Oco in the Money

Oco, Inc., a leading provider of on-demand business intelligence (BI) software, announced it has received $10 million in a Series C financing from investment funds managed by Highfields Capital Management LP, a $10 billion investment management firm based in Boston, MA. This investment is part of a total Series C issuance of $14.5 million.

Oco’s on-demand data integration and analysis solution allows companies to achieve results in a fraction of the time, and at much lower cost than traditional BI solutions, which require the purchase and integration of multiple software products and can have implementation times stretching over many months.

“We chose to invest in Oco because we believe the company has a preemptive technology which dramatically reduces the time, cost and risk of business intelligence deployments,” said Richard Grubman, Senior Managing Director at Highfields Capital Management. “Oco has met the core BI challenge of bringing desktop visibility to enterprise data from disparate systems, and doing it in six weeks, not months. Whether for the managers of a business, or a financing source looking to evaluate company performance, the speed and quality of the information allows decisions that are both faster and better.”

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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)

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)

Teradata splits from NCR to deliver event driven BI

The restructuring will see Mike Koehler, senior vice-president of Dayton, Ohio-based NCR’s Teradata division, take over as president of Teradata, while NCR will continue to be lead by Bill Nuti. The separation process will take about six to nine months, executives said in a teleconference call.

Teradata, whose customers include the Royal Bank of Canada and Hudson’s Bay Co.,  specializes in data warehousing, which collects information on company activity that be can used to make better business decisions. Traditional data warehousing tends to be based on historical information, but Teradata has spent the last few years focusing on “active data warehousing,” which uses monitoring software to alert users as transactions are taking place. In other words, if something out of the ordinary occurred with a customer order, a user could act on it right away rather than do a post-mortem afterwards.

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HP dipping toe into BI Ocean

For more than a decade, big companies and sophisticated data aggregators have adopted data warehouses, yet few have mastered them, and many have outright failed in the effort or have been scared off by the complexity. The goal is to give workers access to real-time data across departments and geographic units, but more often than not, data warehouses end up as costly clunkers with outdated, inconsistent, and missing information.

Hewlett-Packard thinks it can help companies–and not just the biggest and most sophisticated ones–do a lot better. Over the past few months, HP has tiptoed into the data warehousing market with a system, called Neoview, born in its research labs and built first for its internal use.

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Cognos "outperform"

NEW YORK, October 12 (newratings.com) – Analyst Steven M. Ashley at Baird Patrick & Co maintain their “outperform” rating on Cognos (COGN.NAS). The target price is set to $42. In a research note published this morning, the analyst mention that the company believes that the current quarter would be an inflexion point for the company’s Cognos 8 product, which was launched nine months earlier. Cognos has indicated that its sales force, which has transitioned to selling enterprise solutions, has built a client pipeline and measures have been taken to improve sales execution. Cognos has successfully evolved to meet the challenges of the new business environment and is at the helm of a two-year product cycle for Cognos 8, the analyst adds.

Read the full story (NewRatings.com)