The Performance Guys

Getting Lucid With Foreigner

2008-06-23T21:15:00.001-07:00

Just when you thougth June might slide by without a post from the potentially overworked and certainly defocused performance guys, I happened to stumble upon yet another blog gem from LucidEra. Following up on their recent webinar theme, Darren's blog post about Sales Ops Hero Going Platnium includes new lyrics by a fan or interested observer of the blog, the company, Darren's thematic stylings, or all of the above. I admit to some skepticism to the post based on both Darren's prior lyrical works and the fact that the source is not named. However, he did go through the trouble to put in a good YouTube video to enjoy. The only way it would have been better is if the lead singer in the video was wearing a Kiss Alive 4 t-shirt. Rock on brother. Rock on.

879PPESW2GAT

This is Going to Sting a Little...

2008-04-23T18:51:00.000-07:00

Saying you're sorry is never something that vendors are over anxious to do, let alone publicly. Every vendor, from time to time, has to deal with issues that spiral out of control, with of course the preferred method being a quiet communication and a hearty promise to rectify the problem.

The challenge with solving the problem that way is the fact that there are any number of ways for disgruntled customers to turn a private apology into a public relations fire drill. And that seems to be what's happened to Business Objects, an SAP Company recently.

Apparently there have been some major issues with the data quality side of the business, and in an email sent out to clients after close of business Friday (pretty sneaky, sis...) pledges were made, resources were marshalled, internet links were included. All with a hope that things would settle down and the customers would be placated.

Alas, such was not the case, as someone sent the customer note onto DM Review, and now everyone knows the issue. Now it's one thing to be a blurb in a "notes" column; but when the editor-in-chief of the publication goes to the trouble to print an article about the issue, things have clearly gotten away from you. And Franz Amman's email statement, while official sounding, doesn't really do much to close the issue since it's still unclear what the issue was. Reading between the lines, it sounds like poor support for upgrading to a new version that finally took a client or two over the edge. It invites more questions and leaves open a lot of interpretation as to what the issue is. Is it a poor quality product? Do the support people now know about the new version? Are there not enough resources to help with migration? Is the migration a much bigger issue than customers were promised? We're left to guess, which likely makes the issue bigger than it probably actually is.

To their credit, BOBJASAPC is running the standard "play defense" from the PR playbook well: issue your statement, use as few facts as necessary, say you're dealing with the problem, stay quiet and let it die away.

The key now is the execution. If they take care of the problem, this will melt away; if not, E6.1 redux here we come! Great for blogging, not as great for the EIM customers out there.

Costco - Operational BI and Muffins

2008-04-19T16:45:00.001-07:00

There is lots of talk about operational BI and how to make information actionable in order to focus on the customer. I saw it in action today at Costco. Shortly after scanning our card while checking out, a supervisor came up and took it from the check clerk. After we completed our transaction, we were informed we needed to go the service counter for an offer and special gift.

When we arrived at the service counter we were told that Costco recommended we upgrade to the Executive membership in order to save money. Based our purchase history and today's transaction we were told that by spending $50 to upgrade we would get 2% back on all purchases for the year, be able to get into Costco early every day, and we would be guaranteed a refund for the differences if our purchase rebates did not amount to more than the $50 in year. Most interestingly, the clerk indicated that based on our recent purchase history, we would have no issue coming out ahead on this deal.

As we completed the transaction a supervisor was escorting a mother and daughter up for the same offer. Her comment was, "sure I am interested, assuming you can do this fast." Bottom line is that the offer was good, it was based on actual information, and they were prepared to process it fast. Better information leads to a better experience. Sounds like operational BI in action. At to top it off, they gave us a box of muffins to say thanks. My daughter did not care about the BI stuff, but she loves muffins. Who does not love muffins?

Fly American - Take the Bus

2008-04-09T10:28:00.000-07:00

So you really can take the bus instead of flying with American. I am currently enjoying a flight delay in the Austin airport after my AA flight got canceled along with thousands of others across North America last night and today. Once again, poor performance by American in a week of poor performances. Among the big wins for American:

1. American scored #9 out of the top 16 airlines in North America for overall quality of service in 2007 according to the annual quality ratings. Last year was the worst year for air travel in the last twenty according to the survey. I would post a link, but you already know this about both American's poor performance and industry in general.

2. America lost a law suit filed by 9 sky caps at Logan airport. Their new baggage policy where we all now pay to check bags at the curb cost the sky caps money - $325,000 - according to the suit. $2 per bag adds up.

3. Today the front page of the paper - all of them - indicates American had to ground 300 md-80 jets for safety inspection after 15 of 19 jets failed spot checks. Apparently this was known by overnight news deadlines, but nobody bothered to tell passengers until they arrived at the airport. This includes those like me that checking after midnight local time for an 8am flight.

As a result, American is now busing people to DFW to try to get them out of Texas They are also moving them to other flights on other carriers. Who knows what is happening elsewhere. I switched to Southwest and will get to my next stop eventually. However, it will be a long time before I go back to American Airlines. If you want to fly American, you can always take the bus.

Performance Management is Hot says Gartner

2008-04-04T09:53:00.000-07:00

Chicago was host to the Gartner BI conference this past week. I had a chance to attend and tried to focus most of my time on the CPM side of the house attending most of the performance management related sessions, here’s a recap from the events that took place:

CPM is still hot according to Gartner, with strong growth in the market over the past several year, the future looks bright for once upstart now well established category of performance management. Nigel Rainer had a session on CPM where he called out five key focus areas of corporate performance management functionality including; planning and budgeting, dashboards and scorecards, financial consolidation, profitability optimization, and financial management reporting. Rainer also had spoke to hosted solutions in the CPM realm as an area to watch in the next 2-5 years. This holds true particularly in the mid-sized business market where organization have neither the budget nor the IT staff to support user demand around performance management applications.

There was lots of interesting commentary around XBRL and hosted solutions as the future of the space, there was a mention of XBRL filing being made mandatory by the SEC. Rainer spoke to XBRL as a new way to revolutionize the way companies provide financial information to the org. Rainer pointed to the SEC’s financial explorer portal which provides financial details of several dozen publicly traded companies using XBRL tagging. http://209.234.225.154/viewer/home/

John Van Decker and French Caldwell had an interesting session on GRC and financial governance, the net here was that most of the smaller governance vendors will get sucked up by the already consolidated CPM/ERP vendors and added to the portfolio. They also spoke to the overall vision of document management and collaboration as a key piece of the future of GRC.

From a vendor perspective there were a number of other very interesting presentations from the other BI vendors including Oracle and SAP/Business Objects, where they showed roadmap and tried to paint an integrated story. The session that I did sit in on was SAP/Business Objects where they mostly talked around SAP/Business Objects integration or BI/ERP cooperativeness and focused mainly on the Business Objects product stack feature some of their newly acquired technology such as their text mining functionality acquired from a company called Insight.

HammerTime!

2008-04-02T13:24:00.001-07:00

As you no doubt have been hearing if you’re either at the Gartner BI conference this week, or if you’re a regular reader of all the hip, happening IT publications, InfoWorld (among others) has the scoop on the long awaited announcement of which SAP and Business Objects products made the cut, and which did not.

There seemed to be some degree of confusion between what was said at last week’s SAP BI and Portals conference, and what appeared in print, but with no revisions or corrections coming out after the initial wave or articles, our bet is that what’s on paper is what’s happening.

Interestingly, these announcements don’t deal with the entirety of the product overlap—by John Schwarz’ own admission, product decisions on Crystal Reports, Web Intelligence, Dashboard Builder, Voyager Visual Analyzer and BEx BI are still outstanding, so there’s clearly more to come here. But still, we start to get a clear idea of who won out in the product battles:

· Planning—looks like OutlookSoft is the big winner here, perhaps not surprising given the investment SAP was already making in the product; one wonders what will happen to the joint BOBJ/Cartesis new planning product effort bringing a new planning product to market—likely shelved. Also shelved is the ALG and unfortunately, SRC planning products

· Consolidations—interestingly, they announced 2 solutions—kind of “enterprise” and “mid-market” if you will (although they would likely argue on this classification, but his is how analysts are already referring to them). Cartesis, with its large European install base, gets the nod on the enterprise side, while OutlookSoft is on point down stream. Again, a good breakdown, and there were relatively few SRC consolidations customers, and clearly Cartesis was the product of the future here.

· Dashboarding—this one may cause some chafing. They’ve decided to go with the Pilot dashboarding product, and will ditch the Dashboard Manager product from Business Objects. Given the number of customers on the BOBJ technology vs. the Pilot install base, this is not an insignificant move. However, given some of the known architectural and technological limitations of the BOBJ products, they obviously felt that the Pilot product had a more robust technological foundation and didn’t come with many of the scalability issues that Business Objects often had with these products.

· Profitability—no surprise here, as the ALG functionality wins out, and the agreement with Acorn will be undone. ALG, while not selling a ton of product for Business Objects, was a great pick-up, and gave the company a huge dose of credibility in the EPM marketplace, both from the IP they picked up from the company management, as well as the technology itself. The goal now is to scale the skill set for the product into the SAP channel, which should really help sales.

Overall, not too many surprises, outside of the dashboarding strategy. Everyone pretty much knew that SRC was not long for this world, although the team was doing some really interesting things associated with the mid market efforts of BOBJ, so hopefully the product will live on in some form or function; and the vertical expertise and IP (and so forth…) should aid the OutlookSoft application, although that’s not an insignificant effort right there.

Next up: aligning the staffing resources around the product decisions. Hey wait, is there any connection here to the number of resume’s in my inbox lately?

Naahhh…. (man I’ve turned cynical in my old age).

The Big "O"

2008-03-27T12:43:00.000-07:00

News of Oracle Corp's share drop echoed around the software market today as Oracle shares fell 7 percent Thursday March 27. Questions again arise around whether or not the shopping spree the company has been on in the past few years is paying off, Oracle has spent over $35 billion over the past three years on acquisitions. It’s been unique to watch Oracle’s aggressive moves particularly in the BI space with the acquisition of Hyperion, there have always been rumors around whether they will actually be able to successfully pull off their acquisition strategy. Oracle points to some of this downturn to be reflected by the US economic situation and overall market dynamics as many companies are being forced to pull back on their IT spend and investment in new technologies. It will be interesting to monitor this term as Oracle fourth quarter guidance for the is being set cautiously. The macro economic environment will hurt companies like Oracle more than smaller software vendors, giving a fighting chance to smaller players to come up with that next big thing and does open up the door for rival ERP software vendor SAP to gain some momentum particularly in the BI space.

Panorama and Google Apps--The End of Software as we Know it?

2008-03-19T14:58:00.000-07:00

The blogosphere has exploded today with the announcement of the tie-in between Panomama and Google apps. An interesting BI angle here, although adoption of Google apps is fairly non-existant--that doesn't mean it will stay that way.

Something to stay tuned on as the market dynamics around delivering BI and performance management continue to sway between the desktop and the clouds...

Panorama has been a relatively smaller BI player in the past, but this marks a great opportunity for them not only to raise their visibility, but also to get a seat on the Google bus early on. Additionally, it provides them some much needed counter-positioning muscle vs. the other BI heavyweights like IBM and Microsoft, which have their own issues with Google...

As they say on the Drudge Report, "...Developing..."

Is Your Team #1?

2008-03-18T20:02:00.002-07:00

Walking through San Francisco International and I happened to glance up and see the newest (at least to me) "We're #1" pronouncement from Oracle. They claim to be #1 in Enterprise Performance Management, which the sub-head in the ad defines as Business Intelligence, Financial Applications and analytics.

While Oracle gets full credit for leadership as of the latest Gartner MQ, it is not immediately clear that Oracle is #1. This may be a function of overall market share, or it just might be more chest pounding from Oracle. Of interest is the fact that Gartner calls out that Oracle's BI offer needs work and the fact that current customers, especially the Hyperion customers, are taking a wait and see approach to Oracle offerings.

Oracle has a strong global market share in financial analytics, but it is by no means clear that Oracle is #1 in EPM. Especially if SAP has anything to say about it. And they do, based on a recent announcement of Oracle replacements based on their offering not inclusive of Business Objects.

Let the games begin.

Is Your Team #1?

2008-03-18T20:02:00.001-07:00

Corporate Help for Planet Earth

2008-03-12T18:25:00.000-07:00

Watch the following video to get a glimpse at what large corporations can do to help with environmental concerns. Watch video

The video speaks to how environmental efficiences not only save the companies bottom line but are doing something good for the environment. The Green question of the day is how can Business Intelligence help organizations get better insight that will enable these environmental best practices... Watch for more on this topic and the relevant customer case studies that tell the tale.

Check out the green section of the Cognos newsletter to learn more about their Green BI. http://www.cognos.com/newsletter/green/

Press Release Performance Management - Can We Get a Little Clarity

2008-03-10T20:30:00.000-07:00

Ok, so I am overdue to get my blog on after a recent long vacation. Thinking that I needed to get up to date with everything in BI and performance management I did a quick surf of a number of websites to get up to speed with recent events - and found a couple of press releases that could use a strong dose of improved performance. So about Clarity Systems.

On March 5, Clarity Systems announced that they had an airline vertical market and that it is taking off. They went on to announce that JetBlue, Eos, British Airways, and "other" regional and international airlines have selected Clarity 6. This is great news for Clarity, except on the messaging and press release front.

It is great to know the vertical is taking off. Might be good to tell the other internal folks at Clarity, as the press release appears to be the only mention of the new vertical on the whole website. Airline does not even get a call out under "other industries" in the web navigation either under solutions or partners. Note to Clarity for sake of clarity, it is a vertical or not?

In the same manner, are you a leader or not? Clarity indicates they are a leader in performance management - the press releases all say so. This includes the press release where they announce they are visionary, not a leader in the most recent Gartner Magic Quadrant for CPM. As if this is not bad enough, take a look at the quote from Clarity's president Mark Nashman:

“We believe Gartner's report acknowledges our software for its openness, flexibility and depth of functionality in all areas of CPM,” says Mark Nashman, President, Clarity Systems. “In my opinion, it distinguishes Clarity Systems as a thought leader and innovator in the CPM market.”

Ok, I got it. And it other news, Mark's mom thinks he is a wonderful son and could not have committed the crime. Seriously. Seriously? While we all know it can be painful to run the Gartner gauntlet to get a release approved when mentioned in a report, at least they are clear about the rules of engagement. (In contrast to Forrester, which is a whole other post). I guess it never occurred to me that I could have just inserted the words "In my opinion" somewhere in the quote section to indicate this was the actual opinion of the person who is being quoted.

So actually, when Clarity says leader, they mean thought leader. I got it. Ooops, I read the rest of the release. It goes on to quote Nashman at the end of the release:

"We believe Gartner's Magic Quadrant for CPM Suites recognizes what our customers already understand: Clarity delivers visionary CPM solutions to the market.”

So the Gartner quad actually represents what their customers think, that they are a visionary, not a leader. This is helpful and actually explains that their vision is to have an airline vertical, but it is not actually generally available today. We think we are leaders, but our customers don't think so.

This would help explain where the other airline customers might have gone. In the release on their visionary airline vertical, the other airlines are never actually mentioned. Jetblue, Eos, and British Airlines have cleared customs and boarded the release, but the other airlines apparently got caught in a security screening. They did not board. Not in the headline, not in the body of the release. So what is there to prove they actually exist? Who writes this stuff? Who approves this stuff? Seriously. The visionary leader release has Dilbert written all over it. The airline one is a thing unto itself.

Color me dazed and confused. And I am sure it is not only me.

SQL 2008 Launches in LA - Ballmer Talks

2008-03-04T14:51:00.000-08:00

The next wave of Microsoft BI launched last week with the launch of SQL Server 2008. The event in Los Angeles reached 4,000 attendee and is the first city of an epic tour that spans across the globe as the Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008, and SQL Server 2008 are let loose on the market.

Get more details on this event and other upcoming events and watch Steve Ballmer’s keynote here.

Pentaho-mentum Fever, Catch It!

2008-02-26T16:24:00.000-08:00

Congratulations to our good friend Lance Walter (or Walters), and his merry band of Pentaho-ites on their recent round of VC funding. Having raised money and suvived the gauntlet of presentations to generate new rounds of financing, I know how much hard work and effort goes into making this effort a success.

And in this case, it's not just the $12M in funding that's impressive, but who's doing the funding as well--nice set of backers for the company!

Although certainly not tailor-made for everyone, this success certainly ensures that open source BI will remain part of the conversation for the forseeable future. Congrats Lance!

PG's

BI Chasm Crossed?

2008-02-19T14:10:00.000-08:00

If you were around in the early days of BI you likely heard term "Crossing the Chasm." The term, was actually the title of a well known marketing book by Geoffery Moore, which was labeled the bible for bringing cutting-edge products to progressively larger markets. The pure play BI vendors have almost all gone the way of the dinosaur from their hay day almost ten years ago. There were dosens of BI vendors all fighting to be the first to cross the theoretical chasm, vendors like Crystal Decisions, Actuate, Cognos, Business Objects, and MicroStrategy, some those companies are still around, check out a longer list here, be careful this could bring back some memories.

So where are we now in the road to cross that invisible BI chasm? Some might say that for companies like Business Objects, Cognos, Hyperion, the chasm has already been crossed or rather moved to a much larger software category chasm in different area of the epistical landscape. Are there a new breed of software technologies that are on the forefront of a new BI chasm? One could certainly make the case for this when thinking about the movement with on-premise BI and a company like Lucid Era. Or potentially swinging to the other side of the spectrum and looking at a company like Pentaho and how Open Source technology will play a role in the future of BI. And how about a technology like search, something tells me that there are still a few notes to be played by mega vendors (including Google) when it comes to joining BI, simplicity, and search.

