There is a very big movement in the industry away from after-the-fact reporting and analysis to on-demand information delivered in context, what some are calling operational BI. Last year ebizQ did a virtual conference on BI in Action during which we had a panel discussion on BI and BPM, and how BI was evolving into more on-demand, operational BI. The overall message was clear. Organizations are seeking more in-depth information on-demand, within the course of business, as opposed to periodic, after-the-fact reports.

I recently spoke with Truviso about an innovative approach they have developed for delivering on-demand information in high data volume environments. As Roman Bukary, VP marketing and business development, explained it, instead of executing SQL queries against large volumes of data, Truviso analyzes the information as it moves through the pipe. It actually uses standard SQL, but can apply queries to high volume data streams, and feed dashboards with the information or even trigger data-driven actions and alerts.

The company was co-founded in 2005 by Berkley professor Michael Franklin and his assistant Sailesh Krishnamurthy, who is now the chief architect. They developed an engine that uses standard SQL queries to analyze data as it moves across systems, regardless of where it comes from. The result is massive scalability and performance, clocked at 100,000 records per second on a single machine. Additionally, thousands of concurrent queries can be run continuously and simultaneously on a single server, and the queries can be run over both real-time and historical data from within a single engine. Truviso uses open source database PostgreSQL which enables data to be optionally persisted for replay, back-testing, drill-down, bench-marking and other purposes. The system can be run distributed across applications, databases, and edge devices, allowing for massive linear scalability. The system includes integration components so it can accept data from multiple different sources, including message queues. Each connector is provides transformation capabilities.

Foreign currency trading was the first market Truviso entered. They also have solutions for capital markets, retail inventory, logists, SOA/Network monitoring, and RFID/Sensor Network.

Because it built on top of PostgreSQL, it can deploy natively on any OS or hardware platform. It can run in a virtualized environment, and Truviso is (or will soon be) available as a SaaS solution. Because it uses standard SQL companies can migrate historical reporting to real-time analysis in a matter of hours.

BI meets event processing. On demand BI. Intelligent event processing. This technology seems to span categories, as well as uses in the enterprise.

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Today IBM announced its intention to acquire Cognos in an all-cash transaction at a price of approximately $5 billion USD or $58 USD per share, with a net transaction value of $4.9 billion USD. The acquisition is subject to Cognos shareholder approval, regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions, and is expected to close in the first quarter of 2008.

Steve Mills introduced the analyst briefing by talking about the state of the market, with companies becoming more sophisticated about leveraging information, and using analytics for both looking back, and looking forward, becoming more pre-emptive in their decision making. He also spoke about how real-time business analytics was becoming an important part of business process management.

Just about every analyst on the call would have to agree with those statements. Last June, in the ebizQ BI in Action virtual conference this was discussed extensively both in the panel session and in a series of pre-conference podcasts. Indeed, one of the analysts questions was that we’ve been expecting this for a while, why now (answer – a $5 billion purchase takes time).

Cognos fits very well into the IBM stack. For a change it pretty much adds new functionality without adding a lot of redundancy. Furthermore, about 5 years ago Cognos re-architected their solution as a service based offering. It runs on top of IBM (and other) infrastructure software, providing real-time business intelligence and business performance management. The business performance management capabilities are key It enables companies to align, monitor and measure business operations with business strategies. This is truly good stuff – very important to business managers. Nothing for me to pick at.

Except for maybe one thing. Cognos DOES NOT provide predictive capabilities. It provides event management and alerts, but predictive capabilities require some kind of neural network or inference engine to correlate patterns of events. Such events occur throughout the organization in different processes, but when they occur together may predict something of business importance, such as a disruption in the supply chain. Both SoftwareAG (through the WebMethods acquisition) and Tibco have these capabilities. The fact that Steve Mills mentioned this as an important requirement for business management going forward may signal the fact that IBM may be in the market for some complex event processing (CEP) technology. The fact that Mills mentioned it in the context of the Cognos acquisition reveals that he considers it important moving forward. But for sake of clarity, this acquisition does not give IBM this capability.

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If you missing the live broadcast of BI in Action you can still view the archive recordings. It was a great look at the growing importance of BI to the organization.

