of Financial Stability</a>. OFS was formed to manage TARP following the financial meltdown. When I think of government, I don't think of agile or responsive (sorry, slow and bureaucratic comes to mind), yet, those were the biggest themes in the OFS presentation. As I've written in my book Successful Business Intelligence, the idea of IT partnering with the business is a critical success factor, and OFS demonstrated that well. The exhibit hall was revealing in terms of who (from a BI perspective) was there and who was not. Microsoft had a huge presence with SharePoint. However, their booth once again reflected this vendor's disjointed BI story. SharePoint was demonstrated mostly as a content management solution, yet it is also Microsoft's starting point for BI consumers to share reports, dashboards, and PowerPivot spreadsheets. PowerPivot, however, was not installed on the demo machines. Reporting Services did not work. (Maybe someone didn't tell Microsoft there was a BI theme at this conference?). The FAST search and navigation looked pretty nice, though. The BI Pavilion had a number of smaller vendor's exhibiting; traditional BI heavy weights were absent, which is not too surprising for a new venue. QlikTech was there, and LogiXML. I only occasionally come across LogiXML and was impressed by their dashboards and interactive reports. They say one of their differentiators is their straight-forward, server-based license, ideal when reports are deployed to thousands of users. Kudos to them for simple pricing and packaging, in contrast to the complicated approaches many other vendors take, as I describe <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/bi/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229204104&queryText=Howson">here</a>. I'll end this post on a note about Washington, DC. It could have been, and should have been a great venue, with the cherry blossoms blooming and the view of the Capital building inspiring. It's a city I love and an area that was my home in high school and college. Yet from the get go, it reflected a brokenness. Homeless people abound and begged for money while I waited for a taxi (yes, I gave, but wondered why this doesn't happen in New York). I then got kicked out of the taxi at 11:30 at night when I politely asked the driver not to talk on his cell phone while driving (I normally ignore that, but had one too many bad highway experiences in the last year to take this for granted). And then there was the alarming, megaphone at 7 am, "Wake up, get out of the hotel now!" Normally I'm up by then, but it was a long day and late night. There was no fire, no emergency, but rather, hotel workers protesting at the hotel next door, all morning and all day. They had been protesting for months, apparently. Protests have their place, but when they disturb the tourists on which the workers' livelihood depends, it seemed rude and unproductive. The final annoying impression was the DC Convention Center, which lacked wireless throughout most of the building. Archaic isn't it? I'm back in Washington, DC in a few weeks for <a href="http://events.tdwi.org/events/washington-dc-world-conference-2011/information/hotel-and-travel.aspx">TDWI's spring conference</a>. Perhaps the above are all the reasons TDWI picked Arlington, just across the river from downtown DC as the actual venue. Washington DC seems better when viewed from a distance. Cindi Howson is the founder of <a href=" http://www.biscorecard.com/">BI Scorecard </a>, an independent analyst firm that advises companies on BI tool strategies and offers in-depth business intelligence product reviews.2011-03-09T18:08:00ZSAS Talks Up BI ImprovementsIt's a vendor is known for its high-end analytics, but it's also planning improvements to its business intelligence tools and interfaces. Here's where SAS falls short and where it deserves more credit.http://www.informationweek.com/news/229300674?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_Authors"I want my BI to be better than anyone else's," said Dr. Jim Goodnight, CEO and founder of SAS, speaking at the vendor's annual analyst summit yesterday in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. After a full day of sessions in which SAS once again seemed to pay lip service to business intelligence, Goodnight's comment, in a one-on-one briefing, reassured me that this quiet vendor is still intent on carving its path in the BI space. The company recognizes BI's importance. They just don't like to talk about it much, and it's high-end analytics that most excites the company. At the summit, SAS vice president Carl Farrell claimed BI is a commodity. It's a comment Chief Marketing Officer Jim Davis made a few years ago, one that I strongly disagree with and previously responded to <a href=" http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/bi/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228901125">here</a>. Both Goodnight and Davis explained to me that the issue of what is commoditized has more to do with their definition of BI and of analytics. SAS defines BI as query and reporting. I define it more broadly to also include OLAP, dashboards, visual discovery, Microsoft Office integration, and predictive analytics (see the <a href="http://www.biscorecard.com/SecureDownload.asp?qdocID=40">free BI Scorecard BI Market</a> segments report for more detail). Even in the business query space, more powerful and appealing products command a premium price. Capabilities such as multiple star schema queries or merging data with personal data sources are standard fair in leading BI tools, but not in SAS Web Report Studio (yet), showing significant differences in capabilities. Further, what's free in the market place or bundled is not the most widely used. So I'd still disagree with SAS that even this particular BI module is nearing commoditization. Of course, any vendor that has a greater emphasis on the higher end of the BI