Not to knock the master but from a critical point of few Moore places a large emphasis on being the first to cross the chasm, but as we have seen thus far being a later mover in a given technology market may also be advantageous. Although much is still to be determined, you could look at the larger players like Microsoft, SAP, and Oracle as examples of vendors who moved into the BI market late in the game and are achieving success.

So is it about innovation or capitalization? And at the end of the day does it really matter? It certainly matters to the customer and to the overall growth and profitability of their businesses. Analysts have often commented on the how the evolution of the BI market has not progressed as they had envisioned and that the pure plays didn’t focus enough on innovation but rather took a buy approach. Does this lack of attention to innovation impact the end game or are innovative BI features simply rolled into a part of a greater offering that is at the end of the day sold for less and has the ability to reach a greater audience?

We are now at a place in time where the leading analyst firm calls out the 7 leaders in the market, the most in the history of the space. Organizations are saturated with BI tools and overlapping functionality, the mega vendors are coming to the game with cheaper more affordable offerings to drive BI into new places in the market where it has not been sold before. In addition to this BI functionality is being driven into applications and platform technologies and simply given away, where 5-10 years ago it was sold at a premium. My question is, what is the next chasm for BI to cross, will there even be one? There has been a lot of commentary about the removal of the BI Gartner quadrant, why even have one when there are only four or five major players?

It’s sometimes interesting to take examples from other technologies and get a sense for their journey to cross the chasm. Take the example of the new Blu Ray technology, Blu Ray is the next upcoming technology to challenge high definition DVD market and has recently taken a major step forward. A recent announcement that Toshiba will no longer develop, make or market high-definition HD DVD players is a major turn in the market. It’s somewhat similar to the technology transition that occurred with VHS and Beta, remember that thing! Blu Ray is on the promising track to the be the next in line, one way to think of the history is VHS…DVD…Blu Ray. Read more about the Toshiba announcement here.

Whatever the next step in is for BI, it certainly has been an interesting ride thus far and continues to drive towards solving business challenges and delivering insight and value to organizations around the world. Thanks for taking the time to read my chasm thoughts.

Cheers,
Nic

Out and about.

2008-02-15T17:14:00.001-08:00

Apologies for not piling on to the new Business Objects launch, but interesting to read from multiple sources about the surprise nature of the new release...who says there will not be any surprises from the new Business Objects?

So that it will not be a surprise, I will be off the grid for at least a week for a little vacation without blogging, or a mobile phone for that matter. When I emerge I promise to revisit the blog with a little more content than I have been able to show in the last couple weeks. I will also be ramping up the new performance guys Q&A. I will be starting with an noted industry analyst and maybe a vendor or 2 to keep things interesting and see if we can get a little performance management insight that goes more than press release deep.

In the mean time, have a good weekend and send your thoughts on potential questions for our upcoming experts.

XI 3.0--The Stealth Launch

2008-02-15T15:40:00.000-08:00

While we've previously mentioned our brief, but captured-for-posterity, mention in the XI 3.0 launch video, what hasn't been covered nearly as much is how surprised everyone seems to be that this product came onto the market this week. And we're not the only ones.

We'll likely get into details of what's actually "in" XI 3.0 in the coming days, as we gradually get back on our blogging feet (damn job changes and deadlines), but suffice it to say that it looks like the first stab at integrating the text mining capabilities acquired through the Inxight purchase last May into the BI platform. It really remains to be seen how much there "is" in the release that's usable by customers today in 3.0. The other key features seem to be focused in the EIM area, with EPM not directly addressed.

Business Objects has in the past had a stellar track record in supporting and marketing its new releases into the marketplace. It will be interesting to see, with all the internal churn occurring in the organization, if there will be the same level of support and marketing for this release.

My sense is off, given the timing and the manner in which 3.0 was released. In past releases, (V1 and V2), significant new functionality was accompanied by global roadshows and marketing events to drive demand and customer upsell in conjunction with the press release. In this case, looking on the events site, I see a few events in the coming months specifically on XI 3.0 in Europe, but nothing in North America. I'm not sure what that says about the release itself, or maybe the marketing strategy of the new regime in San Jose--or both.

And lest our readers worry that this is turning into a Business Objects blog, we haven't forgotten about Cognos and IBM and their solutions launches this week either, no sirreee...

PS--Yes, Yes, we know the above logo is from 2.0. But seeing as how our friends came up with the whole logo and "XI" concept, that's the version that will always stick with us...

THERE We Go...

2008-02-14T12:23:00.000-08:00

FINALLY the Business Objects Gartner press release makes its appearance.

Given the multitude of changes going on internally right now in the BI and performance management structure (one look at the new management team line-up shows Marge Breya out of marketing and in Juliette Sultan's old job heading up BI, Mark Doll out of the EPM GM role (and back to E&Y), a new marketing lead (from Pilot Software via SAP), and Greg Wolfe back in charge of the Americas), one can imagine that folks may be just a bit distracted. However, and not to dig too far into the weeds, some folks that were "clickable" are not on the front page, but if you click on John Schwarz link, you see all the old BOBJ management team in their old roles (including Marge, Mark, and Greg). Helloooo webmaster!

But that Philip Smeed video is AWESOME--a thousand cocktails to you sir!

Performance Guys get in on the action with XI 3.0

2008-02-14T11:00:00.000-08:00

Check out the latest news on the new Business Objects BI platform, named Business Objects XI 3.0. The new product release brings the promise of information integration and delivery into one BI platform. This release really focuses on the integration of DI (technology acquired from Acta) and the data quality tools (technology acquired from First Logic). XI 3.0 starts to show the pay off from the past couple of years Business Objects has spent on the development of their EIM strategy and their commitment to bringing additional value to their BI platform customers by establishing the necessity for trust of data, and getting the right information to the right people and teams. But beyond all the new technology bit and bytes, the most interesting part of the release is the Performance Guys plug in the new Business Objects XI 3.0 video, watch for it in the background in the first 30 seconds of the video!

Breathless Reporting? Me Doth Thinkest Thousest Protesteth Too Mucheth...

2008-02-07T09:58:00.001-08:00

Contrary to reports that my blog post yesterday was "breathless" reporting by Pat, I feel as though I must respond as such:

1. Wow, um, thanks.

2. Let the record reflect that it wasn't me reporting with a headline that Microsoft was the big winner in the whole magic quadrant thing, but someone from Information Week, and I remarked that it was a fairly bold departure from all the staid press releases with which Gartner constrains the vendors.

3. I would have remarked similarly if the article was focused on Cognos being the leader as well; you know I call 'em as I see 'em.

4. I'm in no way saying that one vendor or the other has everything that a customer could need--far from it, and you dissecting the ins and outs of the various offerings is instructive, but not wholly relevant to the point I was making. And as regular readers to this esteemed blog will recall (here and here), I've written in the past about what I believe to be the myth of BI "standardization," and why just saying "so and so has standardized on our BI tool" actually means little beyond the press release. Are they using Excel? What's their portal? What DB tools and integration tools to they use? How many ERP user licenses do they have? Often times the standardization argument falls down here, which, like it or not, benefits non-pure play vendors like the folks in Redmond (or "did" anyway, now everything's all mixed up, which is a topic for further dissection).

5. I'm as confused as you are on the puppies post--clearly we've entered new territory on this blog and need to get Nic some help.

6. Happy birthday to my fellow PG's, here's to another year of fun and merriment!

Putting the Truthiness in BI

2008-02-06T16:04:00.000-08:00

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?

Surprise, Surprise, Puppy Surprise

2008-02-06T15:48:00.000-08:00

Big news from Gartner yesterday with the release of the new BI quad. The quad itself positions Microsoft as the dominant vendor in the "ability to execute category," partly due to their partner and sales model and mostly due to the new functionality built right into their core platforms which they are using to deliver BI, The Office System and SQL.

The time seems to be now for Microsoft to release the hounds, and deliver on their BI strategy as the major players in the space (Business Objects and Cognos) will be consumed with integration efforts. In addition to this the company just released the v1 product PerformancePoint Sever, which is not really a v1 product but more of a combination of a more mature product portfolio with the ProClarity tools and Business Scorecard Manager (a 4 year old scorecarding tool built in house at Microsoft). What is new is the planning and budgeting functionality which is added into PerformancePoint and is delivered in the all familiar environment of Excel. Add in some new BI functionality in the latest release of Office 2007 and an upcoming launch of SQL Server 2008 and you can quickly get the picture for why Microsoft is that clear leader in the ability to execute column. Oh wait, how could I forget the most important piece, PRICE. Which could actually be more of a factor than anticipated given recent economic rumblings, just ask you stock broker.

What will happen when SAP, Oracle, and IBM get their acts together? Will HP jump into the game and pick up MicroTradgedy? Only time will tell but all of this gives Microsoft a good opportunity to give a real kick of the BI can in 2008, it’ll be interesting to see how many puppies are really inside. Heck just ask the product manager for Crystal Reports what happened when Reporting Services released back in 2002.

Information Week Breaks the Seal...

2008-02-06T07:51:00.001-08:00

It's interesting how all the BI vendors go to great lengths to adhere to the strict guidelines and protocols established by Gartner and the other analyst firms on what you can say about your own particular rating in the annual magic quadrants races, waves, and vendor evaluations. And it's reflected in the type of bland, non-newsy press releases that vendors tend to issue in these cases, like Cognos here, and Microsoft here (strange that we haven't heard from BOBJASAPCO (Business Objects an SAP Company) yet, they're usually right on the ball with these types of announcements when they're happy with their placement--could it be that they're not? hmmm...

In any case, all that is out the window now as Mary Hayes Weier writes today in Information Week about the Microsoft Surge into the leader's quadrant at the expense of some of the other traditional BI vendors. I'm not sure how taboo or copyrighted any of this information actually is, but it does provide some welcomed insight into the actual report, and lists some of the other vendors and the general area in which they placed in this review cycle.

Overall there's a lot to be happy about in both the Gartner report and this article if you're based up in Redmond today. Expect this article to be forwarded around to A LOT of prospects and customers. What strikes me is the refreshing context that an article like this provides, in contrast to the careful dancing and posturing that all the BI vendors go through in their official announcements. Ultimately I think this helps the customer and the market.

Sign of the Times--Bernard Departs

2008-02-03T06:09:00.000-08:00

I wanted to add my own personal observation to others who have written this past week (I liked Darren's post over at the Lucid Era blog as well) about Bernard Liautaud's official departure from Business Objects, as the SAP transaction becomes official. Obviously it's a fact of today's M&A world that as companies get acquired, the executives move on, take new roles, and in many cases, fade into the sunset.

My sense is that Bernard will have a lot more to say about business intelligence in the coming months and years, although I do wonder about the weight of his message, now that it will be given through the prism of SAP's point of view. After seeing him deliver so many presentations about how important "independent BI" was to the Business Objects customer base, it's still jarring to think that just one year ago at the BOBJ sales kick-off, he was up on stage with a safari hunter's hat on and toy gun shooting at the "big game" of SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft, making fun of their offerings, and vowing to take them on whole--he really had the crowd eating out of his hand. And now he's going to be on the SAP board of supervisors. But such is life in the corporate world. You wear many hats, including safari hats; you change teams and allegiances; and even your points of view depending on where your career takes you.

However, I'll relate one personal anecdote from Bernard (I realize this sounds like an obituary, and while he's in fine form, in a professional sense, there's a lot of BOBJ obituary writing going on right now). Before I joined the company, I was listening to a recorded BOBJ earnings call to get a sense for him as a leader, and as someone that I'd potentially like to follow.

What came through in that call was as proud a recitation of goals and ideals of where he wanted the company to go as I've ever heard from an executive. At the time, the Jim Collins book "Good to Great" was all the rage, and I think they even brought Collins into the sales kick-off that year. But however Bernard's vision was executed (and I can go on and on about how it did and to the extent that it actually "was" throughout the following years), there was no doubt that day that the leader of that company was fully vested in making something great out of the organization he had built. He realized then that were he was wasn't good enough, and he was using a great quarter's results to make the case both to the employees, as well as to the investors, that merely being an industry leader wasn't satisfactory--great companies survived through their continuous innovation, commitment to excellence, and ability to change and adapt.

I suppose it's a bit ironic that in the end, the company was sold and was not able to survive. I'm not sure what it says about Bernard's ability to execute on that vision, but it's good to know that there were leaders in the company that actually believed and subscribed to this vision and those ideals. In life I'm finding that often times it's the battle vs. the result that defines you (man I'm getting old...), and no one can deny that although SAP may have "won" in the end, it was one hell of a fight to get to that result, and Bernard was a great leader for so many of us to follow into battle every day.

TWTW, Smackdown Edition...

2008-02-02T11:35:00.000-08:00

Actionable business intelligence--what a concept!

All Things Considered--No Wait, that's NPR--All Things Seen and Heard on BI and performance management...

Yahooooooooooo!

THE BI Blog...the BI blog...the bi BLOG--nope, the first way sounds the best.

OK this was admittedly a paltry effort this week--time to step it up...

PG's

Not Just ANY BI Blog, but THE BI Blog...

2008-02-01T13:52:00.000-08:00

Adding a gratuituous new link over at the right, as the Death Star formally enters the blogging world with the humble and unassuming name of "THE BI Blog." Not content to be snarky and sarcastic in one blog, PG's Guy and Nic will continue their quest for global blogging domination in "quasi-official company men" capacity over at the new site as well, with the help from the multitudes of other Microsofties that are all focused on wearing you down until you see all things BI their way.

Or is it technically "our" way? Or maybe eventually it will just be "the" way...

BI and Search

2008-02-01T13:02:00.000-08:00

Today's news of the proposed acquisition of Yahooooooooo! by the Death Star, while not very BI/performance management related, still brings "search," and more directly "how does this impact BI and performance management" to mind.

Truthfully speaking, the announcement just a few weeks ago that Microsoft was acquiring a real, live, honest to goodness enterprise search vendor, FAST, is probably more directly related to our core topics here, but today's news re-emphasizes a point that several folks have noticed, namely that "search" has the potential to be the future interface of business intelligence.

Now despite attempts by other BI vendors to get into the realm of search (Business Objects' well intentioned, but unsupported "Intelligent Question" immediately comes to mind), and unstructured data, these efforts have been largely unsuccessful, in part due to the fact that the engines aren't optimized to find data outside of the data warehouse and data marts which which the search tools are associated. And companies like our friend Dave Kellogg's Mark Logic exist and thrive due to their ability to work across multiple data types and sources to scour information everywhere to get you the result you need.

But it's hard to escape the fact that there's a convergence in technologies going on here, and that the user interface for finding out what you need, as well as the engines that actually "do the finding" are quickly coming together. And whatever comes out of the other end of all this mish mash is only going to help information workers everywhere get ready access to the information they need--maybe by simply typing in a question into a search bar...

All Things Performance - Seen and Heard

2008-01-30T21:54:00.000-08:00

Lots of activity and reports from all across the world of performance management this week...actually in the last couple of weeks. Some truth, some rumor, some things to be determined. So a little bit about a number of things:

Business Objects announced nice earnings this week, up 20% to $444 million. Most amusingly, Business Objects was referred to by eChannel Line in their write up as SAP Jr.

An industry analyst recently suggested that the Cognos acquisition by IBM is doomed to fail because they are going to get pulled into the EIM group, get squashed and disappear. Time will tell on this one.

According to Valleywag, BEA employees have been instructed not to blog about the impending acquisition by Oracle. In an effort to help, they suggest you send them tips and they will take care of the rest.

One of the more interesting suggestions coming out of the closure of the SAP / BOBJ deal is the idea that John Schwarz, CEO of Business Objects is now in the running as the heir apparent to SAP CEO Henning Kagermann. Apparently he has made a very strong impression with Kagermann and the senior management at SAP.

As of the earnings announcement today, it was officially announced that BOBJ founder and chairman Bernard Liautaud has officially resigned his positions as chairman of the board and chief strategy officer. He is widely expected to be elected to the SAP board later this year. Congratulations to Mr. Liautaud for building one of the pioneers and leaders in business intelligence and guiding it to a successful exit with one of the industry leading software companies. From zero to $1.5B in revenue for calendar 2007. A great ride.

But is it "Actionable?"

2008-01-29T15:00:00.000-08:00

I was speaking to an IT director today from a large oil and gas company--think, well, LARGE--about their user of BI within their organization. Like most companies, they have every BI tool and product under the sun housed within their organization, which causes just the expected headaches you'd think an IT shop would have with that many vendors floating around.

Our conversation focused on if, with so many vendors, they were really able to deliver BI to the people who needed it most in the organization--"pervasive" BI, if you could call it that. He mentioned that it was indeed a challenge, but actually hinged on one main concept--is it actionable?

He relayed that despite all the competing and overlapping products, the cream always rises to the top, so to speak--if you can get the data in tools or applications that make things actionable, those are the tools that people will use and continue to ask for. They don't need fancy interfaces, they don't need 3 weeks of training, they don't need all the bells and whistles and options and features--they need it to help them solve the problem in front of them.

Of course there are lots of ways to read into this, but it's nice to see that customers can see through the hype and fluff, and still be focused on delivering real value to the people who need it!

TWTW, Milestone Addition...

2008-01-25T15:24:00.000-08:00

Tickets, get your BI conference tickets, tickets, tickets, get your BI conference tickets...

This is sooooooooo not going to be acceptable once SAP takes over...

Who knew the word "infrastructure" could have so many different meanings?

