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..."

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.

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!

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!

Information Week Breaks the Seal...

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.

It Depends on What you Mean by "Infrastructure"

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.

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

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.

And How Would You Like Your Performance Management Served?

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.

Rumor has it...

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...

BI - Is it over that it is Over?

After a week of market gyrations about SAP and Business Objects, not to mention the "he said, he said" Oracle and BEA activity of Friday and into the weekend, you have to wonder if maybe the real news here is that BI is done a category. A little more on that and a couple observations.

I find it somewhat surprising that both Business Objects and SAP have gotten such crappy market response to their announcement of the take over. When you are the smaller guy and get offered the premium that BOBJ got offered by a market leader, you call it a day. And when you need what they got - good BI, great customer base, market share, maintenance revenue, scale - you pay to keep up with Redwood shores. SAP is getting a good company, filling in the gaps in technology (SAP BI was not exactly driving huge growth) and solidify your position to fight another day. You can actually make a pretty strong argument that this is actually a classic SAP tuck in acquisition, just a lot more expensive compared to how they have executed their strategy in the past. Also with some performance management overlap that was already supposed to have been tucked in.

A couple of SAP moves are also smart - stand alone company, send BOBJ a senior executive, etc. However, the "there is no overlap" and "give us time, we don't have all the details worked out", from team SAP clearly does not inspire confidence. You have to believe if Shai Agassi was still running the point, the spin control would have been handled better and you would not have seen the sheer amount of negative stories and stock movement you saw last week. Once again for those scoring at home, it turns out marketing is important in technology.

Maybe the bigger observation, not yet reported, is that this move officially signals the end of BI. The simple postgame here is that Cognos takes great pain to position themselves as the corporate performance management company, SAS institute is all analytics all the time, and Microstrategy is less a company than an ongoing hobby for their CEO. In simple English, when Intelligent Enterprise quotes Howard Dresner, the alleged "father of BI", (now an independent consultant after having been issued his walking papers after Oracle consumed Hyperion) to comment on the transaction, and Pentaho manages to position a point release of their product as making them an enterprise BI player, you have to ask yourself, is this a real category anymore? If someone can actually show me evidence of a true innovation in this category for awhile, I am all ears. (BTW - new delivery channel via SaaS, Microsoft paying more attention, or giving BI away via open source do not qualify). Color me concerned and more than a little skeptical.

Also of interest is Oracle playing with the BEA bunny and BEA swatting back and saying no thanks. Goldman Sachs is running a "process" for BEA to sell to someone other than Oracle - or least to try to find more money. This is both very expensive and ensures that BEA will not close any big deals for anywhere near what they were quoted on the street last week. Also notable that Oracle says they are not buying BEA for their process management capability. This is the former Fuego acquisition that has now been dressed up as Aqualogic BPM. Oracle seems to be willing to spend a lot of $$ on a strong application server and a bunch of other Aqua stuff that nobody buys, so BEA gives it away because it hangs off the application server. Seems expensive, and a nice premium to BEA shareholders, but the market will make its own judgments.

I'll See Your Myth and Raise You One Fallacy...

I had wondered if my earlier post on "The Myth of BI Standardization" would get any takers, and I'm happy that Timo Elliott has stepped up to the plate and made the case that you would expect him to make from one of the market leaders regarding the importance of BI standardization.

Timo's column is well written as usual, but unfortunately, I'm not sure that his own words support his claim. I quote, from the later part of the entry:

"Note that most organizations will never reach their standard, because there are inevitable trade-offs between efficiency and local flexibility -- but heading for a standard is obviously better than accepting chaos."

Which is pretty much my point exactly. With BI capabilities residing in so many places within an organization--on the desktop, in the ERP system, in a BI tool, in a spreadsheet, there is no one system that has all the capabilities that you need to effectively do all your BI in a single environment--so there's no such thing as a "standard" in business intelligence. Of course it's going to be less costly to have fewer tools than more, from an administration, training and education, implementation, customization standpoint; in fact, across a lot of factors. But that's rationalization--not standardization.

I will stipulate that if we want to narrow the scope of the standardization claim to "structured BI tool standardization for business analysts," then yes, there are certainly organizations that "standardize" on a single tool (that is, until they download the pivot table into Excel to do "real" analysis, but I digress). But again, if the BI tool is only one place I go to get the answers to my questions, then being the "standard" is a pyrrhic victory at best--not unlike Farmer Ted and Samantha in the body shop in the movie "Sixteen Candles" as he talks about how he wants to be the coolest Freshman in the class, to which Samantha replies that's that's kind of like being "King of the Dipshits."

Now c'mon, you know I'm by no means calling Business Objects or BI vendors "dipshits"--far from it. My point is that to say you're the BI "standard" is great, but ultimately you're not providing, nor are you able to provide, a full spectrum of information to solve a business problem. So what are you really the standard of?

Actually, the recent Business Objects acquisition of Inxight further proves my point. They too realize that all the information you need is not in the Universe--you need to be able to search text, get to unstructured data, and aggregate information to find a trend and make a more informed decision.

So let's continue the discussion! BI standardization is an admirable goal. But I remain unmoved that it actually exists.

The Need for Lower Cost Business Intelligence

I’m stealing shamelessly from Darren Cunningham in his reference to Colin White’s latest posting on the B-Eye Network (linked over on the right hand side on this page), but hope that I would have run across this article as well, since it’s incredibly timely in terms of the issues being discussed not just on this blog, but amongst analysts, the market, and customers right now.

Colin’s a great source for new ideas and trends he’s seeing in the BI marketplace, and while not breaking any new ground with his assertion that the traditional BI vendors need to watch out for new and disruptive technologies and vendors, it’s instructive to see where he thinks this cost disruption might occur. Here’s my take on what we’re seeing today:

It is coming in technology. New innovations are occurring every day, and processes and data that once were disparate and unconnected are increasingly being cobbled together (at least on the front end) that enable accelerated analysis by end users. The BI vendors are starting to understand that getting beyond their traditional 15% penetration will not come in more features within the same product, but through the ability to work cross products in the manner in which people conduct their daily routines. And technology can lead this charge.

It is coming through new business and pricing models. Colin mentions Microsoft as an example, and it’s true, in areas like performance management, it’s not assured that you need to spend $500k on something that might get you 80% of the way there at a fraction of the cost. But it’s not just MSFT—open source, SaaS and pay-as-you-go, subscriptions—all these business models challenge the norm of the marketplace today and turn traditional licensing models on their heads.

It is coming through new vendors. Ever since I first used Google analytics to power a website, I’ve thought they had the potential to be the BI leader. They already have all the public information catalogued in their search engines; add that to Google desktop, and you’ve probably got the makings of a great BI tool right there. But non-traditional vendors (i.e. not the pure plays, not ERP, etc.) that want in on the potential market opportunity have a great shot at providing the most disruption to the market as it stands today, primarily due to their size and scope. While it may stand that a small vendor with a new business model might catch on fire, it’s just as, if not more likely that some like a Google decides this is a market they can make money on and they come in and start to make havoc.

No matter where you look, it’s definitely coming. It will be interesting to see if the impact continues to be at the fringes of the main BI market, or if one someone or something gets right in the middle of things and changes the mainstream. The coast is clear thus far--all the established leaders are doing well. But it doesn’t take much for things to change, and we’ll be keeping on the front lines of reporting what we see and when we see it.