The Week That Was, Walldorf Edition...

We're starting a new feature here on the Performance Guys to give our passers-by a quick recap of what happened this past week in the world of Performance Management. Off we go with the first addition of TWTW:

The Germans are coming, the Germans are coming!
The acquisition is great news!
The acquisition is horrible news!
What's this "business user" segment you speak of, sir?
Mr. Ashe? I have IBM for you on Line 1...
Could Larry really be that sneaky? NAAHHHHHHH...


Wow, what a week! We'll see you on Monday--

PG's

Did Oracle Just Trump SAP?

An interesting theory I was discussing with Performance Guy Nic this morning regarding the news that Oracle has made an unsolicited bid (now rebuffed) for BEA Systems of about $6.7B. This is not the first time Oracle has gone after its competitor in the middleware market, but with the internal turmoil at BEA right now, and the performance of the stock (not to mention the 13.2% stake held by Carl Icahn), the timing couldn't be better.

Now SAP is really on the defensive here, with so much cash and focus now tied up with a long integration with Business Objects, are they in a position to counter the Oracle bid? Not withstanding other competing bids that are likely to come in for BEA now that there's an offer out there (IBM and HP come to mind), SAP may be left on the outside of this market if they let Oracle win.

Interestingly, what if this was Oracle's plan all along? Everyone knows of Oracle's interest in Business Objects throughout the year; what if they were making noises of varying degrees about being interested again with the intent of baiting SAP to make its move, all the while having no real intention to buy Business Objects, but having BEA as their main goal all along?

They saddle their nemesis with a lengthy and arduous integration and cash commitment, they scoop up a hugely competitive vendor and take over more of the infrastructure play, and SAP is again on the sidelines playing catch-up.

I'm just saying is all...

Does Business Objects Really Help SAP get at the "Business User?"

I've been doing some thinking on this whole concept of the "business user" segment that SAP is using as a rationale for their acquisition of Business Objects.

On the face of it, I get it. SAP is basically saying that their core ERP user has most of the ERP they need, and there's only so many ERP users out there, so in order to double their addressable market, they need to expand beyond their traditional user constituency. Everyone pretty much has an ERP system at this point, it's heavily customized, and organically adding on new functionality doesn't get them their growth targets. So great, let's get more into this new business user segment that shows some promise, which to date has been where their own performance management products have resided.

But do the core Business Objects products really help SAP get closer to the business user? The mantra of the BI vendors for the past 4-5 years (at least) is that their systems help unlock the data and information that business users need (so far so good). But then in the next breath, they say that the potential BI user population is only 20% (or so) penetrated; and they, by their own admission, haven't been able to expand the pie any further themselves with their traditional BI tools. So the very business users they proport to want to help are not using the products today.

So who IS using these tools? Well, we know that IT does; they do a lot of work on the reports, adminsitration, security, and integration of the product. But they're not business users. And if they're doing this for Business Objects, they're doing it already for ERP/SAP as well. So no one new here. We know business analysts do, they're certainly business users; they use the pivot tables, cubes, etc., to analyze the information from the data warehouse and universe and look for trends, etc. But there are relatively few of these analysts in a company today, and they're already likely using their ERP system to get out the data, look at orders, forecasts, maybe even financials. So that's not necessarily a net-new user for SAP either; in fact, like the IT user, they may be already counting this user in their population as well. And even if it is, it's a negligible addition to the potential user population.

Well what about the people for whom all these reports and analysis is created--are they are elusive business user? I'm not sure. Would we say they're' "users?" Perhaps in the technical sense, in that they are "using" the information that IT or the analyst is creating to help them run their business. But they're really not using the BI tool or app, just getting information delivered to them. Are they more likely to use Business Objects or a BI tool now that BOJ is part of SAP than when it was independent--i.e. is this an untapped user population? I just don't think so. They're not attached to BI, they don't care where it comes from, they're fine with what they're already getting (or not, but you get my point). So that's not a net-new segment either.

Which brings us to performance management. Here, I'd argue, is the one place where BI companies have been branching out in recent years to hit the line-of-business person, the business decision maker, the CFO, whoever--the audience that SAP is calling "the business user." Cognos led the charge with its performance management initiatives 5 years ago, and everyone else has been playing catch up since them. Including Business Objects. And SAP.

So if this is really where they see the best opportunity to grow into a new segment, someone who will not produce data for others, not just get a report in their inbox, but actually run their business through the BI tools and applications, then I agree, this is where we find a business user.

But isn't this precisely where SAP has already invested, acquired, begun integration, and has almost a 100% product overlap with Business Objects? The BOBJ performance management customer base is pretty small (relative to their BI customer base). So SAP is not getting access to a new built-in business user customer segment that helps them expand the pie. Additionally, the SAP performance management product line-up is already on the way to being integrated into the SAP architecture. So how does adding the only applications really "used" by a business user to a portfolio that already has them (and good ones at that) actually expand the pie? Won't the "business user" product portfolio basically look the same as it does today once integration is completed?

Now please don't misread this as sour grapes on the acquisition or naivity in terms of thinking that this acquisition won't work. To the contrary, SAP was far from successful at weaning itself from the Crystal environment, and SAP users will certainly benefit from the great tools and apps that Business Objects wil provide. I get that part, and I think that SAP shops will have great tools at their disposal.

But saying that BI is for business users flies in the face of the core buying audience and users of Business Objects BI products today. They're selling to IT; IT is the main user, not a business person. The business person is mainly a consumer. The main business users are in the field of performance management, which SAP was already well on the way to doing on its own.

So how is that an expansion?

Was the Object to Buy or to Sell?

Oh yes, some very big news in the BI industry this past weekend as software giant SAP announced the intent to acquire BI company Business Objects. Finally the rumors have been put to rest and we can go on with our work, well some of us can. Being a former employee of both the Crystal Decisions and Business Objects there are likely a lot of people who are wondering the same, what will SAP do with Business Objects? Much of that is yet to be seen as SAP is typically not known for making large acquisitions. But what I wanted to cover in this post is not the ‘what’ but the ‘why’.

Many folks around the industry are scratching their heads about this acquisition, a few years ago it would have made a lot more sense for SAP as they partnered heavily with the software company to complete a BI offering that they couldn’t offer customer. Crystal Reports played heavily into the SAP offering to allow customers to leverage data within R3. But over the past few years the relationship has fallen to the wayside as SAP has become more aggressive in the space, releasing a host of BI applications and driving the premise of BI and business process with the extension of their Net Weaver platform. Not to mention the amount of technology overlap when you through in OutlookSoft, Cartesis, ALG, and SRC planning and budgeting technologies into the mix.

