The changing face of BI

New dashboard research

Tomorrow a new WiseAnalytics research report, in conjunction with Dashboard Insight will be released.

The goal of the report is to help organizations navigate through the data visualization market and understand the business value of the solutions available.  Instead of the regular end user surveys, 26 vendors participated in a survey to identify high level of features, functions, positioning, key differentiators, etc. Some of the high level goals of the paper are to help organizations:

• Understand dashboards and how they are applied within organizations.
• Learn how dashboards fit within the world of business intelligence.
• Identify the business value of using dashboards.
• Identify the types of solutions available (and the main players).
• See how these solutions differ from one another at a high level.

Later in September a Webinar will follow that includes the ability to interact with the sponsoring vendors and ask them questions you want to know regarding their offerings - they are Dundas, InetSoft, Klipfolio, and QlikView.

TDWI in San Diego

Last week I spent most of my time at TDWI in San Diego getting caught up on the latest from vendors attending the show. Aside from a lot of information (most of which is under NDA, making the details I can share fairly vague!), I was impressed with the increasing focus on the mid-market companies - and a realistic one at that. Meaning that as vendors continue to target mid-market companies (generally those with revenues under 1B but with Teradata targeting companies from between 1B to 5B within their mid-market portfolio) there is an increased focus on identifying the unique requirements of these companies - whether this means differing IT infrastructures or the benefits of having a more agile environment based on corporate structure. 

Aside from the larger vendors such as SAS with special pricing packages, SAP with their targeted solutions, and Information Builders with their natural ability to accommodate large numbers of users, smaller vendors and newer entrants are starting to see success with small and mid-sized organizations because of their various value propositions whether or not their initial intention was to target that market.  In addition to lower price points, many newer entrants base their solutions on making the whole process of deploying BI easier.  For instance, whether WhereScape's focus on automating the data warehousing process, or Birst with their SaaS model, many organizations are looking for alternatives to the traditional full-scale BI solutions. 

This increased focus on the mid-market will actually benefit all organizations moving forward as organizations look for diverse ways to add value to their current BI infrastructure or alternatively start implementing BI solutions/components for the first time.

free access to BI...is business intelligence slowly becoming a commodity?

Lately more vendors are moving towards the availability of free access to a specific set of their overall offerings.  For some this means total access to solutions but with a limited number of users, and for others, this means access to reporting or the ability to pull data from a limited number of data sources.  Either way, the affect of open source vendors such as Pentaho, Actuate, and Jaspersoft has been great on the way solution providers expand towards making their solutions more accessible to organizations.

With leading vendors such as QlikView offering free personal use, and Microstrategy with their new reporting suite that offers full functionality for free for up to 100 users, the way in which BI is used and assessed is changing.  Most vendors offer free trials to help organizations get up and running, but with the availability of these new free solutions, will limited trials continue to be enough to satiate users and provide long term value to companies?

Only time will tell -- what is happening, however, is that BI is slowly shifting so that smaller organizations or organizations with a small number of BI users to access and develop their own solutions for limited or no cost.

Lessons learned...BI recommendations

I recently posted something similar on my end user connection for mid-market companies on BeyeConnect. But as I've been doing some research and working on a general market landscape report, interviewing companies using BI, etc. I am starting to see some trends in relation to how organizations would do things differently if they had it to do over again.

So far, the three things I've heard most in terms of how organizations would do things differently, or in other words, general lessons learned, are as follows:

   1. generating buy-in beforehand because, in many cases, it is difficult to gain adoption when end users aren't involved in the process (whether because they feel they are being forced to use a new solution or don't trust the data, etc.)

   2. training and whether to take advantage of formal training or spend time learning the solution(s) independently

   3. not understanding the full breadth of functionality beforehand, thereby spending a lot of time tweaking reports and metrics identification (in some cases, this also relates to the collection of business requirements as well)

How Your Medium-Size Business Can Join the BI Revolution

Earlier this week, I recorded a Webinar with Birst that focused on helping mid-market companies take advantage of BI solutions targeted to small and mid-sized companies. The overall gist was the fact that because of market and technology changes over the past few years, organizations beyond the enterprise market can now take advantage of solutions that may have previously been out of their league. For more information and to access a recording or the slides, follow to links below.

Recorded Webinar and slides:
http://info.birst.com/g/?QZR4IT9N73=clicksrc:lw

Slides only:
http://www.birst.com/pdf/Wise%20May%2026%202009.pdf

Do SaaS solutions really cost less?

As organizations discover the value of software as a service/on-demand BI, its adoption is becoming more mainstream.  Even though touted as targeted to mid-market companies because of the lower costs and lack of on site management, the reality is that many enterprise organizations are deploying on-demand BI solutions at the departmental level. Although this is a fairly widely known fact, I wonder whether SaaS based models will still be more cost effective in the long term? With the increasing availability of on-premise solutions that are less costly and more user friendly, or business user centric, I wonder if the hype of SaaS will continue to increase within the market or whether alternative solutions, or those that are considered mainstream will start to make more inroads into companies that are looking for low cost BI and choose SaaS due to its lower subscription fees.

BI podcast with ebizQ

Check out my recent podcast with Jessica Ann Mola at ebizQ that discusses less expensive BI options available to offset the economic downturn.  Also, we've addressed the increasing role of Web 2.0 and social networking within the work of BI and the overlap of master data management and data governance:

http://www.ebizq.net/blogs/2009/05/where_will_bi_fit_in_lyndsay_w.php

Yes, it's a lot in a short podcast, but definitely a decent overview of these topics.

BI for retail

Today BVI Networks announced the release of RetailNEXT, a retail focused BI solution. Aside from looking at more information than simply what is collected within a POS solution, the way video is captured and analyzed is a great example of how unstructured data can be incorporated into various BI applications. Information about how many people entering a store, where they stop, how they browse, and conversion rates can be translated into valuable information to help retailers identify the success of campaigns, placement of merchandise, etc.  Although BI has been available to retailers for awhile, this has been one area of slow adoption.  I partially wonder if that is because of the lack of truly targeted solutions that can meet the business requirements of retailers without having to spend the additional time customizing and integrating various systems and information types.

Join my BI for mid-market community

It's up and running - the end user connection for mid-market BI!  Looking forward to having you as part of the community - my main goal is to create a community to share experiences, frustrations, successes, network with peers, drive research and content, and basically create the community you want where mid-market companies can discuss BI from a viewpoint that reflects what is happening in your companies.

Looking forward to meeting you all and generating some great content.

http://beyeconnect.com/join/wise 

Will mid-market solutions become mainstream offerings?

Adoption of BI as a service is on an increase as organizations look for ways to get more out of their systems and do not want to invest in solutions that do not show immediate results.  In addition, smaller and newer entrants to the market say they can offer solutions quickly and without a lot of IT management.  So even though these solutions are targeted towards mid-market companies, doesn't it stand to reason that enterprise organizations will slowly shift their adoption patterns towards more cost effective and easier to manage solutions?  Out of anyone it seems as if these larger organizations will benefit most from these solutions.  Even though there will always be a market for the larger mainstream vendors, the question becomes whether their market share will lessen as organizations look for ways to easily integrate analytics into their operational solutions without heavily investing in IT infrastructure and long term maintenance.