The Business Intelligence Blog

Sybase, Inc, the largest enterprise software and services company exclusively focused on managing and mobilizing information, today announced the new Sybase® Analytic Appliance, configured and tuned to provide extreme analytics and alleviate overburdened enterprise data warehouses, data marts and reporting systems. Combining category-leading technologies including Sybase IQ, Sybase PowerDesigner®, IBM® POWER™ Systems and MicroStrategy 8™, Sybase Analytic Appliance has all the benefits of a custom-built enterprise data warehouse (EDW), but is easy, fast and affordable—up to one third of the price of other leading solutions.

Sybase Analytic Appliance on IBM POWER Systems provides fast time-to-value by providing a unified appliance console, pre-configured hardware, software and storage in one compact and power-efficient unit, with single vendor support. The appliance requires lower initial and ongoing investment because, unlike its traditional row-based and parallel-computing counterparts, stored data in column-oriented Sybase IQ is compressed by up to 70 percent of its input size, creating the most optimal and elegant appliance solution. In addition, Sybase Analytic Appliance does not require labor-intensive index tuning, reducing overall maintenance costs. Its point-and-click console simplifies appliance administration and monitoring.

More at the Press Release.

This is probably very evident as more and more corporations move to Sharepoint. Sharepoint is sort-of becoming the ubiquitous tool for Enterprise Content Management . The biggest advantage that Microsoft has with Sharepoint is that they serve as repositories for documents, which are created using their own flagship product, MS-Office.

Having worked with Sharepoint in the last three+ years, it has proved to be a great tool and it still has huge opportunities for improvement. And as the article rightly points out, its a wake-up call for Lotus Notes. I’m sure Lotus Notes engineers are burning enough midnight oil to pull up their market share. Read more at Computer World -

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) 2007 is the fastest growing product in the company’s history and seems to have as many uses as a Swiss Army knife. Its six focus areas are collaboration, portal, search, enterprise content management (ECM), business process management and business intelligence. (Compare collaboration products.)

Just last month, Microsoft added a hosted alternative to fuel adoption. There is a “perfect storm,” observers say, around SharePoint in terms of the popularity of Web-based computing, demand for less-expensive ECM and portal tools, collaboration technology and integration around Microsoft’s Office suite.

Its interesting that more and more sports associations are starting to use Business Intelligence software to analyze statistics. As Ian Ayres points out in his latest book, Super Crunchers, the competition between the traditional experts and number crunching softwares has ended. And number crunching softwares are being increasingly used by tranditional “intutional” experts to analyze the data better.

These are clearly the days of Data Mining Softwares. This one is about IBM Cognos. Read more -

“Our analysis of player performance is as complex and dynamic as the work of high-powered business analysts in Fortune 500 companies, and we need to use the same robust, flexible interface to achieve reliable results,” said Doyle Pryor, Assistant General Counsel of the MLBPA. “Conducting complex analysis in real-time allows us to improve our planning processes and IBM Cognos TM1 Executive Viewer enables the agents themselves to view reports and perform almost limitless ‘what-if’ scenarios for further analysis of the data.”

“The interface for analysis will provide sophisticated users with the tools they’re familiar with and the ability to quickly modify views and reports with as little effort as possible,” said Doug Barton, vice president, product marketing, Cognos, an IBM Company. “Users of IBM Cognos TM1 Executive Viewer continue to gravitate to its features that provide interactivity, immediacy, and flexibility, which, in turn, enable them to accelerate the management of their business’s performance.”

From Fox Business

Comparing a peer group of BI products reviewed in The BI Survey 7, the customer loyalty scores were as follows:

Overall Customer Loyalty Score
MicroStrategy .846
Cognos Reporting .725
Cognos Analysis .653
BusinessObjects .641
SAP BW .641
Oracle Hyperion Essbase .565

“It is a remarkable achievement that MicroStrategy was rated number one in customer loyalty for the fourth year in a row,” said Nigel Pendse, author of The BI Survey 7. “As in the past, the Survey found that well-known vendors with growth strategies based on acquisitions covering the entire BI spectrum have low, and in some cases declining, customer loyalty. MicroStrategy, with its single product architecture and organic growth, was at the top once again. The fact that no other product has achieved such high levels of consistency suggests that MicroStrategy’s customers are extremely loyal and see no alternative to the product.”

This is a great article on how Mohamad Ali, the man behind the $5bn IBM Cognos Deal that happened late last year, communicate the deal and also the next steps of integrating these two companies.

