Inatech talks Business Intelligence Standardization

The most recent Gartner report on standardization of Business Intelligence says businesses hugely benefit from implementing BI standards. This is all very well, but standardization involves time and money that many organizations simply feel they don’t have. Many sector experts, however, see through the apparent problem with ease.

Rather than businesses being scared of the transition, it is a simple, rational business decision to standardize. Jacqueline Coolidge of AMR Research has noted that businesses are beginning to realize that the short-term difficulty of standardization is more than outweighed by the benefits in the long run.

Inatech’s BI partner, Rosetta Stone’s Donald Macdonald is quick to agree with this point of view. “Go back just two years and there were three big players, Cognos, Business Objects and Hyperion plus many of a similar size and many small ones,” He said. “The three big players have gone, been swallowed by IBM (Cognos), SAP (Business Objects) and Oracle (Hyperion) and this makes you consider where the BI sector will be in five years time.

“We see that people are generally adopting a common platform and so are standardizing around a product stack from SAP, Microsoft or Oracle. This is leading organizations to standardize their BI tools where possible on their Platform provider. There are obvious benefits of integration, support, training, interoperability, supplier leverage and so on.

“Oracle is making standardization even more appealing by offering pre-built data warehousing modules that fit right over it's e-Business Suite ERP system and deliver immediate capability out-of-the-box. If it was free, everyone would take it because its value proposition is quite compelling.”

It’s not all so easy, however; in a recession, some companies simply want to fix one problem, rather than uproot all of their systems. Tim Young, vice-president of corporate marketing for Netezza, claims that his organization is on the side of these companies, and that singular platforms are simply for the convenience of IT suppliers. “A customer basically has a problem with a particular application - revenue assurance, loyalty management, clickstream analysis – we would come in and be considered as the solution for that particular problem," he said. "In a recession, that's all people think about. No one is thinking about corporate-wide, enterprise-wide, or culture-changing projects.

“Our view is that in most cases the advantage with the better performance will offset any perceived disadvantage [with regard to] standardization.”

Donald disagrees, saying the advantages are long-term for companies: “The challenge to standardization is that for the principles to work an organization needs to turn off its legacy BI tools and actually benefit from one platform, one solution, simplified training and support and so on.

“However, where an organization has for example 200 reports built in BI Tool A, to re-develop them may cost £200k because of the sheer effort involved and business users will not want to pay that when the incumbent tool may work perfectly well. So, migration or conversion from one tool to another is the challenge to Standardization and making it work.” So where does Inatech stand in the midst of all this change?

Donald is quick to show that the organization is at the forefront of the sector, with expectations all of its own: “Inatech predicts that within two years there will be automation tools to help organizations switch off legacy products and that laws already in place will enable that to happen quicker here in Europe than in North America.

“Already there are software tools that can speed up this process dramatically and have brought forward the financial feasibility of standardizing within the reach of many large organizations and within a couple of years all organizations, depending on which BI tools they want to replace. “Organizations who are troubled with this challenge of removing non-standard BI tools should contact Inatech for a no-obligation review as to what degree of effort, and therefore cost, this would take for them specifically.”

Donald is not alone. SAS CEO Dr Jim Goodnight said in a recent interview that companies must keep on top of their BI systems or risk being left behind: “[Businesses] should be investing in an enterprise wide platform, not just individual point solutions for each department. They really need to take a long look at some of the BI tools they might be using currently and consider how they are going to grow.”

The future of BI looks bright and exciting. Mitch Betts of ComputerWorld.com predicts a process of democratization as BI truly takes flight, with information and BI tools being put in the hands of white-collar workers rather than a handful of analysts. Donald explained in detail the future of BI consultation that will develop as a result of this general democratization process: “After Siebel acquired nQuire in 2001, they fulfilled their objective of selling a data warehousing solution right out of the box. Not just a series of reports or dashboards but the real thing. A series of staging databases, subject oriented data marts, all of the ETL feeds to populate and keep the data up-to-date and then the dashboards.

“They bought nQuire because it had the best dashboard software anywhere in the BI market and it was used in Siebel Analytics as the front end tool and Informatica was used as the ETL layer with a custom component called DAC (data warehouse application console) to manage the mappings and workflows.

“Siebel achieved a significant market share of its core CRM user base. When Oracle bought Siebel in late 2005 it didn't guess that the jewel in the crown was the Siebel Analytics solution. “Further to the Siebel acquisition, Oracle has now closely replicated the Siebel strategy by launching a series of data warehousing solutions based upon the same principles and architectures covering e-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, SAP and other applications. They are based upon the same tool set and still use Informatica and the custom DAC component.

“With Oracle having strong examples of e-Business Suite users and a market share for Oracle Business Intelligence Apps (OBIA) of only 1% or less, you can image why they are focusing on this area. Achieving a comporable market share that Siebel did will drive many millions of dollars in license revenues. However, does this mean that the need for consultants has gone away and if so will the Oracle Partners that provide services defect to other vendors?

“The simple answer is no. OBIA is maybe an 80% fit to a solution that works for an organization but in order for them to maintain their competitive edge they will need to extend and customize the OBIA solution. The real advantage of OBIA to the services sector is that it takes BI into the strategic applications area and out of the tactical solutions one. This means that when organizations have to tighten their belts they won't abandon OBIA as they may have done with a tactical BI solution.

“However, the services organizations now have a much more complex solution to master because OBIA is a complex application made up of a number of software tools working closely together. Their understanding of the processes developed and how these tools integrate will determine their success or otherwise in this evolving marketplace.

Srihari Vedante, managing director of Inatech commented: “When the going gets tough, those organisations that can leverage customer and process insights will be the ones that come out of this downturn ahead of the competition.” He added, “Challenge us show them the tangible benefits!”