BI Marketplace Observations
by Rick
Sherman, Athena IT Solutions
BI vendors are now CPM vendors!
Business intelligence (BI) vendors are no longer
just tools vendors; now they’re selling
Corporate Performance Management (CPM) solutions.
These solutions package a combination of tools,
applications and data. Their toolset includes
BI and Extract, Transform and Load (ETL) products.
The data includes industry or business function
domain metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs)
along with the data needed to supply this information.
The applications include pre-built analytics (reports,
dashboards, etc.) supporting the KPIs, pre-built
databases containing the data to be analyzed,
and pre-built data mappings (ETL applications)
to source the data for those databases. BI vendors’
solutions include not only pre-built stacks of
tools, data and applications, but also professional
services. These services are used to install and
deploy, as well as customize packaged functionality,
or build new applications to fill in the gaps
between their offerings and their customers’
needs.
BI vendors have used mergers and acquisitions,
partnerships with other software companies and
industry standards groups, and organic growth
to fill their CPM packages with tools, applications
and data. The key selling proposition for these
solutions is their high return on investment (ROI),
which they’re able to deliver by addressing
business-specific needs while decreasing the time-to-value
and costs to deploy them. The selling proposition
for IT includes: |
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- one-stop-shopping versus the best-of-breed approach
where the customer has to do the systems integration
between the various tools
- buy-versus-build where you are buying the solution
rather than putting it together yourself
When evaluating these solutions, refer to my August
2003 DM Review article Essential
Guidelines for Evaluating Analytic Applications.
BI and Enterprise Applications vendors are clashing…
Increasingly the offerings from BI, Enterprise Applications
and ETL vendors are competing with each other for a
share of the IT budget to provide information access
and delivery solutions. BI vendors are offering CPM
solutions that pull data from the enterprise applications,
using either their own or their partners’ ETL
products. Enterprise application vendors (ERP, CRM,
SCM, and budget and planning) are offering BI, data
warehousing, and CPM solutions. Although they partner
with both BI and ETL vendors, they are sometimes offering
their own tools or limiting the extent of their partners’
offering within their solutions. They “control”
the accounts and offer their partners’ tools almost
as commodity items.
With both BI and enterprise application companies offering
CPM solutions they are vying to provide competing solutions
with their customers. Although customers could pick
solutions from multiple vendors, the overlapping data,
applications, and tools would make that a costly option.
In addition, multiple packages often encourage the creation
of more data silos in an enterprise.
With custom data warehouses and data marts, ERP BI/DW
solutions, BI and enterprise application vendors’
CPM solutions, and a few data shadow systems thrown
in enterprises need to start examining their data integration
(DW, BI and CPM) projects in the context of an overall
portfolio of IT projects that build the data backbone
of a company.
Industry buzzwords …enlightening or confusing?
Talk about an identity crisis. Vendors and industry
analysts use three different names when talking about
performance management solutions. They all mean the
same thing. Your three choices are:
- Corporate Performance Management (CPM)
– used by Gartner, Aberdeen Group, Oracle, Cognos,
and MicroStrategy.
- Business Performance Management (BPM)
– used by META Group, IDC, Hyperion Solutions,
OutlookSoft, and Applix.
- Enterprise Performance Management (EPM)
– used by Forrester Research, Business
Objects, PeopleSoft, CorVu, and Lawson Software.
And just to make matters a little more confusing, the
BPM acronym also stands for Business Process Management.
Seven Misconceptions about Data
Quality
Data is one of an enterprise's most important assets,
but when it is of poor quality it can cause more problems
than it solves. One of the biggest misconceptions about
data quality is that it's just about missing or incorrect
data. This is a short-sighted assumption. Data quality
is about much, much more.
In this article, we address seven of the most common
misconceptions about data quality.
>>>read
Seven Misconceptions about Data Quality
About Athena IT Solutions
Athena IT Solutions provides data warehousing and
business intelligence consulting services to help businesses
increase the return on investment of their corporate
data. Athena IT Solutions founder Rick Sherman has more
than 17 years of business intelligence and data warehousing
experience, having worked on more than 50 implementations
as an independent consultant and as a director/practice
leader at a Big Five firm. He founded Athena IT Solutions,
a Boston-based business intelligence and data warehousing
consulting firm and is a published author, industry
speaker, instructor and consultant. He can be reached
at rsherman@athena-solutions.com
or (617) 835-0546.
© 2004 Athena IT Solutions |
