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Archive for January, 2012

Puffing and Blowing the Cloud in New Orleans

By
Paul
Published: January 23, 2012Posted in: Paul Blogs on BITags: ,
Puffing and Blowing the Cloud in New Orleans

It’s 5:45 am in the morning (on Jan 17th) and I’m jogging on the spot with hundreds of other crazy people down by the riverside in central New Orleans. It’s still dark and we are about to start a 2 mile “fun” run .  While there was nothing fun about my predicament, the run has been organized by SAP to raise money for a very worthy local charity – the Tipitina’s Foundation (http://tipitinasfoundation.org/) – which supports childhood musical education and preserves New Orleans musical heritage.

The race begins and off I go huffing and puffing into the darkness. I have never been a quiet runner and when I exhale you can hear me from 50 yards away. So as I passed a local man who was still celebrating from the night before, I was not surprised when he yelled out “You be blowing like a whale!”

When I staggered across the finish line, I was blowing like a whole school of whales. I headed straight back to the hotel, showered and made my way to the SAP event I was attending.

As SAP executives presented their key initiatives and strategy for 2012, the Cloud was very prominent. While SAP has been a little behind some of the other major software vendors with its Cloud solutions, Bill McDermott, co-CEO said in a recent interview about this very point that SAP was about to ‘unleash the tiger”. So the announcement that SAP is acquiring the human resource management cloud application company SuccessFactors, for $3.4 billion (pending US government approval) is a big part of that tiger. SuccessFactors has a stated 15 million cloud users which is apparently five times more than salesforce.com.

SAP does need some help in this area because their BI cloud offering known as On Demand has not been hugely successful. I believe this is not because companies are not interested in running BI applications based on Crystal Reports, Xcelsius and Web Intelligence in the Cloud, but more to do with the poor return on investment.

Most large software vendors that have created Cloud based applications have made the implementation and annual subscription costs so high that it is difficult to show that they are truly saving money over the equivalent on-premise solution. The same software vendors have created a climate and a culture where they dramatically discount their on premise software (particularly at the end of a quarter) that the Cloud equivalent does not really save any money. This takes away the major reason why companies would choose a Cloud solution.

Unless these software giants wake up and start offering bargain basement pricing for their Cloud solutions and reinstate the most compelling reason to use them, they will lose market share to those new and up-and-coming Cloud application companies that are willing to do so. If that happens, the SAP tiger could quickly turn into a whale that will be blowing the Cloud away.

Business Intelligence 2012 Predictions

By
Paul
Published: January 16, 2012Posted in: Business Intelligence, Paul Blogs on BITags: , , , , ,
Business Intelligence 2012 Predictions

While 2011 was a great year for Business Intelligence, I think that 2012 will be even greater as many new technologies that gained a foothold in 2011 become mainstream and even more exciting BI solutions emerge.

It is becoming more apparent than ever that the leading BI companies of four years ago (Business Objects, Cognos and Hyperion) having been taken over by bigger software application companies (SAP, IBM and Oracle) are losing their leadership position in BI innovation as most of their BI product development effort is focused inwardly to better integrate with their respective owners applications to take advantage of easier sales within their own customer base. They have almost become “legacy BI” solutions along with Microsoft who is quickly falling into the same category. As many industry analysts predicted at the time of these acquisitions, this has made room for new startup companies to fill the void left behind. So during these past few years , we have seen the meteoric rise of Apple with its mobile solutions, Saleforce with its phenomenal cloud based CRM application and Qliktech with its high speed, fast deployment BI solutions.

The BI landscape continues to change at an ever-accelerating pace and I am sure we will be looking at many new names, unheard of today, in a year’s time. In the meantime, here are my top 5 BI predictions for 2012 :

Prediction 1:  Mobile Business Intelligence will start to dominate over conventional business intelligence as companies will demand mobility as a compulsory feature. Mobile workforces will start to replace laptops with iPads (which will be the tablet of choice for businesses in 2012) as more useful and compelling BI solutions are developed for mobile devices. Companies like Mellmo, with Roambi (www.roambi.com), are already well positioned to take advantage of this trend but other strong competitors will emerge in the coming year as more BI dashboard solutions go mobile.

Prediction 2: Cloud based BI applications will propagate like wildfire and the race is on as to who, if anyone, will dominate this space. The question is do any of the BI vendors have the execution capability and the vision to do what Microsoft did to dominate the PC software business or Amazon did to dominate the on-line retail space – namely drop the price so low (or even free) to gain market share at the cost of profit? If not, watch out for iCloud or Google making a play for this huge BI opportunity.

Prediction 3: BI dashboards will continue to thrive but there will be more trend towards Operational BI rather than Strategic BI in 2012. As the capabilities for alerting, write back, connectivity to all types of applications (cloud, internet, on premise, mobile and machine interface) continue to expand, the possibilities and demand for operational BI with dashboard interfaces will too.

