In a move that turns the heat up on Microsoft Excel, Google is partnering with business intelligence firm Panorama Software to develop a software-as-a-service (SaaS) analytics, reporting and data visualization tool for its free online Google Docs applications suite. The BI firm that handed Microsoft the original OLAP technology that’s now included in SQL Server database management system, is working with Google to push BI and data visualisation capabilities into Google’s Docs applications suite which mimics Microsoft Office with free online word processing, spreadsheet and presentation applications. At the same time rumors are surfacing that Microsoft in experimenting with an online office suite with codename Albany. This in an attempt to fend off competition like Google docs. The Panorama software, which has been released as a beta version this week, is offered as a free desktop gadget that works with Google Spreadsheets. It draws on analysis, reporting, dashboard, visualisation (charting) and data modelling tools that are part of Panorama’s NovaView BI suite. These elements combine to create Panorama Pivot Tables that can be embedded and manipulated in applications like Google Spreadsheets. This Google initiative perfectly fits into one of the BI megatrends for 2008: Integration. We have seen that Business Intelligence continues to integrate with operational processes. The preferred tool of choice in operations is still the spreadsheet (Excel). Microsofts ‘BI for the masses approach’ also boosts excel as their BI frontend. If Google wants to compete with Microsoft (in the BI area) then targeting the spreadsheet sounds like a well thought strategy. But if you compare the installed base of MS Office and Google Docs there is still a long way to go before somebody in Redmond looses sleep over this. Also we have seen a consolidation of BI vendors in 2007. This means that small(er) BI vendors will be looking for partners to survive (or create niche solutions). Again also sound strategy thinking by the guys and girls at Panorama. That they have been in bed with Microsoft before makes it even more exciting.  Finally the Vendor consolidation has created an renewed interest in open source software. Clients are afraid to be ‘owned’ by one mega vendor. Google may be perceived as a alternative. In conclusion, we could argue that the BI vendor consolidation has made the BI market more volatile by creating new chances for innovative parties even from a non traditional BI background.

Take a look at this post on the Eweek website:

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,2227695,00.asp

Reuters wrote on December 4th: ´Shares in software maker SAP extended gains and hit the day’s high on Monday as traders cited market talk of bid interest from Microsoft. SAP declined comment”. If this is true it would be an interesting wave in the latest developments in the BI vendor consolidation tsunami. I asked Ron Torrico, the Microsoft BI Guru Online within Capgemini, for his opinion. Here are his two cents. He expects there will be a clash of cultures, therefore he suggests operating the companies as two separate entities. In his opinion SAP can benefit from the technology know how within Microsoft. But SAP has been investing in integration with IBM Websphere, which is not the core-competence of the guys in Redmond.On the business side, positioning Dynamics for the small, medium business and SAP for the Enterprise level sounds like a good plan. You can be sure that Larry (Oracle) will be pissed off. It may also encourage SAP to be more open. So again, as many of the recent acquisitions, it seems that market share is again the major driver behind this and not so much the technology.

Alles is BI [Click to open pdf]

Everything is BI, but what is BI and what is happening in the BI world with all the vendor consilidation?

In this pdf file you can find an article (I was interviewed for this) published in channelworld about the subject.

ARTICLE IS IN DUTCH

[Click on image to enlarge]

With great thanks to my collegue Ron Torrico, the outcome of a small internal poll. No big suprises here (IBM), although the number #2 Microsoft ? Time will tell.

My prediction? Although IBM and Microsoft are most likely a strategic partnership with Informatica sounds great. It plays the independence card and also completes the Cognos BI platform which lacks a robust ETL tool.

