Performance decisions
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The business intelligence industry has regrouped around the fundamentals of business performance and ROI.
The business intelligence (BI) industry has adjusted its attitude. Having enthusiastically supported the heady business expansion of 1999-2001 with products for every aspect of customer, B2B and web analytics, BI vendors are now repitching the value of their offerings where they are need today - around managing or reducing costs and selectively targeting areas where there is demonstrable and timely return on investment.
While the marketing has certainly moved on, the mechanisms for achieving those revised BI goals are largely the same. Organisations are still looking for robust, high-performance, scalable data warehouse
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What is different is that organisations investing in BI are engaging in levels of risk management, rejecting vendors that are too removed from the fundamentals of BI. "During the high-growth years, organisations were more willing to take risks with smaller, more innovative BI software vendors in the hope of revolutionising BI delivery," says Gartner analyst Howard Dresner.
As a result, right across the BI sector, certain vendors are looking vulnerable. Indeed, analysts have predicting that as many as half of the companies in the highly fragmented market will disappear - or be swallowed up - over the next year.
The upshot is there has been a "flight to safety", as Dresner puts it, an adoption of BI products from companies with solid product lines and sound investment strategies and financials, such as Business Objects and NCR Teradata, as well as vendors which that have been able to leverage the stability of their privately held status, most notably Information Builders, Crystal Decisions and SAS.
"The rationale is that these vendors will survive the economic maelstrom and will continue to support and enhance their products," says Dresner.
But there are factors influencing the BI market over and above the impact of the economic downturn. Looking beyond their core revenue streams, the major business applications companies - SAP, Siebel, PeopleSoft, and Oracle - have built up the business intelligence capabilities of their applications. And with some encouragement. Customers have repeatedly complained that vendors provide no built-in means of analysing the production data that their suites generate.
That situation has began to hurt traditional query, analysis and reporting tools vendors, such as Brio and Cognos. But these vendors are quick to point out that the BI products from business package makers are relatively rudimentary and only allow the analysis of data associated with the suppliers' applications.
Indeed, most mainstream BI vendors have now reworked their portfolios into a integrated product line, underpinned by a universal data model - another development in a market where only those with a pedigree in BI fundamentals will be left standing.
