> According to Gartner the business intelligence (BI) market is in a
> state of flux. Whilst they see this as a threat to the long-term
> existence of a separate set of vendors in the market, it's also an
> op****tunity for BI to deliver more value to users. As companies
> incor****ate BI into their eco-systems by making BI more strategic and
> pervasive, and increasingly embed BI functionality into their workflow
> and business processes, the case for BI as a mission critical
> functionality increases.
To state the obvious, the biggest leverage for the customer is to have
a well integrated BI as part of their
financial re****ting stream. The biggest points of pain are integration
and continuing investment in upgrades
of different versions and tools provided by the vendors. The IT BIG 4
have arrived.
>
> Gartner's Key Findings
>
> The purchases by SAP, Oracle, IBM and Microsoft have consolidated big
> ****tions of the stand-alone BI market.
BI (or OLAP for more technically apt) market has entered the
consolidated stage of MISO. The ranking from the accountant/financial
analyst point of view is as follows:
M_icrosoft (Excel PivotTables),
I_BM (DB2 Alphablox and Cognos)
S_AP (BW and BO)
O_racle (Essbase and Brio)
It's im****tant to understand that OLAP is only as good as its
underlying OLTP (relational databases) are. The ranking for the
vendors in the database market is a little bit different: Oracle, IBM
(DB2), Microsoft (SQL Server), and SAP (MaxDB).
These purchases will
> accelerate both industry understanding of the value of BI and also the
> value derived from BI by end users.
> Innovation will be driven by new vendors who will start by filling in
> the gaps in 'mega-vendors' product lines.
> BI platform revenue will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR)
> of 8.6% during the next five years.
Gartner has a very good handle on the underlying ****pment information
for each vendor as they form their customer base and are also a part
of Gartner's owner****p structure through private funding sources
(SilverLake)
>
> Why the Consolidation?
>
> According to Gartner the main reasons for the level of acquisition
> seen in 2007 included:
>
> IBM, Oracle, Mircrosoft and SAP are increasingly looking to control
> access to organisational information by locking customers into their
> technology stacks.
Agreed. The large MISO vendors have very strong balance sheets and
dominate the IT market. They all make it to the top vendor lists of
Fortune 500 companies. Their biggest concern is maintaining the market
share which prompted the big consolidation wave of 2007. Note the
close proximity of the acquisition dates (with the exception of
Microsoft which is preoccupied with its battle with Google).
> Increased revenue, both by growing product license revenue, and also
> by reaping current maintenance revenue.
> Embedding analytics directly into workflows and processes, both from
> an application and middleware perspective, is a capability that is
> gaining increasing significance.
From the financial end user perspective, either workflows or
middleware, are of no significance unless ease of use and speed
efficiencies are delivered. Both are big headaches for IT departments,
though.
>
> What does this mean for the customer?
>
> Interestingly not a lot of commentary by Gartner on what it means for
> existing customers but if we look at the recent announcements by SAP
> then we can get a sense of what is to come:
>
SAP is the smallest player, but the most integrated one before the
Business Objects acquisition. The highest integration means highest
speed, but not necessarily the easiest use. SAP is the best engineered
software, but the end users have always struggled with even the
simplest tasks. The biggest payoff is at the end of investment instead
of quick hits in the beginning as may be the case with other vendors.
The other vendors in the increasing scale of easier use are IBM,
Oracle and Microsoft.
>
> What does this mean for the independent Vendors?
>
Location, location, location. Find a niche and play along the MISO.
> With recent consolidation, remaining stand-alone BI players will have
> to accelerate innovation to maintain their leading edge. Some emerging
> areas in BI are predictive modelling, enterprise search, interactive
> visualization techniques and in-memory analytics. Independent Vendors
> can also continue thriving by specializing horizontally,
> geographically or vertically. Embeddable BI tools will become more of
> an option for OEMs and custom business application developers as they
> seek alternatives to products that may be owned by their competitors.
>
Thank you yellowfin for opening this up for discussion.
Your independent Finance IT warrior - MISIOrek.
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