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According to Lyndsay Wise, a BI analyst who just launched her own WiseAnalystics Web site, BI is really starting to make its mark in the mid-market.

"There are about three ways that market consolidations are changing the face of business intelligence deployments," Wise explains. The first is that consolidations are leading to embedded BI within vendors' service offerings -- or at least readily available adapters. Smaller and newer entrants are bringing best-of-breed solutions and giving organizations more choice. And last, but not least, the expansion of BI towards SaaS means that hosted offerings can be deployed at a departmental level.

Benefits and Pitfalls

Two key benefits of having numerous choices is obviously, well, there's more choice. Organizations that don't have large budgets or IT infrastructures can choose among the available solutions to find the most appropriate.

"Larger vendors such as Business Objects and Cognos are creating not only mid-market solutions but on-demand solutions as well, so that organizations in the mid-market arena that cannot afford or don't necessary want even a mid-market solution can still get the benefit of these leading vendors but through an on-demand service," she says.

As for challenges, the consolidations bring in more doubt in terms of which offerings will remain available in the next year.

"Organizations won't really know until next year whether or not the vendors that have been acquired will actually still have a role at their own development and their market positioning, etc," Wise says.

Newer entrants can also face viability questions from not having as much of a proven track record.

BI and SaaS / Open Source Development

Both SaaS and open source are becoming more mainstream, and BI has a definite parallel.

"A couple of years ago, it was really only open source organizations or companies or developers that were interested in open source that knew about open source BI solutions," she says. "But now we see that based on different marketing efforts and just expansions in general into the area, that open source vendors are actually becoming more mainstream within BI."

On-demand has the same story. What was once more of a fringe movement is now becoming far more mainstream.

"I think that both open source as well as SaaS-based solutions will continue to expand and become more popular within the BI arena," Wise predicts. "Especially in terms of mid-market solutions because so many mid-market companies don't have really advanced or mature IT infrastructures, it makes sense that they would go towards an on-demand solution."

Executive Summary by Krissi Danielsson 

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Business can feel like a war sometimes, so it's no surprise that the ancient classic "Art of War" by Sun Tzu has relevance to the corporate world.

The Warfare Metaphor of Business

"Let’s look at what the business environment is about. It’s about competition," says Richard Platt, Intel's former corporate innovation program manager and senior instructor for innovation methods. "Warfare is really the ultimate competition."

Warfare, like business, has guidelines and rules and principles though -- and business can be Darwinian with survival of the fittest and most adaptable companies.

It's important in using this metaphor, however, to understand that business warfare is not against customers but about winning hearts and minds and gaining competitive advantage. It's about market share and influence in the mind of the customer.

Survival of the Fittest in Business

A researcher named Langdon Morris performed analysis of Fortune 500 and Forbes 100 companies over the past several decades and discovered some interesting trends. Morris found that between 1979 and 1983 that one third of the Fortune 500 went out of business or fell off the list and that the list had a 6% annual turnover. The Fortune 100 was almost as bad.

If you extrapolate the data, says Platt, and Project it forward, you find an interesting trend. Authors Richard Foster and Sarah Kaplan have predicted that only a third of today's major corporations will survive as businesses for the next 25 years; most will die or be bought out and absorbed.

"The reality is that we’re looking at drastically compressed planning horizons for every company and the need for fast response," he concludes. The root cause of the dropoff is the adaptability issue, just as the best fighters tend to survive a war.

Using Warfare Strategies in Business

So what does this all have to do with the Art of War? Sun Tzu said that the highest form of competing is to win without fighting. In business, that means winning customers' hearts and minds and to compete where competitors are not. One tool for accomplishing the latter is called the Blue Ocean Strategy of seeking calm waters, which contrasts with the Red Ocean strategy of sailing into bloody water.

Another tool, to resort to a military analogy, which be the OODA Loop, which was developed by an Air Force colonel. OODA stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act.

"If we look at this from an agility standpoint, we’re really looking at culture, organizational culture, and a climate of trust that actually encourages people to actually use their initiative and further the goals of the organization," Platt says.

For more on the metaphor and for specific examples of techniques like the OODA Loop in action, be sure to listen to the entire podcast.

Executive Summary by Krissi Danielsson

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