“Even though growth was nowhere near the levels of 2008, and by no means immune to the recession, BI showed that it is not as cyclical as many other software areas, recording healthy growth in one of the toughest years recorded in software history,” said Dan Sommer, senior research analyst at Gartner. “The dominant vendors continued to put BI, analytics and PM front and center of their messaging. Organizations largely continued their BI projects, hoping that resulting transparency and insight would enable cost-cuts and improved productivity and agility. However, there is no doubt pressure has intensified on deal sizes and price points on new sales throughout the year.”

The top five vendors continued to make up most of the market with 71 percent market share. “The large vendors held their own. As IT is consolidating, BI spending often went to a few strategic vendors. However, the application-centric vendors didn’t have the same up-selling momentum as they did in 2008,” said Mr. Sommer.

More here and the full paper can be reached here.

There are a few reasons why the nirvana of BI supplier and supply chain visibility is most certainly a noble objective, but one that is unlikely to ever fully take hold outside of a few very expensive, highly customized implementations. For one, BI tools (especially those we think of, which are tied to an underlying data warehouse) mimic the inflexible characteristics of the ERP systems, which generate the data that we need to analyze. In other words, once you “pour the enterprise-data concrete” so to speak, such systems become rigid and unbending and make it difficult to rapidly adopt new data sources into an analysis. Perhaps there’s a new third-party data enrichment that you want to add (one not supported or resold by your BI vendor), or maybe you’ve acquired a new facility from a supplier that is running a different ERP environment. Good luck rapidly adding these new data sources into any BI model.

Pentaho, the commercial open source alternative for business intelligence (BI), has announced the availability of a new Pentaho iPhone application, saying that it provides native iPhone web navigation of Pentaho BI content.

The integration was developed using the iUI project, currently hosted on Google Code. According to company officials, the new iPhone BI extension from Pentaho offers an intuitive way for business users to access and navigate business intelligence information.

“The demand to provide BI where business users operate has changed significantly as mobile devices like Apple iPhone have simplified business computing dramatically,” said Mark Smith, CEO & executive vice president of research at Ventana Research.

From ITP

The Oracle Business Indicators applications will take data from Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition Plus (OBIEE) and Oracle Business Intelligence Applications, Fusion Edition and push it to authorised iPhone users, allowing managers to receive alerts based on pre-defined parameters.

The applications are available from the Apple App Store, and are free to Oracle business intelligence customers. The application will provide data on business intelligence metrics in either graph or table form.

Still, it’s encouraging that the BI market is still showing signs of life after a period of considerable turmoil and consolidation over the past two years with IBM, Oracle and SAP swallowing up Business Objects, Cognos and Hyperion Solutions. Since March 2007, the three enterprise giants have dished out $15 billion to bolster their BI credentials. Oracle offered $S3.3 billion for Hyperion, SAP pitched $6.8 billion for Business Objects while picking up Cognos cost IBM $5 billion.

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Another development is the blurring of boundaries as BI starts to encroach on other technology areas. For example, Forrester Research cites the merging of BI and search technologies to provide business people with better context and information to make daily decisions. “As search and BI get ever closer, the lines could eventually blur to the point of simply going away,” said Forrester in its ‘Search + BI = Unified Information Access’ report. “This will help bridge the artificial system boundaries between structured data and unstructured content. It will not only affect the interfaces we use to search for, discover, analyse, and report on what we need to know, but help us learn more about what we don’t know.”

This is one of the immediate advantages of convergence between BI and search – the ability to discover things you didn’t know you didn’t know. Forrester noted: “As search gets more powerful and begins to understand the meaning behind unstructured text, entity extraction and other linguistic analysis methods will be able to be used to reveal unforeseen and highly illuminating connections among documents or between documents and data.”

In the latest update, Ned Madden talks about the various tools and vendors in the Analytics domain. Read more.

Today’s software packages are much more focused on the actual application of analytical approaches to specific types of decision problems and specific types of industries, according to Anthony Milano, GMI’s VP of professional services.

“In the old days, tools were typically very general purpose in nature,” Milano told TechNewsWorld. “Now, oftentimes, tools are much more focused on helping users solve specific types of problems in business verticals and industries.”

Vendors are even adapting their core analytical engines to specific needs by creating a packaged solution that includes a version of the engine, analytic models, processes, methodologies, add-ons and extensions that allow the product to solve a very specific need, Milano said.

“Importantly, this type of solution minimizes the amount of time required to solve the problem and makes it easier for the client to get the job done without requiring a deep topic expert,” he added. “In effect, these packaged solutions embed the expertise in the solution.”

Milano stressed the importance of analytics solutions that are provided under the rental model from an application service provider (ASP) as Software as a Service (SaaS).

“These software delivery models have proved to be very cost-effective and efficient for customers, particularly when all the costs of owning and installing your own software are understood,” he said.

More than 800 organisations across Asia Pacific have adopted components of Oracle Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) and Business Intelligence (BI) software, said Oracle, to transform how they manage, interact with and utilise financial and operational information to drive insights into better business results.

Oracle Business Intelligence is a portfolio of technology and applications that provides end-to-end Enterprise Performance Management System, including performance management applications, BI applications, BI foundation and tools, and data warehousing.

My takeaway was that the Top 4 vendors [Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and IBM] of this list are already biggies in the Business Intelligence world. And that’s another evidence that BI is the way to go in the coming years.

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.”

Oracle today announced new integrations between Oracle(r) Business Intelligence (BI) Applications and the Oracle E-Business Suite R12 as well as enhanced support across Oracle’s core BI foundation software, Hyperion Essbase and Oracle Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition Plus (Oracle BI Suite EE Plus). The integrations enable customers to drive additional value from their existing Oracle BI and Oracle Applications investments.

Making it easier for organizations to add BI functionality to their applications environments, Oracle BI Applications offer new support for the Oracle E-Business Suite R12 including pre-built content and adapters for Financials, Human Capital Management, Order Management & Fulfillment, and Supply Chain modules. Oracle BI Applications already support previous releases of the Oracle E-Business Suite.

Built on Oracle BI Suite EE Plus, Oracle BI Applications allow organizations to take advantage of the platform’s hot-pluggable capabilities, and as a result, drive greater insight and leverage a wide range of data sources including the Oracle E-Business Suite, Oracle’s PeopleSoft Enterprise, Oracle’s Siebel CRM, and SAP applications. Oracle BI Applications are comprehensive, standards-based BI solutions that enable customers to achieve fast time to value and gain greater insight through intuitive, role-based intelligence across an organization.

Oracle’s BI foundation integrates Hyperion Essbase and Oracle BI Suite EE Plus to provide customers with a unified, enterprise BI solution that delivers best-in-class query, reporting, analysis and modeling capabilities. Hyperion Essbase takes advantage of the hot-pluggable and advanced query capabilities of Oracle BI Suite EE Plus to access heterogeneous data sources for modeling “what if” business scenarios and forecasts.

In addition, Oracle BI Suite EE Plus now natively supports Hyperion Essbase as an optimized data source. With this integration, Hyperion Essbase customers can now leverage the Oracle BI Suite EE Plus enterprise information model to enable pervasive deployment and delivery of Hyperion Essbase information across the enterprise.

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