Getting Lucid With Foreigner

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...

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

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

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

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!

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"

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?

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?

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?

Corporate Help for Planet Earth

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

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

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!

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?

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.

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

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...

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

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...

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!