So the $7 Billion announcement might not be all good gravy on this past Canadian Thanksgiving holiday weekend but the acquisition does add a significant amount of power from a territory standpoint. SAP effectively puts a stamp on owning Europe in the enterprise software space. Throw in the recent acquisition of Cartesis by Business Objects and you certainly start to get the feeling we are back in the Roman empire. This is great news for customers, as the market consolidates they will be able to take advantage of more affordable software and simply deal with fewer companies.

If we take a minute to think about the cause and effect much of the cause of the this acquisition, from the initial onset it would appear this is clearly a move that allows SAP to add to their solution portfolio to become more competitive against Oracle. This makes sense, especially when you consider Business Objects has announced that they will continue their heterogeneous strategy allowing SAP to get their tentacles into customers where they wouldn’t normally be, ie. a Trojan horse on steroids. But before we jump to the obvious could there be other factors at work here, could this acquisition be more about Business Objects wanting to be sold than SAP wanting to drop $7 Billion on a ton of overlapping technology. The move was a significant one, but simply another piece of a puzzle that has been developing for the past 7 years.

A short history

Let’s take a step back in time and remember the young budding software company with a vision for reporting. In the year 2001, it was Crystal Decisions who was quickly climbing the software ladder, growing nearly 30% year over year, when in 2003 came the announcement of a product called Reporting Services by Microsoft. Although the marketing teams refused to admit it, this announcement effectively ended the reporting business, it was time to get out and in the months to follow another acquisition occurs, the acquisition of Crystal Decisions by Business Objects. Although there are many other factors that likely came into play, at the end of the day it’s the age old by low and sell high by the team of SilverLake investors which drove the eventual sale of the Crystal Reports maker. Over the next few years Business Objects worked diligently to integrate the Crystal technology and add technical components to their BI story, technologies covering areas of data management, and performance management. On the other side of the spectrum, SAP continued to watch another major player, Oracle, continue enhance their ERP portfolio with acquisitions of Siebel and PeopleSoft and a number of industry specific apps. Then came another announcement from Microsoft of a little product called PerformancePoint, stamping a seal on Microsoft’s entry into the BI space, following this announcement was a flurry of technology acquisitions of BI and performance management companies, by just reading the last few months of blogs on this site you can get a flavor for how hot the market has been.

I’m not saying that Microsoft is the only reason the board at Business Objects decided to cash in on their investment but again it comes back to buy low and sell high. As the BI market continues to become a commodity how can companies like Business Objects and Cognos continue to compete, eventually all good times must come to an end. It has been very interesting for this performance guy to be part of the ride and see how things have unfolded. There are only a few more pieces in this BI puzzle to be completed, look for a Congos acquisition to follow in the next few months, likely by Oracle or IBM.

The "Business User" Segment

As the news of the SAP acquisition of Business Objects continues to filter in, one term, new to this Performance Guy, keeps popping up throughout the articles and press conference today--the "Business User." It seems to be a new term to the analysts that follow SAP as well, representing a 3rd-wheel of strategy that is more acquisition friendly for SAP than their core businesses. It's in this third area that SAP apparently intends to continue to branch out with other acquisitions and new technologies (OutlookSoft for instance), and Business Objects is likely to be the cornerstone of this strategy moving forward.

We'll discuss this issue more as the transaction unfolds, but there are some early prevailing thoughts on how this term came to be used: first, it might be something SAP just made up to justify the size of the acquisition of BOBJ--i.e., we can't say this is ERP, let's create a new category--hey Business Objects, who's your main customer? The business user? Great, let's call the new category that." Or, it may signal a big strategic shift for SAP whereby they continue to acquire new technologies under this umbrella and use this part of their company as an incubation area for higher growth IT products (BOBJ's earnings miss not withstanding). Or third, perhaps they created it to allow the illusion of independence for BOBJ customers, most of which are using something "other" than SAP, and upon which the company's "BI needs to be source independent" mantra has been based. By showing themselves as off to the side of the core SAP businesses, perhaps this allows Oracle, Microsoft, and IBM customers to feel more calm about using Business Objects in the future.

Whatever their reason (perhaps it's a combination of all three in some form), it will be interesting to see how it plays out in the course of the next several quarters!

Well THAT Didn't Take Long

News breaking that the hammer has finally dropped on the long rumored SAP/Business Objects takeover, with the announcement of the $6.8B deal today. Even though this possibility has been talked about for months, it's still somewhat of a surprise to see the news, as well as the amount of the transaction, which is quite a premium for BOBJ stockholders.

Other releases out talk about little restructuring at the outset, and of some of the senior management appointments, particular about Bernard Liautaud and John Schwarz on the SAP Executive Committee. Additionally, SAP will operate Business Objects as a "stand alone" entity, which makes sense since most BOBJ customers utilize both SQL Server as well as Oracle as their database infrastructure.

On the performance management side of the world, things are super messy. Both companies are right in the middle of integration of previous acquisitions (SAP of Pilot and OutlookSoft, Business Objects of Cartesis), and now there really IS a lot of overlapping technology there, particularly on the planning side of things.

We'll dig into this more in the coming days, but it doesn't get any bigger than this. Which is actually good timing for this minor little press release also out today on Business Objects missing their number this past quarter--bye for now!

Friday Deep Thoughts

Friday is supposed to be the day when you catch up on email for the week, make calls to the people you missed or avoided during the week, maybe update your blog, and occasionally even take stock of your performance strategy...read the reports in your email, drop from your dashboard to do ad-hoc analysis, bother finance to explain why they have not approved or paid whatever was already approved and supposed to be paid. Friday is also the time to review the gaps in your performance strategy and what to do about it. To that end, a couple of musing to consider from the cheap seats.

The rise of Dynamic Applications
This is Forrester's new term that encompasses their view about the next generation of business applications that are "designed for people, and built to change." While the internal camps at Forrester are not aligned on this position, their entire technology leadership conference last week was built to the theme and exceed expectations for attendance. If you want the snapshot, check out Sandy Kemsley's overview for Intelligent Enterprise of Connie Moore's keynote here.

The net is that Forrester talks about the intersection of process management (BPM - the real one), business rules, Business activity monitoring (BAM) and information workplace. In real life, both the conference and reality of this approach is all about rapid development of business solutions. This is process management with customized interfaces. The top tier of BPM vendors already have all this capability in their product. Bolt on to Windows, add a mash-up, customize and you are off to the races. Did I mention it works with the stuff you own like ERP and CRM? The insight here is that you can and should be able to build something specific to your business needs quickly, make sure the interface does not suck, and be able to use it to operate your business. Sounds like what all the tech folks have been talking about for years may finally have arrived.

