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)

Five Common Pitfalls to Avoid in BI Projects, Part 1

DM Review welcomes Lyndsay Wise as a new monthly online columnist. She will share her expertise and research materials gained as a BI analyst for the Technology Evaluation Centers in this column that will appear the third week of each month.

Annually, more than 70 percent of IT projects fail to meet expectations or become shelfware. Reasons for failure range from business intelligence (BI) projects not being completed on time and within budget to not being completed at all. Alternatively, BI initiatives may satisfy IT’s needs, but may not address those of end users. What should organizations do to avoid the common pitfalls and ensure success? Organizations should benchmark companies who have had successful implementations and learn from their mistakes during the preparation phase so as not to repeat them.

Read the full story (DM Review)

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)

Tibco snares BPM, SOA for Carphone Warehouse

The Carphone Warehouse, an independent retailer of mobile phones and services in Europe, has chosen Tibco Software’s service-oriented architecture (SOA) and business process management (BPM)solutions to serve as its foundation for a flexible order management and fulfillment platform.
The next-generation order fulfillment platform is reportedly designed to improve The Carphone Warehouse’s fixed-mobile converged (FMC) services offering and better meet consumer needs.
The company has begun a phased deployment of Tibco’s software spanning core business functions including service activation, billing, CRM and provisioning.

Read the full story (DMeurope)

SQL and Excel torpedo aimed at BI Vendors

Business intelligence is by far one of the more interesting–and important–software categories in the enterprise space. After all, CIOs can spend millions on revamping business processes and investing in enterprise applications, but if a wide range of folks can’t analyze critical data the effort is wasted. Simply put, you can spend a lot on IT and get a ROI goose egg without business intelligence software.

That fact is part of the reason companies like Cognos and Business Objects are successful. But the party may be about to end. In about a year there may be no better time to squeeze your favorite business intelligence software supplier.

Why? Excel 2007 will add a lot of business intelligence (BI) tools. Coupled with Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services and the software giant could be dangerous to business intelligence players.

Read the full story (Larry Dignan – ZDNet)

Routes to value

BI today is more about value through specialisation, according to key player Cognos, which is currently charting its move into specialised market segments where the technology can help businesses better understand the market they are in.

“The technology today is no longer something meant for top management executives, a notion that many companies wrongly supported. Its value in the enterprise is driven by the line of business managers and increasingly, industry verticalisation and specialisation,” says Ged Simmons, Sales Director, General Business UK and MEA for Cognos.

Read the full story (cpilive.net)

Business Case a Must For Business Intelligence

New research puts analytics and other business intelligence capabilities at the heart of modern marketing. And after disaster recovery and Web services, business intelligence appears in more IT budgets than any other IT initiative. This underlines the importance of building a business case to support successful enterprise business intelligence deployments, says Leah MacMillan, vice president of product marketing at Cognos, one of the world’s leading providers of business intelligence and performance management solutions.

Read the full story (eMedia Wire)

Business Intelligence Market May Be Due For Consolidation

The $18 billion market for business intelligence software is growing at a healthy 10% annual clip, thanks to companies’ attempts to make sense of a growing flood of internal data.

Despite steady sales growth for BI, the market is facing an era of wrenching change. New technologies and business models continue to disrupt the industry as it matures and consolidates.

Read the full story (Investors.com)

Business Intelligence: Exploring the Depths of Data

What do a gasoline engine maker, publishing company and football franchise have in common? Their use of business intelligence software…

Worldwide sales for business intelligence software will reach $6.36 billion this year, rising to $7.04 billion next year and $7.8 billion in 2008, according to IDC forecasts. And with companies consolidating their vendors and seeking more strategic results from their tools, software providers have been building up their business intelligence platforms.  

Read the full story (eWeek)