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« Why BI Needs BPM | Main | How Best to Link BI and BPM? » June 18, 2007 BI: Upfront, Personal & For Everyone In the true spirit of democracy, IT vendors have been harking on about "BI for the Masses" and "pervasive BI" in various mantras for years now. It clearly hasn't happened as yet. It's fair to say that BI is far from being pervasive in terms of enterprise deployment and use – research shows that less than a quarter of information workers in companies use or have access to BI tools, with most being used by financial analysts. There are several reasons why this is so: • Businesses have not yet identified a solid business value case for its deployment everywhere. • There are still problems with usability, including the time and expense of training • The upfront and ongoing costs of BI are also barriers to BI adoption – i.e. companies are still paying too much for BI and not getting enough return on their investment in terms of business value. • Customization of BI for specific types of users and job roles requires considerable work. Nevertheless it is a new "BI 2.0" nut that Microsoft, Business Objects and other BI vendors seem determined to crack. So what's new this time? Let's take a closer look at their recent "nutcracking" moves. Microsoft's New Day for BI Microsoft announced a new rallying cry – "BI for Everyone" – at its inaugural BI conference in Seattle, Washington in May. The company basically wants to drive greater BI usage. Right now it estimates that BI is used by only 10% of information workers. Microsoft's goal is to increase that at least ten-fold. Microsoft is certainly well positioned to achieve that goal. The attendance figures on the conference alone – over 250,000 attendees – testify to Microsoft's strengthening position in the BI market with SQL Server 2005 starting to establish itself as a scalable, enterprise-class data warehousing platform. Microsoft is essentially taking a "mass tools" approach to BI with its SQL Server 2005 (and its forthcoming Katmai 2008 release), SharePoint Server 2007 and Office 2007 products. But owning the knowledge worker desktop and now offering a complete "stack", from operating system, database, to BI front ends, certainly does make Microsoft a formidable force in BI that is changing the landscape for both competitors and users. Here are just a few of the feathers in Microsoft's BI cap right now: • Microsoft is starting to nicely flesh out its BI front-ends capabilities beyond Excel with its ProClarity acquisition and Office 2007 suite. Microsoft already owns the most popular BI tool in use today – Excel. Originally designed as a "disconnected" personal productivity tool, Microsoft has since tightened up integration with centralized BI stores to ensure data/query integrity and currency while still maintaining the familiar spreadsheet interface accessibility. The analysis and data mining tools built-into Excel 2007 have also been optimized, though only for OLAP data in SQL Server Analysis Services. What's missing is relational data query optimization; a point conveniently downplayed by Microsoft. And Office 2007, which shipped last November, now lets business users build BI reports within Excel from data stored on a networked sales database. SharePoint 2007 also has BI capabilities built-in. The recent acquisition of OfficeWriter technology from SoftArtisans further leverages the Office interface and shores up relational data access. OfficeWriter lets users design Reporting Services report from within Word and Excel. The technology will first surface in the next release of SQL Server (codenamed Katmai, which is due in 2008) and later in PerformancePoint Server 2007. • Lowering the entry-level price barrier for BI is a key trait of Microsoft's strategy for wide-scale adoption. For example, Microsoft has lowered the price of ProClarity's software from $800 to $200 per user under its ownership and plans to license PerformancePoint 2007 attractively like other Office products with a single server + single client access license (CAL) at $20,000 per server and $195 per CAL. The license will include scorecarding, analytics, planning, budgeting, forecasting, consolidation, and financial reporting. Despite its aggressive pricing Microsoft claims that revenues for its BI product line has increased, pointing to mass adoption. • Microsoft is also now poised to make its first foray into the performance management space with Office PerformancePoint Server 2007 due in the late summer. PerformancePoint is a server-based application for creating scorecards, budgets, forecasts, and reports. PerformancePoint Server differs radically from BI tools from SAP and Oracle by allowing users to author scorecards and reports in familiar and commonly used knowledge-work environments like Excel and Word. The technology gained from SoftArtisans will also shore up Office access to non-SQL Server relational data sources. However the depth of functionality that Microsoft's BI products offer still remains in question. But the price-point that they fall in still makes it a good deal for wide-scale deployment. Microsoft BI also currently lacks an ability to tap specific processes in its Dynamics ERP suite, something that Oracle and SAP both excel in. However Microsoft's CRM Analytics Foundation, which was announced in February this year and delivered via CodePlex project-hosting Website and the Microsoft CRM Sandbox, is a tentative step in the right direction. Business Objects The notion of pervasive BI is a new concept for Business Objects, a company that has largely grown up selling premium-priced BI tools, that were used by a sub-set of enterprise IT users. But several recent product announcements by the company are squarely framed in a "pervasive" context: • BusinessObjects Mobile – BI software designed for "on-the-go" business users for viewing corporate reports from hand-held devices. Note: competitor Cognos also announced a similar product last September. Mobile access can be added as another service for BusinessObjects' core XI BI platform. Business Objects claims that a third of its customer base plan to give their BI users mobile access in the next two years. • Business Objects XI Release 2 Productivity Pack – The new Query as Web Service capability lets users for the first time publish BI queries as Web services, thereby making it easy to shoot off queries against a variety of applications without custom coding of IT involvement. • BusinessObjects Xcelsius Enterprise – Builds on the core capabilities of Release 2 Productivity Pack to offer personalized BI dashboard visualizations within Microsoft Office applications like Word, PowerPoint and Excel or portals. • Business Objects On Demand BI Connectors – Launched last year, Business Objects' On Demand business is flourishing with over 40,000 subscribers signed up to date for its software-as-a-service version of its Crystal Reports Server. Business Objects is initially targeting Salesforce.com users; around 40% of its on demand customers also run Salesforce CRM. The new Data Connectors and Web Services Connectors now broadens support to both on demand and local data sources through on-premise and web-based applications. Business Objects also acquired NSite, a software-as-a-service specialist, last November to signal a deeper push into the on-demand BI market. Wrap Both of these recent product announcements bode well for wide-scale adoption of BI beyond a handful of specialist users to mainstream business staff like sales, marketing and call center agents. But making sure BI can afford these roles real business value requires careful technological consideration – not to mention a strong business case for the technology investment. Arguably, users necessarily don't want more BI tools. They want simplicity, which has been the traditional barrier to broader adoption thus far. Making BI look like Google search or another Blackberry or iPod gadget could be key. BI vendors recognize this and have launched initiatives to align their BI systems more closely to the enterprise search model. In this respect, Microsoft has a longer-way to go than traditional BI competitors. Pervasive BI is probably more than what most companies want right now. But BI is starting to branch out in different job roles and business processes where it hasn't been used before. Business Objects meanwhile also recognizes that the days of selling fat, unwieldy and expensive BI tools are over. But "thinning down" its existing tools or offering them as a software-as-a-service is not enough. Simplicity and ease of use, particularly at the interface level, also have to be factored into the product design if they are to be widely deployable. Posted by madansheina in Business Intelligence  | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us Trackback Pings TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.ebizq.net/mt/mt-tb.cgi/2021 Comments:  Post a comment Name: Email Address: URL: Remember Me? 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