Look mom, we do SaaS too. Or, I will see your acronym and raise you one
In the same week in late September on opposite coasts, Salesforce.com and SAP roll out the NEW future of applications and platform on demand. Coincidence? I think not. In the red corner, the always allegedly revolutionary team Benioff rolled Force.com, to be an on-demand platform for application development. This was accompanied by a George Lucas sighting, which always gets a certain segment of the tech community (namely those with storm trooper outfits and action figure collections) especially hot and bothered. They also added in new whizzy "build your own interface" capability called Visual Force. The fully quote compliant Benioff referred to SAP as "innovation free". Score one point for team, "no software, but we are introducing an on-demand platform to build applications and yet another new branding scheme".

In the blue corner, team SAP introduced new SaaS Business By Design, which was formerly code named A1S at Hassofest and early press and AR briefings. Among the things of interest here is that Deputy CEO Leo Apotheker taking direct shots at Salesforce in public and comparing SAP's SaaS offer to a three star meal and Salesforce to hors d'oeuvres. So SAP is full course menu and Salesforce is pushing pigs in a blanket?

Apotheker in eWeek:

"Our attempt is to get rid of all the acronyms. Businesses don't buy acroymns, they buy process flow, a business model...we provide a complete suite - lock, stock and barrel."

Among the things to consider here; if SAP is Business By Design is 3 star, what does that imply about all the other things in their offering? Are they going jargon free? What do they actually do about process? Why are people calling it B2D? I thought we were done with acronyms. At least the blue squad now has someone else prepared to talk trash, a capability missing since Shai Agassi decide clean cars, clean energy and venture money were more fun than software. Check Shai's blog to get an update on animal life and family vacation in the Galapagos.

Performance Management - Got Game?
Think you have the skills to lead a global organization and take control of a leading brand? If so, try your hand running McDonald's here. While there is an obvious political slant to the game, the are also some obvious real world realities to consider in management of this sort of global operation. Don't be surprised if you don't win the first time you play. Or at all. You aren't supposed to win.

Have a good weekend.

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.

Process is the New BI

Is BI growing up, getting paid up, or maybe just getting passed up? Depends on who you ask, and what seat they occupy. At a minimum, there is activity on all fronts.

BI is all grows up? You know you are a full adult when Microsoft decides you are a real market. All the cycles around Performance Point signal that the Redmond death star is now fully operational and now focused on market share. If you have a market cap like MSFT, everyone not named you in any chosen category has a market cap the size of the resistance organization. They are big, but nobody seems to be going home. In fact, there are multiple pockets of resistance. Do not be surprised if the Redmond BI team enlists the Master Chief, available tomorrow, to counter the resistance. Can't wait to get in on the road show. Other notes of interest...

Item #1, the fact that the upstart is getting press in your father's newspaper. On demand BI with LucidEra is validated in the Wall Street Journal Technology section. Check this article that talks about the value of BI and mentions Cognos, Business Objects and LucidEra. Note to LucidEra - forward the article back to VCs that funded the new round and declare mission accomplished. New money to fund marketing, new WSJ article. You do the math. It took Business Objects about 10 years to get in the Journal. Guess the new guys are on to something.

Item #2. Business Objects and Goldman - Let's make a deal. Are they for sale? If you ask executives at the company, probably not. At least not publicly. However, when someone shows up with an offer, you either take it, or your hire a firm to conduct a process. Just because nobody is shopping does not mean nobody is buying. Do not be surprised if they get bought. By the same token, do not be surprised if nothing happens. I heard a couple times last year that multiple people had it on good authority that Oracle tried to buy BOBJ when the stock was trading in the low 30s. I heard that got punted when Business Objects said the price started at $40 per share. Looks like a good position, especially considering the current cycles. This could go either way this year.

Item #3. Unsolicited offer for SAS. My understanding from a good source is that a player that matters showed up with an offer. The response back from SAS was, "Bidding starts at $20 Billion." $20 Billion?!? 10X+ trailing twelve month revenues? Goodnight indeed. If you spend 20 years building the company in your own image, hold the controlling shares, and live in a hot market, would you sell? File this one under the simulation scenarios you wish you had. My money is on team North Carolina holding firm and staying private.

Item #4. Forrester reminds people that BI needs to get actionable and mentions TIBCO as a thought leader. You have that right, TIBCO runs BI. Boris Evelson and Colin Teubner from Forrester put out a report last week titled, From BPM to Optimization. The subtitle notes that while "BI vendors fiddle while TIBCO burnishes its BPM offering with Spotfire." This is essentially like calling out BI vendors as unfit to parent, much like Brittany Spears. This makes TIBCO out to be K-FED. Nobody has seen them parent, but sometimes proximity wins you points by association. I happened to speak to someone in product management last week from Cognos who indicated that Spotfire was last seen on the street about 20 seconds before TIBCO purchased them. This makes them an excellent candidate for Cold Case, assuming anyone was interested and wanted to tune in to another Law and Order knock off on visualization and analytics purchased by a platform wanna be. Which begs the question, do BPM analysts at Forrester not get BI inquiries, so believe their own press? Or, is the BI market turning into process management market and the BI players are asleep at the switch? Note to Ottawa, Cary and San Jose - check your dashboards!

Regardless of how you score, BI is hot. Looks like we are in for an exciting end of year finish.

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.

Where is the Biggest BI Opportunity?

With so many companies and products talking about business intelligence and performance management these days, it's hard to differentiate the key target audiences and markets for which the tools and applications are aimed. And while it's possible to have mutliple uses of tools for many different types of issues and people, tools are generally made to solve a specific business problem or technology need.

In triangulating the results from a couple of reports just out from two leading analyst firms, we can get a fairly clear picture of the size of the BI market as it exists today by product type, year over year growth for these categories , and total % of the BI spend. Let's take a look at some of the key areas of growth and opportunity, with the disclaimer up front that as with most problems looking for a BI solution, your numbers may vary...

Biggest categories: There are three that are pretty close in size when you aggregate the numbers--BI tools (including query, reporting, and analysis), dashboards and scorecards, and planning, budgeting, and forecasting. All three are a +$1B market right now. Categories like analytic applictions and data infrastructure are north of $750M, and other categories are smaller.

Biggest growth: In the studies, the categories listed as those with the biggest growth, in order, where analytic applications, followed by dashboards and scorecards, then BI tools. Data infrastructure was almost flat, as was the planning category.

Biggest 2007 % spend: The BI tools category was the only category >25% growth. Dashboards were just under 25%, and data infrastructure and planning were in the high teens in terms of their growth rates.

So putting this infomation all together doesn't tell us a single product that will be the one to carry the day in the coming years, but does give some color in terms of where we might expect new products, new acquisitions, and new feature prioritization from the vendors. Again, this is only a snapshot, but a useful one given the detailed field level data collected by these two firms.

What jumps out: The flatlining of the planning and budgeting market, for one. With all the performance management acquisitions this year, one might expect that category to be growing like a weed. Instead it's less than 2% growth in these studies, although a solid 17% percent of the 2007 spend.

