The Business Intelligence Blog

Business Objects is now officially into Predictive Analytics with its new tool Predictive Workbench and that’s a good news. Read more from Infoweek.

Business Objects on Wednesday announced Predictive Workbench, a new module for its business intelligence platform that lets businesses make predictions about such things as customer behavior and business performance. The module, based on technology from SPSS Inc., is the latest example of a traditional BI company looking to move beyond its expertise in reporting and analysis tools.

Predictive Workbench is the result of an OEM deal Business Objects struck last December to offer SPSS’s technology. IBM (NYSE: IBM)’s Cognos struck a similar deal with SPSS in March, and also plans to integrate IBM-developed predictive analytics within Cognos. Both efforts take a direct competitive shot at SAS Institute, by far the market leader in predictive analytics.

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Since the December OEM deal, Business Objects has worked to integrate the SPSS technology, called Clementine, into Business Objects X1 3.0 so that it’s “totally transparent and seamless for customers,” said Franz Aman, VP of BI product marketing. The result is Predictive Workbench, from which a user can launch the Business Objects Universe metadata layer to run predictive analytics against various databases and data warehouses. Business Objects will disclose the price of the module only to interested customers, Aman says.

A must read article for BI entusiasts on the recent consolidation of the BI industry. Well researched and informative article by Stuart Lauchlan, MyCustomer.com.

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.”

I had a chance to watch a Cognos 8.3 demo for evaluvation purposes. The Cognos Team had created a prototype cube for the demo. Having worked with Cognos for nearly 4 years at my previous assignment, this version of Cognos was completely new to me.

The version that I worked before Cognos EP Series 7. The latest version is Cognos 8.3 and there has been fundamanetal changes made to the UI as well as the architecture.

Here are some of the key improvements that I think are striking

- Metadata management has improved significantly. Instead of metadata being stored as a file, like the previous version(catalogs), they are now stored in the database, just like how Informatica stores them.

I wish Business Objects would also make metadata management as seamless as Cognos. File based metadata management will hit the file size limitations and then they cannot grow anymore.

- The client application’s UI has become simple and helps in faster authoring of reports.

- Their web interface is very intutive. With drill down/up capabilities, enterprises can now have business analysts do adhoc queries on the fly.

- Good integration of all the different tools into one big tool. Cognos used to have Impromptu, Powerplay and host of other tools. Now they all work as one Cognos tool. This could potentially make their prices high but it could help the enterprises with one BI tool solution and could also reduce licensing costs from various tools.

- Though I didn’t dig too much into their scorecarding tools, scorecard portlets is a cool concept.

Looks like Cognos 8.4 is at Beta and is expected to hit the markets soon.

With the new thoughtful and successful buy of Business Objects, this was an inevitable move by SAP. And I’m sure its helping to better focus on their flagship products.

The ERP (enterprise resource planning) vendor gained a raft of BI (business intelligence) capabilities through its $6.8 billion purchase of Business Objects, but the deal also created significant overlap, especially in performance management tools. Much of that overlap was caused by acquisitions made by both companies before the deal. Those included SAP’s purchase of Pilot Software and OutlookSoft, and Business Objects’ acquisitions of ALG, SRC and Cartesis.

Some of those decisions have now been made, said John Schwarz, CEO of the former Business Objects, who is now in charge of BI at SAP. Analysts said they expect further cuts to follow in other product areas.

“They were obviously difficult [decisions], in the sense that each product has customers, each has its merits, each has a team that’s passionately committed to it, so the debates, as you might imagine, were fairly heated,” Schwarz said in an interview at SAP headquarters on Wednesday.

Read more at InfoWorld.

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.”

Should try to get my hands on this next version soon. Seems like a fine platform.

Here’s more from the official press release -

Business intelligence has traditionally focused on the most easily obtainable data: process-centric ‘structured’ information – numbers and text stored in internal databases – analyzed by a select group of data analysts and shared among slices of isolated user communities. With BusinessObjects XI 3.0, all information will be accessible to people throughout the organization and their extended business network. According to a recent survey of 154 global C-level executives conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) and commissioned by Business Objects, less than one in 10 corporate executives believe they have the right information needed to make critical business decisions. BusinessObjects XI 3.0 gives businesspeople the confidence to know their data is clean, and the ability to link it back to its source, so information is easily auditable, accurate and trustworthy.

BusinessObjects XI 3.0 is the first and only BI platform with integrated text analysis, allowing the thoughts and opinions of customers and other people found in unstructured sources such as the Web, notes fields and emails to be easily incorporated into business intelligence and decision making. BusinessObjects XI 3.0 also provides the first platform that delivers BI-ready consumable external information on demand, from the de facto leader in software-as-a-service (SaaS) BI. For example, by using BusinessObjects XI 3.0-ready reports and metrics from sources such as Thomson Financial and Dun & Bradstreet, organizations can compare and track key performance metrics against their direct competitors and the overall market.

In the yearly, Americas Partner Excellence Award winners by Business Objects, it named Accenture as the Global Alliance Partner of the year.

From the Press Release -

Global Alliance Partner of the Year: Honors the partner that provided outstanding expertise in strategy, design, implementation, and customization services for Business Objects BI solutions. The Business Objects Global Alliance Partner of the Year is Accenture. Accenture was recognized once again in this category for its notable customer successes, solution innovation, and partner support. With many years of experience and nearly 4,000 successful client projects, Accenture has carved out a reputation for its unique approach to delivering complex data management, integration and analysis solutions that are aligned to business needs.

And that a welcome thing. Congrats BO !!

From the press release -

As a first indication of the successful pace of integration of the two companies, SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) and Business Objects S.A. (NASDAQ: BOBJ) (Euronext Paris: ISIN code FR0004026250 - BOB) today revealed nine joint product packages, available this month, that will be sold by both organizations’ global sales teams. These packages were chosen to address the most common challenges facing business users from the C-suite to Main Street, which include: gaining better business insight, improving company performance and ensuring compliance with corporate governance policies. These packages will allow companies to license, install, and manage solutions from SAP and Business Objects in a single IT investment transaction.

The companies detail these new product packages in conjunction with today’s announcement acknowledging the next steps in SAP’s successful acquisition of Business Objects (see press release entitled “SAP and Business Objects Unite to Lead Emerging Market for Business Performance Optimization.”) With a broad showing of support from shareholders and business partners, SAP and Business Objects now embark on a road map to expand their wide lead in the market of software for business users into leadership in the emerging market for business performance optimization.