So I am at the British Airways Executive lounge at London Heathrow waiting for my flight and watching England play Sweden in the World Cup quarter finals. England are leading 1-0 going into the second half and then Dele Alli scores a second goal for England. I jump out of my seat and yell out “Yes, Dele Alli”.
Everyone turns round to look at me as if I was from another planet. There are a few people nodding their heads in approval at the goal and muttering comments like “Jolly good show” and “Well done England” but nobody in full rapturous celebration mode like me!
Now Dele Alli happens to be one of my favorite players who plays for my favorite club team (Tottenham Hotspur) so this made the goal particularly special to me but as I watch the celebrations on the TV , I realized most were not Dele Alli or Spurs fans (although they might be now!).
The England team, like the other national teams in the World Cup , are made up of the best players from that country. For the most part, they do not usually play together except when they play for their country. They are, of course, supposed to be the best players for their positions so it is like a dream team.
In the world of Business Intelligence there are many good players out there too and historically they have just played on one team. So if you used SAP BusinessObjects, all your players were SAP BusinessObjects tools and if you used Oracle BI (OBIEE) all your players were Oracle BI tools. In the last few years that has changed dramatically.
After SAP, Oracle and IBM bought out the 3 largest BI companies (BusinessObjects, Hyperion and Cognos), they focused more on integrating them as part of their other software offerings and lost their BI innovation and leadership position. This made room for new BI companies like Qliktech, Tableau and Domo to become the new BI innovators. These new BI companies focused on self-service data discovery and visualization and left the legacy BI companies trying to copy them and play catch up.
But Business Intelligence is more than just self-service data discovery and visualizations and the BI legacy companies remain dominant in other areas of BI like BI reporting, ad-hoc query and analysis, BI applications and data preparation.
As a result, organizations have been adopting the new BI tools while retaining their existing BI platforms. This is very prevalent in the BusinessObjects world where large numbers of customers have adopted Tableau and, more recently PowerBI, for self-service BI data exploration and visualization while keeping Web Intelligence and Crystal Reports for BI reporting and ad-hoc query analysis.
This BI co-existence makes perfect sense and gives these organizations a great advantage over those remaining with just one vendor’s BI suite. They are using the best BI tools for both the job and the people who need to use them. Yes, Web Intelligence is the best BI reporting and ad-hoc query analysis tool on the market but for Power Users who want to do self-service BI discovery and quickly visualize those results, Tableau is the better player.
These organizations have effectively picked the best BI players for their different roles and are creating their own BI dream team.
The next step is to help that BI dream team play better together and integrate their skills and advantages. This is why InfoBurst Tab, which provides integration between BusinessObjects and Tableau, was created.
InfoBurst Tab leverages the versatility and power of Web Intelligence and it’s underlying universe. It is able to schedule and push Web Intelligence data into Tableau along with allowing Tableau users to pull data from its high speed data cache which can be populated from a variety of sources, including BusinessObjects.
That same high-speed data cache in InfoBurst XDC can also be used by PowerBI bringing some very interesting BI integration possibilities to organizations using both BusinessObjects and Microsoft’s PowerBI.
BusinessObjects co-existence is here to stay for a while and if you haven’t built your BI dream team, you might want to start thinking about it soon and not wait till the next World Cup.
