Putting the Truthiness in BI

Ok nation, time for a fact check - or at least a little dose of reality for the BI truthiness that seems to have invaded the performance guys blog from somewhere in the pacific northwest. First we had seals being broken, followed by puppies, and can kicking. At this rate, it will not be surprising to find an Eddie Murphy Boomerang reference and a free year of Cat Fancy when you download your trial of Performance Point Server via a special performance guys offer. Give me a big old break.

First, the facts:

Gartner finally just released their new Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence. Have a look at the report here.

One of the news stories covering the release leads with MSFT's strong position in ability to execute. You can read the article, or check Guy's breathless rehash here.

Nic invariabily lets the proverbial dogs out here.

Steven Colbert popularized the word truthiness when he launched his show in 2005. It was later named the world of the year and the wikipedia definition reads, "a satirical term to describe things that a person claims to know intuitively or "from the gut" without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts."

While their are some facts here, much like Nic's puppy surprise (where did that even come from), there is also a little more to the story. And isn't this supposed to be a BI blog?

I think Doug Henschen is on target in his review in Intelligent Enterprise, that none of the vendors really stand out - and that Gartner played it safe. The top vendors - SAS, Oracle, Business Objects, Cognos, Microsoft - are in one long continuum and Doug nets out that he thinks they all have a ways to go before they get to the top right in the MQ. Sounds about right.

Microsoft gets full credit (some would argue much more credit than they deserve based on their position) for having a strong set of products, large and active ISV channel and strong product quality. They also have a cost advantage for many organizations - especially critical for the SMB market. What is interesting is that there is no mention of MSFT being the BI standard in any account, a point raised for vendors like Cognos and Business Objects. How can you be an execution leader with no tier one enterprise standard deployments? I am not saying they don't exist, I just have not seen them.

Also interesting to note that MSFT gets dinged for being late to the BI party and Gartner notes that according to customers they lag behind in "metadata management, reporting, and dashboard and ad hoc query capabilities." In other words the bread and butter of BI is not as good as the other leaders. Sounds like the litter needs to grow up a little more, something that is widely expected.

As for the other leaders:

Cognos gets point for enterprise deployments and benefits of the version 8 architecture and positive perspective impact of IBM capabilities when the acquisition is completed. They get called out for lack of performance management and predictive capabilities as well as product overlap.

Business Objects scores with strong core BI and platform standard customers as well as SaaS leadership in category. However they get docked points for XI upgrade and migration headaches and get called on the carpet for having the least effective support of any major vendor. Ouch. Both of these have been points of pain for some time and this obviously had a negative impact to their position.

Oracle gets well deserved credit for having a strong enterprise offering, even if the name, OBIEE, leaves more than a little to be desired. Among the cautions are the uptake by Hyperion BI users (surprise) and long integration cycles with multiple BI products and offerings that will occupy Oracle and customers throughout 2008.

SAS rounds out the leadership pack with pronounced breath and depth of analytics that go well beyond the traditional BI requirements. However, as per usual, they lose points for being hard to use, lacking some key features and not even being the BI standard in many places where they are well entrenched for analytics and predictive analysis.

Note that Microstrategy and even Information Builders (on the line), are leaders in this quad, but they are not generally in the same class as those noted above.

Congratulation to all the leader's in this years Gartner Magic Quadrant for BI. It should be an interesting year with new products, new integrations, new market strategies. Let's hope for a little more fact based reality and a little less truthiness. And as Guy notes, where is the BOBJ press release?