spectrum has reason to downplay the bread-and-butter aspects of BI. Being late to the core BI market could also be another reason to downplay its importance. Of SAS's $2.43 billion in revenues, only 11% to 16% (depending on what gets counted) comes from core BI; SAS's core BI revenues grew 22% last year, faster than the industry average. A larger portion of SAS revenues comes from its high-end analytics and its industry solutions. These revenues are growing even faster, at around 26% last year. I argued that core BI is important, because predicting the future is irrelevant if a company doesn't even know what is going on right now. Too many businesses struggle with "How much inventory do we have on hand? Can we fill an order from another warehouse?" Davis countered, "we want to tell you more than which warehouse has inventory; we want to recommend the best warehouse to source from, and at the optimal price." Well, yes, that would be nice, but I'm willing to start with the basics. As an example of being quiet on the BI front, SAS released version 4.3 in Q4 2010. It may not have been a major product release, but it did include significant improvements to dashboard capabilities, improving ease of use and leveraging Flash. Most media and customers were unaware of it. As well, SAS recently unbundled its Add-In for Microsoft Office (AMO) from the BI Server so SMBs could deploy it in stand-alone fashion, branding the solution <a href=" http://www.sas.com/software/smb/oa.html">Office Analytics</a>. <a href="http://www.biscorecard.com/">BI Scorecard</a> rates SAS Office add-in capabilities the best among those from leading vendors. But in the past, users could only get AMO when they bought the whole BI server. So this unbundling is great news for customers, but again, there was no buzz from the company. Looking ahead, SAS plans to release a new version of its BI suite this fall. The company has reorganized, focusing more than 300 developers on improving the user interface, a move that affects not only the BI suite, but also the presentation layer of its industry-specific analytic applications (SAS Solutions). SAS is increasingly leveraging Flash and is also looking at how to design once and render many ways as it moves to support BI anywhere (desktop, browser, tablet, smartphone) and in any interface (dashboard, visual exploration, query, or Office). Also announced this week is a partnership with specialty mobile BI vendor RoamBI. As I've written about this vendor in the <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/bi/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=229000780">2011 predictions</a> and in my Cool BI classes, RoamBI takes a unique approach to mobile BI in that it is BI vendor agnostic for the iPad and iPhone. The product leverages existing report definitions and security for Microsoft, SAP BusinessObjects, and now SAS. SAS did not, however, elaborate on its plans for mobile on other devices, except to acknowledge they will support 20 to 30 devices. Dr. Goodnight started the summit with the message that when customers and analysts think of SAS, he wants them to think Analytics. I'd say that mission is accomplished. When we think of SAS, do we think of BI? Not yet. Cindi Howson is the founder of <a href=" http://www.biscorecard.com/">BI Scorecard </a>, an independent analyst firm that advises companies on BI tool strategies and offers in-depth business intelligence product reviews.2011-02-28T08:46:00ZSAP BusinessObjects 4.0 Mixes Expected Upgrades, Innovative BreakthroughsThe list of business intelligence enhancements includes long-awaited fixes as well as in-memory and real-time advances.http://www.informationweek.com/news/229219471?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_Authors"This release doesn't just level playing field, it takes it up several notches," asserted Steve Lucas, SAP's general manager for Business Analytics at this week's BusinessObjects BI 4.0 launch in New York. "We are far and away the leader in many areas." The list of improvements in this release presents a dizzying array of enhancements and new capabilities. SAP emphasized three themes: real-time, easy, and optimized. I wrote about the BI 4.0 release in this <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/bi/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228900619">blog</a> and BI Scorecard <a href="http://www.biscorecard.com/businessintelligenceevaluations.asp#sapbo">highlight report</a> after it was previewed at ASUG last fall. The BI 4.0 release is now in ramp up, a production-code version that is used by a pre-approved list of 30 customers. SAP expects the product to be generally available in the first half of the year, hinting that the May Sapphire conference would be an ideal deadline. Some of the biggest improvements in BI 4.0 include multi-source universes, mobile, in-memory, and SAP integration. Multiple data sources at the universe level has been a long-awaited improvement. Earlier versions of the product gave users different approaches to handling multiple data sources: at the report level, users could merge data from multiple data sources, but it is a manual, somewhat tedious process reserved for advanced report authors. Data Federator was an optional module that had limited adoption and required an extra server license. Data federation in 4.0 is included in the base license (a point of difference with MicroStrategy). For usability, SAP nicely highlights the different data sources in the Information Design Tool (IDT), a replacement to the universe Designer. The mobile demos were equally impressive and exciting. SAP showed Web Intelligence (WebI) reports and Xcelsius Flash-based dashboards (Xcelsius is renamed just Dashboards in 4.0), on RIM's new, not-yet-released tablet device, the <a href="http://us.blackberry.com/playbook-tablet/?CPID=KNC-kw328554_p6&HBX_PK=rim|5740044e-fded-12e8-d388-00001c4189ed">BlackBerry PlayBook</a>. That