The business intelligence (BI) technology market is undergoing a revolution. I’ve been working in this segment for 20 years, and it is and has been an exciting market in which to work, but its dynamic nature can be daunting to organizations trying to evaluate, purchase and deploy BI to improve their business processes. And despite the advances our benchmark research shows high levels of dissatisfaction with and immaturity in BI capabilities within organizations.
The Business Intelligence Technology Revolution in 2011
Topics: Sales Performance, Social Media, Supply Chain Performance, Business Analytics, Business Collaboration, Business Intelligence, Business Mobility, Business Performance, Business Technology, CIO, Cloud Computing, Collaboration, Customer & Contact Center, Enterprise Software, Financial Performance, Information Technology, Mobility, Operational Intelligence, IT Performance Management (ITPM)
SAS and its Business Intelligence & Information Management Direction
I recently attended SAS Institute’s annual analyst conference. My colleague covered the multibillion-dollar company’s strategy and the event. Now I want to look into some of the details of SAS’s products for business analytics and how they are supported with business intelligence (BI), and information management. Although SAS is not a publicly traded company and therefore is not required to make the financial disclosures that others are, the company revealed numerous financial statistics. Business intelligence represents over $200 million in license revenue to SAS. That’s a significant figure, larger than publicly traded BI vendors QlikTech (NASDAQ: QLIK) and Actuate (NASDAQ: BIRT) have and smaller than but still in the same order of magnitude as MicroStrategy (NASDAQ: MSTR) and Information Builders. These figures are consistent with results in our benchmark research on business intelligence and performance management: 18% of our research respondents reported using SAS products, which places it in the middle of the pack.
Topics: SAS, Social Media, Analytics, Business Intelligence, Business Performance, Business Technology, CIO, Collaboration, Enterprise Software, Information Management, Information Technology, Mobility, Operational Intelligence, IT Performance Management (ITPM)
SAP Enterprise Information Management 4.0: A Technology Secret
SAP has launched its Enterprise Information Management (EIM) 4.0 release as part of its “Run Better Tour.” It includes a broad range of information management components spanning data integration, data quality, data profiling, metadata management and more. The launch was done in conjunction with SAP Business Intelligence (BI) 4.0, which got much bigger billing at the event –to the point where one might call this a stealth marketing campaign. However, the event did identify three themes intended to highlight EIM capabilities: event insight, trusted data and text processing. The goal here was to communicate the integration SAP has achieved within and between its BI and EIM products. IBM announced a similar advance with its InfoSphere products and Informatica has also invested heavily in integrating its information management products. Our Information Management benchmark research validates this approach, finding that incompatible tools create a significant obstacle to organizations’ quest for consistent sets of data.
Topics: Data Quality, SAP, Social Media, Analytics, Business Analytics, Business Intelligence, Business Technology, CIO, Complex Event Processing, Data Governance, Data Integration, Information Management, Information Technology, Operational Intelligence, IT Performance Management (ITPM)
There has been a spate of acquisitions in the data warehousing and business analytics market in recent months. In May 2010 SAP announced an agreement to acquire Sybase, primarily for its mobility technology and had already been advancing its efforts with SAP HANA and BI. In July 2010 EMC agreed to acquire data warehouse appliance vendor Greenplum. In September 2010 IBM countered by acquiring Netezza, a competitor of Greenplum. In February 2011 HP announced after giving up on its original focus with HP Neoview and now has acquired analytics vendor Vertica that had been advancing its efforts efficiently. Even Microsoft shipped in 2010 its new release of SQL Server database and appliance efforts. Now, less than one month later, Teradata has announced its intent to acquire Aster Data for analytics and data management. Teradata bought an 11% stake in Aster Data in September, so its purchase of the rest of the company shouldn’t come as a complete surprise. My colleague had raised the question if Aster Data could be the new Teradata but now is part of them.
Topics: Data Warehousing, Microsoft, RDBMS, SAS, Teradata, Analytics, Business Intelligence, Cloud Computing, Data Management, HP, IBM, Information Management, Oracle, IT Performance Management (ITPM)
Secrets Revealed in Columnar Database Technology
This is the second in a series of posts on the architectures of analytic databases. The first post addressed massively parallel processing (MPP) and database technology. In this post, we’ll look at columnar database technology. Given the recent announcement of HP’s plan to acquire Vertica, a columnar database vendor, there is likely to be even more interest in columnar database technology, how it operates and what benefits it offers.
Topics: Data Warehousing, RDBMS, Analytics, Business Intelligence, Cloud Computing, Data Management, Information Management, IT Performance Management (ITPM)
Living in the Era of Hadoop and Large-Scale Data
It’s clear that now we are living in the era of big data. The stores of data on which modern businesses rely are already vast and increasing at an unprecedented pace. Organizations are capturing data at deeper levels of detail and keeping more history than they ever have before. Managing all of the data is thus emerging as one of the key challenges of the new decade.
Topics: Data Warehousing, RDBMS, Business Intelligence, Cloud Computing, Data Management, Information Management, IT Performance Management (ITPM), Strata+Hadoop
Last week SAP launched the 4.0 Release of its Business Intelligence and Enterprise Information Management products in conjunction with the New York City stop on its “SAP Run Better Tour”. My colleague Mark Smith has already covered the announcement in the context of some of today’s major technology trends. In this post, I’ll focus on the specifics of the product announcements.
Topics: SAP, Social Media, Analytics, Business Intelligence, Business Technology, CIO, Collaboration, Enterprise Software, Information Management, Information Technology, Mobility, Operational Intelligence