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Technology Is Not the Driver of BI Adoption

Posted by Neil Raden
Friday, March 28, 2008
10:16 AM

I'm having some problems with a March 20, 2008 article titled "Gartner: Emerging Technologies Will Help Drive Mainstream BI Adoption." This has been the Holy Grail of BI vendors for over a decade — to increase the number of "seats" using their products, widely reported to be about 20 percent of an organization but clearly much less than that. What troubles me the most about this article, or rather, about Gartner's analysis, is the supposition that new technology is going to crack this old chestnut. It won't. There are only two pieces of enterprise analytical software (broadly speaking) that ever gained currency in organizations in the past two decades — Excel and Google. Wouldn't it be a good idea to understand why?

Continue reading "Technology Is Not the Driver of BI Adoption"

Comments

Posted by Bruce Silver
Thursday, March 27, 2008
8:58 AM

Is there a business process management Hall of Fame? I don't think so, but there should be, to recognize the true pioneers and innovators in the field. BPM's core ideas and technologies come from several divergent fields, and my list would include those who first introduced them — ideas about what a business process is, and what managing one really means. Thinking about who should be in a BPM Hall of Fame is a fun exercise, and you might it helpful in framing your own views. My list emphasizes technology, recognizing those who first recognized that improving business processes demanded fundamentally new technology, often enabled by fundamental shifts in the surrounding IT environment.

My nominees would be:

Posted by Phil Kemelor
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
1:34 PM

It's a question people ask a lot in many domains, but especially in software. As such, it regularly pops up within the Web analytics community.

You can rank the vendors crudely by number of individual customers. Let's take a look at the vendors we reviewed in the most recent Web Analytics Report and see how many customers they have — or rather, how many they say they have:

Posted by Rajan Chandras
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
9:10 AM

This month, Bill Gates urged lawmakers to increase the number of H-1B (guest worker) visas; two bills were introduced in Congress seeking to raise the visa cap; and a study was released indicating that increased employment of guest workers is, in fact, beneficial to domestic (US) employment. Meanwhile, opponents of the guest worker program are sharpening their own knives at this onslaught of pro-immigration lobbying. In other words, it's open season on the H-1B program once again.

As we approach the fateful date of April 1, when the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) begins accepting H-1B applications for the next year — which for some reason begins on October 1 — the controversy is reigniting yet again.

Posted by Sandy Kemsley
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
9:40 AM

I attended Experience!Tech 2008 last week at the MaRS Centre in Toronto — nice to attending a conference in my hometown for a change. The opening day's sessions are beamed to us live from the IDC Directions conference in Boston, so although we have the timeliness of seeing the speakers present, it's not quite the same as seeing them in person.

Unfortunately, it appears that I missed the only good presentation of the opening morning, given by Grover Righter of iMobileInternet, but apparently the slides are online and a number of my peeps were Twittering about it. The rest of the morning's presentations, all provided by IDC executives, sound like guys who are either scrambling to figure out what Web 2.0 is, think that they're teaching Web 2.0 101 to some of the suits in the audience, or inadvertently loaded a 2006 slide deck. Honestly, if I hear one more middle-aged guy talk about how his kids shop/watch TV/live their lives on the Internet (implying, of course, that he still has his executive assistant print out his email for him), I will not be responsible for my actions. Obviously, I'm living in Middle Age 2.0, because I'm sitting in the audience Twittering with the people who are sitting directly beside me, and creating this blog post.

Posted by Mark Smith
Monday, March 24, 2008
8:09 AM

The economic environment has placed increased pressure on organizations to ensure they are even wiser with their IT budgets and resources in order to respond effectively to business. As organizations find methods to reduce and avoid costs, the dilemma of installing and maintaining software and applications continues to be a place for examining alternatives. These software as a service (SaaS) alternatives could be a great opportunity to deliver business value more immediately and avoid long IT cycles that may conflict with the time pressures of your organizations. But nothing comes so easily without precautions and warnings.

