The New Era of BI and Business Analytics

Information Management Magazine, July 2004

Jean Schauer

"The new generation of business intelligence and business analytics is about the ability to truly empower everyone in an enterprise or extended enterprise to have the information they need so that the insights drive their actions and interactions," proclaims Larry Barbetta, vice president and general manager of Siebel Analytics.

"There has been a real shift to using the information captured in transactional systems - ERP, CRM and supply chain - to try to derive insight. If you think about this broadly," explains Barbetta, "we've seen the operating efficiency side of the equation taken about as far as it can be taken. Now, businesses are looking to move to the next step - which is about how they can become more effective and how they can use their information to run their business not just efficiently, but effectively. They want to know how they can do a better job of retaining customers, attracting customers, pricing their products and so on. They want to be able to effectively use the insight from all of the customer data."

Barbetta is not proposing that traditional BI tools are no longer needed. "It is clear that the BI market is moving far beyond traditional query and reporting and OLAP. Those capabilities will always have a very vibrant place within an organization, but there is now a need for an entirely different class of capabilities. We really are seeing a new set of needs. Reporting will continue as will data marts and budgeting and planning and data warehousing. There are certain types of operations that require the rich historical and contextual data that resides in the data warehouse. Our products enable the best of both worlds. They can hit the data warehouse with everything, and they also have the ability to reach outside of data warehouses when that is needed."

"Focusing the new generation of business analytics/business intelligence," says Barbetta, "requires some very difficult things technically. It is very clear that complete information across multiple data sources - including external data - is needed, and it is needed in a timely manner. In many cases, you need real-time data. If there is latency in a decisioning system that requires an organization to wait for everything in the world to get into some magical place, it's just too late. The opportunity will be missed. We see the need for BI and business analytics to be able to provide insight from larger volumes of data across boundaries and sources with a real-time capability. The other important aspect is making access truly pervasive throughout an organization."

Most people recognize Siebel Systems, says Barbetta, as the dominant player and market leader in CRM. What they may not know is that a little more than two years ago, Siebel made a strategic commitment to participate in the analytics market - both in the context of CRM and even beyond CRM. He adds, "Last year's IDC market research indicated that Siebel has become the leader in customer analytic applications - which is cited by IDC to be the fastest growing segment of the entire analytic application and overall business intelligence marketplace. Siebel has moved from being just the market leader in CRM to also being the market leader in customer analytic applications."

Siebel Analytics' meteoric rise is the result of a number of key factors. "When Siebel decided that they wanted to move into the analytics space, they didn't just buy an analytic application company," explains Barbetta. "Siebel realized that what was needed was a new kind of platform to deliver the analytic solutions. Thus, in October of 2001, Siebel announced its plans to purchase nQuire, the company I had founded. We had released our nQuire Suite, an open analytical platform, in late 1999. That infrastructure became the core of Siebel analytic solutions and provided, in effect, pre-built, pre-designed data warehouse technologies underneath it, and pre-built metrics addressing industry-specific issues tailored by role on top of that. We are providing more and more capabilities in our total solution. All of our applications are built on a single comprehensive platform that does everything from reporting to complex business intelligence to predictive analytics. The platform has points of integration where appropriate, and we provide a coherent, comprehensive business analytic technology stack to meet the new needs. We are operationalizing the analytical capability so that it can fuse all of the analytic capabilities into an organization's business processes, making it broadly available and having feedback loops so it gains insight from what it does, which affects what happens next time." Additionally, Barbetta notes that predictive analytics must work in collaboration with business rules and business constraint, and Siebel Analytics hides that complexity from the users.

The origins of nQuire provide interesting insight into the factors that led Barbetta to found the company and explain why the acquisition has been so successful. "We put together a great team to found nQuire," says Barbetta. "Because of the massive explosion in data, the proliferation of data sources and the requirement for more timeliness or zero latency, we saw the need for BI and analytic capabilities that would be pervasively available within and outside of the organization. This was confirmed when I got home after a long meeting with a set of executives from a Fortune 50 company. My five-year old daughter was at the computer, and I found it sobering that she had the ability to find basically anything on the Internet, while the executives I had just met with spent the whole day telling me how they had no access to any useful information. What's wrong with that picture? I viewed it, as did a number of people on our team, as a failing of BI technologies in the current state. We put our heads together to solve that problem. When we were approached by Siebel in the fall of 2001, we realized that Siebel could provide a serious distribution infrastructure and access to significant capital that would enable us to reach our full potential. Siebel was - and is - very strategically committed to enterprise analytics, and the rest, as they say, is history."

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