Intelligent Economy

Who's the fairest of them all? That's what Nucleus Research set out to find out when it interviewed 30 executives that had deployed BI solutions from various vendors. Among the companies it looked at and rated on the "ROI potential" of their products: Business Objects, Cognos, Hyperion, Microsoft, MicroStrategy, and SAS.

Several issues, according to a piece in Optimize Magazine, rose to the top as customers weighed their experiences with various vendors.

One was "comfort." Once companies have evaluated the technical capabilities of various products, they begin to look at "the people behind the technology," explains Kathy Quirk, research manager, Nucleus Research. "How easy are they to work with? What support options do they provide? How do they speak of their competitors? In one case, a company found two products that would suit its technical requirements, but went with the higher-priced tool because the vendor of that product had a better understanding of the company's business. In addition, the company tired of all the competitive bad-mouthing from the other vendor."

She also points to "vertical expertise," as a key decision criterion: "Industry-specific knowledge and guidance provide a faster path to ROI." Finally, she says vendors were assessed on their ability to weigh the competing demands of their clients. "In order to cater to two distinct sets of users, companies must strike a balance between experienced users' need for speed and the easy access and rich graphical features that will let new users join the BI nation," she concludes.

Posted by Britton Manasco at 09:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Employees in finance, sales, marketing, and customer support are the leading users of business intelligence applications, according to a new study by Ventana Research. The study suggests that customer-focused initiatives and operations are a key driver of today's analytical investments.

The research, sponsored by CMP Publications and Siebel Systems, was based on the responses of 437 executives -- 73% of whom were in IT organizations while 27% had line-of-business roles. "The main features respondents look for in BI solutions are simplified integration of data and metadata across multiple BI applications and central management of metadata," states Eric Rogge is VP and research director at Ventana Research in Optimize Magazine. "Stovepiped BI applications aren't acceptable. Companies stitch various BI applications together to weave larger information fabrics, creating a seamless, consistent view of the customer and other key business entities."

Further, he pointed to a growing interest in Operational BI. " It's not designed to support strategic planning, but to gather and analyze operational BI and deliver this actionable information to front-line workers," he explains. "Operational BI enhances corporate performance by improving day-to-day, minute-by-minute decision making and the performance of critical business processes."

The trouble is that that too many Operational BI applications are "addressed with a task-specific application to support a defined set of decisions. Unlike general-purpose BI tools used by business analysts, these point-solutions historically were created one at a time by in-house development teams, which often can't keep up with the organization's burgeoning need for information."

The demand is attracting vendors, of course. They promise to put together more comprehensive packaged applications -- some of which are already being deployed. Unfortunately, not everyone's happy with their deployment experiences. "Areas for improvement cited by study participants include shorter time to deploy, more interactivity, faster query performance, better data integration from multiple sources, and more complete customer views," noted Rogge. "Deployment times varied: About half of the respondents say it took longer than a year to deploy vendor-developed BI applications. A third said the deployments were available in less than one year."

Posted by Britton Manasco at 09:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

From time to time, we're going to take a look at what various vendors are up to in the Intelligent Economy.

In this case we'll take a look at HP's vision for Business Intelligence.

Yale Tankus spells it out for us in his blog. It's all about "synchronizing strategy & execution."

But how?

If you look beyond the sales-talk, you'll see there is flesh on the bones. HP has built an enterprise management framework around "process aware" business intelligence. Admittedly it's still somewhat IT-centric, but they're headed in the right direction, with partnerships with SAS, Cognos, and Hyperion among others.

What's going to tie all of this together in a manageable way? SOA. And according to HP, their SOA Manager product.

Let's watch the fun. The first step will be getting HP consulting up to speed on SOA. The challenge is not in the vision, but in the execution. The first integrator to get their talent base up to snuff is going to win this game.

Are you listening, IBM Global Services?

Posted by Christian Sarkar at 12:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)