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Business Intelligence on slow road to consolidation

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10th Jun 2006
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Analysts donned shades and played rock music to raise the excitement at Gartner's European Business Intelligence Summit earlier this week. However, the razzmatazz couldn't disguise the fact that little has changed in a market that is growing at a modest 7%.

The main point of the keynote speech was that pervasive business intelligence (BI) drives business transformation, a message Gartner was putting out last year. However, evolution is probably a good thing, given the long haul businesses face getting from a collection of spreadsheets to an enterprise information architecture capable of driving change.

According to Gartner, a the pervasive "BI continuum", which integrates planning, analysis, decision and execution will be enabled by standardised, commodity products that reduce the cost per user.

However, BI continues to be inhibited by "information apathy" as a result of concentrating on technology and infrastructure; "analytic obsession", with too many silos of applications and expertise; or "information anarchy", resulting from too many spreadsheets acting as information systems "duct tape". Just to make matters worse, Gartner reported that all the organisations it talks to still suffer data quality problems. Delegates were advised to set up BI competency centres to bring together skills in information management, process and collaboration.

Gartner's quarterly Magic Quadrant reports are becoming the industry's benchmark. Since last year user-oriented enterprise business intelligence suites have added more development and integration functionality, while developer-oriented BI platforms have added more front-end user tools, so the two quadrants are now combined.

Cognos and Business Objects emerged as leaders, with SAS and Hyperion scoring well on vision, with SAP, Microsoft, Information Builders and Oracle challenging on ability to execute. Bill Hostmann, research vice president at Gartner said Business Objects, Hyperion, Information Builders, Siebel and SAS Institute have improved most over the past 12 months, as a result of releasing new platforms.

"Microsoft has made progress," he added, "and is adding a lot of industry veterans to its talent bench."

The BI industry undergone major consolidation as these enterprise platforms have started to take shape. Gartner expected acquisitions to continue as standardisation of BI products becomes the norm within most organisations.

"We are going to see the heavy artillery, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP, moving into the marketplace," said Hostmann. "The pure play vendors are going to have to rise above the battlefield and offer new types of functionality and a higher level of unique value, otherwise they will get lost in the battle."

For example, Hyperion has split its high-value analytic capabilities from lower-value multi-dimensional data storage, allowing it to work with Microsoft and Oracle databases. It also has an ambitious, three pronged acquisition strategy.

As far as the BI platform goes, IBM is "missing in action", Hostmann suggested.

"At some point it will be forced to make an acquisition or invest into the marketplace to complete head-to-head with its primary competitors who offer it as part of their product suite," he said.

Fortunately, accountants are long used to evaluating vendor strength and putting it above functionality.

Rod Newing

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