the Playbook supports Flash natively has to be the product's biggest differentiator over the Apple iPad (as well as corporate security, smaller size, camera, synching with smartphone, printing... but I won't digress). WebI on the iPad was also demonstrated. SAP BusinessObjects previously only supported Explorer content on the iPad. This reflects an important point to all customers -- that you need to know both what content and which devices your BI vendor supports. Ramp-up customer Hilti (maker of power drills) talked about their experience with HANA, SAP's new in-memory analytic appliance that also leverages a columnar data store. Queries that the customer used to run in two to three hours now run in two to three seconds. The data volumes were not that big -- 9 million customer records. But it's the complexity of customer segmentation and that the queries were running directly in the transactional source system that made for slow queries. Christian Ritter, head of Reporting and Global IT at Hilti, explained that with HANA, they would skip building a data warehouse altogether. Data is replicated in near real time from the SAP transaction systems into HANA.Oddly enough, it was the SAP integration that got little attention at the actual launch event, as the vendor continues to try to remain agnostic for non-SAP business app customers. The company had pre-briefed me on what's new here, the main headline being improved performance between BW and the SAP BusinessObjects client tools. Because the client tools now access content through the BICS (Business Intelligence Consumer Services) layer, a proprietary communication layer that SAP's Excel interface, BEx, also uses to communicate with BW. Xcelsius leveraged BICS connectivity last year, but now in BI 4.0, all the traditional BusinessObjects client tools do as well, including Web Intelligence. This change reportedly boosts performance by a factor of four and addresses one of the biggest complaints with the SAP BusinessObjects XI 3.1 integration kit. Beyond the performance improvement, the other big benefits here are that customers don't have to first create a universe on top of a BEx query or BW InfoCube; the BEx query can be access directly in WebI. The big question will be: what does this mean for third-party BI vendors who support BW and for customers who use third party BI tools? If you are an SAP customer with a custom data warehouse, the playing field is still level. If you're on BW, SAP BusinessObjects now has a leg up. Two of my biggest questions about BI 4.0, though, remained unanswered (or answered but vaguely, so I am unconvinced). One question was "how easy will the upgrade be? Executives were clear to say it's an upgrade, not a migration, but none of the ramp-up customers at the event had evaluated the upgrade utilities. The other question is about the impact of the 4.0 server running only on 64-bit operating systems. While many corporations use new hardware and OSs in their data centers, infrastructure for BI application servers seems to still be 32-bit (<a href="http://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/report/Virtualization-Decisions-2010-Purchasing-Intentions-Survey">one recent survey</a> cites 83%, which sounds high to me). Bottom line: if your current BusinessObjects deployment is on older hardware, you need to plan for an upgrade. And if you have server-based licensing that counts cores, expect to have to re-negotiate. You tell me: is your BI server on 64-bit already? And if not, do you suspect that the 4.0 upgrade will be costly on the hardware and software licensing front? Cindi Howson is the founder of <a href=" http://www.biscorecard.com/">BI Scorecard </a>, an independent analyst firm that advises companies on BI tool strategies and offers in-depth business intelligence product reviews.2011-02-08T12:07:00ZBI Licensing And Lawsuits: A Sure Sign Of FailureA plea to simplify complicated and out-of-sync business intelligence software purchasing terms.http://www.informationweek.com/news/229204104?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsSoftware licensing is never an easy topic, for either the buyer or the seller. For buyers, it's so much easier to discuss features and capabilities and whether or not the product is a good fit. For the seller, it's so much easier to highlight why their company and product is the best. So you do your proof-of-concept analyses, confirm requirements, and capabilities, and at the eleventh hour, bring in your purchasing department to negotiate the best deal possible. Relationship doesn't matter here. Discounts do. Buying BI software is particularly complex. Rarely can you buy the "BI suite" or "everything demonstrated"; instead, it's a plethora of unclear choices between roles and products, server-based or named-user licensing, optional modules that the unsuspecting buyer would have thought was standard, maintenance based on list versus discounted prices, and so on. There is a big disconnect in BI buying. Buyers want as much as they can get at the lowest price. They certainly don't want to be forced into the embarrassing (career-ending?) position of having to go back to the executive committee to garner more money for a BI module they overlooked. Vendors, on the other hand, want to extract as much value from the customer as their product warrants. Both <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/bi/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=46800409">want what's fair</a>. So if a customer upgrades hardware and does not increase the number of users, should the customer have to pay a fee to the BI vendor? That doesn't seem fair to me, but that is a consequence of server-based licensing that considers CPU-clock speed and power ratings. What about a report consumer who normally refreshes a report, but now wants to drill down into the details? The capability to drill may involve a higher-level, role-based license. I