Interesting developments in the the "other" BPM marketplace--are end users getting the shaft?

Any chance to celebrate an anniversary with Beatlemania, we're taking it--PG's at 4!

That will do it for us this weekend, we're off to have some cake and ice cream to celebrate, but if there's clowns at this party, we're outta here...

It was 4 Years Ago Today...The Performance Guys Started to Play...

2008-01-25T06:59:00.000-08:00

They've been going in and out of style,
But they're guaranteed to raise a smile,
So may I introduce to you?
The act you've known for all these years...

The Very First--Performance Guys---Colummmmmmmmmmn...

Yes, kids, it was four years ago today that two young lads from Business Objects set out to change the world of performance management. Armed with a T-1 line, a computer, and hearty dose of sarcasm and cynicism, the first Performance Guys column was penned for DM Review.

We'd like to think we've matured in the last four years, but who are we kidding? We'd also like to think that the performance management market has matured as well. We don't know if we're kidding about that, but we'll let you decide after you take a stroll with us down memory lane and revisit (or for 99.999999% of you, visit the first time) our take on performance management back in early 2004.

(ed.--note that there were originally 7 myths, but in typical Morrissey fashion he felt he needed to edit me down)

The Five Myths of Performance Management

You can’t drop a quarter without hitting some sort of performance management project these days. Everyone I every industry is struggling for better performance. If that’s the case, why is it that so many of us are still confused about what performance management is? Is it due to endless process reengineering by your in-house consultants or because you can’t get at the data? Is the sales team demanding a new dashboard?

Frankly, we’re confused by all the confusion, and hope to use this monthly forum (gratuitous thanks to DM Review) to help you wade through the fog and FUD that is performance management and give you some practical advice on how to proceed within your organization. So let’s start out this first column with us trying to explode some of the most common myths we’ve heard about performance management, and why your organization “can’t” do it—

Myth #1: Performance Management is too new and won’t stick in the marketplace. This is a great first place to start. The truth is that term performance management, or “EPM,” “CPM,” or “BPM,” or whatever software vendors are calling it today, is in fact relatively new—just over two years in fact since our friends at Gartner came out with their first magic quadrant on the market. What’s not new, however, is what performance management is trying to do for your organization—that is, align people with goals and objectives so that you’re all dancing to the same beat. Ever have an initiative to improve customer retention? How about employee development? Surprise!—you’ve been doing performance management. It’s not new it all—it’s what you’re already doing today.

Myth #2: It’s a technology problem. Wow, does this one get a lot of play from people who are dragging their feet on getting started on performance management initiatives. Usually (by the way) from people who stand to lose something or get exposed if such an initiative moves forward. So really quickly—do you have a data warehouse in production—or several? Does your company have access to its own CRM, SCM, HR, Financial, or ERP data base? Are you producing reports for your business users on topics like customer profitability today? Ta dah, all of these things come about as a result of technology. The systems are there, so relax. Focus instead on how you get the information OUT of the system. That’s not a technology problem, it’s a project management challenge.

Myth #3: A Balance Scorecard is the Answer. Now don’t get us wrong, we’re big fans of Kaplan and Norton, and everything they’ve done to advance the discussion. Plus, they throw a mean conference party if you ever get the chance to go. However, because companies don’t understand what performance management actually is, many have latched onto the concept that if they just adopt the Balanced Scorecard system, all their problems will be solved. Actually nothing could be further from the truth. Too many companies are using Balanced Scorecard as a crutch, when they should be using it as a cornerstone from which they really attack the key factors in making their business more productive and successful. Truth be told, it’s hard for many companies to fit all of their key objectives into the four main pillars that Kaplan and Norton espouse. Does it mean BSC won’t work for you? Absolutely not. But BSC is a part of a performance management initiative, and just that.

Myth #4: You know what a KPI is. A lot of the breezy talk about performance management assumes that the IT teams are fully versed on key performance indicators, or KPI’s. We’re guilty ourselves of speaking with so many acronyms pertaining to business needs and pay little attention to whether or not these are terms and metrics that a) you understand, and b) you can help us report on in our systems today. The fact is that just showing a VP of Sales the total number of customers gained this month is not a KPI. It’s nice to know, but not a KPI. Why isn’t it? Because there’s no context to the number, that’s why. Who cares how many customers were gained this month? A better question—how many net new customers do we have this month vs. plan? See the difference? KPI’s require some background information, and they need to be measured against a goal. Just regurgitating the numbers does little for the business user—but giving them context gives them the knowledge they need to make the tough decisions.

Myth #5: A New Planning System solves the Problem. This one will hit close to home for some of our vendor brethren, but it’s not a slam against them—per se. It’s actually more in tune with myth #3 above—it’s a crutch. Now, if you’re using some mainframe legacy system that you had to band-aid together to make it Y2K compliant, we feel your pain, and have some folks you can call. But one of the hugest myths in performance management is that everything starts with a plan or budget. And that’s just not the truth. Planning and budgeting are certainly involved and a big part of performance management. But as so many companies are discovering today, it’s about more than just that, and thinking you’ve got performance management beaten once you sign the P.O. for a new planning system misses the mark. If you don’t have good processes, methodologies, and a way to link your high level objectives with your tactical goals and metrics, no one can save you, not even the best planning system on the planet.

Well, that about puts a wrap on the first column. We hope we’ve helped get the discussion started on performance management, and we’re looking forward to continuing with this next month.

Not too bad actually. While certainly myth #1 has gone by the wayside, EPM is certainly in the mainstream, we still actually see the other myths quite often out in the marketplace. And thank God for that, or else this would be a really boring blog...

On to the next four years and beyond!

Are Vendors Ignoring Users in Business Process?

2008-01-24T13:35:00.000-08:00

So among the many things crossing my Google alerts in the past week is this little gem posted on ZDNet and referring to recent Butler Group research which suggests that Business Process Management vendors are tech-obsessed, creating features at the expense of users needs.
According to the article.

BPM typically allows business professionals to develop operational processes which reflect their business requirements, according to a Butler Group report, with application development, modelling and integration services driving the users' need for the technology.

However, vendors tend to get carried away with technical aspects of BPM rather than responding to users' real needs, Butler Group said: "One worrying issue is that BPM has a history of hooking into the latest and greatest technology wave."

While users focus more on the human interaction angle of BPM, vendors prefer to see the system as a "technology sell" — a standpoint which can negatively affect communication, according to Butler.

No issue with what BPM is and what drives it. However, I am not sure why anyone should be surprised to find that when integration services are potentially an important part of the equation, then vendors might look for more features. The fact that BPM is often a technology sell speaks both to who the buyers are (at least 50% of the time in IT) and maybe more importantly, who is selling it.

When you view the summary of the Butler report, you find that their recommended short list for vendors in the current state of the market includes BEA (soon to be Oracle), Pegasystems, Metastorm, TIBCO, and Software AG. There are many things I could take issue with regardng this leader short list and I can only assume they have a very European centric view of the market, but the reality is that 4-5 of those vendors, if not 5-5 of those vendors are focused on and have built their business on IT driven sales. So the idea that IT vendors selling with an IT slant a particular technology that is also applicable to business people might cause issues with the communication of value of said solution is a surprise why?

The simple reality here is that all these vendors have arrived at the BPM party by trying to come up-stack to include business analyst and senior management related tools like stand alone process modeling, condition logic, business activity monitoring, custom forms, dashboards, etc to capitalize on the growing interest in BPM. This also helps them compete with pure play leaders in the space (Savvion, Appian, Lombardi) who focus more on the business side of the value equation. Core to BPM's rapid growth and success as a category is that the value proposition is easy to understand: rapidly develop process solutions (usually sub 90 days for the first application) which are easy for business users to specify, define, and then manage once implemented. The fact that these solutions help close the gaps between existing legacy applications and work with whatever the organization has in the back office is very compelling to both business and IT. Often the business value and ROI is very high.

Both the article and the research summary also suggest that SOA is a threat to BPM. This is not likely unless a BPM project gets caught up in the wheels of SOA strategy and never gets executed. The reality is that companies who are smart about BPM use the capabilities around modeling and rapid solution development to scope and execute on enterprise wide SOA strategies which deliver both high value in terms of business readiness and lowered cost. That would be a great topic for more research and much more helpful then the suggestion in the article, which is obviously incorrect, that SOA is a new feature of BPM. Yawn. However it does a pose a threat to business value when one of the big platform or IT guys sells BPM as one more thing on the price list while they are trying to sell integration technology or application servers. In that scenario, everyone loses.

It Depends on What you Mean by "Infrastructure"

2008-01-23T14:00:00.000-08:00

There's a lot of talk in the wake of all the BI combinations of what role BI actually "plays" in the technology world. For while there are (and hopefully will always be) great vendors that provide specialized BI capabilities that addresses specific audience or industry needs (think vertical specialities like CPG trade promotion analysis analytics), for the most part, with all the big players now having a full-blown BI portfolio, BI is now largely a feature of the infrastructure--albeit a huge feature--but a feature nonetheless--of that these vendors are selling to the market.

Which begs the question, "what do you mean by "infrastructure?"" Because that can mean a few different things.

On the one hand, with data warehousing, data integration, and all the security, administration, etc. abilities that come with BI these days, saying that it's now an infrastructure play is easy to follow. Most of the BI platform plays are administered by IT, not the end users, so they're a core part of what IT delivers to the rest of the employee base. So infrastructure as a technical term is well understood.

But taken another way, infrastructure can also mean "embedded." And this view of BI is far more interesting in my opinion. Because for most vendors the goal is to have "BI everywhere" and "BI ubiquity" and "BI democracies" (and I could go on with pithy vendor terms), we only achieve this if business intelligence is inherently baked into my daily job. I may not even know I'm using BI--I just see an alert, pull up a credit score, see a forecast trend, all within my daily routine. BI? Never heard of it.

That's where I suspect we'll start to see the next cool aspects of BI and performance management emerge. We're already seeing vendors talk about embedded BI--part of the process, part of your job, not something that you have to do different. You don't have to stop what you're doing, log into a system, run a report, then resume your work--you just right click and pull up the report, for instance.

There are some vendors that are farther along than others in getting BI to this level, and whereas sexy graphics and analytics were all the rage just a few cycles ago, be on the look-out for embedded BI capabilities coming to an application near you for the next big thing.

Baby Got BI

2008-01-22T16:57:00.000-08:00

It's not quite Sir Mix-A-Lot…but Baby got BI. Check out the music video from the Business Objects team in Vancouver, this is how nerds break it down. Peas and carrots. Word-up.

The Big Ticket

2008-01-21T13:38:00.000-08:00

The dates are set for the second annual Microsoft BI conference Oct. 6-8 in Seattle Washington. The events hopes to build on the tremendous popularity of the first Microsoft BI conference held in May of 2007. Sure it’s not U2, The Red Hot Chili Peppers or The Rolling Stones and the ticket scalpers down at SafeCo field probably aren't getting too worked up over it but who’s to say software can’t get it’s groove on from time to time. For more information on the conference check out:
http://www.microsoftbiconference.com/

TWTW, LIVE, FROM NEW YORK, IT'S...

2008-01-19T05:14:00.000-08:00

So this whole vendor consolidation thing--it's totally going to work, right?

Cognos BI v8.3.1 blogging fever, Catch it!

And if you dropped it, try catching it again!

Is it saas? Or SaaS? Or wait--it's not SAAS is it? Oh forget it, let the partner figure it out...

Innovation? You want innovation? We've got your performance management innovation right here buddy...

"Cognos V8.3 BI" and "The Princess Bride:" Two phrases we honestly never thought we'd see together

"BI" and "Draft Funk:" Two phras--OK this has got to stop RIGHT NOW!

SAP and Business Objects--Germans. French. This will TOTALLY work--history is on our side!

Whew, well that will do it for us this week. We'll be over at the bar if anyone needs us...

PG's

Kind of a Busy Day Yesterday in the World of BI...

2008-01-17T16:12:00.000-08:00

So in addition to the big news that Oracle was final able to find a number that Carl Icahn could live with, and with Cognos trying to convince the world that v8.3 of their BI suite was the greatest thing since sliced bread, SAP and Business Objects also got into the act yesterday, announcing that the transaction was all but done, and coming to market with 9--count 'em--9 new solutions to the marketplace.

And the changeover to the SAP web motif is already underway, if you head over to http://www.businessobjects.com/ and check things out. Not sure that the color schemes really match up, and I think we all know where things will end up, but an interesting dichotomy and contrast in styles side by side in the same website nonetheless.

In the midst of well placed banner ads and somewhat murky conference calls yesterday came the solutions. Did we mention there were 9 of them? We can show you a press release in case you don't believe us. Spanning the spectrum (gratuitous last "Let There Be Light" plug there for the old BOBJ marketing team) of performance management, reporting, and everything in between, these new solutions, available on the market today and likely trained on heavily at this week's final BOBJ sales kick-off, are now in the hands of sales reps everywhere.

But what are they? Well, it's hard to tell. If you click on one of the solutions from Business Objects, you actually head over to the SAP website, where the solutions talk a lot about capabilities, but little else. It doesn't take a marketing genius to see that these solutions are little more than marketing rebranding, and that's actually not necessarily a bad thing. After all, they need to start somewhere, and at such time (months or years down the road) when they get the product roadmap figured out, these should be formidable offerings. Until then, however, if I'm a competitor, I'm going to have fun making the SAP rep talk about the products that comprise these solutions and how they actually work together.

Scalable BI: Around the World Around the World…

2008-01-17T11:45:00.000-08:00

As BI continues to go "around and around" for organizations (see the Daft Punk for a visual and audio reference to the current BI challenges) an interesting article has come out from the folks at B-eye network on the top three enablers for scalable BI. While highlighting the fact that reliable information is critical, and must be (1) presented in the right format, (2) deliver at the right time and right way to be consumed and (3) embedded within the right business process. The article also distinguishes the fact that there are different types of BI, including corporate, team, and personal. An interesting way of looking at BI across the organization and segmenting the various purposes of BI.

I wanted to call out point number two specifically, as this hits home on the issue of organizational productivity and brings the conversation of scalability to a direct head making the issue of timing and right tool for the job become a key ingredient to reach true organization scalability. Giving users the ability to get answers in the simplest way possible and enable maximum productivity in the environments in which they are already working.
It seems pretty critical for business users that BI functionality is embedded into the processes and tools that they address in their everyday world. There is undoubtedly an abundance of BI tools out there but for an organization to truly scale their BI investments will come down to how they approach and bring BI into the worlds that their users currently work. Now back to more Daft Punk...

More from Cognos - So About The Product

2008-01-16T14:14:00.000-08:00

Picking up and closing off from yesterday, let’s talk product for Cognos 8v3. The demo portion of the event was led by Cognos VP of Product Marketing, Leah MacMillan. MacMillan started by quoting a recent Accenture study indicating the up to 2 hours a week is wasted looking for information, most organizations information is wrong half the time and that people admitted they used the wrong information at least once a week. Interesting, sounds like they need BI, specifically Cognos 8v3 to storm the information castle.

MacMillan then did a very credible job in calling out key issues for different classes of users and new features in Cognos 8v3 to address those points of pain. Among the key highlights for the CEOs include briefing books and the demo included Indigo Montoya’s briefing book displayed in PDF format. It was not clear what time frame and metrics where measured for Mr. Montoya’s quest. Also new capabilities for the portal, portlets and metrics management.

Cognos mobile was also highlighted for business line managers as well as new additions to the planning capability and multi-tabs displays for their dashboards. While hard to show the capabilities of how you can change a spreadsheet and the plan, the planning element of the demo did showcase integration with MSFT PowerPoint.

Those important non-BI users called employees were also called out with new capabilities focused on author once, publish many times. Other details mentioned include integration with leading enterprise search capabilities including Google One Box, MSFT Express 2008 and other vendors, as well as enhanced personalized alerts. This includes the ability to right click and add alert conditions.

MacMillan finished with mention of additional capabilities required for customers, partners and suppliers and well as hard core BI professionals and indicated she did not have time to review but teams were prepared to demo and spend time. She noted there were additional benefits for these groups of users. However the likelihood is that the focus on administration is among the highlights for both camps. The BI administrators get more capability to manage from the portal, which in turn helps them manage users outside the firewall.

The demo section was then followed by a quick Q&A Chad Erman from Southwestern Energy. Suffice it to say that Erman is a fan of the company and technology, noting in his responses that Cognos is a company “that just gets it”, and that they are so good they are nearly mind-readers. However he is very credible on stage and should be a strong reference to Cognos for the foreseeable future.

The demo and the presentation were both handled very professionally. Ms. MacMillan is very credible on stage and showcasing the product. The key themes around the event – the evolution of performance management and performance management in the real world were both delivered on in the presentation. Cognos deserves high marks for the event and their presentation and new capabilities.

However, as one might expect from a point release, this is not a game changer, and I am not sure that Cognos meets their suggested bar around innovation. The concept of BI on a Blackberry, re-usable portal widgets, portal based administration and multi-tab dashboards are not exactly new or innovative. However, they are all very useful capabilities that should be high on the enhancement request lists of existing customers and are likely to have immediate uptake. This is a straight upgrade for customers on Cognos 8v2. This is not necessarily a straight upgrade from earlier versions, so your results may vary. Look for Cognos 8v3 from your local sales rep as it is available now and have fun storming the castle.

The Many Mutations of Performance Management

2008-01-16T07:09:00.000-08:00

As you know, we here at the Performance Guys are always on the look-out for new thinking and new solutions that focus on the performance management arena. And while the big players are slugging it out at the macro level, hiring top industry analysts, having one last sales kick-off, and getting ready to take over the world, other specialist vendors are quietly going about their business and solving problems for companies across the vertical spectrum.

