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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.

Posted by bethgb at 01:06 AM in BI | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us

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