There are several positionings I could find fault with in the latest BI platforms Magic Quadrant (MQ). That both Microsoft's and Oracle's "ability to execute" is higher than IBM Cognos' and SAP BusinessObjects' would be two; I say that in terms of their BI-specific offerings, not their overall ability to execute. Vendors are very much at the mercy of the Magic Quadrants, when in reality, positioning in the MQ says little about how well a particular company or product will meet a customer's needs. And therein lies the problem.

As is this vendor's tradition, the general session kicked off with a rock impersonator, this year, Gwen Stefani. The performance wasn't particularly memorable, in contrast to last year's Tina Turner ("we're simply the best…") or to the both daring and amusing Kinks' Lola in 2008 ("BI bake off…"). (Truly, if there were a YouTube clip of this rendition, I know BI teams around the world would be playing it at their selection kick offs.)

The seeming assuredness of the Packer's loss at the beginning, followed by their incredible comeback, and the volatile overtime, made me think of the competitiveness of the BI landscape and the difficulty in predicting what 2010 will really bring.

I hope I'm better at predicting BI events than football outcomes. Here are my thoughts on where the excitement and let downs will be.

I recently attended the SAP Influencer Summit in Boston. At this annual event, 275 thought leaders gather to hear about SAP's strategy and vision around BI and more. The tricky thing about events like this is that some attendees want broad, high-level insight, and others, like me (and readers like you) want much more detail.

SAP announced that Microsoft supports SAP BusinessObjects Planning and Consolidation (BPC, formerly known as OutlookSoft) as a preferred solution and are identifying joint marketing initiatives.

I've been collaborating with open source and BI experts Jos van Dongen and Mark Madsen in this process. Jos is the founder of Tholis Consulting in the Netherlands and co-author of the recently published book Pentaho Solutions. Mark is the founder of Third Nature and a fellow instructor at TDWI.

I had the honor of delivering the keynote on Monday, with new findings on secrets to successful BI (details to follow next week), but I first wanted share some insights from my "Cool BI" course.

One of the tricky things with BI for SMBs is that the IT department may be a one-person show, with limited resources and rarely the expertise to build a data warehouse or to deploy complicated BI tools. Fast deployment and simple administration are key. I'll find out in a few weeks just how well the just-announced IBM Cognos Express addresses these aspects when the product will be available for trial download.

Business intelligence is helping monitor swine flu in a number of ways. Emergency Medical Associates (EMA) operates hospital emergency rooms in northern New Jersey and New York metro area. They have a relatively unique ability to collect patient data across multiple hospitals, on a daily basis, and then analyze it with SAP BusinessObjects (see graph)...

Oracle has a "protect, extend, evolve," policy, meaning if you were on Hyperion System 9 prior to the Oracle acquisition, you can safely continue to expand your deployment on that platform. The vendor has announced lifetime support for all the Hyperion and Oracle Standard Edition BI products. In fact, the "plus" in "OBIEE Plus" is that it includes Hyperion Interactive Reporting (formerly known as Brio) and Production Reporting (formerly known as SQR); Essbase meanwhile is a separate license (see this evaluation for clarification on modules and strengths and weaknesses).

The acquisition fills what had been a void in IBM's business intelligence capabilities and is a further expansion of its Information on Demand portfolio, with $10 billion in acquisitions over the past several years.

Predictive analytics has been a hot topic for years but one in which there seems to be little consensus on how to bring it from the back room to the front lines. It's clear that building good predictive models requires a high degree of expertise and is not something that will become main stream any time soon. However, incorporating the results of those models into everyday decisions that even the most novice of information users can consume and act upon has become the holy grail. So what does that mean -- store everything in the database? Execute at run time and surface in a report?

You might argue that BI requirements are much more objective than music performances, where taste in music is very subjective. In some cases this is true. For example, support for Linux is a clear yes/no. However, support for "multiple data sources" is open to interpretation, with all vendors responding "yes," but no two supporting it in precisely the same way. Ensuring a consistent understanding of requirements among all key stake holders is the key to ensuring a successful selection process. So as part of the course I teach at TDWI, we first start with those definitions. Only after this discussion do we launch into the bake off in the afternoon.

Most product evaluations involve a degree of subjectivity, with varying definitions and opinions of what capabilities and criteria matter more. The IDC market share figures, on the other hand, are cold-hard facts: what were the revenues, who's leading, who's growing. While such data may have been somewhat trackable on 10Ks when BI vendors were independent, it's now largely impossible as BI is often but a small part of a larger company. Software vendors don't have to report their revenues by market segment, and throughout the year, we only get vague, imprecise references about how the BI business is going. The IDC report lays out the breakdown by vendor.

Take the updated survey here. As before, it's not vendor-sponsored.
Is the economy helping or hurting your BI efforts? Maybe a down economy is forcing you to work smarter, or maybe layoffs and budget cuts are putting a dent in your BI strategy. Two years ago, 42% of you had standardized on a BI platform (see chart below). Have industry consolidation or the economy changed that? And if so, which vendors are you standardizing on?

The most intriguing part of Cohen's keynote was VP Daniel Ortolani's demo of a new feature of Active Reports called Active PDF. With Active PDF, the entire range of Active Reports capabilities (sort, filter, chart) are now available from within a PDF document. While Information Builders' positions Active Reports for a mobile work force, I see the value as much broader to any information consumer, including customers, suppliers and regulators who receive currently static reports and documents. As a residential electricity consumer, I would love for JCP&L to send me an Active PDF e-bill so I can figure out which months our consumption flags us as a high-consumption electric user. (Heck, I leave our thermostat at 78 in summer, and we even have a portion allocated to wind power! But let's not digress).

Non disclosure agreements (NDAs) are one of the trickier aspects of analyst-vendor relations. Vendors will share things under NDA for a number of reasons. Sometimes, it's to gauge the reaction, and if it's consistently negative, then maybe the vendor changes course. Often, though, the NDA is for only a week or so until an announcement has been made publicly. Those NDAs are easy to respect. The harder NDAs to respect are broader, with no deadline, and lots of exceptions. Like "anything said during this four-hour period is NDA, unless it was about product A or Z, release N or N.1." And in this age of blogging and tweeting, timely and clear NDA guidelines are a must.

Yesterday at SAP's Sapphire conference in Orlando, Fla., the vendor announced "Explorer," a combination of Polestar and the Business Warehouse Accelerator (BWA). BWA is SAP's in-memory database and appliance (see my in-memory BI feature for more info). And don't let the "Explorer" rebranding confuse you (as it did me!); we aren't talking about the former SAP BEx (a.k.a. Business Explorer).

There are a couple reasons why this is a big deal.

So far, I can't find the catch. Given the product capabilities, migration path, and support, it seems like a deal too good to be true.

I have often said BI pricing is a buyer's nightmare. No two vendors package products the same way, so defining requirements and evaluating alternatives can be a painful process. You would think that procuring the software is relatively easier, but it's often not.

The SAP Insider conference is different from many of the BI conferences in that a media company, rather than the vendor, runs the event. I had last attended an SAP Insider conference shortly after the Business Objects acquisition was announced. Then and now, I noticed a stark contrast between the former Business Objects' conferences and these SAP Insider ones. I would have liked more enthusiasm and certainly less emphasis on legacy products.

No, it's not that I am on the bandwagon for the stimulus being the answer to all the world's woes. However, when President Obama first mentioned a website (recovery.gov) as a way of ensuring full disclosure for stimulus spending, I got as excited as anyone can amid this economic crisis.