The Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing software products space seems to be in a funk! It seems to be somewhat mature and looking for some new directions!
Users have been always clamoring for more flexible, do-it-yourself Business Intelligence solutions and many companies have been taking off in the recent past.
Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence are mature in their usage within companies. However once the basic reporting is in and used, users veered off and started using Excel Spreadsheets with data extracted from the main BI and Data Warehousing tools.
This is because of essential design decisions that are usually made at the design stage and quite often, these are set in stone and inflexible. Organizations quite often do not know ahead of time, very clearly what their eventual BI requirements may be.
This leads to some basic data warehousing design decisions that set some of the tables and multi-dimensional structures in stone. It is either too expensive or too much of a hassle evolving these backend designs continuosly.
Users make up for these problems by just extracting the data into their own Excel spreadsheets from which they create their own processing macros or pivot tables and do further analysis.
There are many tools in the market currently that do many of these do-it-yourself kinds of data collection and reporting. If only the larger vendors realize the need for flexibility in use! May be they do. But my own impressions are of a kind of Status-Quo!
Stay committed to your decisions, but stay flexible in your approach. - Tony Robbins
The bottom line is, get more for less quickly, which drives decision making. There are several tools available. The question is what works where and at what cost. No BIG vendor tools are required for any large practical BI / DW project.