One such example comes to us today from Red Prairie from the NRF show (you may have seen other cool NRF unveilings earlier in the week--pretty soon the damn shopping carts will be driving themselves--and the futuristic vision of Webvan will yet be achieved--VICTORY!--but I digress).

Companies like Red Prairie, focused on vertical solutions, are unveiling their own performance management solutions--this one branded in the imaginative "R"PM, or "Red Prairie" Performance Management (bets on if this name catches on? Anyone?) for retail companies. Now Red Prairie isn't necessarily a household name like some of the links above, but sports an impressive client list that uses--and depends on the RP software to help them optimize their operations and performance.

OK, there "is" the matter of the product being built on top of a certain software giant's own performance management application, but that aside, it's important to remember that many vertically focused organizations--retailers in this instance--are wary of using the big guys as their vendor of choice for BI and performance management--they're worried about cost, customization, and if the vendor truly knows and understands their key issues. Vendors like Red Prairie show us that in this rapidly accelerating era of consolidation (It's true, Oracle will one day rule us all), that innovation and laser focus on solving key business pains for a customer still has a place in the market.

And How Would You Like Your Performance Management Served?

2008-01-15T11:48:00.001-08:00

There's obviously been a lot of talk over the course of the last few quarters about the changing delivery model for performance management and business intelligence to the marketplace, and there are huge ramifications with the move from a desktop/server delivery method to a more services oriented approach.

Just a few years ago when Business Objects was releasing their first version of crystalreports.com, the interest from customers and prospects was exceedingly low--and the adoption, aside from all the "free trials" that were given away, was even lower. The common argument of not trusting the data outside the firewall, integration, and overall control comprised the litany of reasons why companies would never turn to a SaaS model for BI.

Fast forward a few years, and with the help of forward thinking SaaS companies like LucidEra, and our blogging friend Darren Cunningham, the issue is no longer whether the model is viable, but rather, how it gets integrated with other enterprise applications--which shows just how far the ball has been moved--the SaaS vendors are getting the same barriers to adoption as traditional vendors. That shows a real maturity of the technology.

Another sure sign that you've arrived--Microsoft is not only in the game, but experiencing channel conflict on who would host the SaaS services, and how that might impact partner revenue streams. Now since the folks from Redmond are highly dependent on their extensive partner community to be their eyes and ears out on the street, a channel uprising is no small matter. But more importantly, it shows that the argument has moved from whether cloud computing, or software + services, as MSFT calls it, is a viable way to deliver technology, to who is going to be the one delivering it.

With new applications like mobile computing and enterprise search making strong headway into the information worker's mindshare, the issue around performance management adoption is rapidly moving from "if" a company should adopt a performance management solution to help their top and bottom lines, to "how" they'd like their solution delivered.

Cognos 8v3 - Ask the Experts

2008-01-15T10:54:00.000-08:00

After Mr. Ashe concluded his keynote presentation, he did a little Q&A with industry analyst John Hagerty of AMR research, a noted expert in performance management as well as compliance. John is a favorite of the performance guys and a great choice for this type of event for a variety of reasons - he knows a ton about the space, is very credible, and he speaks clear English and does not pull his punches. He also happens to be a former Cognos employee, which never hurts, but John did not expressly endorse the product, nor would you expect him to.

John did a Q&A with Rob Ashe and continued to reinforce some of the key themes and challenges in the market place: billions of dollars spent on aggregation and collection of information without enough measurable impact or direction on what to do with the information or how to drive business return. Also the challenge of not enough tools - or the right kind of tools for all types of users.

Hagerty and Ashe both commented that for many organizations, the journey to a performance managed and optimized organization is still early stage. Ashe also commented that journey is often custom to the needs of individual organizations. (Very good point)

To address this issue, Hagerty outlined a maturity model for organizations moving to a more strategic approach to BI and performance management. For AMR clients, you can find it here, but for the rest of you, the headlines of the 4 stages are:

1. Reactive - Performance management and/or BI used to address a specific issue. This services as the baseline in the department or organization

2. Anticipation - The viral impact as performance management projects starts to spread. Nothing breeds success like success

3. Collaboration - A more proactive approach as the organization starts to recognize the cause and effect relationship between their goals, the information and the expectations of performance.

4. Orchestration - A coordinated approach that moves everyone to the same sheet of music. Very much rooted in strategy

Both Ashe and Hagerty asserted that most organizations are early in the process, but on their way to a more strategic, higher value approach. Interesting, and likely due to time constraints, neither panelist was asked or volunteered examples of more mature or performance managed companies. While Southwest Energy was on the video transition to the panel and spoke live later(I will comment on this later), I thought this was a missed opportunity.

The closing remarks by both men netted out to don't boil the ocean with your performance strategy and look for return at every step. This is very much on point and a constant struggle for those in both business and IT looking to execute on their performance strategy.

Overall this was a good session and both presenters were on script and kept things moving. However, the audience and Cognos might have been better served to allow John Hagerty a little more time and his own stand alone presentation slot to get one level deeper on how to make performance management actionable and reference some more specific case studies in context of the AMR maturity model. This might have cut into the demo a little bit, but the credibility of AMR and a global view would have served the corporate interest at least as well. And teams were standing by to demo around the room.

Stay tuned for new product features and demo update.

Cognos Brings Their Performance DNA to Gotham

2008-01-15T09:01:00.000-08:00

Greetings from the Cognos kick-off event for Cognos 8v3. Cognos bills this as The DNA for Performance Evolution. Doors opened at 8am and to their performance credit, the group running the event managed to get it kicked off on time. Cognos bills this as performance management in the real world, with a target of reaching 8,000 customers in 35 cities as well as an online event.

Mark Jeffries kicked off the event and quickly gave way to Cognos CEO Rob Ashe. Ashe welcomed everyone and noted that Cognos 8v3 is a “foundational release – very sturdy and the product of more testing than any prior release from the company.” Ashe asserted that performance management is the #1 priority for all organizations.

Ashe followed with the standard BI assertion - the issue starts from the sheer quantity of data. Another issue is the increasing competitive environment. Arguably we are on the edge of a recession and Ashe suggested that is part of the priority and urgency. Performance of the business is critical. Finally, part of the issue is management. Too much money on automation. Too much back office, but not enough focus on optimization and driving performance.

Ashe commented that Cognos has been on a 20 year journey of innovation. However, the product circle that appeared behind him was not as high quality as other graphics in the presentation. It was the standard circle with performance in the center, first ring measure and monitoring, next planning, finally, reporting and analysis. Ironically, the product diagram was less good than the one I remember when I presented right after Ashe at Computerworld’s BI show in 2005.

He presented an overview of the BI industry using Cognos products for reference and the reality over the last couple years that performance management is where it is going. Performance management is growing up and the result is more demand and CPM going very broad and very deep.

The focus of the Cognos message and belief:

1. BI + Scorecards + planning must all be integrated on a single platform.

Delivery of a framework – revenue management, long term asset management, expense management, financial management. Looking for what is unique in the business and using it to drive forward
Architecture – services oriented backbone on a single, SOA, extendable platform.

Cognos 8v3 key message points: More targeted info to more users, easier to deploy and manage and new solutions and best practices to accelerate success

Interesting that Ashe commented that this has been the longest product test. 9 months. IBM performance lab tested 3 times before release. Ashe also asserted that “Cognos stands alone in ability to make it easy to administer and manage applications in real deployment and drive adoption.” However, it is not clear from the demo that they are providing anything that is revolutionary or truly new here.

There was a little time spent on acquisition talk. Cognos recently closed the deal from Applix and Ashe mentioned that the new company and technology is a strong fit and well received. TM1 was positioned as an “all in one solution for the mid-market”. It was interesting to hear it positioned this way as that was not consistent with the original press releases on the topic.

On the topic of IBM, Ashe noted that he and the whole company are excited. The deal was approved by the Cognos shareholders yesterday with approval vote of 99%. Ashe asserted synergies and shared vision around business optimization and performance. He also mentioned that Cognos employees are excited about the merger. Clearly it is not a merger and it is not clear that everyone is excited.

The event venue is great, being hosted in a rotunda of a former bank. Kudos to the Cognos team for putting the stage together and adding Cognos signage without taking away from the elegance of the venue. Mark Jefferies is the host for the event and while he is high energy, he clearly is not a Cognos employee because he was reading his open remarks from his clip board and needed to refer to the sheet to remember the names of the presenters. Overall a very solid presentation and a good set up for the rest of the presenters.

The Perils of Software Vendor Consolidation

2008-01-13T20:08:00.000-08:00

CIO Magazine has a solid article that should help get your day off to a roaring start by addressing the rapidly consolidating software vendor landscape. With the rash of acquisitions in 2007, and already more this year, the number of choices for companies is rapidly shrinking--in fact, the article cites a Forrester Research report that shows only 17 major software vendors left--which is almost hard to believe.

Now that doesn't mean that there are only 17 software vendors left in total--but that for enterprise and larger mid-sized organizations, their choices, based on the existing and future standards, are rapidly shrinking.

Now while there's a great case to be made for the "one throat to choke" strategy (that's mentioned in the article), increasingly we're seeing the power shift from customers to vendors as choices continue to be narrowed, and that's not always a good thing for companies and CIO's in particular right now. Once the dreaded "standardization" banner has been raised, it's harder and harder to switch away from that vendor's services--there's too much time and money invested, too much customization, too much hassle. And among the lesser-known switching costs are issues like credibility and politics, issues that never make it onto a Cap Ex proposal but are an inherent part of what leads you to pick a vendor and the "safe choice" in the first place.

A study that I haven't yet seen, but would be interesting either to see the results, or to grab it if it has been done, is to compare the costs of "inter" system integration, and "intra" system integration. Is it really less expensive to do everything within one system? Because often times you go with one of the big vendors due to the breadth of their offering, not necessarily the depth of their functionality. So you end up spending more money to get the less-functional, more "integrated" system to do what you actually need it to do, perhaps negating the cost savings of using the single vendor strategy in the first place.

Confused yet? It's still a jumble out there, and there's great technology and ideas that are most likely on the way--we always see talented people leave after an acquisition and go off and start their own company, focusing on a particular technology or vertical--and this year will be no different. And with the economy doing who-knows-what in the coming 12 months, CIO's may be looking for a more specialized, less costly alternative than their vendor standard, which on the whole, is a good thing for this industry.

TW'sTW "Wait--2008 Started LAST Week?" Edition

2008-01-11T15:56:00.000-08:00

New Gartner CPM Quads--Victory is Mine! Oh wait it's not? Crap.
The Performance Management version of Indecent Proposal coming to a market near you... "How can it be a category if everyone is a leader?" That pretty much sums it, up, doesn't it?
We hope this doesn't mean Pat is going to sell us out and go big-time...
Our money is on Bernard as Harry Potter this year in the BOBJ sales kick-off skit...
Just the merest hint of a rumor that the next Gartner BI quads are right around the corner--but you didn't hear it from us...
Oh great, another "best-of list"--that's soooo December, 2007...

Looking forward to PG Pat's liveblogging from the Cognos performance management forum next week...

PG's

Sales Kick-off Most Memorable Moments...

2008-01-11T15:11:00.000-08:00

I thought I’d follow up on Guys SKO note with a few sales kickoff most memorable moments… January marks the beginning of a new year and chance for those product marketing guys to get in front of sales and pitch the new roadmaps, demos, product direction, solutions, case studies and best practices to energize and get the sales teams jazzed about the upcoming year. Sometimes these events can be a bit of a boondoggle/pep rally, but hopefully there’s always some learning to take away and some energy generated to get the promise of BI out in front of customers in the upcoming year. That being said, whenever you get a bunch of marketing and sales guys together some crazy things always seem to happen. Looking back over the years, there has certainly been some interesting moments and I’ve been fortunate to be a part of three different BI organizations so I thought I’d list a few of the memorable ones:
1. XI is announced – Crystal and Business Objects come together
2. The C-suite and VPs of Business Objects do a super hero skit
3. “And now for something completely different” - Monty Pythons own John Cleese keynotes
4. Sinbad hosts the evening reception at the Bellagio in Vegas
5. Crystal unveils the “Beat the BO Campaign” with VP of sales Bill Gibson boxing with a big blue guy on stage, six months later they are acquired by BO
6. Checking out the penguins in the world’s largest aquarium in Atlanta
7. EPM and EIM are like Oreo cookies!
8. The marketing team takes out a hotel chandelier with a t-shirt launcher while rehearsing their segment
Cheers to the new year in BI and the memorable moments to come!

Sales Kick-off Fever, Catch It!

2008-01-11T14:01:00.000-08:00

Well as the calendar turns, the performance vendors turn their attention to motivating and inspiring their sales forces to go out and conquer the world, or at least make their number for the next few quarters.

Microsoft kicked off things this week in Seattle with a gathering of their rapidly expanding BI sales and marketing teams, and Business Objects follows-up next week for their fond farewell as they kick-off 2008 one last time in Las Vegas. Cognos follows-on next month for their swan song as well.

Sales kick-offs are a strange type of event. For the marketing folks, it's a lot of work, as presentations, video's skits, and the logistics of running a top quality event for hundreds, or even thousands of people occupy most of the 3rd and certainly the 4th quarters of the year. Many a Christmas break has been spent on presentation revisions and early drafts of witty videos and management skits. Anyone who has been associated with Business Objects, for instance, knows that the executive management skit planning starts in the summer, and it's almost impossible to find an exec in the evenings leading up to the big sales dinner where the skit takes place, so elaborate is the production.

However, for the sales people, it's often just a chance to let loose in a fun city away from the family and get into random mischief to all hours of the morning before stumbling into the next morning's keynotes.

And by the end of the meeting, no one can remember any of the slides and assumes they'll be posted on the intranet, and everyone can't wait to crawl back home and never see each other again--at least for another year--

Good times, good times...

Rumor has it...

2008-01-11T13:49:00.000-08:00

We may be close to seeing a new BI magic quadrant in the coming weeks. Any chance there's a shake-up in the leader's group? Will Business Objects retain its crown from last year? Will Microsoft finally move the millimeter or so it needed to get in the leaders group? Will any of the new and up-and-coming vendors make a splash that will shake up the industry?

Don't look at us, we have no idea, we're just stirring things up...

Watson, Crick, Darwin and Ashe - DNA of Performance

2008-01-11T12:12:00.000-08:00

Next week Cognos takes the covers off the next generation of performance management in NY during a live event called The DNA of Performance Evolution in New York City. The event takes place at Gotham Hall next Tuesday the 15th and includes keynotes by Rob Ashe and Q&A with John Hagerty of AMR as well product demonstrations and a customer discussion with Southwest Energy.

The main stage product demo on the agenda is titled "Experience Performance Management Innovation." I will be happy to offer my candid view on Cognos' delivery of this promise as I will be attending the event and hoping to blog in real time if at all possible.

Interesting to note that Cognos is clearly promoting Cognos 8v3 as evidenced by their web links and details on the site. Regardless of the marketing around the assertion of innovation, the launch is clearly important to Cognos 2008 plans. They are doing a similar agenda as a road show as well as a virtual event. Expect customers and partners to be just as interested in the new relationship with IBM as they are in the latest release.

More from NYC.

Process Management Gone Wild

2008-01-08T20:43:00.000-08:00

It took Doug Henschen at Intelligent Enterprise doing a Q&A with Janelle Hill from Gartner on the state of play in the business process management segment, as well as the recent IE Dozen Editors choice awards, to prompt me to make some comments on the state of play in process management.

The Q&A with Janelle was related to Doug's blog commenting on Gartner's BPMS problem. Doug mentions that Gartner has a problem because vendors are upset this may be the last BPMS MQ, a notion that Janelle rejects - at least mostly. It is under review, but Doug comments on the concern of one unnamed vendor that Gartner's concept of a Business Process Platform (BPP) favors the big vendors. Like the ones who sell platforms. Ya think? Doug also notes that the genie is out of the bottle for process vendors, and he is likely right. The game is on and process is now something that is offered by a variety of vendors.

The leaders quadrant for BPMS, in rough order of placement (yes, high and to the right matters)

Pegasystems
Savvion
Lombardi
BEA
Tibco
Metastorm
Global 360
Software AG
Appian
IBM

On the outside of the leader section looking in: Oracle, Adobe, EMC and more. To quote a friend from Texas, this looks like a goat rodeo, and there are a lot of goats. And a couple things that make you go, hmmm.

Among the big headlines for Business Process Management:

First, the category has clearly arrived. BPMS is one of the fastest growing in software, yet what is interesting is how many different types of organizations are spending on capability to make process explicit in their offering and aggressively market it.

Second, the top three players in the space combined for less than $200M in revenue in FY '07. This suggests that not only are they potential acquisition targets, but that the bar to distinguish themselves with innovation has just been raised. Claiming leadership in this market is more difficult now, and the competition punches much harder.

Third, two of the big 4 platform guys are notable by their absence - SAP and Microsoft. SAP gets mention in the report for recognition of the importance of process management and some gaps, especially on the human side, but they are working on it, mostly in the Netweaver end of the house. MSFT is missing in action, but I have heard that the good folks in Redmond are up to something on BPMS. They are also a strong lead feeder to the .Net players in this space like Metastorm.

Finally, can it really be a category when everyone is a leader? Among the concerns here for customers as well as for vendors is the overall criteria and scoring. There are many marked differences among the leading vendors, yet they are hard to discern from the MQ, much less by someone new to the party. This is like when my brother founded the math club in high school and one of the bi-laws was that everyone in the club had the title of president, that way they could submit their college applications with a little something extra. Now think about what happens the next time someone in IT issues an RFP for process management. Goats gone wild.

