MicroStrategy is well known to support the most complex enterprise requirements, having some of the largest BI deployments in terms of data volumes and numbers of user. Now in this release they have simplified the implementation and integration of BI in many methods that will expand the realm of what is possible with BI. Most importantly it will make it simpler to deploy sophisticated and easy-to-use BI. I hope to see how MicroStrategy will also make lower-cost entry points for smaller teams of business and IT groups. But by addressing the need for business users and analysts to easily design and deploy BI on a robust platform, this release brings enterprise class capabilities with in-memory and multi-source ROLAP for accessing data and processing it efficiently to support any type of deployment.

The initial set of HP Neoview customers that brought momentum has not increased a lot, and the future of the product is not clear. There's significant competition from the likes of Teradata, newly confident and competitive, IBM, with its advances in appliances announced at the IBM IOD conference, and Oracle, which announced a data warehouse appliance with HP at the recent Oracle OpenWorld conference. Other competitors, like Greenplum, Infobright, Kognitio, Netezza and Vertica, have also inserted themselves into the ring for your data warehouse business, making things even more interesting with specialized database and appliance technologies.

If you read my blog on the latest from Microsoft at its BI conference in October, where it accurately describe the dilemma of "Excel Hell" created from the misuse of Microsoft's spreadsheet tool for storing and analyzing data across business. Unfortunately, Microsoft's prescribed antidote, called Project Gemini, won't be available until at least 2010 or beyond. The challenge with Microsoft's announcement is not just the promise of the release in the future, but the estimated requirements for the version of Microsoft Office, Microsoft SQL Server and operating systems. Why wait years to evaluate a product when there are solutions today?

The keynote highlighted the latest salesforce.com release called Winter '09 which is the 27th release in nine years, and they are excited about the technology accolades they are getting. But will business be as excited? In the marketing department, they have added Google adwords support, email templates, site landing pages, campaign hierarchy support and influence, and analytics snapshots. The demonstrations provided some insight to handling landing pages, which provide the Web analytics to then be able to manage influence across campaigns providing the basics of lead nurturing. Some of these capabilities are already being delivered by partners like Marketo and MarketBright, which automate other elements of this process and will need to compete against their partner as they advance their efforts.

On a personal note, I was pleased to hear salesforce.com highlight that it does significant work to help the community and non-profit organizations by donating more than 90,000 workforce hours and $13 million in grants to community service with some 5,000 non-profit organizations. This donation should be applauded as companies should give back to the community, especially as they continue to grow and succeed.

Saleforce.com is moving beyond the 2007 launch of the cloud computing technology platform Force.com and just competing against other IT technology platforms like IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP, as referenced in my blog "Can salesforce.com make the dream reality." Salesforce has gone beyond the traditional enterprise software market and is venturing into a new realm of applications and platforms for developers to bring cloud computing closer to a reality in your enterprise.

Let's be honest. Organizations have not managed their businesses using systems to understand current performance and risk in a common, enterprisewide fashion. Without such an approach, the appropriate changes to business plans to minimize impacts on shareholders and the workforce can't be implemented. Frankly, the current environment shines the light on the lack of performance management and business intelligence. My take is that the lack of management processes, with analytics and information coordinated from across the business, has led to our current quandary. Business management in the financial services industry has failed the world by not heeding the need for enterprisewide decision-support systems for managing performance and risk.

Tapping its large customer base and years of research into understanding what is needed to make business more productive and effective, Infor has developed a new class of user interface and role-based capabilities for enterprise applications. Infor MyDay provides information to specific roles to help enable easier actions and decisions to improve results of workers handling daily tasks. Infor MyDay will begin to roll out to ERP customers under maintenance and in 2009 will reach Financial Management (FM), Enterprise Asset Management (EAM), Supply Chain Management (SCM), Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and other Infor applications to address the need to access, search and interact with specific information related to key tasks and activities. This includes the metrics and key performance indicators (KPI) needed to guide workers.

Microsoft SQL Server 2008, previously known as project Katmai, offers a number of new capabilities to support data warehousing and analytics for BI that expand its value as an enterprise data platform and its support of nonrelational data sources, as well as what Microsoft calls "pervasive insight" but is really the reporting and analysis of data that can be published. Microsoft has added new data adapters for Oracle, SAP BW and Teradata systems to enable users to gain better access to data and mechanisms for data compression and governors for resources and queries. A new Report Builder helps simplify developing, deploying and maintaining reports and delivering data into Microsoft Word and Excel.

Actuate also entered into the open source market in 2005 with BIRT (BI and Reporting Tools) contribution to Eclipse and their open source BIRT community. Actuate has bet that the use of open source will be a key component for their future and starting point for developers, where at some point will purchase support, services and then the more robust commercial products. In fact, Actuate open source efforts now contribute 10% of Actuate revenue. This open-source-based approach to commercial enterprise software expands Actuate's reach across the world and deepens relationships with developers. The benefit for developers is that it is easier to download and work with their basic products before determining what is needed for deployments that require support, services or higher-end technology.

Unfortunately, the pressure to reduce costs and resources in IT has impacted many organizations' ability to dedicate further attention to BI. The reality is that each organization will have to determine how IT should prioritize budgets and resources for BI and how to respond to this growing need. Business knows the problems quite well, and limitations of existing BI efforts has proliferated further spreadsheet use. And as we all know, the copy and paste function of spreadsheets leads to inaccuracy and hampers quality decision-making.

Listening in to one of the keynotes by Thomas Kurian, Senior Vice President, Fusion Middleware of Oracle on Tuesday, he reviewed a broad range of what is happening with their technology platform. There were many positive advancements and points in the presentation of Oracle's Fusion middleware, but one point should not be left without comment.

I'm sure you all know the Teradata brand and its dedicated focus on data warehousing, but the company has also been building — through acquisition, organic efforts and partnerships — a robust set of analytics solutions that span line-of-business and vertical industries. In October, Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) won the Financial Performance Management Leadership Award from Ventana Research on the strength of its ability to meet deep, domain-specific customer requirements — a capability richly supported by Teradata.

IBM plans to add Cognos to its Information Management division, which is a precarious position to place the company as this group is not well versed on the BI market, as I have previously written. Considering that it has placed brands like Tivoli, Rational, Lotus and WebSphere at the same level, IBM is spending a lot of money to place Cognos under Information Management, which is focused on middleware technology and infrastructure. There are some great synergies between Cognos BI and IBM Information Management group where they have a great opportunity to have deeper integration, but it will impact Cognos' current agreement to license competitive Informatica data integration technology.