What this means: Not a lot of movement in terms of vendor replacements likely on the horizon. Companies may be satisfied with what they have, and may be spending money to upgrade their current implementation, but not to rip out and start all over. Which means a dogfight for bigger deals since they may be fewer and farther in between.

What else jumps out: Dashboards and scorecards continue to roll. For a category that is seemingly now a "commodity" and being relegated to the platform level feature set of some BI vendors, there sure does seem to be a good market for these products. It's the 2nd biggest slice of the BI market pie, has the 2nd highest growth rate (4.5%) next to analytic apps in the market, who are growing faster but on a smaller base; and has the 2nd biggest spend this year next to BI tools. Microsoft must be salivating at these facts--wonder how many companies are using SQL Server and looking for a front-end dashboard solution right now...

What this means: Look for new features and fuctionality from all the major vendors on this front in coming releases. Business Objects recently talked about an initiative with Accenture around Objectives Management, which is a role-based scorecard; Cognos continues to upgrade Metrics Manager, and even the on-demand guys are getting into the picture on this front, not to mention the boys up in Redmond. So all in all, great news for customers out there, there will be lots of options to choose from.

Other miscellanee-i: BI tools is still the king--biggest slice of the market, biggest spend this year. See previous post on standardization myths--I'd submit we're not near the mid-point of the BI revolution. There's a great market to make better sense of the information out there, and even as the big guys contract and merge, like every market, there are new and exciting offerings from companies like LucidEra, Pentaho, QlikTek, Adaptive Planning, and many others, that continue to fill in the gaps--Free markets win again!

Stay away from: Nothing really--no red flags in the studies, which is good news for our blog, and OK, the industry I guess if you want to be all magnanimous and all.

They Myth of BI Standardization

BI standardization is a topic that vendors have been pushing on their customers for years. There are no shortage of press releases, case studies, and customer references that talk about X company "standardizing" on "so and so's" BI platform. And from a vendor perspective, it's a good course to take. Everyone wants to become the standard. It's the corner square, the top of the hill, and and defensible position whereby you get to dictate the other technology that your product interacts with in the client IT environment. The nirvana catch-phrase of "we can't use them, they're not the standard" is the dream of every vendor who attains such lofty status, and the big 7-figure deals that BI and EPM companies tout in their quarterly calls are often predicated on the issue of "standardization."

The only problem is that it's not true.

At least not in the way that the vendors would have you believe it to be true. And we all know it. First, just look at the customer logs of all the big vendors. If company X was the standard, with 85% of the Fortune 500, wouldn't it stand that company Y could only say they had 15% of the same list at most? Why then is it that every vendor counts 7 out of the Top 10 pharmaceutical companies, the top 30 retailers, the largest of the global 1000--whatever your measure--amongst their customer base? It's because there is no standard. It's all about departmentalization.

Truth be told (I've always wanted to type that phrase), there are actually very few mainstream technology "standards" in companies today. Microsoft Office is one--or more broadly--Windows. But even there the free-apps crowd is starting to encroach in a few organizations. Still, let's give Redmond that one. ERP as a standard gets muddled when you've standardized, say on SAP, only to acquire a company running Lawson that's so customized that your SAP system can't do the things this other system does, so you keep that system and interface it to SAP. Is SAP still the standard? Maybe. But I think you get the point. Bigger companies have multiple ERP systems in play. Sure, SAP may be the "standard," but they're paying maintenance to three other vendors as well. The pure-play BI vendors for years have feasted on "heterogeneous" environments, data sources, etc. as the arbiter of all data. "Sure, you can have as many data sources as you want," they'll say, "but you need one BI standard if you REALLY want to get the benefit from business intelligence or performance management. So use us."

But do we actually need a BI standard?

The oft unspoken truth is that the bulk of the deals done by BI vendors are at the individual, or even departmental level, and they'll likely stay that way. Even the "global accounts" teams in these companies are usually in with only part of the account, or at most a few business units or geographies. GE for example, owns every product under the sun in their organization, and yet multiple vendors tout "standardization" by GE on their products left and right.

And we know why they all do it--it's for credibility. If you can say that "GE" has standardized on your products (vs. the competition), and people look at GE as a company they'd like to emulate, then that may be worth something in a sales cycle. There's just one problem--it's not true, and more importantly, it shouldn't be.

Here's why. Just like the iconic Apple 1984 ads that have evolved over time to encourage us all to "think different," the needs and uses and sources for information that people use to make decisions and solve business problems are not and cannot hope to be addressed by one tool or set of applications. There are too many use cases, too many data sources, too many new ways to use and share and analyze the myriad of information that bombards a typical worker on a daily basis. Do we really think that a typical project manager is going to use just structured report data to address all the issues they have in front of them? Are we to expect that everyone will access the same universe and metadata to query the database and get the answers to the questions in front of them? It's just not going to happen.

And why is that? Well, usability for one. Say I have to put together an analysis of the potential revenue associated with a new product launch. Now accessing my "standardized" BI tool for historical reports and forecasts is one place I'd go for information. But what about information that's not in that system? Past launch plans. Ad hoc analysis on a spreadsheet. Third party research data. Am I going to use the same BI tool to get this information? Probably not. First, the tool doesn't support getting me that kind of data. And second, even if it could, it would have to be a highly customized pre-set query that would let me get just what I need (not to mention helli-smart to know where to get it within the vast wasteland of both my hard drive and the company network).

So what do I to do get all the information I need? I use not just the reports from my BI system, but also things like spreadsheets, business process tools, files on the share drive, IDC or AC Nielsen data--whatever I need to accumulate enough information to put the plan together and send it around for review.

And all these tools also comprise my business intelligence environment.

As a manager, I WANT my people using all the available data and tools at their disposal to help make the right decision. The thing is, is that all the available data is not just in the tool we've "standardized" on, it's in a lot of places, and I'm likely to use not just a report I build from the BI system, but a lot of different BI tools in order to come to my conclusions. That's hardly standardization, and yet, that's the reality of business today. The goal of "business intelligence" is to help people make better decisions with the information at hand. But there's no one "standard" for how that should be done. There are lots of them. And they're going to be different based on how I work individually, how my team works, our industry, our company size, our technology model--all of which could be wholly different than the person and the team on the floor above me.

So when you see the next press release come out, the next huge client that's "standardized" on one product or another, keep in mind that they've done no such thing. They may be "officially" declaring that they'll use only that BI tool vs. any others, but there will always be a multitude of tools and applications at their disposal to ensure that their people solve the problem in the fastest way possible. That's when you see business intelligence achieving its promise. And as our close friend Martha Stewart* would no doubt say, "that's a good thing."

*This statement is a lie. We don't know Ms. Stewart and hope she doesn't sue us for stealing her catchphrase.