My guess is that the shelf life of this quad will be about 18 months, much like the last one, and then it will not be renewed. High and right is full, no more leaders please.

One other note from the BPMS Magic Quad. It was published on December 14th by Janelle Hill and Eric Deitert with a couple other analysts. Gartner announced this week that Deitert has left Gartner for a position at Pegasystems, where he was a former employee. Just another thing that makes you go hmmm...

I'm engaged, but I still see other people

2008-01-04T11:49:00.000-08:00

Interesting to read the recent article in e-Week on how the SAP-Business Objects deal may impact the long standing relationship between IBM and Business Objects. IBM and Business Objects have been close partners for many years. In fact, IBM has been neck and neck with Accenture as the most important strategic partner for BOBJ for some time. Interestingly, they also develop software together, with specific emphasis on SaaS. And then there is the minor issue of IBM having just spent $5B on Cognos. Guess that might make these strategic partner dinners a little uncomfortable.

In reality, this face-off is likely much ado about nothing - at least in the near term for a number of reasons.

First, many of the partner deals are driven via IBM global services. Even when Cognos becomes fully assimilated into Big Blue, Global Services or whatever they are called these days are likely to do as they please, much as they have always done. And if you don't think they won't recommend Business Objects to an existing account, or Cognos to a SAP Shop, you are kidding yourself. (BTW - Will Cognos' logo become blue?)

Second, IBM continues to drive both a platform play and custom consulting to tailor results for clients via a wrap and trap strategy. Their message to clients is, just keep your existing PeopleSoft HR, essbase, R/3, Agile, JDE, mainframe, and whatever else in the basement. We will freeze those systems where they stand and start building solutions for you on our platform to maximize your investment and provide near term value. Of course BI will be part of those solutions. I am not sure if this is a result of Innovation man or those ideation sessions they show in their idiotic commercials, but it makes sense to many companies. Especially when the alternative is a complete rip and replace with the new stack from Oracle or SAP.

Third, when those big ELA contracts come up and IBM reps are looking for what else they can stick into the goody bag for the $50M they want to charge, Business Objects and Cognos are already on the price list. There will be no incentive for the IBM field guys to vote Cognos, especially if the client has previously bought BOBJ via IBM.

Over time this is may be a stickier issue, but among the options provided short term, IBM customers have more choice and have a little bargaining leverage. For my money, this will be even more entertaining if the rumor of IBM acquiring SAP were ever to come to pass. This would make those awkward blended family holiday situations look warm and comfortable

Piecing Together the Gartner CPM Magic Quadrant Results

2008-01-02T11:23:00.000-08:00

Well, we knew when we broke for the holidays that the Garnter CPM magic quadrant release were just days from coming out. We deliberated about doing a post-festivus alert, but knowing that everyone was quickly headed out of town, decided that the world would have to wait with bated breath for our in-depth analysis of the latest results.

Now while we're not able to actually publish the quad itself, it being copyrighted and all, it's pretty easy to piece together where the main players fell out in the mix based on the 55 font type press releases and wire service reports that have been pinging our inboxes every day since the results were announced.

The big winners:

Oracle/Hyperion: The combination of the two companies nearly complete, they make for a compelling offering in the CPM space; and with the long-time leadership of Hyperion, this one was a no-brainer. Oracle has been on quite a roll lately, racking up leadership awards from all the main analyst firms. Now whether they all equate to Oracle being #1 in BI is another story, but there's no question that the BI pieces have come together for them in the past year.

Cognos: Although their acquisition of Applix was not fully factored into the mix, Cognos was positioned in the leaders quadrant this year, as they have in every year since the quad was released. Another strong showing from Team Ottawa in their last quad as an independent vendor. As IBM has not been represented on the quad in the past, expect the big name change in the leader's quadrant for next year.

Business Objects: The big mover this past year, BOBJ was also positioned strongly in the leaders quadrant, along with soon-to-be lord and master SAP. The combination of the two company's offerings should make this coming year's competition interesting, product roadmap challenges not withstanding. As has been well documented, the Business Objects strategy of buying their way into the leadership position with acquistions of SRC, ALG, and finally Cartesis was enough to push them over the top.

Not-so-Big Winners:
Now while everyone's a winner in our book, you can always tell these companies by the fact that they don't rush out press releases touting the fact that they came in behind the pack, like, for instance...

SAS: Nope, move along, nothing to see here. SAS isn't exactly touting the fact that they aren't in the leaders quadrant again this year, something that must be disappointing to them, seeing as they are rated about the same as they were in 2006--close, but actually falling a bit behind the new leaders given how much the market has changed.

Microsoft: We should really label Team Redmond as having an "incomplete" this time around, as Gartner points out in their review that the PerformancePoint Server product was not fully taken into account into the evalutation, as the product was not actually out in the market in-time to hit the cut-off date. As such, Microsoft was dinged a bit on their ability to execute, but those of you with the quad in your hand will recognize the rightward tilt of the completeness of vision that vendors fight most with Gartner on that they actually did pretty well on. With a full year of PPS selling and positioning in the marketplace, it will be interesting to see how much MSFT is able to move in the coming year.

Other Miscellan-ee-i that we can disclose and have opinions on:

--Total number of vendors in leaders quadrant in 2007 vs. 2006: 4 vs. 2
--Total number of vendors on the quad in 2007 vs. 2006: 13 vs. 16 (so much for all-consuming consolidation)
--Biggest winner: I'll go with SAP actually. If you compare last year's and this year's measurements, while Hyperion/Oracle and Cognos are still clearly the leaders, their position really didn't change that much. However, with Business Objects moving into the leaders quadrant along with SAP, they are well positioned for a strong year, again pending product issues (and those are huge, by the way, so while I don't discount them, they are well set up)
--Biggest loser: Has to be SAS. They were so close last year to the leaders quad, and barely moved up this year, actually losing ground to several competitors. Getting to be a tough market!
--Vendor to watch: I'll leave aside the obvious choice in Microsoft, and actually go with Infor. Their completeness of vision continues to move right, and they themselves are getting very close to the upper right region.
--Off-the-wall New Year prediction: This is the last year for a stand-alone CPM quad--there's already rumblings that it will be BI and CPM next year--we shall see!

Merry New Year!

2008-01-02T11:06:00.000-08:00

Happy 2008 everyone!

Hope your holidays were fun and exciting. We here at PG are stumbling back from vacation and will up and fully running shortly. But while we were taking a break, the performance management world was not. More shortly on the bes--OMG NEW GARTNER QUADS ARE OUT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!111111

TYTW—The Year That Was—Festivus for the Restofus Edition…

2007-12-21T14:06:00.000-08:00

Well campers, as we come to the end of our posting year for 2007, we wanted to take a minute to thank you for your support, comments, and encouragement in helping us get started on this little venture. When we began blogging The Performance Guys earlier this year we couldn’t even get our families to read the thing, let alone anyone of any importance; and now there are thousands of you visiting the site every month, something that we’re frankly still a bit mystified by (Ed. note—maybe it’s a Festivus Miracle!)

In any case, we will dispense with any airing of grievances, and instead wish you and yours a very Merry Christmas and Happy Holiday Season! Here’s to a great 2008, where we resolve to try to use this blog for good, not evil; write and act closer to our age, and continue on our quest for the holy grail of BI and performance management that we’re sure exists somewhere…

We’ll see you in January, 2008!

Tis the Season to be Mobile

2007-12-20T16:34:00.000-08:00

There’s no doubt PDAs will be popular stocking stuffer this year, whether it’s the new iPhone, Blackberry, or Windows Smart Phone, there’s something out there for everyone. The mobile market has always been read hot but when I read a recent article about RIMs Q3 earnings announce that more than doubled, I couldn’t help but write a post about the growth of mobile and the relevance to mobile BI.

BI vendors have been waiting for years for this egg to hatch, bringing the power of business intelligence directly to the users mobile devices has been a strong area of interest for quite some time now. Just take a look at where some of the BI players are at with their mobile strategy, read about the Business Objects mobile strategy, and how they are making BI available on any mobile device. Cognos 8 goes mobile as well extending the value of the Cognos 8 Business Intelligence architecture by providing users with access to timely, secure, and personalized information on their BlackBerry® wireless devices. Microsoft is also in the mobile BI game and is actually one vendor who has an interest in both the BI and the mobile businesses. They have a whitepaper on using windows mobile and business intelligence for making better business decision wherever you are.

Look for the wave of PDA user empowerment to continue and vendors to look for simpler ways to get information into the hands of the business users. Good or bad, BI on the mobile device is yet another reason to make us all more addicted to our little dingleberries!

Public Sector Performance Management

2007-12-19T08:46:00.000-08:00

We here at The Performance Guys like to tackle a variety of BI and performance management topics (with an occasional BPM post thrown in just to keep Pat happy--I kid, I kid...). But it's not very often that we talk public sector, and this story from the Chicago Tribune highlights the fact that county government (in this case, the black hole that is Cook County government, in which Chicago is located) has its own performance management challenges as well, and that the issues that we try to attack and address with business intelligence are not limited to for-profit companies--they affect organizations of all types and sizes.

The issue confronting the County is not a new one--they lack critical visibility into where the budget is being spent, and whether or not a proposed tax increase will actually have the intended impact. Now, speaking as a Chicagoland resident for over 25 years, I can tell you first hand that in the past, passing a tax hike was as easy as finding Lake Michigan. With the government fully aligned with the City and Mayor Daley, there's never been a huge debate when fares, fees, or levy's have been instituted.

But take a look at this passage from the article, which could be a transcript from any for-profit company around the world:

At public hearings the county has hosted on its current $3.2 billion budget plan, its leaders sometimes sounded like CEOs reassuring shareholders their investments would pay off: "We don't waste anything," Cook County Chief Judge Timothy Evans said in November: "The money that we're asking for is money we will put to good use."In seeking $890 million a year in new tax revenues, Stroger said he has achieved "enormous operational efficiencies" during his year-long tenure, and has adopted "modern business practices."

Stroger also points out that he has introduced "performance-based budgeting" using productivity benchmarks.Seigle's idea for a Cook County bankruptcy filing would not solve its "revenue problem," Stroger spokeswoman Ibis Antongiorgi said in a statement Friday (see box above). "When any business, public or private, refuses to raise revenue while expenses continue to outpace income, then it is time for all stakeholders to consider drastic expenditure reductions. Cook County government needs additional revenue to pay its employees."

What's missing from Stroger's budget plan is specific-enough objectives, said Gidwitz, a director of Rush University Medical Center, which works closely with the four county-run hospitals. "Where you can cut is the second question," he said. "The first question is, 'What do we need? What are the priorities and strategies?'"

What's interesting about this budget squabble is how leaders from the private sector are being asked to get involved and help the County address its issues and raising critical questions that you hear project teams talk about in most EPM projects--how do we institue processes that solve our problems and help us be more accountable? And when you read the quotes from the former CEO's and executives, what becomes apparent is that like most organizations and performance management, they know they have a problem, but aren't sure how to fix it. Enter a great performance management opportunity!

Many times, especially in Cook County and Chicago, the government isn't too high on public accountability and disclosure; but in this case, we get to see some interesting insights into the challenges that government has with accountability, budgeting, and performance, and how the principles we advocate and write about here can be applied to the public sector as well.

Can't wait to get back for Christmas!

Pumping Some Serious Iron

2007-12-18T00:32:00.001-08:00

Just off the heels of the PerformancePoint Server launch, Microsoft is getting pumped up again with another major BI product launch just around the corner. SQL 2008 holds the promise of trusted and secure data and the ability to leverage core business intelligence functionality to gain better business insight, now that’s strength that even the Govinator couldn’t handle. SQL Server has long been the backbone of Microsoft’s BI story, together the wave of PerformancePoint Server 2007, SharePoint Server 2007, and soon to come SQL Server 2008, Microsoft is really stacking up the rack. Watch for more details on the launch of SQL Server, in the meantime you can get more familiar it by watching the demo here,

TWTW, "Predictions? We Don't Need No Stinking Predictions!" Edition...

2007-12-14T14:34:00.000-08:00

HEEEEEEEEEY, Bubbles!

Making the connection between the subprime lending mess and personal performance management as only Pat can...

Cognos and Applix, finally together where they belong...

More Cognos! More Solutions! More of everything for everybody in every vertical everywhere!

Oco is completely Loco...

OK Santa's little helpers, that will do it for us this week--more parties to attend, more performance management mayhem to unleash, more timewasting games for PG Nic to uncover. See you next week!

Still More BI Predictions

2007-12-13T19:09:00.000-08:00

So just when you thought it was safe to get on with business because we have so completely and thoroughly covered BI in 2008 via multiple predictions as noted here, along comes yet more BI predictions from Oco. I guess that gives us a total of 20 predictions on BI in 2008 (at least that we know of). The Oco 5:

- BI goes diagonal. In 2008, we will see the era of vertical and horizontal BI solutions converging toward diagonal solutions -- those focused on specific business problems extending across similar industries. (Huh?!? I am not sure I even know where to start with this one)
- BI Best Practices...customers will insist on best practices to measure and improve their performance. (I would file this one under the Seth Grimes obvious category. In other news, data quality is important and A-Rod is well paid)
- Technology will move from an IT priority to a business decision. Business users will decide what type of technology, what business model, and even which vendor. (Not only are these mutually exclusive, but anyone who ever took a project in front of a purchase committee knows this is self evident. )
- Growth of the IT Light Solution Model. Forward looking organizations are looking at projects more strategically and selecting business models to move faster. (There is more here but it doubles back on business model, vendor and some reference to IT off shoring)
- BI adoption rate expands into small and medium-sized organizations. BI will become more mainstream in 2008 with adoption in the mid-market. (I am having a hard time with this one for a variety of reasons including BI for the mid-market is such an old idea, small companies like Microsoft spend a lot of time here, say it with me "open source", and the sentence makes no sense.)

Generally, I would like to give credit for having a point of view and sharing it with the market. However, when you apply the Jim Rome rule, "Have a take, don't suck", this clearly does not meet the standard. It looks like the Oco guys saw competitor LucidEra's top 5 and shifted into action mode. Not fast action, because they are down 15 predictions to team Lucid, Intelligent Enterprise, and the Performance Guys.

However, 10 days later when they get in the game, they produce the BI equivalent of a football team looking at 3rd and 25 who runs a draw play to clear 5 yards for the punt team. BI goes diagonal? Seriously? You can't make that up. Seriously?

It looks like Oco is on to something with SaaS BI, focus on segments and customers, and appears to have a smart CEO. They also make a guarantee of success and apply a fixed bid methodology to their delivery approach. Very interesting. It also looks like their marketing, or at least their PR sucks, and that the CEO did not read the press release where he was quoted before it hit the wire. (I am also not sure about the Cincinnati Bengals Nike Swoosh logo thing, but that is another column.)

Oco has some name brand customers, a strong value proposition and a chance to succeed in 2008. Here is hoping they make good.

Cognos Blasts the Performance Management Market

2007-12-13T13:01:00.000-08:00

We've spoken in the past, as has every industry analyst if you ask them or read their work, about the fact that it appeared that the Cognos performance management offering was starting to appear a bit worn around the edges, what with the newer, flashier acquisitions and products being released out into the market.

Well earlier this week, on December 11th, the fine folks in Ottawa started firing back, issuing a torrent of press releases touting their new performance management vision, new financial performance management solution plans, strategic financial planning solutions, as well as a pharmaceutical performance solution as well, which addresses a key market that other vendors have not explicitly called out.

Now the skeptics and competitive vendors among us will point out, and perhaps rightly so, that these press releases are nothing more than a rebranding of the Applix products now that the acquisition has been completed. In in part, they would be correct. But it's hard to argue with the fact that when you read the reviews of the Applix acquisition from analyst firms who caution customers and prospects to get a better idea of the Cognos plans before committing to the Cognos solution, this is a necessary step to help regain lost market moment momentum that inevitably occurs during these "we bought them but don't quite own them yet" periods.

But if you dig down a bit further into the first press release, you see that they're really beefing up both the innovation center concept; and with the introduction of the pharma performance solutions, they still have a really comprehensive offering around the discipline of performance management--it's good to see them back in the game and fully engaged.

The Window Dressing Begins...

2007-12-13T12:56:00.000-08:00

News this week from our friends at Cognos that with the closing of the Applix acquisition, they're ready to get going on the rebranding efforts, starting with the names, which take on the "Cognos" front end, while retaining their "Applix" back end.

Frankly admitting that "The products do not currently integrate with the Cognos 8 BI software," and that that work should be done sometime next year, is refreshing. Too often vendors who grow by acquisition try to apply some quick back-end band-aids, which end up fooling no one. And with the enormity of the roadmap exercises facing the big vendors as they try to digest these acquisitions, few would believe that the necessary resources have already been devoted to back-end integration at this piont anyway.

It's been a busy week for our friends up in Ottawa, which we'll continue detailing next...

Personal Performance - O'Neal Goes Golfing As The Ship Goes Down

2007-12-11T14:30:00.000-08:00

The sub-prime mess continues to expand and move the market with everything from today's rate cut and dow drop to the President's bail out plan for home owners. What is interesting is how rarely you get a look into the inner workings of the institution as the tidal wave mounts. In the case of Stan O'Neal and Merril Lynch, it appears as the crisis mounted, he was golfing.