Posted by Seth Grimes
Thursday, March 20, 2008
2:51 PM

Intelligent Enterprise and TechWeb are not the New York Times, so we get to publish some of the news that's seemingly Not Fit to Print:

Data warehousing powerhouse Teradata has acquired BI/DW solutions provider Claraview.

The news is there on Claraview's Web site — "Claraview is a division of Teradata Corporation (www.teradata.com), the world's largest company solely focused on raising intelligence through data warehousing and enterprise analytics" — but I don't have a clue why Teradata hasn't seen fit to announce the acquisition. There are a few hints of the take-over out on the Web, and an individual in a position to know told me the deal is (or was) "an open secret."

Posted by Bruce Silver
Thursday, March 20, 2008
6:53 AM

BEA recently completed a "thorough analysis" of the business process management market, based on analyst reports, articles, and customer surveys. Some highlights, with my thoughts:

• BPM is one of the fastest-growing software markets, projected to go from $500 Million in 2006 to $6 Billion in 2011. When I see $6 Billion I have to wonder what they're counting, but yeah, it's definitely moving.

• Rapidly consolidating, from 150 vendors in 2006 to 25 in 2007. That's just silly. It was never 150, and it's more than 25 today. I would say the BPMS market is still ripe for consolidation, which hasn't really happened yet.

• 65% of BPM solutions in BEA's own survey integrate 3+ systems. A good sign I agree. Being BEA customers, though, I suspect that is well above the industry as a whole.

• Company politics and shortage of soft skills outweigh technical challenges. I agree, for a SOA shop, BPM is a piece of cake technically.

Posted by Rajan Chandras
Thursday, March 20, 2008
6:25 AM

A Forrester Research paper I read recently stoked my interest (again) in the canonical data/information model, a once hot pursuit that seems to have cooled down in recent times. In short, the paper states that the canonical information model excludes "at rest" data (legacy systems of record, packaged applications etc.) but includes information in motion (messages, service invocations, etc.). My first instinct was to disagree with this definition…

But then, I began wondering about what, exactly, is a canonical information model, and realized that this definition only serves to highlight the confusion out there around [enterprise] [canonical] [business] [data/information/object] models… starting, as you can see, with the term itself. As somebody (Confucius? African proverb?) once said: "If you don't know where you are going, any road will take you there."

Posted by David Linthicum
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
9:44 AM

I've been talking about the SaaS-only or SaaS-majority enterprise for some time now. In essence, it's a new or existing business that has most or all of their critical business applications — and data — delivered on-demand. While this scares the hell out of most IT shops, the courageous and innovative organizations that use Internet-delivered applications and services are finding huge benefits.

Case in point is this eWeek article about Shaklee's strategic movement into the SaaS space, finding many opportunities to save money and time over traditional approaches.

Posted by Seth Grimes
Monday, March 17, 2008
11:00 PM

SAS has announced their take-over of text-analytics vendor Teragram. The companies' joint press release states that "the acquisition will enhance SAS's own robust text mining and analytical BI offerings and extend them to enterprise and mobile search." The release cites Teragram's natural language processing (NLP), categorization, and enterprise search technologies, but it leaves much of back-story untold. Here's my take on positioning, technology, and solution considerations that likely motivated what seems like a smart move for both companies.

The essence of the announcement is captured in SAS CEO Jim Goodnight's statement, "Teragram's technologies augment, strengthen, and extend SAS's ability to combine structured and unstructured data – not only in our text mining solution but embedded across the entire SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform – to drive better answers faster." SAS chief text mining strategist Manya Mayes added in e-mail to me, "Teragram has a broad solution that includes enterprise search and mobile BI" that "complements SAS Text Miner."

Posted by Phil Kemelor
Monday, March 17, 2008
8:52 AM

Everybody loves a party, and Web Analytics vendor Omniture is no exception, using its annual summit to announce the release of SiteCatalyst 14 and a truckload of other news, including a partnership with Baidu and the roll out of the combined Touchclarity/Offermatica offering.

If you have SiteCatalyst, you probably are now just getting familiar with the new release. So, what do you think of it?

I recently received a briefing, and certainly the new Ajax interface jumped out as a big improvement... 13.5 was getting tiresome to look at, especially when compared to Google Analytics, IndexTools, and Nedstat.