“The Five Possible Suitors”

So by now everyone has heard about the now infamous “Le Figaro Leak” from over the weekend, where some enterprising young reporter/disgruntled employee/cash poor intern, whoever—got hold of news that Business Objects has retained Goldman Sachs to help them find a buyer.

Couple of important markers to tell you this has some legs to it—first, multiple emails going out to employees to not discuss the matter externally, or even with each other. The old “loose lips sink ships” mantra is in full force in the halls of San Jose and Paris. Second, however, no statements of outrage, denial, or any sort of righteous indignation came out yesterday, and with the crack PR staff of Hill and Knowlton on speed dial over there, one would think that something would have been said to squash the rumors before they gained legs. So lets assume that there’s some smoke here.

Importantly, this smoke is really not new. For months before Oracle acquired Hyperion, there were rumors that an announcement was imminent—the “safe” room had been set up, documents were being exchanged—it just came down to a price issue. Now whether or not that’s the truth, I have absolutely no idea, but the point is that amongst the employees, they’ve been down this road once already this year.

Marketwatch mentions five possible suitors for the company, and since none of the Performance Guys work at Business Objects at this point in time, and all my options have cleared, let’s look into our EPM Magic 8-ball and see who might be contacted to see if there’s an “expression of interest” on their part…

SAP: “Outlook seems clear.” This is the one “name” that’s out there in terms of who would likely be most interested. Becoming more acquisition-friendly with recent purchases of Pilot and OutlookSoft, but far less of a partner and far more of a competitor to Business Objects in recent years. Also, OutlookSoft acquisition is a direct overlap to BOBJ Cartesis/SRC/ALG acquisitions—so do they take it for the BI side? Two European companies—might be easier to bring together culturally—wait what am I saying—SAP and culture? Sorry about that…

HP: “Intriguing—hadn’t thought of them, wait to shake again.” They have been making noise for some time about getting into the BI space, and with the business humming along all fronts, this would be a bold move in an area in which they have little experience or mind share. However, they have the deep pockets, and as the server and printer businesses continue to mature, the higher-growth apps business may beckon, and this may be an easy, less threatening way to get into the game. Local as well with the San Jose/American side of Business Objects, would afford good integration at the corporate level.

IBM: “Maybe, but not sure this works for them, hold still a minute. Yep, makes sense.” They keep making inroads into the BI space with EIM and ETL acquisitions, but also have deep partnerships with Cognos and others that would be sacrificed to bet everything on Business Objects. Great services opportunity for Big Blue (are we still allowed to call them that?) here, and if they want to make a play against the big apps vendors, this would certainly be that stake in the ground. Culturally, way different than Business Objects, but it would be an easy integration for most of the product line. The key is the services arm—do they want an exclusive with one vendor?

Adobe: “Just how hard are you shaking me?” Just announced stellar earnings, doing more with Business Objects, have a contrary technology to Microsoft around documents and reports, have the #1 product in Acrobat around document sharing—what’s not to like here? The companies are reportedly working on an announcement around business process management, might this be a precursor to something bigger? This is an intriguing combination, one that will require further watching...

Oracle: “Are you insane?—shake again.” As mentioned above, this was the assumption earlier in the year before the Hyperion announcement, and in the words of O.J., “if they did it,” they’d likely be doing it for the BI and EIM business, not the EPM business which is now well served by Hyperion. Boy talk about technology overlaps—but—to keep it out of SAP’s hands, might that be enough of a carrot for the Oracle folks to grab onto?

How Lucid is the Business Objects On-Demand Strategy?

With apologies to our friend/choreographer Darren Cunningham, still on a roll over at the Lucid Era blog, his world just got a whole lot more interesting today with the announcement by Business Objects that yes, they really ARE serious about On-Demand business intelligence, and dammit they’ve got the hoppin after-party to prove it!

After some small foray’s into the on-demand market through crystalreports.com and the purchase of their FIRST “Insight” named company, the company had gone largely dark in terms of its strategy and direction in this area. Mysterious blog entries by internal luminaries like Timo Elliott told us something was up, since Timo tends to be somewhat of an Oracle on these things, as the company’s semi-official blogmaster (so look for his next posting on how cool SAP, IBM, HP, and Adobe would be to work for at “some point” of his career given today’s “other” news…).

The Business Objects strategy is both sound and comprehensive, and includes some sizzle as well, with the introduction of their external “Information OnDemand” site, which allows users to buy or rent access to prepackaged industry information that can be used in a dashboard to facilitate analysis with internal data.

But sizzle aside, by partnering with “The end of software” leader salesforce.com, and using as its tagline “BI with no servers and no software,” they are clearly going to continue to pay attention to this space and may roll out future offerings tied to other parts of the business, like performance management and analysis to end up with a parallel product offering of license and on-demand offerings.

One key will be pricing. This represents a miniscule portion of the Business Objects revenue. Will they be competitive with companies like Lucid Era and Adaptive Planning? Do they need to be? Do they just want more customers? Another key will be the friction of the revenue model from 600+ sales people who want big license deals. When it gets to, say, mid-September with two weeks to go, will they steer the customer towards the annuity payments, or the big up-front license costs? Just two of probably 102 questions that the on-demand vendors will have as FUD in the coming weeks.

In any case, I think I have the song that Darren might want to parody next—“Don’t you want me baby?”

BI Virtual Appliance

An notable announcement was made in the BI space yesterday as Business Objects introduced its first BI virtual appliance, a flexible and high-value solution designed to radically change how companies evaluate, deploy and manage their business intelligence solutions, making it even faster and easier to transform their businesses through intelligent information. The company is leveraging its relationship with VMware to offer the virtual BI appliance, which is planned to be available in the VMware Virtual Appliance Marketplace, as well as directly from Business Objects. This solution could be seen as a step in the direction of on-demand software as this solution delivers a pre-installed and pre-configured solution that dramatically reduces installation, configuration, and deployment time. The other foot is firmly rooted on providing the lowering the total cost of ownership, the virtual appliance is an interesting way to offer more flexibility to the customers BI purchase. This is certainly a trend we could continue to see as the strong growth of the virtualization market continues, just take a look at the last 30 days of stock performance by VMware, Jim Cramer must be screaming “Buo-Yah” somewhere.

Cognos stays on offense

Someone or something seems to have lit a fire under Cognos in the past month or so. Word on the street (and in this blog, truth be told), was that they were starting to get passed by in the performance management and BI market by the aggressive moves of Business Objects, as well as SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft. Even in analyst notes, the sense was that Cognos was getting left behind while others were charging forward, whether it be with new branding, new acquisitions, or catchy new Flight of the Conchord's song parodies...