I ran across this article from famed author Michael Lewis (Moneyball, The New New Thing) in Financial Week that gives precious insight into O'Neal's last days at the helm. Between August 12 and September 30th O'Neal played 20 rounds at 4 different courses. You can look it up on the USGA website. While ML was busy losing $8.4B, O'Neal's handicap improved slightly from 10.2 to 9.1. With his expected $160M buy-out, it is a good bet his handicap goes even lower.

The article with commentary from Lewis inside the mind and out on the course is worth the read. I guess personal performance when the chips are down really counts.

Here Comes Another Bubble

2007-12-09T17:50:00.000-08:00

This one's worth a watch... love the "blog, blog, blog, won't you please blog this song" part, so I did.

TWTW, The Count Edition

2007-12-07T13:38:00.000-08:00

10--no, 15 possible trends for BI in 2008 (cue "The Count" laugh)...
ETL--Cadillac, Toyota, or the power windows that are really standard but could be sold separately--discuss amongst yourselves...
Finance, meet IT, IT, Finance--ok, um, wow, this is awkward...
SAP and Microsoft--two great tastes that taste great together!
Why do we think this study was sponsored by the makers of Altoids?
Business Objects and SPSS--two great tastes tha--oh wait, we did that one already.

Well, that will do it for us this week everyone. Two of the three PG's will be getting all gussied up for the big holiday shindig at PG Guy's house tomorrow evening. If a holiday party is in your weekend plans, enjoy the debauchery and remember--lamp shades go best with a plaid or brighter colored sweater.

Lucid Predictions for BI in 2008 and Beyond

2007-12-06T18:57:00.001-08:00

December means holiday sales, all you can eat football, any excuse for a holiday party, and operating plan reviews. Often this includes a look back at the year and a look ahead. Our good friends at LucidEra added their good cheer and prognostication to the BI market with a press release and blog on what is ahead for BI in 2008. According to team Lucid:

1. SaaS BI will gain market traction. (We assumed this based on Lucid's funding round this year)
2. Innovation will be led by smaller vendors (Hmmm)
3. There will be a shift away from tools to pre-built apps (may not be great for Lucid)
4. Applications that integrate data and improve processes across transactional systems will drive the next wave of SaaS (they are on to something here)
5. A new breed of BI channel partner will emerge (or old partners breed new services and offers)

Full credit to LucidEra for having a point of view and sharing it via multiple channels. I would not be surprised to find they are growing, especially via their Salesforce relationship and focus on applications tied to revenue visibility. Every CEO wants to know, "where is my deal?" so this makes all the sense in the world.

However, if prediction 3 is right, it does not bode well for Lucid and small fry. Now that Cognos, Hyperion and Business Objects have all moved their BI platforms and applications to the P/L statements of larger applications providers, the law of the jungle suggests that unless the small guys deliver a discontinuous innovation with high barrier to entry, the large full stack applications vendors will win early and often.

An entertaining rebuttal to the Lucid top 5 was posted by Seth Grimes in his weblog with Intelligent Enterprise. Seth gives Ken Rudin credit for insight, followed by suggesting that his top 5 list was "mighty solipsistic". Ouch. Like Dennis Miller ouch. (Yeah, I didn't either so I looked it up with my friend Merriam.) Not sure this makes Ken Rudin out to be Bill Parcells, but maybe it explains why LucidEra lists itself in their own customer list. Got to say, I don't think I have seen that one before.

Seth then adds his own list of BI prognostications for 2008:

Ever increasing attention to data quality
BI integration of streaming and text-extracted data.
Location intelligence.
Collaborative analytics.
Advances in natural-language query and question-answering capabilities, which will all the same remain far from mature.
The start of attention to data provenance, reliability, and uncertainty

Generally not bad additions, but I don't know that I buy the idea that data quality is any more important next year than it has been over the last 10. Since Seth points out that his list is not exhaustive, I would like to add a couple highlights not covered in either of the above lists.

12. The intersection of business process with business intelligence and performance management. Gartner suggested in their last BI MQ that combining BI with process management was likely to happen this year. It did with Tibco buying Spotfire as we noted here. Both Forrester and Gartner indicate this is a no-brainer, and Ken's item #4 starts to point this direction, but this is by no means limited to SaaS and is much more about process than data.

It is only a matter of time because process management as a market is projected to be a $6B stand alone market by 2010 by IDC, and it is growing at about 25% CAGR. Looks pretty sexy next to the BI growth numbers, however the BI guys don't have a good solution. Oracle has some notion of integration-centric process management, Business Objects has no actual process management capability but SAP is heading in this direction via Netweaver, Cognos relationship with Lombardi is dead, and SAS appears to be doing barney partnerships with a couple vendors while they try to figure it out. It is coming. Write it down.

13. Open source BI is big and getting bigger. See also JasperSoft and Pentaho. What don't you get about free?

14. Simplicity and ease of use. Somebody commented on this in a response to Seth's blog and is right on point. Why can't my BI portal be as sexy as my fantasy football dashboard and reports? It remains my contention that if everyone could customize their applications, dashboards and reports with everything from their favorite sports team to their Second Life avatar, BI usage would skyrocket.

15. Predictive analytics. This crosses into the process management world as well as complex data mining and modeling. Business Objects just announced a partnership with SPSS as we noted here. If predictive analytics can continue to be simplified and broadly available, things will get interesting.

It seems we could discuss further the intersection of the BI and performance management, but rationalization of overlap in the portfolios of the big vendors will happen naturally over time.

Here's to an exciting 2008!

Is ETL still a standalone market?

2007-12-05T07:17:00.000-08:00

With the recent wave of consolidations in the BI and performance management space, there’s one vendor that’s rather glaring in that it’s still a vendor—and not a division of one of the big behemoths—and that’s Informatica. You really do have to give this company credit, with their singular and laser guided focus on one aspect of the BI market—data integration, and all that entails..

While they briefly ventured into the world of analytic applications back in 2003-2004, they eventually abandoned that strategy and refocused both their development, as well as their sales efforts, on the far-less sexy, but all-of-a-sudden far more important aspect of integrating data from any data source, cleaning it up, and getting it ready for use.

It’s a sobering, but often realistic fact of life that when something bad happens, while one group suffers, there’s likely another group that actually benefits—morbid to think about, but part of the world in which we live. We mourn a relative dying, but funeral homes and graveyards actually need people to die to stay in business. Our car breaks down, the tow truck takes Visa; the plane is delayed, the Body Shop in the terminal makes a sale—it happens all around us. Now OK, you’re obviously asking what the F*&% this has to do with data integration. And I’m getting to it. The “bad” compelling event that caused the most suffering in the business community earlier this century was Sarbanes-Oxley. Tons of headaches, additional costs, consultants, filings—all the “stuff” that we didn’t have to do before. But what happened here was that as a result of needing to absolutely ensure that the data was clean and trusted, we then put a premium on companies that could provide us that assurance. Enter vendors like Informatica. See, it was worth it to stay with me right?

So INFA has been chugging along, and was long rumored to be a natural fit for any number of vendors, but particularly Hyperion, SAP, and Cognos, once Business Objects bought Acta (which INFA then sued the very next day for patent infringement and won, albeit a reduced verdict just recently), and IBM bought Ascential. But those acquisitions never came, for reasons we’ll leave to the side for now.

And now that Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, and IBM all have their own flavor of data integration and ETL capabilities, has Informatica missed the boat? Or can they maintain their relevance in a specialty market that’s now an ingrained part of a larger offering? In the “department of unfortunate timing” category, they had recently signed OEM agreements with SAP and Cognos, so were certainly making moves to stay independent and maintain their viability. But now, we need to wait and see what shakes out with the respective product roadmaps that everyone is waiting to see from these vendors before we have a clearer idea of what to expect.

The need for clean, timely, and trusted data is certainly not abating—if anything, it’s more of a need and requirement than ever. But increasingly, the question of whether I need the Cadillac of data integration, or a nice boring Toyota of ETL is one that customers will be asked to answer. And if the Toyota can be offered with the free rustrproofing, sunroof, surround sound speakers, and GPS that vendors like Oracle and MSFT can easily bundle in, might that not be enough for most people.

Or is data integration that important that only a Caddy will do?

The CFO-CIO Partnership in Performance Management

2007-12-04T08:30:00.000-08:00

Much is obviously made of the focus on the line of business (that’s "LOB" for all you performance management insiders) regarding performance management software and applications, and rightly so. After all, most IT pro’s have no idea what planning and budgeting software actually does, much less which product actually fits best for the finance teams, so while they will often act as a primary gatekeeper or “rule out but not in” the preferred vendors, they rarely act as the decision maker, and in fact have often been relegated to a signatory on the PO in the entire process.

But there’s a strong case to be made for allowing the CIO to move up from the back row of chairs against the wall and join the main table at these discussions. For while the CIO is often now reporting to the CFO in the wake of the regulatory and financial scandals of the early 2000’s, they now command a vast array of applications and infrastructure investments that give them a unique and highly desirable perspective on the technology being used within the organization, beyond whether responding to whether they’re an “Oracle or SQL shop.” Let’s discuss just a few of the key reasons for ensuring that you have a strong CFO-CIO partnership in your organizations today as you embrace performance management projects:

First, they can bring invaluable experience and lessons learned from past implementations. Whether it be an SAP or Siebel project, they can point out the pitfalls and lessons learned from what was likely a long and drawn out process, and ensure that in BI and performance management, this time around you don’t make the same mistakes.

Next, they can point out new trends and technologies that they’re seeing their peers use, or that are starting to be adopted, and give you the pro’s and con’s of adopting those technologies yourselves. For business people who are used to a Software as a Service model in many aspects of their lives, SaaS may not be a big deal—but there may be significant IT implications, limitations on how the application can be used or who can access it at any one time—and you need to ensure you’re aware of how a new technology would impact your use cases.

They know ROI. In part because in many cases their past IT projects have often failed to achieve the lofty ROI goals set by the project team at the time of purchase. They know the staff that it requires to implement such products, the hidden fees and resources often required, and the unforeseen pitfalls that may not affect your project directly, but that will impact the broader IT environment, and further complicate their lives, while slowing down your project. While we on the business side often tend to get fairly excited about the potential of the technology, they can give us the straight scoop.

Additionally, they know the products that are making the biggest impact on the market. We’ve all read about the frighteningly short tenures of CIO’s these days, which means that your own CIO has likely been around the block at time or two. This is a good thing for our purposes, because it means they’re likely highly networked and know many of the vendors you’re evaluating from their prior lives. They’re plugged into their own roundtables and networking groups, and they have the off-the-record conversations that senior executives have that will let you know if you’re on the right track with your project. After all, at the end of the day this IS an IT implementation—and their neck is also on the line to ensure that it’s a success. They’ll be the ones to let you know if the product you’re evaluating has had issues elsewhere, and what those issues might be.

Now, there are likely 100 more reasons to ensure that the CIO is part of the discussion as you get ready to fully embrace the promise of performance management, but hopefully these few, if not giving you pause, then perhaps help you ensure that the CIO is at least on the “TO” line of your next project evaluation meeting, and not just a “CC.”

MicroSAP Anyone?

2007-12-04T08:25:00.000-08:00

Posted with limited comment, because this would likely make our heads explode...

Personal Performance - You Just Got to Read This

2007-12-03T22:26:00.001-08:00

So in an effort to discuss performance in all its many facets, Monday brings you an update from the personal performance category - bad kissing means you do not pass go and do not advance to second base. According to the article today in CNN and elsewhere, bad kissing is bad for relationship performance. A recent Gallop study notes that the majority of men use kissing,"as a means to an end -- namely, to gain sexual access." Hmmn, really? Thank you Peter Gammons (the Red Sox are good too)

In other news, the sun rises in the east, the Yankees are likely to spend big in the free agent market, BI vendors will push dashboards, the Patriots win again, and women place more importance on kissing in the relationship.

Stay tuned for other performance developments...or something

Predictive Analytics and Performance Management

2007-12-03T11:25:00.001-08:00

Our friends at Business Objects continue to be busy in putting together their BI and performance management portfolio, as they announce a rather significant OEM agreement with SPSS to embed their data mining and analytics platform within BusinessObjects XI.

Good news all around for customers of both platforms; obviously with SPSS being a smaller player in the statistical and data mining space, there's a lot of (hands clasped before saying this word) "synergy" in bringing these two solutions together. First, the unification of two relatively complimentary technologies against a common foe--in this case, SAS, just as last week it was Abobe and Microsoft was the target.

It's an interesting combination that SAS hasn't been able to completely exploit in the marketplace, the combination of forward-looking, predictive analytic capacilities embedded into the business intelligence and performance management process. But it has some solid capabilities and potential to take performance management solutions up a notch in terms of their sophistication.

And while it's early days, it still does remain to be seen if this actually gets BI and information into the hands of more people, or if it's just a richer analytical environment for the experienced and sophisticated BI and analytics users that are already using the tools. If it doesn't expand the (pardon the pun) "universe" of users for the BI environment, then I'm not convinced that this is much more than a marketing relationship, since the BI sales process and the hard-core analytics sales process hit two different audiences with two different products.

But if they can find a way to embed the anlytics into BI processes, and make BI more process aware to the average user, thereby attracting more folks to the BI environment, then I think we can actually be getting somewhere. But kudos to both groups for seeing the potential of BI and predictive analytics and moving to bring them together in an alternative to the big dog SAS.

LWTW

2007-12-03T11:19:00.000-08:00

With apologies to missing the Friday recap, some worthwhile posts to catch-up on before starting off this week...

This just in, Portals may be the next frontie--wait, didn't someone already say that?
Cognos checks in with the performance guys...
BOBJ and SAP seal the deal...
Adobe and BOBJ seal THEIR deal...

Quick week last week, we'll look to make it up in these next 5 days...

PG's

Portal Wars--The Latest Volley

2007-11-30T06:56:00.001-08:00

Regular PG readers will remember this post from about 10 days or so ago where we talked about the potential future importance of the Portal in determining the BI strategy for many companies. The thinking goes that since so much BI functionality is being put into the portal, and with the increased need to collaborate and work across teams, this "Team BI" concept becomes critically important to how we use BI information as individuals, as well as how we align with our corporate and organizational goals.

So it's not entirely surprising, given this hypothesis, to see Business Objects announce yesterday that they're going to provide a free PIK (or portal integration kits to you BI rubes) from the XI platform and Crystal reporting roducts into the Microsoft SharePoint portal, affectionately known as MOSS (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server--catchy, isn't it?).

This integration is a great attempt to lower the threshold of the potential issue of having different collaboration and BI tools in-house, which is a smart move for both companies--Microsoft, continuing its partnering ways with all BI vendors and platforms, making MOSS a versatile and open portal platform that can work with everyone, and for Business Objects, they get to show their flexibility and independence as well, and can draft behind the momentum of MOSS in the marketplace.

Good times, good times...

All The Cognos News Fit to Print

2007-11-28T13:13:00.000-08:00

The Performance Guys are happy to report that our good friends at Cognos are now reaching out to us directly to keep us informed on all the great things happening with Cognos and IBM. According to the note from Cognos,

"The Performance Guys is a respected business
intelligence site and we’d like to help keep you and your readers
up-to-date on what’s happening at Cognos."

We appreciate the compliment. In the future we hope we can evolve to "highly respected," followed by "industry leading" and potentially over time, "market moving." We are all about performance.

Here are the latest updates from our friends at Cognos.

They have recently been acquired by IBM, press release is here.

Cognos dashboards continue to be good for performance. Whitepaper for download here.

Radio Cognos podcasts here. I confess that I need to interrogate this and report back. Comments welcome. Also need to start working on Performance Guys Radio.

Performance Guys to headline Cognos High Performance roadshow in Tulsa. Link here. Ok, the last one is not official Cognos material, but it could happen. And Tulsa is a beautiful place. The website says so.

We look forward to getting more updates from the Cognos team and commenting as and when appropriate. Or when we get a minute to comment.

In related news, Business Objects acquisition by SAP was approved by the EU. There is no comment as to whether the current unrest and riots in France are related.

Adobe and Business Objects Deepen Their Partnership

2007-11-27T19:55:00.000-08:00

News last week that Adobe and Business Objects continue to work together across multiple fronts, integrating Crystal Xcelsius and other technologies (previously an agreement was signed to align the Adobe process management capabilities) to fight the evildoers up in Redmond.

Adobe has had some great financial results recently and is really on a roll, and there were minor rumblings about them being interested in potentially acquiring Business Objects before SAP stepped in earlier this year. So with that possibility off the table, the two companies continue to find common ground from which to compete against a common enemy.

TWTW, Things We’re Thankful For Edition

2007-11-21T09:36:00.000-08:00

Today we pause to take a break to celebrate that most Ameri, er, NORTH American holidays (which, it must be told, was already celebrated by PG Nic and his ilk last month) by giving thanks for so many things in our little corner of the blogosphere. Here’s just a short list of things we’re thankful for this Thanksgiving…

That we’ve never heard Darren actually sing his BI songs in person…
That we had Business Objects stock at the time of the SAP takeover…
That someone finally bought Longview…
That Microstrategy doesn’t care what you think…
That this guy is out there protecting us…
That we really have never seen a report do THIS before…

And of course, we’re thankful for traffic spikes, repeat visitors, increased cross-posting, more snarky anonymous comments, and most of all, for a lively discussion on all things BI, process, and performance management.

Enjoy the holiday weekend, we’ll be back and ready for a long session on the stairmaster on Monday morning…

Portal Wars—The Future Frontier of BI Dominance?

2007-11-20T17:14:00.000-08:00

As we continue to sift through the coverage of the IBM and Cognos combination and get ready to take a breather for the holidays, we can start to leave the news of the most recent acquisitions in the wake, and focus on the factors that will likely shape the market in the coming years.

