Industry Briefs
This issue includes a couple of business intelligence
industry observations, as well as links to my
latest
DM Review column.
- Rick
Sherman, Athena IT Solutions -
Data Integration vs ETL
The top two ETL companies, Informatica and Ascential
Software, aren’t just ETL companies anymore.
They are Data Integration companies.
Make no mistake, if you call them ETL companies,
they get downright insulted. Press releases, marketing
collateral and interviews by their top executives
all discuss how they have a broader vision than
just ETL tools. In fact, they see ETL tools becoming
commodities.
This trend is being caused by a couple of developments.
First, the major database vendors – Oracle,
IBM, and Microsoft - are giving the technology
away. Second, Microsoft is looking to make major
inroads in databases and business intelligence.
Although their ETL capability (Microsoft DTS)
is primitive now, it will only get stronger in
the next version.
Both Informatica and Ascential Software have
metadata management, data quality, and data profiling
in their suites, although Informatica’s
offerings are newer or though partnerships.
Ascential Software has been on the acquisition
trail with EAI vendor Mercator adding application-to-application
integration to their suite. Informatica, on the
other hand, has dropped its analytical offering
and gone back to its data integration roots.
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Reporting is back!
Lot of people over the last few years have looked at
me like I was a dinosaur when I mentioned reporting
as a part of a business intelligence portfolio. Reporting
was so 1980s!
Well, it’s back.
Cognos, MicroStrategy, and Microsoft all announced
major product initiatives involving reporting. Business
Objects and Hyperion acquired Crystal and Brio respectively
for their reporting capabilities.
Why is reporting back? Because after purchasing thousands
of licenses for awesome slice-and-dice, drill-down-across-over-and
out BI tools, business users still just want their daily
or weekly reports to know how the business is doing.
It's not their job to play with BI tools. They need
to focus on running the business. It was only the “power”
users that ever wanted to play with BI tools.
Reporting is more sophisticated than in the 1970s.
Green-bar, six-inch-thick reports have been replaced
with web-enabled reporting — PDF documents for
downloading and e-mail alerts for exception reporting.
The massive, one-size-fits-all report has been replaced
with reports whose content is highly-targeted to specific
business users. In addition, business people are able
to examine the details behind the numbers and exceptions
to discover what is fueling the trends.
Ultimately, reports and spreadsheets are the mainstay
of how business users are going to monitor their business.
Software vendors have seen the light after watching
a lot of their product licenses become shelf-ware and,
of course, by the pitter patter of Microsoft’s
fast-approaching little feet.
(Don't miss the next issue of Business Intelligence
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