Posted by Rajan Chandras
Friday, March 14, 2008
4:48 PM

It's time to take a closer look at the increasingly popular catch-phrase "Information Democracy." Some time back, I received a vendor e-mail message promising "information for all" through MDM. But deep contemplation of this important matter (interrupted only by intermittent wakefulness) led me to an astonishing revelation: Information isn't a Democracy, it's (gasp) Communism!

Information available to all, where you need it, when you need it. That is the promise of Information Democracy, and to be sure, information integration and MDM solutions go a long way in providing this. But this definition ignores two critical factors: Who and Why. Information is not freely available for all, where and when your need it. In fact, data security, provisioning and governance are all specifically aimed at making sure of this. Everyone is not equal in the information they may seek or receive. Information Democracy is a great catch-phrase, but it is also a great fallacy.

But if not a democracy, what is Data?

Posted by Doug Henschen
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
2:23 PM

"Follow the money." This approach to investigation, applied by criminal prosecutors going back before Eliot Ness and made famous as a line in the movie "All the President's Men," is exactly how soon-to-be-ex New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was tied to a high-end prostitution ring. In this case it was fraud detection technology, of the kind routinely applied by banks in money laundering investigations, that led directly to Spitzer and to his resignation.

"Internal Revenue Service investigators conducting a routine examination of suspicious financial transactions reported to them by banks found several unusual movements of cash involving the governor," reported the New York Times in this story. "The transactions, officials said, suggested possible financial crimes — maybe bribery, political corruption, or something inappropriate involving campaign finance. Prostitution, they said, was the furthest thing from the minds of the investigators."

Posted by David Linthicum
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
8:50 AM

Back in the day, meaning 1995, I was doing developer-tool reviews for Byte Magazine, PC Magazine, DBMS (now Intelligent Enterprise), and a few others. Those gigs where a blast since I was able to play with the newest and coolest development tools out there, review them, and hold my thumb up or down like Caesar. I was younger, had more hair, a huge ego, and one of those new-fangled Pentium computers... life was good. Now I just have the huge ego.

What was cool at the time was cross-platform tools, or, tools that promised that you could write an application once and run it on any number of platforms. Long story short, most of them worked equally poorly on all platforms. The fact is that you can't be excellent on all of them. Pretty sure not many of those tools are around today.

Posted by Cindi Howson
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
11:02 AM

Last November, Business Objects officially released Crystal Reports 2008. It's the product's flashiest release in recent years — and I do mean that literally. One of the most noteworthy enhancements is the ability to embed Flash files within a report. The use of Flash brings reports to life in a way that make them more like mini applications — rich, interactive, and visually appealing. The Flash files can be built in a report developer's tool of choice, but the tightest integration is with the company's dashboard product Xcelsius.

The other enhancement is the ability to view reports over the Web and interactively sort and filter the data cached within the report. The parameters refresh the display without reexecuting a query and thus straining the database, a weakness in some competitive products and in earlier versions of Crystal Reports. There is the inevitable 'BUT' and that is in the product's timing and dependencies.

Posted by Doug Henschen
Monday, March 10, 2008
5:59 PM

"Over the past several months, more than 100 customers worldwide purchased SAP solutions for enterprise performance management with the intention to replace Hyperion solutions from Oracle." SAP heralded this announcement late last month as a big milestone, but after reviewing the facts, I'm thinking the number sounds low. I'd also observe that it's a bit too early to be talking about "unifying the full range of financial and operational processes in a single stack," as claimed in the press release.

As for the facts, Hyperion, which was acquired by Oracle last year, is the acknowledged market share leader in performance management with more than 12,000 customers. Given Hyperion's long history, plenty of these customers have aging legacy products and are or will soon be facing upgrade decisions. Oracle was quick to point out when it made the deal that many Hyperion customers are also SAP customers (4,000 according to one press release), but perhaps it didn't anticipate that SAP would buy its way into performance management in such as big way last year. Having acquired Pilot, Outlooksoft, Business Objects and, through the latter, Cartesis, how could SAP help but rack up 100 performance management wins against Hyperion? Throw in SAP's preexisting performance management technologies, and you begin to wonder if the win figure shouldn't be higher.