But clearly this is not the case. On the heels of a huge BI win with Nestle' , as well as the announcement of the Applix acquisition, they’ve also announced a deeper strategic partnership with Informatica to resell their data integration and data quality tools within their performance management offering.

Now, Cognos partnering with INFA is not new—the companies have worked together for years. But based on the the moves by Business Objects in this space, as well as the overall success of the Business Objects Enterprise Information Management products in the market, this move makes sense.

Having an integrated data quality and integration story is key to enhancing overall performance, and it's a topic that business audiences and CFO's alike are more than comfortable in both talking about and evaluating in terms of the technology out there. So this agreement should clearly shore up an issue likely being raised in the field around Cognos’ capabilities in this area.

What may be more surprising is that Cognos has never outright purchased INFA, although it’s one of those “logical” acquisitions that people have been talking about for years. Perhaps this is “step 1” down the path, or perhaps Cognos feels that this is not technology that is costing them deals by not having it native to their own applications.

Whatever the reason, they’re clearly ratcheting up the activity in the market as of late, which is good for customers all around.

Get ready for a whole lotta lauchin’!

Big week coming up in the world of BI and performance management, as both Business Objects and Microsoft get ready for their respective product launches.

Business Objects is first up tomorrow, with their EPM XI launch webcast, touting the integration of the former Cartesis products being rapidly integrated onto the XI platform. We’ll leave it to them to explain what this actually means, since they’ve previously announced a year-long roadmap to integrate the products. But this should help some with current XI customers and with the bulk of the sales force who are selling XI to the IT function make a clearer case why they should consider Business Objects for performance management.

Microsoft is up next week, as they kick-off the PerformancePoint Server launch with a big soiree in New York City, and later next month in London. Seeing as how they’ve been talking about the product for the past two years, it’s about time! But in the wake of the hype in the market, the glowing analyst reports from the tier 1 firms, and the momentum within the Microsoft customer base (their first BI conference in May was 40% larger than the 2006 Business Objects Americas conference, now in its 11th year), it should be interesting to see how this product takes hold in the market.

It's Business, It's Business Time

First of all, you gotta check out this Flight of the Conchords - Business Time vid on youtube.

Then check out Darren's rendition of this for On-Demand Business Intelligence Time, ooooh yeah baby!

Gettin Fuzzy with IT

Business Objects went and did it again with the acquisition of FUZZY! Informatik. Yet another data quality acquisition for the French based software company, in 2006 Business Objects acquired First Logic, a data cleansing, data quality software company with a history routed in helping organization cleanse their mail data to avoid duplicates and data falsities. This is another technology addition to their EIM (Enterprise Information Management) product portfolio and although this could be seen as more technology overlap, it’s continues to put the French based software company in an interesting position vs the big players.
Here’s some background. Fuzzy Informatik; established in 1994, with 50 employees, revenue is between $5M and $10M Euro with 350 customers. They have solutions for data analysis and “fuzzy searches.” Details on their products can be found here. They focus mainly on CRM implementations (name address profiling and correction). They have partnerships with universities in Germany and the US, and are part of the board of the German Data Quality Association. Here’s the press

Cognos and Applix - OLAP is the new Black

Cognos announced today that it plans to buy Applix (NASDAQ: APLX) for $339M in cash, or almost $18 per share. I speculated earlier that the consolidation wave in BI and performance management had crested with OutlookSoft's purchase by SAP. Guy also commented on the interest in Applix here and their stock premium here. Clearly surf is still up. But consolidation in the industry and this acquisition is a little more interesting when you take a little closer look. From the Cognos press release:

"Applix performance analytics will give customers new and enhanced capabilities to analyze and optimize financial performance. This will include improved analysis and optimization of large, complex financial performance data; strong finance self-service capabilities such as business rules management; new solution areas including profitability analysis; and innovative technology, including Applix TM1, a patented, 64-bit, in-memory multidimensional OLAP server."

Now let's take it apart.

New and enhanced capabilities to analyze and optimize financial performance? Highly configurable OLAP yes. Purchased by a BI company with an OLAP based platform, yes. New to Cognos - nope. More like double down on OLAP.

Not only is this more OLAP, but this is yet another financial applications acquisition by Cognos, who has made several. Interestingly the management bios for Applix include Michael Morrison, former Cognos VP responsible for the acquisition of Adaytum in 2003. Adaytum overlapped existing functionality with Cognos, and this is more of the same.

Innovative? You can't be serious. Not that TM1 is not strong, high performing technology with a loyal customer base, but innovative? The BI Diva, Cindy Howson, puts a fine point on this with unintentional irony in her weblog on Intelligent Enterprise, "TM1 in fact used to be the underlying engine for Hyperion Planning, prior to Essbase." While I get that slim ties are back in style, and that the Bangles have a new album, I would not suggest they are innovative.

The innovation lies in the in-memory capability that TM1 provides (great positioning) with the application of 64-bit technology. Credit and mindshare for this positioning in BI resides with QlikTec, now being managed by former SAP veterans. This helps explain some of the positive spin on the deal.

Cost here is 5X TTM revenue, as compared to Business Objects $300M acquisition of Cartesis at about 2.4X TTM revenue. Most of the financial reviews note the premium, but suggest this is still a good buy to compete with SAP, Oracle and Business Objects.

Overall this looks great for Applix shareholders and customers, but does not do much for Cognos shareholders or position in BI and performance management. Cognos gains customers and strengthens its story for performance management and in-memory analytics, but doesn't move the market needle.

What is interesting here is how little anyone has taken Cognos to task for yet another acquisition of overlapping technology, especially related to the multiple. Also notable that a number of trades and weblogs have written about the deal, including mention of the innovative technology acquisition when it clearly isn't. It is interesting that Cindy Howson calls out that the acquisition doubles the number of Cognos performance management customers to 3500. Not exactly staggering considering Cognos has claimed to be the leader in performance management dating back to their positioning change at the time of the Adaytum purchase.

Now the everyone has partnered up in performance management, let the games begin. Surf's up.

Hyperion is Back at Oracle

New Flair: Hyperion site update. The brand new red and white Oracle signage was applied yesterday on the former Hyperion (and Palm before that) buildings yesterday. It turns out news of Hyperion's removal was premature, and the new PLM addition to the family, Agile, is about to join with some of the Hyperion team in their former office space at Santa Clara. Either way, people are moving around and things are happening. While it is still not clear which version of BI the field sales teams are selling at Oracle, they are clearly selling the Hyperion financial applications and all the ERP reps have the opportunity to sell PLM. This may or may not be Office Space recut as a horror movie, but certainly a lot of new people making the "Oh" face.

Hyperion Bites the Dust

Finally, the end of an era. The Hyperion logo has now been officially removed from the building and street signage at the former Hyperion mothership on Great America Parkway in Santa Clara. The building and parking lot has looked empty for a while, and maybe that is the reason it took so long to finally remove the signage.

