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February 27, 2008
IBM Leverages Cognos
My colleague Elizabeth Book Kratz caught this nugget of valuable information related to the IBM-Cognos acquisition, buried in IBM's latest announcement about its new System z10 mainframe: IBM’s Information on Demand strategy is helping customers gain access to the right information they need, when they need it, along with key business insights needed to address and respond to changing market demands. By deploying Cognos 8 BI for Linux on System z, customers will be able to easily report and analyze hundred of millions of transactions directly on the mainframe - ensuring everyone across the organization can quickly identify and respond to critical business trends. IBM is also announcing the immediate availability of DB2 for z/OS Value Unit Edition, which provides a new one-time-charge offering that enables the deployment of new application workloads. This offering strengthens the role of System z as a cornerstone for key business initiatives such as SOA, Data Warehousing, Business Intelligence and packaged applications such as SAP. DB2 for z/OS Value Unit Edition and IBM Information Server enable System z clients to further deliver trusted information for their dynamic warehousing requirements. In addition, IBM will bring new Master Data Management capabilities to System z in the second half of this year. This will include the InfoSphere Master Data Management Server for Linux on System z, which allows businesses to centrally manage customer, product, and account data for use across an enterprise. Posted by joemckendrick in BI Vendor Watch • Business Intelligence • Data Management • Decision Support • Performance Management | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) January 24, 2008Hey, Someone Forgot to Tell the BI Sector that Times are 'Tough'
While commentators seem to be in a state of utter panic over recession talk, the business intelligence vendor community doesn't seem to have gotten the message. There seem to be plenty of funds flowing to BI. For example, IBM has been pouring money into the sector -- it just acquired Cognos, of course, and just the other day announced it was acquiring AptSoft, an event processing platform and tools provider. Then, there's last week's announcement that Sun Microsystems is buying MySQL, the open-source database provider, for $1 billion. Claudia Imhoff observes that money is flowing to many smaller BI vendors as well. "In just the past few weeks," she wrote on January 23rd, "BI and MDM [mater data management] companies have scored big -- like almost $80 million BIG! ...Certainly says a lot about the confidence venture capital firms have in our space." Claudia provides examples of big BI-related deals going down, including ParAccel snagging $20 million on December 10, 2007 to further fund their Analytic Database product. "The funding will be used to expand engineering, sales and support, and to open their Cupertino office according to Scott Humphrey, their marketing communications person." Greenplum - another data warehouse appliance company like ParAccel - just received $27 million in venture capital. "And this only 11 months after a $15 million venture round," Claudia points out. "They plan to use the new funds to continue development on Greenplum's database and to expand their sales and marketing efforts, especially internationally." Claudia also points to Siperian, a developer of MDM software, which announced that had closed and "oversubscribed" $25 million. The additional funds "will be used to expand their European presence, develop their channels and further advance their MDM Hub technology." Claudia sums up the state of business intelligence and data management, which are must-haves, whether the economy is booming or busting: "Am I enthusiastic about our industry? You bet I am. Corporations all over are realizing now more than ever in these stressful times that their very survival depends on their ability to make the right decisions. What better time than now to invest in the very companies that make that possible?" Posted by joemckendrick in BI Vendor Watch | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) December 31, 2007BI, Delivered from the Cloud
A new report in Knowledge Management confirms a trend that began emerging over the past year -- business analytics delivered via Software as a Service. "More and more business analytics software providers are moving to address increasing market demand for software that is updated frequently, hosted off-site and purchased on a subscription basis," KMWorld notes. Factors propelling this trend include corporate budget constraints on traditional software, limited development resources for in-house BI software, and increasing maturity of BI-over-the-wire solutions. The authors note that they don't expect the whole BI world to move to the Cloud anytime soon, however. As they put it, the shift will be gradual, and both SaaS and traditional, on-premises, licensed software will co-exist within enterprises for a long time to come. A few months back, while preparing a report for Database Trends & Applications, I spoke with Tracy Trawick, consumer insights manager for Hamilton Beach, which employs such a hybrid approach to BI, getting the best of both worlds of SaaS and on-site. Hamilton Beach's market research department primarily relies on on-site software, but lately has begun tapping into SPSS's SaaS-based platform to cover a growing workload that end-users simply don't have time to sort through. "All the data manipulation on the back end is supported by SPSS," Tracy said. "We're using it for very template-based iterative projects so we don't use up a lot of programming time. I don't have the time to learn the logic and the programming tools." Tracy uses the SPSS SaaS platform to create and launch consumer market research surveys, and manipulate the data as it comes in. However, she still employs SPSS on-site software for more complicated projects. In line with