Bill Gassman, Research Director, Gartner, talked about how BI is being used to Drive Business Performance . Bill talked about BI as "an umbrella term for applications, infrastructure, platforms, tools, and best practices," and gave examples of how organizations that make the best use of business intelligence have significant competitive advantage. In fact, he showed how the BusinessWeek top 50 Performers all used BI extensively for better decision making. He also talked about how BI is changing, and discussed a framework that includes:
- Alignment: with strategic business objectives and sponsors
- Metrics: Agreed upon Performance Management Framework
- Skills: Process managers and developers
- Integration: Reduction of analytic application silos
- Cost: Efficiency/scalability of analysis & delivery capabilities
- Information: Availability, agility, transparency and data quality

Bill also talked about the trends and the technologies to watch over the next 5 years, especially the combination of BAM, BI and BPM for enabling rapid business response. In fact, Bill indicated that companies that fail to keep up with these trends do so at their own peril. So be sure to tune into this webinar.

For those of you looking for a BI primer, look no further than Boris Evelson's presentation on the Current State of the BI Market. . Boris defines Business Intelligence (BI) as "a set of methodologies, processes, architectures, and technologies that transform raw data into meaningful and useful information". He had one slide that outlined all of the different capabilities of BI and all the different technologies and features required to deliver a set of functionality.

Boris then gives a refreshingly candid overview of all the vendor offerings in the market based on this categorization of capabilities. I highly recommend Boris' presentation to anyone interested understanding BI, and the different technology options. Boris' presentation ran a bit long so we didn't have much time for questions (but it was worth it). However, he was kind enough to answer some questions offline so check them out. Boris also suggests checking out Forrester's Information and Knowledge Management blog.

It seems the panel discussions are always the most popular sessions and this conference was no exception.
Rob Risany, Director, Product Marketing, Savvion, Michael Corcoran, Chief Marketing Officer, Information Builders, Guy Weismantel, Senior Director of Corporate Marketing, Business Objects and Joe McKendrick, BI in Action Blogger all participated in a discussion on the Role of BI in BPM and SOA. This was a very interesting discussion that really highlights in growing importance of BI services within the overall architecture, and the role it plays in making business perform better. Definitely worth a hour of your time.

Let us know what you think.

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Boris Evelson gave a terrific overview of the BI market today at the BI in Action conference. I plan to review it in my blog tomorrow. However, there were a number of questions we did not have time to address. Boris was kind enough to answer some so I wanted to get them posted right away. Thank you Boris!

1. You have not really addressed the area of Human Capital BI? What's your view of that space?

Answer. I think this is an emerging area with multiple opportunities. There’s a triad of high level components in any
organization: processes, data and HR. While there’s been many innovations in the process and data analytics, HR analytics (work force optimization, for example) is playing catch-up.

2. Same question as before: is the consolidation of the market continuing on its way with other major operations? Who will be the next target: SAS, BO, Microstrategy? And the predator: IBM, Microsoft, Oracle?

Answer. I do agree that there will be almost complete consolidation in the BI market within the next two years, and the “dark ages” of BI may set in since Oracle/Microsoft/IBM/SAP and others having acquired all pureplays will have to devote most of their time to integration, not innovation. Next transactions will probably be initiated by HP and maybe Teradata, since both are contending to be “BI players” but really don’t offer any BI tools other than infrastructure and databases. If the acquirers are HP or Teradata, than Business Objects will probably be the first target, since BO acquisition gives the buyer an almost complete BI “stack”. Cognos will be next on the list. A combination of Teradata/Microstrategy or Netezza/Microstrategy may also be interesting since the arrangement will be an awesome VLDB (very large database) front end/back end combination.

3. Can u tell more about advance ETL process & SOA?

Answer. Since the early days of BI it’s been a dream of every architect to put data messages on ESB (enterprise service bus) and consume them as needed by ODS/DW/DM. It’s a difficult process both from the business (defining and agreeing on a standard message format) and technical (pub/sub architecture, message queues, long transactions, multi phase commits, etc) points of view. Little has changed, except for fewer protocols and more standardization (.NET, J2EE). Only a few forward thinking enterprises have achieved this advanced level of BI architecture.

4. Often real analysis requires data from various processes and therefore analytics imbedded with processes are too narrowly focused. What is the best practice in addressing this.

Answer. Look for generic BPM vendors (not horizontally or vertically focused solutions) that (can) span all enterprise processes: Pegasystems, Savvion, Lombardi. And look for generic BPM/BI solutions from Tibco/Spotfire, Cognos OEMing Lombardi and Pegasystems just announcing a partnership with Panorama Software.