In order to adapt to faster changing circumstances, organizations are more and more in need of a (near) real time supply of information within the decision making process. This means gathering transactional data from inside the organizations processes (often structured data) or on the outside edge (often unstructured data).  The true business value of business intelligence (BI) can be found in the ability to efficiently gather useful information from a diversity of both internal as well as external information sources and by sharing or interacting the intelligence with the ecosystems partners and customers to improve mutual performance.  This information centric approach is also reflected in the BI or Corporate Performance Management (CPM) suite of various vendors: integrating both organizations processes such as planning, consolidation and forecasting and search / knowledge management solutions. This makes sense as the most productive fields within the BI/CPM market are at this point in time: financial consolidation, BI platform, budgeting, planning and forecasting. This makes BI/CPM suite vendors a tasty bite. BI/CPM vendors often have similar products build upon the same type of technology. Therefore there are little distinguishing characteristics between the various vendors. It is therefore more than likely that technology is not the driving force behind the recent storm of BI/CPM consolidation. Keeping or gaining market share is their main goal. From a technology standpoint there is a case to be made that the innovation will come from small companies focusing on niches, such as: strategy & implementation tools, meta- and master data, advanced visualization, text mining, search or business activity monitoring. These will be likely candidates for a content driven acquisition. A strong trend in the BI/CPM market is the integration between hard- and software. The main push for this is the focus on real time transactional data for the decision making process. This will result in a merge between (transactional) platforms/databases and (interactive) BI/CPM solutions. A dominant position for platform/database vendors such as SAP, Oracle, IBM and Microsoft is to be expected.  These BI/CPM platform vendors will end up with a large number of duplicate tools. They will have at least two or more tools fit for the same solution. They must choose if they want a technical integration (complex, time consuming) or to thin out or rationalize their stack (kill your own darlings). Over time this heated BI/CPM consolidation will result in new product stacks, making recent tool selections obsolete and future ones a challenge.  Recent BI/CPM acquisitions Some of the most striking BI/CPM acquisitions so far have been:

• SAP acquiring Pilot Software, Outlooksoft and Business Objects;
• Oracle acquiring Peopleosoft, Siebel and Hyperion;
• Microsoft acquiring Proclarity (and the release of their Performance Point Sever);
• SAS announced a strategic partnership with Teradata (just separated from NCR);
• Cognos acquiring Adaytum, Frango, Celequest, Applix.

SAP acquires Business Objects SAP has announced that it intends to acquire Business Objects in friendly takeover. They will pay 4.8 billion Euros for this deal. Business Objects will operate as a stand alone business but part of the SAP group. SAP is an established ERP vendor and market leader in Enterprise or business applications. They have a strong transactional platform which includes BI (Netweaver) and CPM (Outlooksoft) capability. SAP has had limited success with their own BI solutions. The main reasons for this are their weak front end capabilities and problems with unlocking data from non SAP sources.  Business Objects is a pure BI player with very strong reporting, analytics and CPM capabilities with many industry models available, focusing on the mid market. They have been the market leader in Business Intelligence. Business Objects has entered the CPM arena late in the game, some say maybe too late. They have made up for this by buying SRC, ALG and Cartesis, allowing them better access to the finance and CFO office. However as they are still busy with the XI integration this must be quite an extra burden. With SAP being strong in enterprise applications but falling behind in BI, this acquisition of the Business Objects makes up for this. Not only can Business Objects help them with their front end solutions or metadata, they can also give them the much wanted business user access and mid market expansion. Business Objects can also help with Non SAP data integration.  Does that mean that everything is like hand and glove between them? Some analysts question the robustness of the Business Objects ETL tool, especially in complex SAP environments. But the main challenge will be the integration of the all the (previously) acquired companies and their solutions. Having more than one solution for planning, reporting, consolidation, analysis or score carding will also create much confusion with their clients on which will survive the cut.  In summary, this acquisition allows SAP to have the transactional platform and the interactive Business Intelligence (Business Objects) and Corporate Performance Management (Outlooksoft) solutions. However they will face a large product overlap in the CPM area: planning, budgeting, financial consolidation. Having said this, technology probably has never been the main driver for this acquisition. This can purely be considered as a strategic reaction against the Oracle / Siebel /Hyperion merger.

Last week Microsoft came in the news with two seemingly separate events. The Dutch government has decided to make more use of open source software. There are several reasons for this: lower costs, more innovative employees and so on. But the most dominant driver for this was limiting the position of power of Microsoft.

Also the European community won their fight with Microsoft, forcing them to give other companies more information on the ins and outs of Ms Windows. Giving these so called API’s to other companies allows them to better integrate their products with Ms Windows. In the extreme this can be considered as a first step towards making Microsoft more open(source).

The support for open source software among some IT professionals is powerful. For example there is a high correlation between pony tailed network administrators and (Linux) penguin T-shirts.

As many of you know Microsoft has been entering the BI arena with products like performance point server. Many argue that Ms Excel already is the dominant BI tool anyway. It has been common practice among IT professionals to bash Microsoft and for BI professionals to bad-talk Excel. But on the other side, the business people (especially those grayish people from finance) cannot live without their spreadsheets. So if IT doesn’t want it but the Business needs it – are we at a deadlock?