The logo was part of the marketing makeover spearheaded by the arrival of Heidi Melin as CMO. As the logo was fairly new, it likely does not invoke the same nostalgia of the PeopleSoft logo, or PeopleSoft the company. There are many people who still speak very fondly of their time at PeopleSoft and it is not uncommon to see one of the old PeopleSoft dark backpacks with the red and blue logo which were standard issue for the entire organization on the street or in an airport. Team PeopleSoft positioned themselves as the people people in technology. Maybe that is why it still doesn't look right when you drive east on 580 and see the old PeopleSoft campus and sign with the big bold colors of Oracle. It would be interesting to hear Melin's take on this since she was group VP and brand czar at PSFT before coming to Hyperion. What looks great in the bank may feel a little less great. At least one version of Hyperion's logo still lives on in the Oracle website. As for the Hyperion BI product, it remains to be seen.

LucidEra Takes Better Visibility to the Bank

Proving once again that SaaS is not only a great delivery model, but a great way to the bank, LucidEra, an on-demand BI play, recently closed a new round of funding. LucidEra closed a Series B round to the tune of $15.6 million. There must be much rejoicing in the marketing department as the stated reason was investment in sales and marketing and innovation with their analytic solutions. This actually means more sales people, more development resources and some lead gen help. All good things and congrats to the team clearly carving out a pure play disruptor role as a leader in on-demand BI solutions. Let's hope that some of the new marketing dollars translate into Darren getting his own blog link so that he doesn't have to continue his multi-tenet situation squatting in CEO Ken Rudin's blog.

It's Shark Week

I hope all of you are tuning into the discovery channel for Shark Week this week, this performance guy certainly is. There was one segment I was watching where researchers were tagging great white sharks in the Pacific ocean to learn more about their migration habits and ultimately track where the sharks move to feed. From the tracking device the researchers could get details into the water depth, water temperature, and location of the great whites. They were able to map the migration patterns of 80 sharks and link the data back to a central data source where they could do more analysis. One of their next steps was to take shark attack data from the past 100 years and overlay it with the data they had compiled from the shark tagging. Now that’s some performance management that can help everyone “Shark Performance Management”, especially those performance guys that enjoy to surf… Good on ya mates! Maybe I can get them to build me a dashboard for Great White feeding patterns in the pacific north west so I know when to send one of my buddies just a little further out on the water than me.

Microsoft Product Fair Insights

I wanted to share some interesting observations from a recent internal product fair on the Microsoft campus. Product fair was a chance for the product teams at Microsoft to showcase the latest and greatest to the rest of the company. We’re not just talking Office and Vista here… we’re talking everything from Zune to Forefront Systems management. There was 16 tents that featured over 100 products, they even had popcorn and snowcones to munch on while getting the down low on the latest bits and bytes. I could go on talking about the enormity of the product fair but I’ll get to the point of this post, which is around PerformancePoint and organizational needs for performance management. With over 70,000 employees Microsoft is a pretty good example of a large enterprise with complexity and overlap, you name it they got it. While speaking with colleagues from different parts of the organization about the plans for PerformancePoint, I was surprised to learn about all the various BI/performance management projects occurring internally within Microsoft. Across, IT, HR, operations, and finance I had a constant line of people wanting to discuss new features of Microsoft’s performance management solution and how it could help their teams internally monitor and analyze their business. Very neat to see a strong “eat your own dogfood” mentality, brings me back to the Crystal Decisions days where it was like the Seinfeld soup Nazi, Crystal Reports or no soup for you! This experience really opened my eyes to the power of bringing BI to the masses, in a span of 3 hours nearly 60 people came up and asked me an internally focused performance management question about how they could better track and understand their particular business. Needless to say, this performance guy was pumped, it’s nice to have some real world validation from time to time.

The Performance Management IceBerg

While on a flight to Vegas I was browsing through some of Wayne Eckerson's book Performance Dashboards. I know what you are thinking, what kind of dork reads a performance management book on a flight to Vegas, shouldn’t you be playing video poker and getting your drink on? To that I respond, ever heard of thing called detox, and besides, how can you ever get enough Eckerson, come on, that guy is the man!

What I wanted to point out, or rather revisit is an old visual analogy of the performance management iceberg, a great visual tool for understanding how BI and performance management relate to each other, dashboards and scorecards being just the tip of a much larger beast lurking beneath. Looking back the my time spent analyzing the data warehousing market and speaking with customers about the value of performance management there was always a gap between ETL and overall information management best practices with the sex and sizzle of a cool executive dashboard. It’s always good to go back to the basics, especially when dealing with sales people (did I write that out loud?) and a good visual model is a good as gold, or in this case as good as an iceberg!

Eckerson, Icebergs, time for some vodka, later ya’ll

The Arrogance of the BI Vendors

Is it arrogance, is it lack of interest, or do they not get it? You might think I am referencing Nic's post below with photo that seems to imply that Microsoft is the evil empire and PerformancePoint Server is the Death Star of BI. This, while plausible, was not where I was going.

I managed to carve out some cycles last week to spend time at OMG's Think Tank on standards for business process management - as in BPM. Not performance management. The think tank was by turns thought provoking and painful, often within a matter of minutes. It is always great to get a bunch of vendors and analysts together on a neutral site and watch the games begin under the guise of "helping the industry." If you want the blow by blow on who was thinking what, I recommend you check out Sandy Kemsley's blog. However, one of the things I found of interest was Colin Teubner's lunch keynote that discussed the relationship between BI and process management.

Colin is an analyst at Forrester Research, focused on business process management. He gave a lunch time keynote focused on BPM with two main discussions - the relationship between process and BI, as well as BPM intersecting with collaboration and information. Both are much longer topics for discussion, but Colin presented some more recent thinking from Forrester on the intersection of process and business intelligence. Colin suggested 5 specific use cases on how the two technologies work together.

1. Business intelligence on a process - analysis and reporting on process applications
2. BI triggering or changing a process - BI kicking off a process
3. BI inside a process decision - when executing a process, BI should help
4. BI to help humans work with process -more information is better to make decisions
5. BI to predict the future of process work - think trend analysis and data mining

Look for this to be a topic of further research from Forrester building on work that was started initially by Keith Gile (Now doing strategy for Business Objects) and Connie Moore, a VP and research director at Forrester. Colin is working on this with a number of contributors. Of particular interest were two of Colin's comments.

The first is that from the Forrester point of view, BI converging with BPM is a no-brainer. I tend to agree on this point and you can see this starting to happen with BPM companies introducing BI capability as core to their offering and partnering with BI vendors. MSFT performance point is also heading in this direction. See also the Spotfire acquisition by Tibco that I commented on when it happened. So what is the hold up?

