The Business Intelligence Blog

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.

..

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.”

You can check out the list of Top 100 Most Influential Technology Vendors for 2008 as anounced by the Aberdeen Group.

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.

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.”

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.