Product Showdown: The Changing Face of BI

BI Analytst Take

Information Management Online, October 18, 2007

Lyndsay Wise

In the last couple of years, acquisitions of data integration and business performance management (BPM) vendors have become quite common. Organizations can often be left wondering whether their current provider will be swallowed up by a larger player in the market and how that will affect their IT infrastructure.

Within business intelligence (BI), acquisitions have generally included large BI vendors acquiring best-of-breed vendors in the data integration space as well as BPM space to enlarge market share, to increase market penetration and to develop a more complete set of capabilities within these markets. Additionally, vendors outside the traditional BI space have also begun to see the benefits of integrating best-of-breed BI suites into their software offerings, either as an add-on or as a new solution to customers.

To illustrate how the acquisition of BI suites helps vendors expand and enhance their product offerings, the following vendors have been chosen for this showdown: Exact Software, Oracle and Microsoft. The use of these vendors for comparison also highlights the fact that vendors have different purposes when acquiring best-of-breed vendors. To explore this concept further, a brief explanation of the focus for each of the vendors will be provided. Moving one step further, an analysis of the ratings will be given to shed light on why Exact Software, Oracle and Microsoft may rate the way they do.

Software Evaluations

When evaluating BI vendors, there is a general shift away from only looking at features and functionality toward addressing business needs based on history and focus of the vendors represented. In addition to services and support offered by vendors, organizations should evaluate a vendor's focus and the reason for their acquisition to help gain insight into their future roadmap. This showdown explores the focus of each vendor acquisition and how acquiring best of breed functionality enables these vendors to expand their reach within the market.

Overall Scores

The Figure 1 identifies the overall feature and functionality ratings for Exact Business Analytics, Oracle's Hyperion System 9 and Microsoft's ProClarity within the categories of reporting and analysis, analytics, data warehousing and data integration. These categories represent the essential areas within a BI solution. The rating disparities link to the overall focus of the organization and the priorities set on BI.

Figure 1: Overall Product Ratings

Overview Analysis of Graphs and Vendor Positioning

Figure 2 identifies Oracle/Hyperion as the clear leader in both reporting and analysis, and analytics, with a slim lead in data warehousing and a second class finish in data integration. Exact Business Analytics comes in second place in both reporting and analysis and analytics. In general, although these ratings show a high level of features and functions offered by vendors, they don't provide organizations additional details regarding a vendor's market focus that can offer additional insight into more important aspects of a software evaluation.

In October of 2005 Exact Software acquired BI vendor Vanguard Solutions Group. By expanding their offerings to include business analytics, their customers are able to integrate analytics into their current ERP and CRM usage. The overall goal being to enhance offerings provided to the current customer base. This may be an explanation of why areas such as data integration and data warehousing fall in last place. Exact Software's focus is the reporting and analytics that can enhance current ERP-based solutions as opposed to a focus on a full BI based go to market solution.

Oracle's acquisition of Hyperion added to a current set of solutions including Oracle's own BI offering. Aside from trying to get an edge on SAP's customer base, Oracle added more BI and BPM functionality to their product offerings, increasing their reach within the software industry in general.

Microsoft's entry into the BI market helps shift attention away from the Enterprise market and towards a focus on SMBs. With this trend towards BI offerings for SMBs, the acquisition of ProClarity and its integration into Microsoft's BI solution widens options for SMBs. Microsoft's goal of bringing BI to all decision makers within the organization helps push the market towards a focus on the requirements of smaller organizations.

Figure 2: An Overview of Ratings for the Four Categories

A Deeper Look at Analytics

Analytics requires a deeper look as each vendor scores lowest in this section in comparison with the three other categories. The Figure 3 provides a breakdown of functionality offered by vendors within analytics and may explain why these scores are not as high as the other sections.

Generally, the ratings for data, text and Web mining are low. Because BI is still young in these areas and because the ratings represent advanced analytics that are normally reserved for best-of-breed solutions in these areas, vendors are not as strong in these areas. OLAP and administration capabilities are areas that are mature within BI applications, but within the next couple of years more importance will be place on predictive analytics and data and text mining because they enable organizations to identify patterns and to forecast initiatives to identify strengths and challenges within the organization.

Figure 3: Analytics Breakdown Graph

This showdown offers a first step for organizations looking to implement a new solution or to enhance their current BI environment. The features and functionality provided by vendors are just one area to consider during the evaluation process. Also, the organization's current infrastructure (for example a strong Oracle shop may automatically consider Hyperion), future requirements and vendor focus are additional areas to consider.

For a tailored BI software evaluation, please visit http://bi.technologyevaluation.com/business-intelligence/

Lyndsay Wise is an industry analyst for business intelligence. For more than seven years, she has assisted clients in business systems analysis, software selection and implementation of enterprise applications. Wise also conducts research of leading technologies, products and vendors in business intelligence, marketing performance management, master data management, and unstructured data. Check out her blog at myblog.wiseanalytics.com.

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