Posted by Seth Grimes
Saturday, March 8, 2008
10:02 PM

I learned of the March 5 death of computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum from a posting on the CPSR e-mail list. CPSR, Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, recognized Weizenbaum with their Norbert Wiener Award in 1988. But he was of course best known for creating Eliza, a mid-'60s computer program that conducted natural-language conversations, notably mimicking a psychotherapist's interview with a patient. Eliza was named for the character in George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion (familiar as the source of the musical My Fair Lady), someone who was similarly taught to impersonate something she was not. Weizenbaum wrote in his 1976 book Computer Power and Human Reason, "Eliza created the most remarkable illusion of having understood in the minds of the many people who conversed with it."

Posted by Mark Madsen
Thursday, March 6, 2008
8:51 AM

I heard about an interesting presentation planned at the EMC World conference in May. According to this talk, EMC will introduce another entry into the warehouse appliance market via a partnership, this time with ParAccel:

"EMC and ParAccel have jointly engineered and developed a highly scalable and performant analytic appliance. This solution is built on EMC CLARiiON midrange CX-3 UltraScale networked storage and ParAccel's analytic columnar data store. Customers can deploy the EMC/ParAccel analytic appliance by simply extending their existing EMC footprint on enterprise ready storage while leveraging EMC's proven solutions."

Posted by Alan Pelz-Sharpe
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
9:21 AM

So Google has launched a product called Google Sites to compete with Microsoft's SharePoint. Even at first glance it is no SharePoint killer and is (as is normal for Google) more of a Beta product then anything that shows real maturity.

The real discussion we need to be having is whether these tools are the "productivity" applications they claim to be. Both Google and Microsoft have the means and depth to produce impressive tools, but just because something is usable and quick to deploy does not mean that by definition it is a good thing, particularly when it comes to managing confidential information. This is where things can go badly wrong. As we have discussed elsewhere, one of the major problems with SharePoint is not the technology, but its viral growth. What seems good to one end user can represent a compliance and auditing nightmare to their employer. With Google we have the added complication that by using their collaboration tools we are also entrusting our information to their care. Google has a strong and valid approach to confidentiality, security, and privacy issues, but it's not one that fully assures everyone.

Posted by David Linthicum
Tuesday, March 4, 2008
8:22 AM

While the number of SaaS providers grows, along with enterprise acceptance, we are really not breaking new ground. In essence, SaaS providers today provide visual systems, meaning they communicate with a human being. Also, they provide a single visual interface, and the users have to take both the data and behavior, as provided. We could call this an enterprise application that's not much more than a Web site, or an old-Web technology.

Moving forward, we have the opportunity to leverage discrete services for use within both SaaS-delivered and enterprise applications. These are typically Web services that provide a specific and narrow set of behaviors and data that are meant to become part of a larger application or composite. For instance, address-validation services, tax-rate-calculation services, stock-transaction services… you get the idea. These are not visual services, but can become core components of larger applications, and they are services you won't have to write, test, or host. Thus, you have the ability to build core applications by mixing and matching services that you rent, not create. This is the destination for the new Internet, and the next frontier for the existing SaaS players.

Posted by Seth Grimes
Monday, March 3, 2008
11:30 AM

Greenplum recently released a new version of its BI optimized DBMS, Greenplum 3 (G3). The software is based on the PostgreSQL open-source database system; proprietary extensions add support for parallel loading and query and other scalability and reliabilty features.

But with G3, Greenplum appears to be moving ever farther from the company's open-source roots. Specifically, Greenplum sponsors Bizgres, an open source, BI-optimized but non-MPP DBMS, downloadable as an April 2006 0.9 version at bizgres.org or via Greenplum's site. Later versions are available in the code repository but no later version has been packaged as a General Availability release. Note that Greenplum does, separately, contribute to core PostgreSQL development. Frankly, I wonder if/why that contribution isn't the focus of the company's open-source involvement.