don't know many organizations that can track to that fine a level of detail exactly what users want to do, or that can accurately anticipate how user requirements and capabilities will evolve overtime. I cringe at the stories I hear. One manufacturing company has a full-time equivalent tracking BI licensing compliance. This doesn't seem to be value enhancing. A health care company is in a legal dispute with its BI vendor because it didn't realize virtualization wasn't explicitly allowed. The firm also didn't immediately disable logins for employees as they left the company, so it temporarily exceeded a named-user license count. One influential BI consultant will never again recommend a particular product to a customer because of a miscount in the way the software tracked its license usage for one of his customers. A legal dispute followed. Yet another customer is abandoning a project because of the sticker shock it faced when it explored rolling out a BI application to more users. I know there are some disreputable customers out there who use grey market software. But most of the situations I've encountered are honest mistakes and the fault of complicated licensing models that are out of sync with dynamic infrastructures and workforces. Once a customer and vendor enter a legal dispute, any notion of a <a href="http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/bi/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228900735">partnership in BI success</a> is destroyed. My recommendation to customers remains: buyer beware. Read and understand the fine print early in your evaluation process. Involve procurement early in the buying cycle. For vendors: simplify, simplify, simplify. Nickle and diming customers for a short-term profit is a recipe for long-term failure. I could speculate on why this problem seems to be growing: a difficult economy, mega vendors who have greater account control, vendors who know BI switching costs are high. But you tell me: is this problem declining or increasing? How clear are you on your vendor's licensing policies? Post a comment here, or if you are worried about a backlash, e-mail me confidentially at <a href="mailto:cindihowson@biscorecard.com">cindihowson@biscorecard.com</a>. Cindi Howson is the founder of <a href=" http://www.biscorecard.com/">BI Scorecard</a>, an independent analyst firm that advises companies on BI tool strategies and offers in-depth business intelligence product reviews.2011-01-31T09:40:00ZMicroStrategy Revs Up Mobile ComputingTransactions services and new cloud computing and data visualization options enrich the vendor's business intelligence portfolio. http://www.informationweek.com/news/229200080?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsLast week's MicroStrategy World was one of this vendor's largest conferences ever, with some bold announcements from a vendor that continues to innovate at a rapid pace. CEO Michael Saylor noted the biggest things in technology that are generating excitement and Wall Street investments: mobile, the cloud, and social. From a business intelligence perspective, MicroStrategy has been ahead of the curve for mobile BI, supporting a larger range of devices natively and with advanced functionality such as interactivity, location awareness, and device-based caching. MicroStrategy is kicking it up a notch (several, really) with Transaction Services. A new product, Transaction Services allows a BI user to act on information directly from a mobile device (or Web), whether for approvals, or to modify data for forecasting, for example. It's an out-of-the-box-solution that lets administrators map transaction processes and data to information in the MicroStrategy business meta data. So, for example, a supply chain manager may be viewing his inventory on an iPad, and click a re-order button that writes back to the transaction system. The demo was impressive. The closest capability I have seen is Oracle's Actionable Intelligence in the recently-released 11g. MicroStrategy also announced Cloud Intelligence, in which the vendor will support its infrastructure and software in the cloud, using a combination of its own data center and Amazon's cloud. The move into the cloud is intended to help lines of business and small- and midsize-businesses more quickly deploy MicroStrategy's BI solution, but also to provide elasticity when demand spikes in enterprise deployments. The company demonstrated new data visual exploration capabilities on day two of the conference. Visual Explorer may not be on par with other advanced visualization products, but I was surprised this new product got so little attention. The positioning of the solution was also rather weak, being described by VP of Products Mark LaRow as an interface "between "Ad Hoc and OLAP." This makes me think that MicroStrategy doesn't quite get the impact of visual discovery tools. On the positive side, the product is included in the Report Services license for customers on maintenance. Customer LinkedIn presented a fascinating session on how they analyze data and what they are discovering. For example, "analytics" has been one of the fastest-growing job categories since 2000. So if you are reading this, it confirms what you probably already knew: everyone in BI is busy, BI experts are in high demand, and it's a great area to specialize in! Starbucks and Société Générale impressed me with the scalability and fast response times of their deployments, despite use of complex dashboards accessed by thousands of users concurrently. Coca Cola and Guess certainly took the geekiness out of BI entirely with mobile dashboards that are beautiful. One long-time MicroStrategy customer commented that things are moving too fast -- faster than what the customer base can absorb. As I tweeted away, feeling frenetic and longing for the times when a reflective article was more valued than an off-the-cuff tweet, I had to agree. It made me