To do that, of course, he needs the help of the 4,000-plus Cognos employees. So on day one — a half-day presentation-cum-celebration welcoming the newcomers shortly after the deal closed Feb. 1 — he began communicating the plan as vigorously as possible. Other experienced integrators stage similar events, but few do them on IBM’s scale. For Cognos, based in Ottawa but operating multinationally, there were 20 day ones in quick succession around the world. Besides learning about their mission, the new employees all received ThinkPad laptops and even saw a video documentary about IBM, which George Clooney narrated. Engineered by IBM’s M&A communications team, day-one events have grown steadily more polished over IBM’s 95 acquisitions, including the 12 Ali has now led for information management

This was just a beginning and there was alot to be done. Read the complete story.

Yes, all the ones whom you think about are there. No Misses. Good Going !!

Read More about each of these vendors on the story.

There are 9 vendors on the core list for 2008, same number as last year. This may surprise some people after all of the mergers and resulting consolidation of 2007. The fact is that some vendors that were not on this list before have now made it because of their acquisitions. Therefore, while the number is the same, the names of the vendors on the list have changed quite a bit. In addition, some smaller vendors that have been around for awhile have broadened their product set or customer base or both and now merit inclusion. Here now, in alphabetical order, are the core performance management vendors for 2008.

Adaptive Planning
Clarity Systems
IBM/Cognos
Infor
Longview systems
Microsoft
Oracle
SAP
SAS

After the recent acquisition of Cognos, IBM is starting to add applications to its BI suite by leveraging existing Cognos products and also new BI tools.

From Infoweek -

IBM (NYSE: IBM) last week laid out its plan to integrate the business intelligence products from recently acquired Cognos with its own information management software. To show that it means business, IBM introduced no fewer than 10 BI packages that do just that, for industries such as banking, retail, health care, and life sciences.

The strategy involves melding Cognos’ business analytics and reporting tools with IBM’s content management and database middleware. One offering, for example, adds Cognos’ Store Operations and Planning blueprints to IBM’s Retail Integration framework. Such combinations take “us deeper into business analysis and analytics,” says IBM senior VP Steve Mills.

For banking, IBM introduced the Financial Risk Insight Solution, which couples the IBM Banking Data Warehouse with Cognos 8 Business Intelligence modules. It’s meant to give financial services companies an enterprise-wide view of risk across products, divisions, and geographies.

From Marketwire -

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today introduced new software that allows businesses to better manage the growth of information by integrating data warehousing and archiving capabilities. The new InfoSphere Warehouse with Optim Data Retention will help companies better manage enterprise data throughout its lifecycle and deliver optimal performance and compliance with changing business policies.

InfoSphere Warehouse combines the strength of IBM data warehouse software and recently acquired Princeton Softech’s Optim Data Retention solution to more efficiently manage large amounts of data to enhance users’ competitive advantage.

Here’s more on IBM InfoSphere™ Warehouse with Optim Data Retention.

From Washington Post -

IBM’s US$5 billion acquisition of business intelligence software vendor Cognos took a step forward on Thursday as European regulators gave their approval to the deal.

After examining the acquisition, the European Commission said in astatementthat it “would not give rise to competition concerns, since the parties’ combined market share would be moderate.”

IBM announced its intention to buy Cognos, based in Ottawa, in November, saying it hoped to combine the Cognos software with IBM’s back-end database products. They hope to close the deal by the end of March, but there are still a few regulatory requirements to be met, including the approval of Canada’s minister of industry.

Very recently, two of the biggest Business Intelligence product companies were bought by bigger giants. That goes on the prove, the Business Intelligence arena is gaining momentum with the increasing demand for BI/Data Mining services.

Cognos was bought by IBM yesterday and three weeks ago, Business Objects was bought by the ERP giant, SAP.

From Cognos/IBM Press release –

The acquisition of Cognos supports IBM’s Information on Demand strategy, a cross-company initiative announced on February 16, 2006 that combines IBM’s strength in information integration, content and data management and business consulting services to unlock the business value of information. Integrating Cognos, the 23rd IBM acquisition in support of its Information on Demand strategy, will enable new business insights to be delivered to a broader set of people across an organization, beyond the traditional users of business intelligence.

From BO/SAP Press release –

Together, SAP and Business Objects intend to offer high-value solutions for process- and business-oriented professionals. The solutions will be designed to enable companies to strengthen decision processes, increase customer value and create sustainable competitive advantage through real-time, multi-dimensional business intelligence. SAP and Business Objects believe that customers will gain significant business benefits through the combination of new, innovative offerings of enterprise-wide business intelligence solutions along with embedded analytics in transactional applications. Additionally, the joint partner ecosystems will be fueled by the industry’s most powerful business process platform providing customers with the best enterprise information management platform available for SAP and non-SAP environments.

Having worked extensively with both these products, Cognos and Business Objects, I have to say its a great buy for IBM and SAP respectively. For IBM, Cognos a costly but a great BI tool is an amazing bombo with Teradata. For SAP, this will be a great addition to their ERP suite and Oracle is already huge in the BI area. We have to just wait for the next move. It’s getting to interest the on-lookers of the BI industry.