Companies active in the business intelligence channel would be well advised to begin focusing higher up the value chain: there are excellent opportunities to be had with high-value customers; there is less competition; and margins are under less pressure in this area of the market.
This is the word from Julian Field, MD of local Ascential distributor CenterField.
"Companies active in the traditional business intelligence market will find themselves competing for a limited number of clients, with intense competition from other vendors," says Field. "For this reason, these companies should investigate new markets, those which are emerging and which forward-looking corporate clients will embrace over the next few years."
By way of example, Field refers to the discipline of ETL (extract, transform and load), which forms the underpinning of any business intelligence project. This is a hotly contested market, with any number of companies active, from dedicated vendors such as Ascential to Microsoft and Oracle.
"Any value-added reseller competing in this space will find itself scrapping for the same clients as all other vendors," says Field. "A far better strategy is to identify the new white space and to start developing the competencies for it."
In the domain of ETL, the logical evolution - the next white space - is enterprise data integration, which embraces ETL, metadata, data quality, data integrity and real-time integration services.
"This is a brand new space, so it offers exciting new opportunities for our resellers," says Field. "All that they now require is to identify the opportunities and begin strategising and skilling up to address them."
Ascential`s recently announced Real-Time Integration Services (RTI Services) piggybacks on the company`s Enterprise Integration Suite 7.0 and enables interoperability within a company`s service-oriented architecture (SOA).
Through support for interoperability standards such as Enterprise Java Beans (EJB), Java Messaging Service (JMS), and Web services, the benefits of on-demand, in-flight data integration capabilities can now be brought to other common enterprise integration solutions, including business process integration (BPI), enterprise application integration (EAI) and enterprise information integration (EII).
"What we have seen in the last five years has been a near-ubiquitous takeup of ETL tools to assist customers with business intelligence roll-out," concludes Field. "It is clear that the higher value solutions will become as ubiquitous, and alert resellers will begin gearing themselves to tackle this opportunity."
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