the Hamilton-Beach example, I also spoke with Oliver Halter, partner with Diamond Management & Technology Consultants, who concurred that "companies currently tend to use SaaS on the fringe of their operations." Oftentimes, "this also means that the SaaS partner provides an additional service that makes it worthwhile for the company to outsource the software and function. Companies tend to have an easier time switching to SaaS if the data managed in these systems is 'non core' and is not considered a competitive advantage." Moving to a SaaS model has its share of challenges, however. Dilip Wagle, a partner with McKinsey & Company, told me that integration remains a big challenge, especially for companies seeking to leverage solutions from the Cloud. Dilip cautioned, for example, that "counter to the promise, the deployment and integration effort is not zero. Most effort is centered on integration and customization effort of single SaaS applications, especially in the enterprise space. Moreover, as companies increasingly move to more SaaS applications, integration challenges will manifest themselves in terms of integration with other SaaS applications." Data security and availability is also another challenge, and perhaps the achilles' heel of SaaS arrangements. What happens if the application provider goes out of business, or has a major network outage? SaaS customers need to make sure they have robust backup systems in place. Security raises more red flags. As Dilip warned, "pure 'in-the-cloud' services imply that all the customers data are essentially stored off-premise in a data center owned or contracted by the service provider. In the event of data center failure on the part of the service vendor, the customer has no recourse but to hope that data were appropriately backed up and managed in a secure fashion. The problem can be exacerbated if the SaaS vendor in turn, outsources back-end data center operations to yet another third party. This can complicate accountability and liability in the event of failure or security breaches." Posted by joemckendrick in BI Vendor Watch • Business Intelligence | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) December 30, 2007Rumors of BI's 'Death' are Greatly Exaggerated
In a 2007 year-end wrap-up, InfoWorld declared BI to be "dead," citing it as it's ninth-most underreported story of 2007. Hmmm. An entire industry and technology sector disappears under our noses, and it only rates number nine as a news item? Actually, it appears the author, Bill Snyder, was being somewhat facetious, mocking the pundits that predicted the end of the market as we know it, resulting from the mega-acquisitions of leading vendors that took place over the past year -- Business Objects being gobbled up by SAP, Hyperion by Oracle, and Cognos now falling into IBM's orbit. But, keep in mind that there is still a huge market remaining with players such as SAS, SPSS, MicroStrategy, and Actuate. Oh, and what's the name of that vendor out in Washington state again? I think they have something or other linked to their database product. As Rob Tholemeier, a former industry analyst turned private investor, put it, the acquisitions of the big players creates space for other companies to flourish. The same thing happened to the database market, he notes: “There are more database companies around now than when Informix was purchased.” There's going to be plenty of competition and solutions for a long time in this market, with enough room for everyone. Long live BI. Posted by joemckendrick in BI Vendor Watch • Business Intelligence • Microsoft | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0) November 12, 2007IBM to Acquire Cognos: What's the Deal With That?
The whale swallows the biggest fish. Billions of dollars flow. In September, Cognos made big news in the BI-data management world when it acquired Applix. Now, Cognos itself is about to be ingested by Big Blue. Is this a dynamic, consolidating, paradigm-shifting, evoluting, revoluting market, or what?! Some details: IBM and Cognos today announced that the two companies have entered into a definitive agreement for IBM to acquire Cognos for approximately $5 billion. (The acquisition, of course, is subject to Cognos shareholder approval, regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions. It is expected to close in the first quarter of 2008.) Lately, the trend for big infrastructure vendors has been to grab a BI company to add business intelligence to their portfolios. Oracle has Hyperion, SAP has Business Objects, and now IBM has Cognos. A remaining BI company that has not been reeled in is SAS. IBM said it has already made 23 major acquisitions to build its "Information on Demand" initiative. Acquired players include Princeton Softech (data archiving and compliance), FileNet (enterprise content management), Ascential Software (information integration), DataMirror (changed data capture), SRD (entity analytics), Trigo (product information management), DWL (customer information management) and Alphablox (analytics). What do IBM and Cognos get out of the deal? IBM said the Cognos acquisition would help it reach further into CFOs’ offices with financial planning tools. The acquisition will also provide a broader reach for Cognos solutions across multiple industries and geographies with a more complete set of offerings, including consulting services, hardware, and other middleware software. Following completion of the acquisition, IBM intends to integrate Cognos as a group within IBM's Information Management Software division, focused on Business Intelligence and Performance Management. IBM also will appoint current Cognos President and CEO, Rob Ashe, to lead the group. In other words, bye bye, Cognos, it's been real nice. More information on IBM's acquisition of Cognos is available on IBM's investor Website. Posted by joemckendrick in BI Vendor Watch | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) November 06, 2007Who's What: Among BI Vendors
