Successful businesses have always put a high value on
the information they collect. This value is derived from analysing
the patterns and trends that emerge from data.
A reliance on the intelligence gained from any insights can make
a difference to margins or competitive differentiators.
And, for as long as there is a need to extract this business
intelligence from IT systems, suppliers have been offering
analytical software to enable users to drill down into data to find
meaningful results.
Alongside this so-called data-mining, suppliers have also worked
on simplifying how information derived from the data locked in IT
systems is presented to the end-user. This has led to the
development of intuitive graphical interfaces designed to help
end-users make better sense of all the business data they are
presented with.
The biggest single benefit of business intelligence is that it
offers a holistic view of the business, although this can be hard
to measure. Tangible benefits include making IT easier to focus on
cost savings, revenue growth and consistency of information.
The more IT systems become critical to business, the more they
are used within the decision making process. The worldwide business
intelligence platform market size is testament to this demand from
users.
Analyst firm Gartner is predicting a compound annual growth rate
of 6.5% during the next five years, which means businesses will be
buying £1.7bn of new licences by 2010.
But with so much choice, who should a large enterprise look to
for business intelligence technology? And what differentiates the
products in the market?
One of the most immediate problems for IT directors is that
end-users may be running different business intelligence products
at departmental level, for finance, supply chain and many other
operational functions.
Bloor Research analyst Gerry Brown said, "Most firms say they
have between six and 15 forms of business intelligence software.
Many of the main suppliers have massive overlap between their
customer bases."
The proliferation of different flavours of business intelligence
technology used at departmental levels is an opportunity for IT
directors to look at business intelligence consolidation.
"Businesses want one version of the truth. If you are buying
enterprise scale business intelligence licences, you will want to
know that investment will scale," Brown said.
To derive value from business data and get more out of your IT
investment, a single corporate reporting function enables more
widely accessible, manageable and ultimately meaningful
intelligence.
Research from Bloor has found that smaller companies can offer
users innovative approaches to business intelligence.
For instance, business intelligence software supplier QlikView's
latest analytic tool is optimised for 64-bit technology.
Although 64-bit enables more calculations in the memory (as
opposed to interrogating the server hard disc), it also means such
nascent business intelligence suppliers present a challenge.
QlikView has more than 3,000 customers worldwide and its
revenues grew 80% in 2005.
If exceptional speed of response is your main need, then an
enterprise needs to make sure it runs on Microsoft, as QlikView is
not yet ported onto Unix-based systems, like Sun Solaris for
example, according to Bloor Research.
Beyond niche suppliers of specialist business intelligence
tools, the majority of providers roughly fall into two camps.
There are products that enable a company either to buy a
horizontal business intelligence platform, and those that take a
layered approach, where the IT director builds or buys a suite of
components that fit together.
Some suppliers are from a query and reporting background like
Actuate, Cognos, MicroStrategy and Hyperion.
Another company taking this approach is JasperSoft, a supplier
of open source business intelligence and reporting products
integrated with JBoss application server products and MySQL
databases. JasperSoft also offers off-the-shelf products.
The approach taken by enterprise IT suppliers such as SAP, SAS,
IBM and Oracle, is to provide a business intelligence platform for
their existing users - allowing them to take advantage of
enterprise products already deployed within the end-user
company.
This grouping also includes Microsoft, with its dominance in
the relational and online analytical processing (Olap) database
server space. According to the Olap Report produced by research
group Business Intelligence, Microsoft Windows Server grew its
share of this market from 75.7% to 84.7% last year.
Moreover, Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet, often the tool with
which end-users gain their first experience of business
intelligence, is due for a major revamp as part of the launch of
Office 2007.
Renaud Besnard, product marketing manager responsible for
Microsoft's SQL Server-based data management and business
intelligence portfolio, said, "We look at our product stack as
three different layers. The foundation is the data management
platform, then comes the extract, transform and load layer.
"Once the data is aggregated and put into cubes, the information
needs to be disseminated across the enterprise with reporting.
There will be some very exciting developments in those last two
layers over the next few months."
One of the areas of focus is Office 2007. It includes a new,
extensible user interface, open XML formats, workflow and search
features, and a business datawarehouse.
All this allows Microsoft to argue true enterprise business
intelligence scalability and integrate the advanced analysis and
visualisation technologies it gained with the acquisition of
ProClarity in April.
