Business Objects and Microsoft To Make War in the Midmarket

Seeing a huge market opportunity to sell business intelligence software to companies with 100 to 1,000 employees and $100 million to $1 billion in revenue, Business Objects today announced a major new-product family and larger initiative aimed at catering to midsized companies. The midmarket now buys $2.1 billion worth of BI software each year, according to IDC, and Business Objects says that figure is growing 12.5 percent per year — 50 percent faster than BI sales growth among large enterprises.

To cater to the tighter budgets and leaner IT staffs of midsized companies, Business Objects is introducing Crystal Decisions, a “holistic” product that will be offered in Standard, Professional and Premium editions. The Standard edition, which includes reporting, query and analysis, is being released today starting at $20,000. The Pro and Premium editions, which will add data integration and performance management capabilities, will debut in the second and fourth quarter, respectively. All three editions will be able to deliver data, reports and analyses within Microsoft Office and SharePoint.

Read the full story (Intelligent Enterprise)

Political Skills Key to Business Intelligence

Your organization’s business intelligence project will fail if the relationship management team lacks political clout or is starved for resources, according to industry analyst firm Gartner Inc.

Speaking at Gartner’s BI and Information Management Summit in Sydney Tuesday, senior analyst Rolf Jester said the biggest reasons BI projects fail is the lack of balance between vendor-user trust and control, and loss of predefined goals.

Read the full story (PC World)

Business Intelligence Power Play

Come forward, seeker of knowledge. You stand before BI, the great mystic oracle of information. Ask your questions and gain enlightenment.

Wait! BI is much too complex and arcane for one such as yourself to interact with the great one directly. You must direct your questions through one of the priests of BI, also known as the business intelligence analysts. These priests will make your queries pleasing to BI and also will be able to interpret BI’s answers for you.

Read the full story (eWeek)

BI Making Headway in Banks’ Profitability Efforts

Imagine being able to look at all the data on your customers across your organization to determine the best ways to increase the profitability and loyalty of those clients. Nothing new there — banks have been doing this in some form for years. It’s called CRM, right?

Not quite. Although customer relationship management and the technologies that have grown around it provide banks with some value around data interpretation, the future of analytics lies in business intelligence (BI).

Read the full story (TechWeb)

BI in 2007: For Some, The Year of Living Mundanely?

What’s on tap for 2007? Many rank and file BI pros say to forget MDM, BSO, or other such novel acronyms; they’re focusing on more mundane stuff.

What’s on tap for business intelligence (BI) pros in 2007? More of the same, it looks like. While CIOs and other C-level-types seem preoccupied with ambitious projects involving next-gen acronyms—business performance management (BPM), master data management (MDM), and business service optimization (BSO) , to name just a few—many rank and file DW and BI pros seem to be focusing on more mundane, but nevertheless crucial tasks, such as improving decision-support availability and service levels, rolling out new DW and BI solutions, and grappling with ever-expanding data volumes.

Read the full story (Enterprise Systems Journal)

BPM and SOA insight from Mathias Kirchmer

On the heels of the ARIS ProcessWorld conference in Amelia Island, Fla., SearchSAP.com sat down with Mathias Kirchmer, chief innovation and marketing officer for Saarbrücken, Germany-based IDS Scheer to discuss the business process management (BPM) topics that came out of the conference. Kirchmer dissects some trends he’s seeing in the BPM market, gives an update on the company’s partnerships with SAP and Oracle and offers some advice for BPM projects.

Read the full story (SearchSAP)

Gartner: It’s business intelligence 2.0 time

Forget talk of Web 2.0, it’s time for BI 2.0, according to Gartner.

The analyst group has laid out its case for improving the use of business intelligence in enterprises. Speaking at the Gartner BI Summit at the Royal Lancaster Hotel in London on Tuesday, Gartner vice president for research, Andreas Bitterer, said the next generation of business intelligence (BI) would be defined by what it was not.

To begin with, BI 2.0 is not about more suppliers, said Bitterer. “There are too many BI vendors,” he explained.

Read the full story (ZDNet)

What is Business Intelligence?

Ask a room full of people to define business intelligence (BI) and there will probably be as many answers as there are people. Some may believe this is a problem; however, to be successful in meeting BI needs today, emerging and enterprise businesses have to accept that it covers a broad range of capabilities.

The typical approach to BI centers on data integration and technology. Using this approach, various source databases are identified, the data is consolidated and aggregated into a data warehouse or data mart so it can be analyzed in the form of an OLAP cube and put into some sort of presentation format. This is only a technical view of what it takes to solve the problem of converting data into information. This approach worked in the past, at high cost.

Read the full story (DM Review)

BI and CPM markets in 2007: When two become one

For years analysts have asked suppliers “so which market are you in – BI or CPM?” Suppliers were somewhat coy about the answer. BI and CPM were perceived as distinct and separate markets. BI was the high margin Cash Cow and CPM was the Question Mark in the portfolio.

Suppliers did not want to risk cashflow from the large $7bn BI market by gambling on the smaller $1bn CPM market. Hence supplier commitment to a CPM marketing message or a BI marketing message vacillated depending on whether cashflow or new market penetration was the current key directive. But all has now changed.

2006 was a great year for the CPM vendors and most registered 30%+ revenue growth. Sniffing opportunity, supplier indecisiveness vapourised overnight. The answer to the “which market are you in?” question has been categorically answered: “BOTH”.

Read the full story (IT Analysis)

HP’s New Unit Meant to Spur Storage

HP, stung by recent poor storage performance, has formed a new software unit in an attempt to boost its data management story.

 The new Business Information Optimization unit is the first step in a broader repositioning strategy, as HP looks to emulate its rival IBM by wrapping services around storage software in an attempt to lock large customers into its technology. Roadmap details remain fuzzy.

HP execs say the new unit will sell software and hardware, including storage gear, from across the company. A business intelligence wing will be responsible for Neoview, a high-end data warehousing product that HP has been developing for the last two years. A separate information management wing will focus on archiving and management of data.

Read the full story (Byte and Switch)