Business drivers, data quality drives BI

With Gartner predicting a 7% to 8% compound growth rate for the business intelligence (BI) market in 2006, it should come as no surprise that BI and security take turns as the top two IT spend priorities for business this year.

According to the January 2006 Gartner Executive Programme`s survey of 1 400 CIOs, BI applications are CIOs` top technology priority in 2006 - and, for the second consecutive year, business-process improvement is the number one business concern.

In an interview with ITWeb, Andreas Bitterer, VP of research at Gartner Europe, identifies the key trends shaping the BI landscape this year as: more platform and analytics talk from vendors, with business seemingly more focused on real-time business drivers, addressing data quality and marrying operational applications with BI tools.

"There`s definitely been more platform talk in the market, with vendors pushing end-to-end platforms from a single provider as the solution. While it is in theory a good value proposition, the reality is it will be a major challenge for any business to transition to a single platform from all the various BI tools already in use today," says Bitterer.

While each industry has its own BI drivers - regulatory requirements in financial services, fraud detection in insurance, RFID in retail, customer data integration in telecoms - performance management and data quality are seen as BI drivers across all industries.

"I don`t think there`s one company on this planet that hasn`t a data quality problem," says Bitterer. "The only difference is whether they are addressing the problem or not."

He also argues that any one vendor`s strengths in one or several areas do not necessarily compensate for its potential weaknesses with respect to specific discrete solutions.

The result has been considerable acquisition activity in the BI space in the past 12 months, with more to come, according to Bitterer.

The Siebel acquisition was key to Oracle`s BI strategy, he notes. This month, the vendor unveiled the Oracle BI Suite, which includes its recently acquired Siebel Business Analytics products.

In the case of Cognos, the acquisitions of Adaytum (which produced planning and budgeting software) and Frango (financial consolidation) were key to the vendor fine-tuning its performance management product and market strategy.

Last but not least, in an effort to extend its reach into the domain of BI giants such as Business Objects and Oracle, Microsoft in April also acquired one of its longest standing partners in this space, ProClarity.

While IBM`s 2005 purchase of Ascential Software certainly fits well with its broad ambitions in the middleware category and it appears to be close to Hyperion and Cognos, insofar as the BI space goes, Bitterer says IBM is "missing in action".

In the end, regardless of which BI vendors` tool or end-to-end platform an enterprise may opt to use in its BI endeavours, it is not about the technology.

"It`s about governance. The days of CIO standing for chief how-can-I-hold-on-to-my-job-as-long-as-I-can officer are over. If you are a CIO, you should be serious about information and manage it as an asset," Bitterer concludes.