Microsoft claims these new features will extend its Office and
SQL Server investments.
Microsoft's strategy is to offer users a single product that
can solve all a user's business intelligence requirements, to
support both data-warehousing and transactional reports.
But in today's complex IT infrastructures, where strategies like
business process management and SOA have increasing parts to play
in providing timely, accurate, auditable and cost-effective data,
there are some suppliers who argue that to think of a "box" is to
set boundaries to integration, and challenge accuracy where sharing
data.
Cognos, for instance, has re-engineered its business
intelligence platform Win Cognos 8 to support web services, and is
licensed based on the role of the end-user.
The web-services based architecture approach advocated by Cognos
incorporates relational online analytical processing, peer-to-peer
services, a common management layer and search capabilities powered
by Google.
Others too, share this vision of moving the management of data
out of the database and into the peer-to-peer systems used by an
organisation to run its business.
US business process management supplier Tibco, for example,
argues that aligning business intelligence with business process
management removes a reliance on central databases, by
democratising data with event-driven systems, rather than relying
on constant polling for data.
Bloor Research predicts that business intelligence applications
will increasingly become embedded into business processes.
Olap Report author Nigel Pendse pointed out that most of what is
on offer in the market today may have a little way to go before
achieving such functionality.
"It is a nice idea to be able to issue business intelligence
queries using some kind of Google-type technology, but you would
have to enable so many keywords that it would end up looking almost
like SQL. The technology is just not sophisticated enough yet," he
said.
He added, "No one business intelligence supplier is best at
everything. Do not assume they all offer the same things. Some
parts of an enterprise's IT may be working fine, so there is no
point in any rip and replace.
"I think the suppliers that sell the standardisation message are
in mortal danger from Microsoft, which has been a business
intelligence supplier for some time. They are aiming the next
version of Excel to be a better business intelligence client."
However, Pendse expects that suppliers such as SAP, Oracle and
IBM would be the preferred choice for users running enterprise
systems.
"Oracle and IBM are so deeply entrenched at CIO level. And these
suppliers can bundle business intelligence products thrown in as
sweeteners as part of larger deals."
When choosing business intelligence tools it is important to put
independent, industry-driven knowledge and domain-specific advice
above the technology itself.
"Pick a problem you actually have to solve first, and then
shortlist products without talking to any salesmen. Do not be
afraid of using more than one supplier.
"Use different consultants for the evaluation and deployment
stages, as systems integrators often have strategic partnerships
with these suppliers. And get business users involved from the
beginning," Pendse advises.
Case study: How Graniterock is getting intelligent with
lorries and quarries
US construction materials company Graniterock is making
innovative use of business intelligence in combination with RFID to
track trends and improve its customer service.
The construction company is using Business Objects reporting
software to track inventory and supply movements through its
quarries, in a bid to reduce the amount of time a lorry spends at
the quarries.
Graniterock found that its information management needs grew
exponentially after implementing an RFID tagging system.
Employees throughout the organisation – including the finance,
accounting, and sales departments, as well as senior and middle
management, job project managers, and preventative maintenance
planners – use Business Objects to gain insight into the transport
cycle and ensure timely delivery of materials to customers.
Steve Snodgrass, chief financial officer at Graniterock, said
the information is also used to monitor against the company’s
internal efficiency scoreboard. “Our goal is to get lorries out of
the quarry within 10 minutes,” he said.
In California, lorries are charged at 60p per minute, which
means the more time they stay at the quarry the more it costs the
customer. “We needed to get the lorries through the quarry faster,”
he said.
Snodgrass began a project using passive tags on the lorries. The
system collects information on the lorry, project assignment and
weight for each load via RFID tag readers located at plant
locations.
When a lorry arrives at the quarry a Visual Basic application
provides a unique ID and the lorry is weighed. On leaving the
quarry, the lorry is weighed again. The application stores this
information automatically and calculates the weight of asphalt on
the load, without requiring staff to key in any information.
“Previously staff at the quarry had to punch in all the
information into a computer,” Snodgrass said. Reports containing
the turnaround time for lorries can then be e-mailed to the
customer.
At its largest quarry, 500 lorries a day are passed through the
system, Snodgrass said.
The next stage in Graniterock’s RFID deployment will involve
implementing GPS. “This will allow us to figure out what exactly is
happening at a customer’s site,” Snodgrass said.
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