think of a remark I have used in the last year: that the recession was about the survival of the smartest. With some of the recent innovations, how much are we also moving to a survival of the fastest? There is sometimes value in first-mover advantage. They key is in figuring out which ones provide your company the most benefit. Last week's conference ended in the midst of yet another whopper of a snow storm in the Northeast. So I was one of those stuck for a couple days and bounced between flights. I'd say I'm so happy to be office-bound this week, but with more snow and ice forecast in New Jersey, I'm not so sure! Cindi Howson is the founder of <a href="http://www.biscorecard.com/">BI Scorecard </a>, an independent analyst firm that advises companies on BI tool strategies and offers in-depth business intelligence product reviews.2011-01-17T13:16:00Z5 Big Themes in BI for 2011Business intelligence will become more visual, mobile and social in 2011. But how should you balance central vs. departmental control, and does it make sense to upgrade?http://www.informationweek.com/news/229000780?cid=RSSfeed_IWK_AuthorsThere is nothing like a record snowfall (here in NJ, where I live) 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 Go Mainstream Last year, QlikTech went public, Tableau Software revamped its product, and IBM Cognos released its second-generation dashboard solution, dubbed "Business Insight." Advanced visualization and discovery tools continue 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 to which 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 your BI platform. 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 <a href="http://www.typepad.com/site/blogs/6a00d83517f23953ef00d83517f23a53ef/post/6a00d83517f23953ef0148c794c9fb970c/www.biscorecard.com/businessintelligenceevaluations.asp">hundreds of criteria</a>). 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 attempts at developing dashboards tend to look like glitzy pin ball machines, but as people gain experience and expertise, these 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. In the cool BI class I teach at TDWI events, this innovation rarely gets top nod from attendees. However, few could have foreseen the wild adoption of Apple's iPad. The wider screen real estate and sheer beauty that 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 on 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 broadest and most robust, including support for iPhone/iPad as well as Blackberrys. QlikTech and Actuate also are further ahead than some of the larger platform vendors. Niche vendor RoamBI, which supports content from multiple BI vendors, is worth investigating. Companies that fail to consider mobile BI's potential and limitations will be forced into reactionary mode; when you scramble to pull together a strategy, you risk 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, lobbies, advertises, complains, and thinks. It's impossible for this trend 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 offline. Key decisions from the insight are made verbally or shared via e-mail 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? Some vendors have already 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 BI-integrated collaboration capabilities built into Microsoft SharePoint 2010. 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 Enterprise Edition 11g included support for Web Center (someone should rename this product!), and IBM Cognos 10 shipped with Lotus Connection. So the BI heavy weights are making inroads, but niche vendor Lyzasoft seems to have gotten the "user-directed" aspect most right. So we've seen some innovation here, but the convergence of social networking with BI is still very young.4. Economic Recovery Stretches BI Teams The economy shows signs of recovering. Companies that 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-wide, 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 metadata development that supports such an approach. 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 BI is not growing primarily because it's free; it's growing 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 commercial BI, the 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 BI is also attractive to governments and foreign companies that don't want such critical assets to be powered entirely by U.S.-based software makers. 5. Will New Releases Bring 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 (IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP) 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 versions. In some cases, 2011 will be a time to assess the cost of upgrading versus the cost of switching preferred vendors. It has 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 it can be to shut down previous versions and move reports and metadata layers into the upgraded software. In-Memory and More So what about all the other things I wrote about <a href=" http://biscorecard.typepad.com/biscorecard/2010/01/predicting-2010-highlights-for-bi.html#tp">last year</a>: 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 the 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). It 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 vendors like Oracle 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 <a href=" http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/bi/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=228900475">last year's</a> take on the year ahead, my BI predictions seemed fairly accurate. And with the Packers winning not one but two of their playoff games so far, perhaps my accuracy is finally carrying over to football! I hope it's a good omen for next weekend! Happy New Year! Cindi Howson is the founder of <a href=" http://www.biscorecard.com/">BI Scorecard</a>, an independent analyst firm that advises companies on BI tool strategies and offers in-depth business intelligence product reviews.