If this first step of forcing Microsoft to open up its secrets to other players continues - perhaps in the future IT and Business can work together in making Microsoft BI (2.0) a truly collaborative business intelligence experience.

Bookkeeper and BI professional – both wearing a “I LOVE BILL” T-shirt – working together on improving Microsoft BI. Shall we live to see this?

For as long as I can remember, the market for Business Intelligence tools has been more or less stable. Sure, sometimes a new player entered or another disappeared. But on the whole, the market was dominated by a couple of vendors. The most exiting news came from new versions, upgrades or a technological breakthroughs. To put it bluntly: you could choose either Cognos or BusinessObjects or if you were running SAP you could go with BW. Than things slowly started changing. Instead of Business Intelligence we suddenly found ourselves talking about things like Corporate Performance Management, financial consolidation, budgeting, planning, dashboards and scorecards. And we embraced the tools that came with it. Our work was no longer limited to reporting and analysis. We were proud that after so many years finally the strategic value of Business Intelligence was recognized. Thus changing the playing field completely. The focus in BI was shifting from a technical toward a business solution.

The BI and platform vendors quickly recognized this also and have been embracing these tools as well. They bought up companies that had tools specializing in this specific area and integrated them – as best as they could – in their own product portfolio. SAP for example acquired Outlooksoft (Consolidation) and Pilot Software (Strategy Management). Oracle acquired Hyperion (after they bought Peoplesoft and Siebel) – the market leader in planning, budgeting and financial consolidation. Microsoft acquired ProClarity (Analytics) and made a firm entry to the BI/CPM marketplace when they launched their Performance Point Server. Cognos – a pure BI player – acquired Adaytum and Frango and created a complete CPM solution. Finally BusinessObjects- still busy with integrating Crystal – bought Cartesis (consolidation) to complete their CPM offering that they already started building on when they acquired SRC and ALG Software. However is this buying up – this consolidation – not the kiss of death? Where is this going to end? Why this focus on applications rather than information?

Business Intelligence has come a long way. It is now closer tied with the business processes as ever before making the basic data (quality) that comes from this also more and more important. BI still can be an aggregated report of last month sales on a highly accumulated level but it can also be operational dashboards monitoring key business processes on a real time level supporting split second decisions. This makes a strong case for the platform vendors. They have the applications to support the business processes, capture the data and report on them. An integration of software and hardware therefore seems to be unavoidable. Cognos is one of the fist BI pure players to understand this. Their launch of Cognos Now! – which integrates a hardware server and dashboard for realtime monitoring – is proof of that. They might well be the first BI platform vendor.

But basically all BI/CPM vendors have more or less the same products and use the same technology. Even the corporate take over strategies are being copied resulting into a concentration of BI vendors. The real innovation still has to come from small companies that specialize in a niche of business intelligence such as: strategy implementation, meta- and masterdata, advanced visualization, text mining, search and business activity monitoring. These small companies will probably at some point in time be bought by one of the large BI vendors. After all, Cognos Now! was Celquest before. The real challenge for the large BI vendors will than be the technical integration of all these tools. It is easy to make a Ms Powerpoint presentation of where this new application fits in your product portfolio – but making it work with these other tools is a far more difficult thing to do.

Finally, will we end up with one or two BI vendors with a standard set of Business Intelligence tools? No, I don’t think so. The BI tool set will always be dynamic. Remember? After DDS (Decision Support Sytems) and EIS (Executive Information Systems) came Enterprise Reporting and OLAP (Analytics). Than came the consolidation, planning, dashboard and scorecarding tools. Nowadays, the streaming servers and realtime monitoring tools are being wheeled into the business. There will always be something new. The platform vendors will take a dominant position in the BI market but there will always be room for vendors with a focus on BI only. It is almost like the Olympics. Sometimes you need the decathlete to jump, run and throw the javelin and sometimes you just need a 100 meter specialist.

But I am not sure that the real innovation will come from these companies, though they may well acquire the innovators to embed them into their enterprise solutions. Like a thousand points of light, there are individuals and small companies out there already thinking in a really innovative manner about what Business Intelligence could be given new capabilities and technologies.

Who are they? I can’t wait to find out! Let me know what you have seen or are thinking, and that also means the big players too.