One such area where the industry may pivot, surprisingly, is not even in the BI products themselves, but farther upstream, in the portal. As more and more functionality moves into the middleware layer of the IT infrastructure and collaboration becomes easier and more integrated into how we work, (with additions such as process engines to help us along, let’s say), attention is moving to how we access BI in addition to how we use BI (and what BI we actually use).

Several vendors have reported very robust sales for their portal products as the functionality in them improves and more and more content is funneled through this part of the technology stack than in the application layer. And it makes sense for employees. With the personalization and customization that you can do in the portal environment, it’s often times where you start you day. I would completely plead guilty to starting more than one BI demo logging into a dashboard or scorecard and seeing my metrics and goals and confidently stating that “as I log on in the morning, I can see that sales are down” or whatever drivel I would spout. But the truth is that’s a pretty unnatural act for most people. They don’t start the day in a scorecard, they start the day with email, and logging onto the company portal or intranet. Whether it’s company news, useful links, or internal HR information, intranets and portals are the place where most people start out online. And now more and more companies are putting the KPI’s, goals, metrics, and key tasks in their portal so that both individuals and teams can get the most up to date information in the place where they already spend a lot of their time.

This was frankly one of the main reasons why the BI vendors never got the scope or reach they were after in terms of users and seats. The 20% penetration ceiling is due to lots of factors (as we’ve previously discussed here and here), but partly it was due to the fact that they didn’t integrate on a wide scale with the portal technology that had become the corporate standard—i.e. the above vendors.

And since the vast majority of the enterprise customer base now has some combination of Websphere, Netweaver, Fusion, or SharePoint, my sense is that you’re going to see a lot of new features and functionality head here; and once you’re hooked into a portal standard, it’s going to be far easier for the portal vendor to sell you on their other technology that’s already integrated into the portal than it’s going to be to connect another vendor into the portal.

You heard it here—trust the Portal, Luke…

More on Consolidation - Business Objects and Cognos together?

2007-11-20T14:02:00.000-08:00

Interesting comment and prognostication from Rob Preston at Information Week regarding consolidation. While Cognos being consumed by IBM is notable for the size and last tier one vendor to leave, Rob believes there are many more to come, some sooner rather than later as the tier one players - IBM, Oracle, SAP and Microsoft - as well as the tier two players in software - HP, Symantec and CA continue grow. Among the interesting suggestions here:

- SAP would be a great acquisition for IBM. Among the reasons cited was the marriage of applications from SAP to IBM global services. Not mentioned is the perspective $5B+ overlap of BI and EPM applications. Not out of the realm of the possible.

- A mention that Oracle may be running out of big companies to buy, but buying a big services company is unlikely according to Jason Mayward from Credit Suisse Worldwide because "Oracle isn't interested in the relationship business." He said it, I didn't.

- MSFT could still be interested in Yahoo.

- A Joint venture between Salesforce.com and Workday, the SaaS ERP company built by the same great people who brought you PeopleSoft.

I suspect the consolidations will continue and the big will get bigger. What will be interesting is to see the next class of companies who deliver new value and innovation in the shadow of the larger players.

BI and Performance Management Invade OOW!

2007-11-20T08:23:00.000-08:00

Anyone looking for some insights or clues as to how seriously Oracle is taking the BI and performance management market need look only as far as this post from Rittman Mead Consulting, an Oracle centric partner in the area of business intelligence and data warehousing.

Now admittedly a more technically focused review on BI platform and data warehousing functionality than we tend to deal with here at Performance Guys, but in seeing statements like :

..."There were hundreds of business intelligence presentations, with a separate Hyperion stream, dozens of Oracle BI EE talks, BI keynotes and presentations on the new data warehousing and analytic features in the 11g release of the Oracle database. What’s more, all of the main conference keynotes had business intelligence as a major component..."

It doesn't take a genius to see that this is a space that Oracle is just a bit serious about, and with all of its main competitors now fully vested in their own BI strategy, it's a more than impressive opening move to show its customers, developers, CIO's, CFO's, and even CEO's that this is just another part of the IT budget that Oracle wants you to spend with them.

Talent Raid!

2007-11-20T08:12:00.000-08:00

Our old friends at Microstrategy are at it again. Love them or hate them, you have to acknowledge they have a defined marketing strategy that’s very public, very brash, and very much not seeming to care about what other people think. You want earnings guidance? Pshaw. Lower support costs? Give me a break. Conventional marketing? You’re kidding, right?

Their latest gambit focuses on publicly announcing their desire to raid talent from both Business Objects and Cognos at the grown up version of a career day, to be held on November 29th at Microstrategy offices in cities around the world.

If I’m Business Objects or Cognos, do I not just have my senior people stand outside the Microstrategy offices that night to see if I recognize anyone? Or do I not care if my people are going to this company?

Probably the latter I’d suspect—after all, if people want to leave and feel that they have a better opportunity elsewhere, you’ve likely already lost them. Plus, given all the activity around HR and personnel issues these days, if I'm smart I've already had private, 1:1 chats with all my key people to keep them around.

And while I’ve certainly received my fair share of emails and phone calls from friends and former colleagues in the past few months inquiring about potential openings, only Microstrategy would be bold enough to go public with their quest for the best talent. Personally I love the approach. As the saying goes, it's not bragging if you can do it--so let's see who they can peel off.

I'm just thankful on this Thanksgiving week that there's still have a vendor is keeping things interesting!

IT Management as a Performance Management Project

2007-11-19T09:47:00.000-08:00

We here at the Performance Guys are always happy to welcome new points of views to the world of performance management, and our friend Paul Ross begins today to add a new dimension to the discussion around performance in an organization with his first blog entry on IT systems management and its role as an asset in driving organizational performance.

Granted Paul will have a more Microsoft-centric viewpoint on things, but given the fact that he's helping to market a $1B business, I think his viewpoint represents a more than credible voice to how performance management is not just a business issue, but goes to the heart of how an organization thinks about IT--is it just a cost center, or can it be more than that? I think Paul's blog will attempt to prove the latter point.

We can't help but feel a bit like Judge Smales and Danny in Caddyshack in welcoming Paul into the discussion in person, and not just in random anonymous comment postings (not that he would do that, we're just saying...)

Paul's blog is also listed over the right, be sure to visit often and add it to your bookmarks.

The Week That Was, Big Blue Edition...

2007-11-16T16:48:00.000-08:00

A Vote for the Performance Guys is a Vote for Family Values...
Thanks for playing, Cognos...
8 Ball Corner Pocket, Cognos 8--get it? No? Neither do we...
Why does the number 3000 keep sticking with us? Oh yeah, this is why...
So be honest, who rushed the stage in San Diego to get a piece of Pat?
Oh, THERE are all the Cognos articles...

OK folks, that will do it for us this week. A pretty significant one in our little corner of the technology world we think. We need a drink...

Finally, the IBM/Cognos Analysis Begins Rolling In...

2007-11-16T09:34:00.000-08:00

There's been a lot of talk this week about the relatively ho-hum reaction of people around the industry to the news that IBM is acquiring Cognos, thereby completing the consolidation that everyone had been predicting would occur as BI largely ceases to be a standalone category.

Part of the reason is that quite frankly this had been expected for well over a year--I've spoken with people who were working for all the major BI and ERP vendors who have said they were on SWAT teams or on marketing teams preparing for this news back in 2006. It's long been seen as a pretty natural combination, with little product overlap and the ability to seriously extend Cognos' reach through the IBM services group.

The other reason is more my opinion, but I think people used most of their energy around SAP and Business Objects, because of the size of the acquisition, as well as the implication on the industry regarding the independence of Business Objects now that it was a part of SAP. IBM and Cognos don't really have that element of overlap or intrigue--probably due to the fact that it just makes a lot of sense given the consolidation trend.

So while the emails among the competitive teams of all the big vendors have been on fire this week preparing their field teams for the talking points and competitive analysis, the press and analysts have been relatively quiet.

But now we're starting to see the analysis roll in from lots of different sources, most all of it positive:

Rob Ash was apparently golfing when he first took the call from IBM indicating their interest...

David Kirkpatrick from Fortune tells us what the combination means for the industry...

Lee Pender from the MSFT focused Redmond Channel Partner IT magazine tells us all to save ourselves, the end of the BI world is near...

Mary Hayes Weier from Information Week talks to the remaining independent vendors who predictably are still carrying the "Independent BI is still the best" party line...

And finally, Bert Hill of the Ottawa Citizen tells us that "Breaking up is hard to do" and talked dissolution fees should someone else want to enter the picture at this point as well as talking about Rob Ashe's compensation accelerators in the deal...

Performance Guys in the Spotlight

2007-11-13T08:23:00.000-08:00

We here at the Performance Guys are not usually in the business of tooting our collective horns (as our grandmother was fond of saying), but it must be pointed out that our own Performance Guy Pat is on tap to deliver the keynote at the big Shared Insights Business Performance Management Conference this week in San Diego, CA.

Aside for getting the deluxe accomodations that always come with being the head honcho at one of these swanky swank resorts that host these sort of shindigs (the Hotel Del Coronado takes center stage for this particular event), Pat will be sharing both his wit, charm and actually, spot-on knowledge of where the process management market is heading, which, in light of all the acvtivity in the BI space, should make for an interesting speech.

To our multitudes of fans down in San Diego, if you're dried out from the weekend, try to crash the party and go see Pat in action!

3000 Consultants Trained on PerformancePoint?

2007-11-12T13:47:00.000-08:00

So says Eddie Short, a VP at CapGemini, attending the MSFT PerformancePoint Server launch in London a few weeks ago, when asked about his firm's commitment to the Microsoft product. In fact, that's not 3000 consultants in the next 5 years, that's 3000 consultants by the end of THIS year. Gerry Brown, senior analyst at the Bloor Report, picks up the story in this IT Director blog posting.

As we probably all know, consultancies are generally not in the business of taking their talent off the streets for training unless there's a business model that shows that they'll get their investment back in spades. And Cap isn't the only one--the other big SI's are also investing heavily in the new Microsoft offering, albeit a bit more discretely than Mr. Short's organization.

Another data point from which to triangulate here--the price point of PerformancePoint Server. As has been known for over a year, the $200/user, $20k/server price is far, far below what the other vendors typically charge for similar, or even the same technology. And in the last year, many of the competitors to PerformancePoint have been associating price point with sophistication, scalability, and feature function set--the old "you get what you pay for" mantra. The thinking goes that if it only costs that much, there must not be a whole lot in it, or it's just for small and medium sized businesses.

But if it is, when why are there 3000 Cap Gemini consultants soon to be able to implement the product? Cap doesn't "do" 6 day engagements, they do 6 MONTH engagements. So Mr. Jones must see a business opportunity here somewhere...

8 Ball Corner Pocket

2007-11-12T10:14:00.001-08:00

Have you ever played pool against a really good player and wonder where your turn went? The BI market has seen enough moves in the past 18 months to make Fast Eddie Felson shake his head in disbelief. Oh and no, my “8 ball corner pocket” title wasn’t referring to the end of the Cognos 8 product, or was it? Lame BI jokes aside, the one thing this acquisition does do is put IBM in an interesting position to actually be able to provide the technology and truly implement on it with one of the most complete software to services BI solution sets. Services has long been the abandoned love child of BI vendors in the past, as the technology has matured vendors have traditionally looked to partners for implementation services. Over the past 10 years IBM has built strong practices from data warehousing to performance management partnering heavily with BI software vendors like Business Objects and Cognos.

From a technology perspective I’d strongly agree with Guy’s take on the strengths of the big four, IBM will also have a nice marriage of the Cognos BI functionality and their data management technology; master data management and ETL capabilities they acquired from Ascential, in March of 2005. For this performance guy, it was been a exciting to be in the middle of a market while its consolidating so rapidly. As the balls get re-racked and the new players chalk up their cues, it will certainly be interesting to see the new strategies that unfold and the direction.

Finally, the Table is Set

2007-11-12T06:30:00.000-08:00

With IBM's move to acquire Cognos now official, the consolidation once predicted by the sages in the world of industy analysts has finally come to pass. Leaving aside some of the other not-insubstantial players still out there but less like to be acquired (SAS and MSTR come to mind, as they did for BOBJ blogger Timo Elliott), we have a very interesting line-up remaining--vendors with incredibly deep pockets, all having the same customers in one department or other, and each with their own angle from which to advance their vision of BI:

SAP--from the ERP system

IBM--from the database but with one of the strongest implementation arms

ORCL--from the database and ERP/EPM applications

MSFT--from the database and Office

This is of course broadly speaking--there's overlap all over here (Dynamics ERP from MSFT for instance), but as we move to the next generation of BI, it will be interesting to see how each of the vendors are able to exploit their strengths, and their opponents weaknesses, to their advantage. More to come on this deal analysis later!

Counter Point - Absence Management, People Management and Family Values

2007-11-11T20:30:00.000-08:00

Great post by the original performance Guy, last Wednesday discussing the impact of Absence Management and commenting on a recent article in Business Week discussing how employers are fighting the issue of employees playing hooky. This topic is of high interest to many people - both in senior management and at the line level. And the reality is that that the approach endorsed by the Business Week article is completely opposed to the reality that organization performance is a function of people.

For the defense, I submit a great article from Jeffrey Pfeffer in the most recent, and regrettably, last issue of Business 2.0. In his article, "It's time to live up to family values," Pfeffer, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University's school of business, notes that a key issue for employers is the declining birth rate and the reality is that most employers don't practice what they preach in terms of work / life balance. Among the damning stats:

- 86 million Americans do not get a single sick day to care for a sick child
- The US is the only industrialized nation without a policy of paid leave for infant care
- Many employees don't get paid vacations
- The current policy of 12 weeks UNPAID family leave is resisted by many employers
- Many people and organizations would rather have sick people on the job than at home, at the expense of performance and productivity

Pfeffer notes that the over the last decade, companies on Fortune's list of top companies to work for (Fortune is the parent company of the newly departed B2.0) have notably improved work-family benefits. And those companies typically beat benchmarks for shareholder return. While this is not the entire story unto itself, the top line would seem to indicate that being good to employees and their families is good for the stock and good for performance. Is there a better indicator of strong performance management?

On the flip side of the coin, you have companies that focus on performance, not if the employee is in the office or has punched the time clock. A great example of this is Best Buy, also mentioned in the Business Week article, but with little detail. This is unfortunate, and likely due to the fact that their story runs counter to the slant of the article. Best Buy is on the forefront of the concept of performance impact with their concept of ROWE - Results Oriented Work Environment. The net of this is that performance is based on (get this) performance, not hours worked. Best Buy does not care if you are in the office, they only care if you get something done. The concept is covered in Business 2.0's April edition.

According the the article, more than 60% of the Minneapolis' based Best Buy's corporate workforce at the home office is now managed based on ROWE. If you factor out senior executive staff who are measured on things like EPS, the real percentage is even higher. According to the article, implementing a resulted oriented approach as improved productivity by 35%. You heard that right - the team is more than 1/3 more productive when measured based on what they produce, not what time they show up at the office.

According to a spokesperson in the article, the program "has forced managers and employees to be really clear about what needs to be accomplished". This is interesting for a variety of reasons including the revolutionary idea that performance should be judged on well defined goals, not the number of hours worked, whether you were at your desk promptly at 8am, or whether at performance review time your boss happens to like you.

Interestingly, Best Buy is has not only spun off a consulting organization to impart this success to other organizations, they are also experimenting with the ROWE concept for their retail stores. While there are some obvious hurdles, if they achieved 50% of the performance improvement in store that they have achieved at corporate, the results as measured in sales person productivity and by association, same store sales, would be extraordinary.

Also interesting to note that the companies called out as using software to track absenteeism in the BW article include Wal-Mart, whose contributions to performance management include low or no health benefits and locking 3rd shift cleaning employees in store, and Dell, who happens to have restated their earnings and fired their CEO for playing fast and loose with the numbers. If this smacks of a double standard, it should. Or at a minimum, it is reflective of a corporate culture and how performance is managed and incented or not.

In a performance oriented world, always-on world, it is my strong belief that if employers spend half as much time on employee care and incenting performance as they did trying to play defense against the small number of people who abuse the system, we would all be much farther ahead.

The Week That Was, Academia Version...

2007-11-09T14:48:00.000-08:00

Everything you wanted to know about process management in a single blog post...
TMI people, TMI...
Pat gets all Wall Street on us...
Redmond gets its search on...
If a person doesn't show up are they really not there? Hmm...
Marketing? Performance Management? HA that's rich...

That will do it for us this week, thanks everyone for playing, and we'll be back with you bright and early Monday morning!

Cross-Blogging Content Stealing Feaver...Catch It!

2007-11-09T14:21:00.000-08:00

Over at the sassy blog of the stars, Red Slice (now linked over on the right as another blog we here at the Performance Guys highly recommend), Maria brought up a topic that she and I have talked about on several occasions, that being the real impact of marketing on the bottom line. And that got me thinking to the impact of performance management on marketing

To paraphrase the gist of her entry, marketing is often censured when things are not going great, and not given nearly enough credit when they are. And to a certain extent, I suspect that will always be the case, as sales is always going to be as quick to blame when things are bad as they are quick to take the credit when things are good.

Additionally, it's also true that in many cases, the direct impact of marketing, or lack thereof, can be hard to attach to a given sale. Few are the clients who you'll actually get to say "we bought your product because of the nifty ad you ran in the Wall Street Journal last week."

