There have been significant shifts in the business intelligence and corporate performance management markets in the last 18 months, with more to come.
The dust has not yet settled, and while the recent spate of acquisitions and software releases has left the four main players - Microsoft, SAP, Oracle and IBM - owning the lion's share of the market, there is still some uncertainty as to how this is going to play out in the future.
The Chinese saying, "May you live in interesting times", is actually a curse, not a blessing. The last few years have certainly been interesting; something of a rollercoaster. While the rollercoaster is slowing down, it still has a bit of life in it. The software market is being commoditised, as always happens when the mainstream players enter, and it will respond to different stimuli going forward.
Harvey Jones has been leading this sector of the market in South Africa for the last decade, and was one of the leading ProClarity distributors globally prior to its acquisition by Microsoft.
Our job is to spot the trends before they become mainstream and make sure we are ahead of the curve. We had to see where the market was going and make sure we continue to lead the way. There were a number of trends we identified as being the major drivers going forward:
* Business IP - offering best practice
* Quick deployment - reduced time to deliver
* Value in the data - true costing and profitability analysis
* Skills shortage
* Hosting
Of the above trends, the first three are market drivers, the last one is not and the fourth one is a result of the commoditisation that is happening. I will not focus on hosting as it is a way of reducing costs and leveraging best practice and usually getting a quick deployment into the deal.
I will cover the other four areas in more detail:
* Business IP - best practice. The main issue any BI practitioner will tell you is that the business doesn't usually know what it wants. "I'll know what I want when I see it" is a common refrain, which leads to iterative prototyping as the safest way to deliver. What users are looking for are business solutions, not six-week analysis phases. Business IP allows the common drivers for an industry and market sector to be identified and pre-built. We always need data, and it should be clean; those are a given. What the market is looking for now is best business practice based on months and years of analysis being done for its specific needs without the delay, the pain of investigation or the corresponding price point.
* Quick deployments - The software market is being commoditised, but all of the main players will recommend the same approach to building a BI solution. The analysis/design/ETL/DW/OLAP/report/analyse cycle is the same for all vendors. It is expensive and time-consuming, and it usually misses the mark. Quick BI, our response, is all about packaging both the technical and business IP into a solution that allows you to produce results in a fraction of the time. We see this as being the next area of the market that will come under pressure.
* Value in the data - This comes from making the right decisions and knowing, without doubt, that the data you are viewing is not hiding any issues. It usually means applying costs at a low granular level and getting true customer and product profitability figures out.
* Skills shortage - Good BI skills are now hard to find as the market has grown. The simple question is "How can I do more with less?" We need to build any number of cubes and roll them out for the enterprise, but can't find the people to execute. The first two points will go a long way to solving this problem.
Which platform? We have always been focused on the Microsoft market, but did not let that influence us in making our decision where to go. The momentum is with Microsoft, without a doubt, and with its footprint, route to market and pricing model, it was easy to see it would dominate the sector.
It was also interesting to see the shift in the market. For years Microsoft had been lambasted for an incoherent BI strategy. Now it appears to be the only player in the market that has a clear vision of where it is going.
So, we were looking for a solution set that could leverage the Microsoft stack to offer packaged business best practice, rapid deployments and value in the data. We chose another product to offer the costing value in the data as this is a specialist niche area of the market, and not required by everyone.
We came across ProfitBase through a referral from the ProClarity team in the Netherlands. The business templates offer the packaged IP the market is looking for. The ProfitBase product offers us quick BI with the packaged connectors and easy-to-use single point of entry user interface, and the openness of the product and ability to combine data from multiple sources ensured we would be able to customise the product to meet every customer's needs.
It was not an easy adoption within the business. We have a team of diehard best-practice BI practitioners and a highly experienced technical team. We had many heated discussions around Ralph Kimball, Bill Inmon and the failings (or lack thereof) of Visual Studio.
Some argued that best practice was meeting the client's needs quickly. This was countered with issues around star schemas, which were countered again with the point that these are technical issues and should not be used to confuse the business issues at hand.
The net result was we banned best-practice discussions in the offices while we were doing the product evaluation. After a couple of highly successful deployments and a number of proofs of concept, the team is converted and strongly believes ProfitBase has a leading role to play in the future of the BI market.
The product delivers on its promise. It delivers scalable, flexible, best-practice solutions in a fraction of the time of other products on the market and it does so by fully leveraging the power of the Microsoft stack.
We are excited by the possibilities and see this as one of the main driving factors in market commoditisation. A business intelligence solution that delivers business value in a couple of weeks. That has to be a market changer. And it really works!
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