According to Colin, one of the big issues around this discussion is the arrogance of the BI vendors. He noted that BI vendors should get it, but that they don't understand it well enough and they are too caught up with themselves. He was also specific that none of the top players really offered real process functionality today. This is a very interesting observation, especially when you consider how long BI vendors have been trying to explain their relevance and importance, especially relative to the ERP big guys. Guy commented on this here and here. Seems to be going on 20 years now. Nothing worse than a young adult with a sizable IQ and low self esteem.

Is this arrogance, insecurity, too much navel gazing, or not enough interest to motivate action? Maybe this is just as simple as the devil you know - much easier to deal with than the devil you don't and the associated multiples required.

I think this is an open question and something to watch. This post both catches me up on posting and addresses the open questions to me by my performance partners in crime. Now about this Death Star issue...

Here Comes the Mother Ship

Guy is not kidding when he says PerformancePoint is in full swing, two weeks ago was MGX (what Microsoft calls sales kickoff). The 15,000 person event was host to the latest and greatest product demos and feature the plans and strategy for the upcoming year. Included in the mix was a main stage demo of PerformancePoint Server tied together with the Microsoft Unified Communications products. The demo nicely tied together BI capabilities of scorecards, analytics, and planning with communications functionally via live meeting, instant messaging, and VOIP. If you’d like to get a good look at PerformancePoint, there’s a demo recording on YouTube from the recent Microsoft BI conference in Seattle featuring our good friend Bruno Aziza. There will be a continuous string of activities throughout the rest of 2007 and into 2008, so pack your bags and grab your favorite conference outfit, it’s gonna be a performance management boogie fest.

Oracle still on the move...

No, we don't have a juicy rumor to pass along today, but there are always tremors in the greater Bay area, aren't there? And our friends at Oracle seem not to be quite finished with their buying spree in the technology space just yet.

As posted in the very topical ZDNet blog, Oracle may be on the move once again.

We posted about this here and here, evaluating some of the pro's and con's of the remaining performance vendors out there in the marketplace today, but our Spidey Senses tell us that in this case, we need to think beyond the perhaps strict definition of performance management vendors and think about more broad-based technology and applications vendors in this case.

Perhaps something in the business process management space? What say you Performance Guy Pat?

PerformancePoint--Oh it's on...It's ON!!!

Gin up the ole PR machine, get your analyst briefing scorecards out, and start standing in line now for one of 1,000,000,000 field events (90% of them planned by Performance Guy Nic) around the world supporting the PerformancePoint Server launch later this fall. You thought the Paris Hilton coverage was a bit much--trust us, she's got nothing on our friends up in Redmond.

Our good friend Russell Damske from the B EYE (get it) network gives us an early preview, and trust me, this is only the beginning. (OK we've really never met Russell but we're sure he'd be a good friend if we knew him).

We're seriously thinking of live blogging the whole launch event here at Performance Guys, we're that excited. Not like Steve Ballmer excited, but very excited--more like Japanese funny dance excited.

PS--Nic is the one in the middle--

Lucid Era Blog

Here's a link worth checking out, LucidEra blog http://www.lucidera.com/blog/ this blog is put together by our good friend Darren Cunningham. LucidEra is an up and coming "on-demand" BI company and as the world of hosted BI continues to grow I'm sure there will be some interesting commentary, be sure to check it out.

You Just Gotta Read This - Open Source BI On the Move

Either it was a slow news week over the July 4th holiday in the states, a great interview, or both. Matt Asay on his CNET blog The Open Road, did an interview with Pentaho's marketing VP, Lance Walter. You know you are dealing with a pro because Lance took the opening softball question from Matt and gave him both barrels, citing a Crystal Reports replacement, as well as the Pentaho win at Universite de Montreal against the entire BI category. The press release is a complete category smackdown of the usual suspects in BI - Cognos, Business Objects and Oracle. Go big or go home indeed.

Also interesting to see Lance speaking kindly of the Jaspersoft camp while asserting that Open Source is big enough for everyone and undercutting those with proprietary technology. This follows rule #2 of marketing - it is not truly a category if you are the only one in it.

Open source is clearly on the rise, and Pentaho seems to be the leading voice in BI. Not only good technology, but good gear. This is not exactly a rule in marketing, but it sure is nice to have. Disappointing that Pentaho seems to be going more corporate as they no longer offer lingerie as a How?Ho! gear selection.

TIBCO announces a new BPM solution

The worlds of BI, performance management and business process management continue to come closer together. A couple of days ago, software vendor Tibco announced their new iProcess, a management suite of application modules built on open architecture providing and end-to-end development platform for business process modeling. This announcement is just another example of the BI, BPM, and PM worlds coming together and demonstrates the importance of a flexible open architecture.Building on their BI capabilities, Tibco also recently acquired data visualization up-and-comer Spotfire, more commentary on this from Pat here. The momentum in this space will continue later this year as September will showcase even more market changing technology as Microsoft comes to the table with two releases that bring BPM and PM together with the release of PerformancePoint Server and BizTalk Server.

As business climate intensifies the investment in SOA is integral to extract value from BPM initiatives over time. This performance guy smells something else cooking, look for more activity in this area of the market in the near term.

Smart Enough Systems - Read All About It

James Taylor and Neil Raden are out today with their new book, Smart (Enough) Systems, a look at the process of decisioning and a detailed overview of the intersection between business rules, process, business intelligence and measurable business impact. Data and technology you have vs. how you run the business everyday and what people use to make decisions.

I had the chance to preview the book and I think Taylor and Raden do a great job of setting up the arguments and then delivering a lively play by play on how to make technology work in the real world. The book is a great read for anyone struggling with how to make the rubber meet the road and providing information that is relevant about making process an operational discipline. Among the things I like about this book is the passion of the authors (the book starts with a manifesto!), as well as the number use cases and examples they come back to. Many books are great at citing examples from big clients, this book does a great job of painting the use case on an industry level that should make it broadly applicable for near term help and longer term reference. It is kind of nice to read a book with a POV, a how-to, and that also happens to be an interesting read.

Both these guys are well known in the industry and their views can readily be found at conferences and in blogs like James on Decisioning on eBizQ, and Neil on BI in Intelligent Enterprise. I am sure their book will be a success. You can purchase it from Amazon here.

As for the blog, I am back from early month vacation and typical end of quarter excitement and ready to provide some much needed balance to the resident performance Guy. Thanks to Guy for all the heavy lifting over the past several weeks.

Oh, Say Can you See, We Stand on Guard for Thee!

Happy Canadia Day and forthcoming Independence from Kings and Tyranny Day to all our readers this week. As the performance guys are a multi-ethnic melange of Canucks and Yankees, we feel an exceptional amount of pride and gluttony during this week of the summer. May our friendship endure as long as the border is long. Or whatever.