Prediction 4: “Big Data” wars will drive more demand for BI. With IBM leading the pack and SAP and Oracle not far behind, I predict a battle on an Exabyte scale as they and others compete as to who can analyze the most data in the fastest time and push it into meaningful BI solutions. The good news for businesses is that this will drive the price of BI tools down (as will the competition from Cloud and Mobile BI solutions).

Prediction 5: Business Intelligence for Web and Social Media content will be super-hot in 2012. The demand to perform BI against unstructured data sources from the web and use BI tools to analyze and visualize will go beyond conventional marketing applications and become an invaluable asset in all areas of business. (Of course, this was the prediction I did not score myself well on in 2011 so I want to go further out on the limb with it this year!).

So let’s see what happens. I am certainly pumped up and excited to see how BI will continue to evolve this year. It is a safe prediction to say that it will evolve for sure but it is usually the unpredictable direction that keeps us (especially me) on our toes. Enjoy the ride.

Looking Back on 2011 Predictions

By
Paul
Published: January 3, 2012Posted in: Business Intelligence, Paul Blogs on BITags:
Looking Back on 2011 Predictions

At the beginning of 2011, I made 5 predictions in terms of Business Intelligence trends for the year and I thought it would be interesting to look back on the year and see how those predictions turned out. So here goes :

Prediction 1: Visual Dashboards will remain dominant as the BI User Interface of choice. They will expand beyond their traditional tactical and strategic usage and be seen more in operational BI applications as backend performance with in memory analytics and caching continues to improve. Tools like Xcelsius will increase their presence due to both their visual appeal and ease of use.

Well Visual Dashboards did remain dominant and they certainly did expand into operational BI areas. We saw non-traditional BI functions like “write back” become more used. Xcelsius continued to grow in popularity and usage. I think I scored a 5 out of 5 on this one!

Prediction 2: Data Governance will be a priority as both large and mid-size companies are compelled to accurately consolidate and clean up their data for more relevant and precise business intelligence. Data quality, integration and master data management solutions will become mandatory in many organizations.

Data Governance was a priority with many large companies in 2011 but not so much with mid-size organizations as they tried to navigate a very unpredictable and bumpy economy. Data quality remained important but was still often pushed down the priority list in favor of meeting deliverable deadlines. I think I can only give myself a 2 out of 5 on this one.

Prediction 3: The race for optimal mobile business intelligence solutions will get into full swing. With a plethora of new tablet devices and new BI mobile software products, I anticipate a year of experimentation and we will need to wait another year before the real market leaders are determined. Watch out for Roambi (http://www.roambi.com/) because they are definitely heading in the right direction.

Mobile BI was a big topic in 2011 and a lot of new solutions appeared, both streaming and off-line based applications. Many companies did explore and experiment and some purchased and deployed. We saw many new tablet devices appear and almost as quickly disappear. Apple’s iPad remains the business tablet device of choice while Androids are becoming the most popular mobile smart phones. Roambi increased its presence globally and just released more amazing new views (Layers and Squares) and has become the BI mobile solution to beat. I score myself a 5 out of 5 on this one!

Prediction 4: Relational database Data Marts and Warehouses will continue to be the BI repository of choice in 2011. OLAP cubes will remain a niche market and the new in memory databases are just too immature and too expensive to have a serious impact this year. There will probably be lots of hype but until this new technology is affordable to the masses, it will have minimal effect. Data Mart projects will continue to thrive in the small to medium enterprise space.

Data Marts and Warehouses still remain the BI repository of choice although many companies are looking at a quicker method to deploy their ever-increasing demand for BI analytics. SAP spent a boat load of money, resources and hype promoting their new HANA in-memory analytics solution but there are very few running in live production. As the technology evolves and becomes more commodity that may change. I score 5 out of 5 on this one.

Prediction 5: Business Intelligence for Web and Social Media content will be hot and in demand. The need to perform BI against the predominantly unstructured data sources of the web has never been greater as more business and institutions both grow their web presence and web driven marketing. BI tools and solutions that can quickly analyze this data both quantitatively and qualitatively will see fast growth and adoption in 2011.

Using BI against Web and social media content has grown in 2011 but it has not been as hot as I was predicting. I have read several articles this year about success stories in this area but I have actually encountered very few first hand. The tools to analyze the unstructured content are good but are still relatively expensive and require a lot of services (more expensive). Maybe that will change in the next year or so. I can only score myself a 1 out of 5 for this one.

So my final grade is a 72% which according to my daughter in High School is only a “C”. Well I will have to do better than that so stand by for my 2012 BI predictions coming in the next few weeks.