Forrester's Wave on Business Intelligence players 2010

In Forrester’s 145-criteria evaluation of enterprise business intelligence (BI) platform vendors, we

found that IBM Cognos, SAP BusinessObjects, Oracle, Information Builders , SAS, Microsoft, and MicroStrategy led the pack because of the completeness of not just BI, but overall information

management functionality. Actuate came out as a Strong Performer on the heels of the Leaders offering equal — or in some cases superior — BI functionality, but it mostly relies on partners for the rest of its information management capabilities. TIBCO Spotfire also came out as a Strong Performer offering top choices for analytics, even surpassing other Strong Performers in the overall information management arena based on its traditional strength in middleware and application integration. Last but not least,QlikTech and Panorama Software moved up from Contenders and into the Strong Performers category based on the continuous improvements in their analytical capabilities.

Top 10 CIO Priorities – Gartner Survey 2010

Gartner conducted survey of world’s top 1600 CIOs and here is what came out of it.  Top 10 priorities for CIOs were

1.       Improving business processes
2.       Reducing Enterprise Costs
3.       Increasing use of Information/Analytics
4.       Improving enterprise workforce effectiveness
5.       Attracting and retaining new customers
6.       Managing change initiatives
7.       Creating new products and services
8.       Targetting customers and markets more effectively
9.       Consolidating business operations
10.   Supporting regulation reporting and compliance

History of Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence with Mobile Apps

Business Intelligence will be pushed to new heights by the recent phenomenon on mobile applications. Here is how I think it will help
1. More and more enterprise BI applications will be ported on mobile, e.g. CRM analytics would be pushed to mobile and you can do ad-hoc querying to your central Data Warehouse to get latest sales summary, drill-down it to region/city/customer and order
2. Manufacturing Intelligence will to be pushed on mobile apps

More later ...

Business Intelligence On Cloud

OCO Business Analytics http://www.oco-inc.com/, is interesting company, they have created product which makes BI available on cloud as SaaS. I always thought that most of the reporting, OLAP and BI needs can be better delivered on the web.

This reminds me of 2000, when some of the companies created a category of applications/market called ASP ( Application Service Providers), they were right in their overall vision, but at that time, some of the developments in hardware and software not there to make them "SaaS" or "cloud" applications.

There 3 technological changes that have enabled this kind of widespread transformation from ASP to Saas/Cloud:

1. Hardware advanced in virtualisation

2. Provisioning technologies

3. Software development productivities, by way of crashing of software development cycles.

BI on Cloud/Saas will increase its adoption in the coming years and we will see more and more BI applications coming from cloud.

Top 5 Business Intelligence Companies

Here is a list of Top 5 Business Intelligence Companies(not in strict order):

1. SAS: SAS has over years morphed from a statistical software company to fullfledged Business Intelligence company giving business solutions
2. COGNOS: Cognos products are very good in their look and feel and overall visual appeal
3. QlikTech: This is one of the disruptive innovators, they have a unique in-memory-database architecture
4. BusinessObjects: BO has been very good as a departmental Business Intelligence solution
5. Microstrategy: Considered to be a very strong enterprise Business Intelligence platform

Business Intelligence 101

Business Intelligence covers following features:

1. Reporting
2. OLAP
3. Dashboarding
4. Workflow
5. Predictive Data Modeling and Data Mining
6. Portal Integration
7. Dials and other visual reports
8. Single Metadata Repository