5. Do the Microsoft solutions support Mainframe data?

Answer. All open architecture (Wintel, Risc, Unix/Linux) BI vendors (including Microsoft) support mainframe data only indirectly via gateways and EII (enterprise information integration) middleware.

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Last week I spoke Lyndsay Wise, Senior Research Analyst for the Business Intelligence and Business Performance Management sector at Technology Evaluation Centers about web-based BI solutions.

Lyndsay cited 4 different types of web based tools. "The first one, is portal deployment, the second one are full Web-based BI suites. The third are actually hosted or SaaS-based models. And the fourth are open source." I must admit it took me some time getting my head around that analysis. The last 3 seem to have to do with how you buy a web-based BI solution and Lyndsay gave some good advice in the webcast as to what to look for, and what to think about when you evaluate solutions. But the first one - portal deployment - seems to be Lyndsay's way of saying the original web based solutions were vendors offering reporting via a browser.

While Lyndsay focused on web based BI for our discussion, my recent discussions with BI vendors opens up many more areas for comparing BI solutions in terms of capabilities. For example, there are the traditional BI vendors that focus on analytics, now integrating with BPM solutions for delivering operational BI within the context of a business process. There are Business Activity Monitoring solutions with complex event processing that correlate disparate events to define business patterns and deliver predictive capabilities. There are BI gadgets that can deliver desktop KPIs. These business level intelligence solutions can be used as part of business performance management. In fact there's a lot of technology out there that can go under the BI banner.

Want to hear more? BI in Action will be broadcast live on Web., June 20th. Tune into Bill Gassman's keynote at 11:00 am ET on June 20th to learn more about Business Performance. For an overview of the whole market tune into Boris Evelson's keynote at noon ET. Then at 1:00 pm tune into the panel discussion on the role of BI in BPM and SOA. Bring your questions.

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For the second podcast in our continuing BI in Action podcast series we spoke with Frank Pursel, Senior Prinicipal with HP's Information Management Practice, where Frank serves as the competency leader for business performance management; Gaurav Verma, who is the Business Intelligence Marketing Manager of SAS; Karl Kwong, Product Manager at Business Objects, where he focuses on driving the adoption of BI in operational and mission-critical systems; Arman Eshraghi, CEO and Founder of LogixML; and Tobin Gilman, Senior Director of Product Marketing for Hyperion Solutions, which is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Oracle Corporation.

Frank Pursel spoke about how BI is becoming much more pervasive throughout the organization. “We have the executives looking at dashboards, score cards, trending type of information. We have analysts that are using pretty much the same type of applications they did before, but with more advanced features. We also have field people who are looking at mobile analytics, they are also looking at quick, almost real-time type of data. And then we also have operational folks that are looking for alerts and again more real-time type of information.”

Guarav Verma of SAS agreed that BI is becoming more pervasive throughout the organization. He also stated that end users are moving from structured periodic reports to more advanced statistical analysis, forecasting and modeling. He stated as SAS, a market leader in BI, sees the marketing starting to mature it is starting of offer BI vertical solutions that include offerings include domain expertise and intellectual property. The other emerging trend he noted was the inclusion of BI in processes.

Karl Kwong of Business Objects spoke of a push away from analytical systems to delivering BI to a more operational set of users as part of the existing business processes. The integration of BPM and BI is clearly an emerging trend we are hearing more and more. Business Objects is creating a new service tier that focuses on integrating into business process.

Arman Eshraghi of LogiXML spoke about making BI broadly available throughout to all levels of operational users by providing browser based systems that are easy to use, learn and integrate.
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Tobin Gilman, of Hyperion Solutions, recently acquired by Oracle. Tobin stated that going forward everything will be Oracle, the Hyperion brand is likely to be dropped. Hyperion focuses on business performance management. One trend Tobin mentioned was the merging of BI tools for reporting and analysis with packaged applications and performance management applications. The result is accelerated planning cycles, forecasting cycles and closing cycles for reporting both statutory and management reporting.

It is clear that BI is becoming more pervasive at all levels of the organization. To hear more about how these vendors view the evolution and future of BI tune into the podcast.

Be sure to tune into the BI in Action virtual conference on June 20 to hear Bill Gassman, Research Director, Gartner
speak about how BI is Driving Business Performance.

To learn more about how BI is evolving tune into the keyone on une 21st to hear Boris Evelson, Principal Analyst, Forrester.
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