Alex Fletcher, over at the IT Gumbo site, provides an excellent list of who's what among leading vendors in the BI space. Of particular interest is this whole category of "Lightweight BI," which includes search providers, and I have a feeling this is a space to watch with the growth of the Web 2.0 approach to helping end-users solve business problems quickly, without the need for a three-year technology acquisition plan. Posted by joemckendrick in BI Vendor Watch | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) October 19, 2007Teradata's New Course Up the Stack
For years, Teradata was known as that big, big enterprise data warehouse company for big, big companies. And as an independent subsidiary of NCR. Last week, however, when I made my annual pilgrimage to the Teradata Partners' Conference, held in Las Vegas, I saw the signs of an emerging new vendor. Perhaps one that was looking at the medium-size business sector as well. First, in the week preceding the conference, Teradata become its own entity, spun of entirely from NCR's tutelage. As anyone who follows the IT space knows, this is the era of acquisition, of big fish eating slightly less-larger fish. So, right away, Teradata is going against the grain. Mike Koehler, CEO, joined other executives in a Q&A session and talked about the spin-off. Though it was not entirely clear what Teradata would be doing differently now that it was on its own -- and NCR always seemed to keep its hands off the golden goose anyway -- it was clear the company is engaged in a self-directed push to become more than a "data warehouse company." Koehler's motto is that "the companies who operate with the greatest intelligence and speed will win." He predicted that five years from now, "Teradata would be a leader in active enterprise intelligence." Active Enterprise Intelligence is another catchword Teradata is promoting to describe its new direction -- which is, unquestionably, up the stack, to the business intelligence level. The cornerstone announcement of Teradata's coming-out party was a partnership with SAS, the analytics algorithm provider. SAS applications can take advantage of Teradata's high-availability infrastructure, and Teradata customers will have greater access to analytic tools to run against their data. The foundation of the partnership is to enable businesses to run and optimize key aspects of SAS solutions and analytic processes within the Teradata database engine. Teradata customers will be able to leverage SAS capabilities and analytical functions to utilize the core parallel processing inherent in Teradata's architecture. Additionally, the joint road map also calls for selected SAS solutions targeting financial services and retail to be optimized with Teradata. Was the partnership triggered as an alternative to the SAP-Business Objects combo that now is in the offing? Or the Oracle-Hyperion combo? You bet. The data warehouse/analytics market is maturing, and with that maturity comes consolidation and suites. Kohler was asked, in fact, why he didn't consider buying SAS outright, to which he responded that the two companies already have as tight a partnership as you can get, without the legal wrangling and fees. (Here's to loose coupling between companies!) When asked if the SAP-Business Objects buyout would affect Teradata's relationship with B.O., Teradata VP Bob Fair pointed out that such events most often result in a strengthening of the partnerships already established -- he expects that to happen with B.O. One phrase I heard several times -- uttered by both Teradata and SAS executives -- is to "move the processing to the data, rather than moving the data to the processing." This makes a lot of sense in a world where data -- and the ability to leverage data to compete on analytics -- is now the source of competitive advantage. And, one thing is abundantly clear -- Teradata intends to be an aggressive major player in the analytics/BI space, both through partnerships and its own offerings. Posted by joemckendrick in BI Vendor Watch | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) October 07, 2007SAP to Acquire Business Objects: What's the Deal With That?
What a weekend for business intelligence. ERP and enterprise software giant SAP has announced it will be acquiring BI leader Business Objects in a $6.78 billion deal. According to a report in ComputerWorld, acquiring Business Objects will allow SAP to move into the BI market in a big way. SAP CEO Henning Kagermann said that the acquisition will enable SAP to offer integrated software, versus solutions arising from a partnership between the two companies. The deal is expected to close in the first quarter of 2008. Enterprise systems and business intelligence tools have been moving closer in alignment in recent years. The thrust of the BI industry into corporate performance management draws directly from a enterprise/ERP foundation, so the synergy has been ripe. In addition, over the years, one of the biggest complaints about ERP software has been its less-than-stellar reporting features. Adding a robust BI capability to the mix may help change that perception. Of course, many leading BI vendors have made a living off filling the reporting gap in ERP systems. It remains to be seen if having Business Objects built into these systems will pose a competitive threat to the bread and butter of BI industry competitors. Plus, since many organizations manage multiple ERP systems, the challenge of consolidating reporting into single views still remains a challenge. Will Business Objects remain "Business Objects," or be absorbed into the SAP mega-machine? According to Business Objects CEO John Schwarz, B.O. will continue to operate separately from its new parent, as "a stand-alone entity within the SAP Group." Ultimately, however, B.O. software will be more tightly aligned with SAP products. The move is also seen as a counter-move to Oracle's recent acquisition of Hyperion. Posted by joemckendrick in BI Vendor Watch | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) |