But take marketing away, or cut the budget, and we give sales a convenient (and, truth be told, somewhat true) crutch to complain about the "lack of air cover vs. the competition," or the lack of leads in the pipeline (which, if my father, or perhaps George Castanza's father, were running things, would be solved by a simple "pick up the damn phone and call someone if you want a lead!") But I digress.

The point is that marketing often allows itself to fall into these defensive postures by often times not proving its worth or value to the business. And performance management can play a role in marketing just as it can in finance or operations or HR or any of the other disciplines.

Marketing departments are run by metrics--impressions, clicks, web hits, downloads, attendees, visitors--all these things are great first level KPI's that give us an indication of whether our marketing programs are on track. But they certainly don't tell the entire story or prove worth.

Actually that's in the next level down where you move from leads, to qualified leads, for instance. Was the person just visiting the website, or were they gathering information for a vendor evalutation they're about to do. How many of the webinar attendees have a current project budget? You get the picture.

Ultimately tracing the marketing activity through to the first sales call is a great measure to track marketing success for hi-tech companies, since advertising and brand building is not done on a huge scale. And while marketing can't make the customer actually sign on the dotted line, there are many metrics within everyone's business that give an indication of how well marketing is performing. Tracking these against goals and objectives linked to qualified deals is a sure fire way to ensure that you're getting the biggest bang for your buck on your marketing spend.

The New Science of “Absence Management”

2007-11-07T10:38:00.001-08:00

The adaptability of technology to any variety of performance management causes is limitless, and I recently stumbled upon the latest use of analytics and information to focus on one of the most hidden, yet troublesome areas of cost to companies today, employee absenteeism.

Whereas in the past we would likely get a raspy voicemail from a co-worker or underling informing us that they were too sick to some into the office, today the communication is much less personal when we get an email—we can’t judge the “fakeness” of the message or actually talk to the employee to see if they’re really sick, or just not coming into work. And as people learn how to game the system, it’s becoming more and more of an issue for companies today.

Well leave it to good old American ingenuity—where there’s a problem, there’s a solution, and where there’s a solution, there’s money to be made. Much like factoring companies swooped in to take over aged receivable and loan balances and stepping up collection efforts for manufacturers and banks, now companies are digging into employee absence data to look for trends and information that can help get people back to work and increase worker productivity within the organization. And a new cottage industry focused on the area of “absence management” has sprung up.

As Business Week magazine points out in its latest issue, employers are starting to say “enough’s enough” with employees not showing up. With the cost of absenteeism rising to over $74 Billion in lost wages and time, organizations are trying to pinpoint reasons why employees don’t show up from work, to take the dreaded “corrective action.” That’s where the new absence management vendors spring into action.

There are obviously a lot of different reasons that people don’t come to work, most of them in and of themselves benign and normal. So part of this effort is to find the cheaters and the people who are basically lying about their reasons for not working and take the appropriate action. But a larger effort is to find the reasons “why” people are most calling in sick or taking days off. By pinpointing these issues, companies can then take the corrective action needed to remedy the problem permanently. One example pointed out in the article referred to workers on a team with a boss they loathed. The underlying reason for the elevated absenteeism of people on his team? Quite simply, they didn’t want to work around him. So by analyzing this information and confidentially talking to members of the team, they HR staff was able to pinpoint the problem and take the necessary corrective action and get people back to work.

Which pretty much sums of the promise of performance management!

Better Late Than Never

2007-11-07T05:20:00.000-08:00

Microsoft announced the expansion of their Enterprise Search portfolio yesterday with Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express. Fashionably late to the search party, Search Server 2008 is based on SharePoint and is a downloadable offering that provides secure, powerful enterprise search capabilities – all for free! Anyone can download a release candidate now at http://www.microsoft.com/enterprisesearch, with the final RTM version available in H2 FY08. Microsoft is certainly putting emphasis on how you arrive rather than when you arrive to the party, this fall has been full of enterprise software releases including Unified Communications, PerformancePoint Server, and now Enterprise Search.

Managing Performance - Getting Fired

2007-11-06T15:17:00.000-08:00

So this is an interesting week to talk about performance, especially performance in context of people. More specifically, when performance goes bad, who takes the blame. The last few business days have provided some very high profile examples of senior executives who have lost their heads...

The sub-prime mortgage mess has ended the tenure of Stan O 'Neal at Merrill Lynch, followed shortly by Chuck Prince at Citigroup. Turns out money was not free, as well as ability to manage risk as part of business strategy is critical. Among the things of some interest in this story from a performance point of view:

We now have the answer to, "what does it take to get fired?" According to a recent account in Fortune, in O'Neal's case it is $8.5 billion write-down on sub-prime mortgages. O'Neal is categorized as "having no ability to manage risk". Sounds like a fine bit of understatement. A very hard fall for a well known executive who has graced all the major magazines as a strong leader and strong performer over a long career at ML.
In Prince's case at Citi, the amount currently stands at $3B, a number widely believed to be conservative. The actual story will take some more time to figure out.
The O'Neal story has additional legs for 3 reasons - he is black, so his departure, along with the departure of Richard Parsons at Time Warner, is seen in some quarters as cause for concern. He is expected to leave with a package in the neighborhood of $150M - go big and go home. Finally, he and the board appear to have sent him packing without a succession plan in place. This last is potentially more unbelievable than his exit package. Isn't the corporate governance 101 handbook with chapter on "executive gets hit by bus" part of standard b-school fare?

While I am not equipped to provide a commentary on the state of the mortgage business or the state of CEO pay and packages, these are very clear example of poor performance and being held to accountability. It also points to the importance of people in all things performance. No amount of technology can help people execute on a flawed strategy. More importantly, technology still requires people to build strategy, execute the strategy and be held accountable for the performance of the organization.

What Are We Doing With All This Information?

2007-11-06T04:55:00.000-08:00

As you might know I’m hot down the path of Personal Intelligence, a somewhat ambiguous category that spans into how technology impacts our personal lives. I recently read an article in Wired magazine that puts some proof in the pudding and takes a knock at Google and whether they are helping the problem or creating more of a mess, titled Thanks, Google. You’ve turned me into the most efficient time-waster ever.

At last week’s CFO conference in Chicago (already heavily blogged on by Guy) Erik Brynjolfsson a Professor of Management at MIT Sloan School of Management, commented on how rapidly digital growth is occuring. In the next 13 months alone, the digital information produced will double that of all the previous years recorded, just take a look at The Expanding Digital Universe: A Forecast of Worldwide Information Growth Through 2010 Websites like facebook, myspace, and youtube are good examples of how our lives are becoming filled with new digital content at an alarming rate. The topic Brynjolfsson hit on in a business context was interesting to the PI conversation, as information becomes more abundant the ability to manage, navigate, and prioritize the information becomes scarce. This brings me back to the Wired article that speaks to how productive we are in our daily lives, and whether a portal that manages your stocks, RSS feeds, and online calendar actually makes you more productive. There are some interesting similarities between the business world as Business Intelligence enters a new trend around end user productivity and how the tools and technology provide the information we need to become more productive in our jobs. In the world of Personal Intelligence the same rules seem to apply.

2008 - All About Process Management

2007-11-05T10:24:00.000-08:00

The word of the day is process. The word for 2008 is Process Management. At the most recent Gartner IT Symposium in Orlando, the keynote laid out their 10 strategic technologies for 2008. The strategic technologies were defined as capable of disrupting IT, business or both, requiring strategic investment (Eg: real money), and Gartner is suggesting you don't want to be late or left behind. Check this eweek slide show for the overview. Gartner's top 10.

1. Green IT
2. Unified communications (seems like we have talked about this before)
3. BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT
4. Metadata management
5. Virtualization 2.0
6. Mash-ups and composite applications
7. Web platform and WOA
8. Computing Fabric
9. Real World Web
10. Social Software

Among the things of note is that business process shows up on the top of the software stack as a must have. Maybe this is response to the Moore's Law effect currently happening to analyst BPM forcasts - the size of supposed market doubles every 18 months according to Forrester, IDC and Gartner. Also interesting that Gartner makes reference to starting with process modeling for all classes of users with the idea that complete process management suites are required to bridge the gap between process as a discipline and whatever is happening in IT regarding SOA.

This topic is likely top of mind for many organizations as they look to unlock the next generation of repeatable performance based on process. Watch this space for more details.

The Week That Was, CFO Style...

2007-11-02T15:37:00.000-07:00

Wow, like WOW, what a keynote!
A more, ahem, "analytical," view of the SAP/BOBJ deal...
HELLOOO RESTON WOOOOOOOOOOO--PerformancePoint Continues its world tour...
Pre-Occ-U-Pa-Tion, Pre-Occ-U-Pa-Ay-Shun, it's takingmyeyeofftheball...

That will do it for us this week, putting an APB for Pat, last seen living it up in the lap of luxury in the Tom Douglas Seattle restaurant empire...

GGW

"If We All Have it, How Does it Make Us More Competitive?"

2007-11-02T11:04:00.001-07:00

So continuing my recap from the CFO conference earlier this week, and particularly the keynote presentation from James Dallas of Medtronic...

As the CFO conference started, the moderator flashed some statistics on the screen from a recent study conducted by CFO magazine focusing on a few areas around technology. One of the statistics focused on whether or not CFO's felt that the technology they had in-house gave them a competitive advantage. Approximately 60% of the survey respondents said that they thought that technology "did" give them this advantage.

As Mr. Dallas started his speech, he seemed to question these results--querying the audience and asking them who had ERP, who had CRM, who had BI? And as everyone answered that they did, he asked the $64,000 question: "So if we all have the same technology, if we're all using SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, etc., how does that make us more competitive? We're all using the same products!"

Well that got the room buzzing, and certainly set the tone for the rest of his excellent keynote speech. But something struck me as ringing very true in his statement. If we all have the same technology, how CAN we make it so that we're more competitive and excel ahead of our competition?

The answer for me is crystal clear. You use the product better, smarter, you find ways to make your people more productive and make the technology work for them. In their jobs, in their roles, in their processes. The reason that so many technology projects fail is because we ask our teams and employees to change the way they work to fit the product. What results is a huge spike in usage of the product right after training, followed by the "blue" (if you're typical) or "green" (if you're lucky) ski slope of erosion of usage as people drift away from the product or leave the department, and return to what they were previously using. And the technology hasn't helped anyone.

But by fitting the technology into the way your company works, and focusing on what makes your workers more productive with the same technology that your competition is using, that's where the difference lies between #1 and #2. The game isn't won in the center--everyone has the technology.

No, as Mr. Dallas reminded us so capably, the game is won at the margins--and a focus on making the technology work for you, vs. you working for the technology--that's where the battle is being fought today.

My Culture Will Eat Your Strategy For Lunch...

2007-11-01T11:09:00.000-07:00

While Performance Guy Pat was up closing big business in PG's Guy and Nic's hometown earlier this week, we were both at the CFO Technology Summit in Chicago for the annual conference held by CFO Magazine to tie together finance and IT people and see what happens.

The keynotes are worth a few posts here, as they were very substantial and insightful, particularly right out of the gate, with the CIO of Medtronic, James Dallas, who spoke about the need of IT and Finance to start speaking the same language if they want to truly move the business forward together.

Mr. Dallas started his career in finance, and had a role in an Atlanta-based bank in the cost accounting side of the house when he started getting more involved with IT projects, and thought he could become the conduit between IT and Finance to help them understand each other and where they were both coming from. He's kept to that creed over the years, to the point where he mentioned that the entire IT staff at Medtronic is enrolled in a "finance competency" course (my words, not his), so they can learn "the language of the business." Seems like an excellent idea to me, I wish more groups would go forward with this.

However, one of his slides was particularly insightful in terms of getting these type of finance/IT projects off the ground--and that is, to keep in mind the company culture before imposing new technology on your workers. He took this comment, "My culture will eat your strategy for lunch" from a colleague in his company, who made the comment in response to the proposal of a new stratetic project within the organization.

And while it's humorous, it's also a often overlooked aspect of performance management projects. The technology can look great, do great things, even let you get to the "leading edge" of data access, but if it doesn't fit in with your people, it will fail. We've all seen the surveys and graphs charting new software usage, where it climbs during the pilot phase and peaks the weeks after training, only to fall back down to the 15-20% of the population who regulalry use the product or have an acute need for it.

Mr. Dallas' point is that we need to consider how our people use information to get them through their day--and give them the tools that help them do their job better. In other words, understand the culture of your teams, and make the technology work for how they do their jobs--not the other way around.

Sage advice that we'd all do well to heed as we think about blanketing the world with our respective applications!

Another Angle on the SAP/Business Objects Merger

2007-11-01T10:49:00.000-07:00

So while we've commented a few times (like here, here, and ok, here) on the potential issues behind the impending SAP/Business Objects merger, today on RealMoney.com, writer and investor Vasu Vijayraghavan chimes in with a more financially oriented analysis of the balance sheet fundamentals of both companies, and comes to the conclusion that the deal isn't a great one for SAP shareholders--to the point where she's sold her shares.

Now the Performance Guys are not in the business of touting a specific stock, and we certainly don't pretend to be as educated as the experts in the field. But in contrast to a drive-by "this deal stinks don't do it" type of article, Ms. Vijayraghavan cites some compelling reasons why this isn't good for holders of SAP in her opinion. Some tidbits to support this hypothesis:

#1: Most of the BOBJ current financial metrics are, on the income side, worse than SAP's, with a table full of supporting data contained in article;

#2: Balance sheet and cash position of BOBJ including outstanding liabilities and restricted cash;

#3: Significant increase in total liabilities due to recent acquisitions (up to 38% of total equity from 2% last December, primarily (it would seem) as a result of the Cartesis acquisition, which was the biggest investment the company made this year)

All this, coupled with the decrease in quarterly revenues, has her antennae up. Now Business Objects investors are protected of course, with the offering moving ahead full steam and the stock trading at the offer price.

These facts could be more of any issue, however, when it comes time to derive the "synergies" that SAP investors will be expecting from the acquisition. That's when we'll see if these issues raised are just disparate data points, or precursors to some major restructuring that needs to occur to ensure SAP continues to deliver. To date we've heard nothing from both SAP and Business Objects other than the party line, which is focused on changing very little in the structure of both organizations. However, it will be interesting to see if that stance changes should the underlying financial fundamentals of both companies continue to diverge.

Is SAP Too Preoccupied?

2007-10-30T07:24:00.000-07:00

We've wondered here before that in this Performance Guy's opinion/hypothesis, was Oracle always intending to go after BEA and not Business Objects, forcing SAP's hand and tying them up in a costly and lenthy acquisition and integration process while continuing to encircle them with more competitive technology?

Now news comes that Oracle has added to its performance management portfolio with the announcement of their intent to acquire Interlace Systems, a maker of integrated planning systems, which in large part acts as an extension of sales and operational planning--kind of a "planning for planners" type of approach. This move will further differentiate Oracle's performance management portfolio, and adds a solid extension of planning capabilities that you would expect to be used in sales cycles as soon as the acquisition is closed.

Interestingly, the "SAP may be distracted" angle was just picked up by another blogger we're now linking to on the right hand side here, Tony Baer at www.SandHill.com/opinion. Tony's insights are interesting in that as he looks on the Interlace site, while they have IBM, Oracle, and SAP as partners, the SAP partnership does have prominence over the others, particulalry on the support and certification side vs. what they are doing with Oracle, and he surmises that this may be another acquisition that Oracle has snatched away.

Time will tell, but first BEA, now Interlace, stay tuned for more developments...

PerformancePoint Launch Update

2007-10-26T19:09:00.000-07:00

One more quick one before the end of the week... Alight, it’s time for this Performance guy to do a little bit of tooting his own horn. It’s no secret that PerformancePoint Server has hit the world with a bang, officially releasing in late Sept. I wanted to share some of the special sauce and give a glimpse into how enormous this launch really is. Let’s start with the technology preview program, since Feb 2007 it has had over 10,000 downloads, pretty amazing. Next, let’s talk about press as there has been a tremendous amount of news that has hit the wires in the past few weeks around the launch of PerformancePoint, here’s a small taste:

Richard Pends, OLAP Report, June 27, 2007 “There is now no doubt that Microsoft is deadly serious about taking a very big bite out of the performance management market. PerformancePoint has a scalable architecture, designed with considerable attention to performance, and early customer reports are positive. Indeed, PerformancePoint is reported already to outperform some of the established market-leading products.”

John Hagerty, Market Outlook: Microsoft’s Looming Impact on the Business Intelligence and Performance Management Market) June 27, 2007
“It’s the total Microsoft solution, not just the BI/PM products... While some competitors will dismiss Microsoft products as not scalable or lacking functionality, that assessment is short-sighted.”

And finally lets talk about execution, if you’ve been wondering why this performance guy has been so quiet lately it’s not because Van Halen is back together, although that would have been a good guess. The tour at large is over 50 cities and globally, here’s a flavor for what’s happening in the US alone:

20-Sep New York
9-Oct Chicago
17-Oct Milwaukee
25-Oct Reston
1-Nov Honolulu
6-Nov Pittsburgh
6-Nov Houston
7-Nov Kansas City
7-Nov San Francisco
7-Nov San Diego
7-Nov Seattle
8-Nov Houston
8-Nov Bloomington
9-Nov San Antonio
9-Nov Dallas
13-Nov Omaha
14-Nov Seattle
14-Nov Nashville
14-Nov St Louis
15-Nov Boston
15-Nov Overland Park
27-Nov Downers Grove
28-Nov Madison
28-Nov Des Moines
28-Nov Reston
29-Nov Omaha
4-Dec Columbus

4-Dec Atlanta
6-Dec Cleveland
6-Dec Los Angeles