Ventana Research | Executive Blog Home

Does HR Understand Their Information Dilemma?

4/24/2008 6:00:27 PM

The recent years of technology investments by HR are now showing their cracks and flaws as the disparity of systems being adopted from different suppliers lack the fundamental basic access to unified workforce information. Without a common foundation of workforce information, how can you gain a unified view of performance and compensation or competencies to recruit into or promote from within? Well the state of workforce analytics and BI about employees is pretty sad and with it not being a top priority in most organizations, it is not getting better any time soon.

Now with more pressure from finance and operations to get more detailed information and even a lack of analysts to accumulate and calculate them in separate worksheets, the state of HR information systems has never been worse. The lack of support and priority by CIOs and guidance by the finance organization to invest further now has reached its toll.

Now what? Well smart HR executives will take a step in the right direction and assess their information chaos. Next step is to establish an information model that will help provide information to business and then themselves that can answer the basic and sophisticated questions. Without this they are not a business partner or service to the organization.

Do you have a good story or situation in your organization? Let me know.

Let me know your thoughts.

Why IT Might Be in Big Trouble - Again

4/22/2008 9:13:09 AM

I might be a little harsh, but my experience in the last six years analyzing organizations across all industries and company sizes provides insight to a serious problem. IT has lost touch with reality as they have been disconnected from the situation in business and do not seem to be concerned about it. My recent blog pointed to the state of business being mad as hell. IT is apparently responding by shifting focus to the management of an organization’s data assets rather than worrying or focused about the capabilities needed by business.

Even more challenging is that recent trend seems to indicate a shift to spending more time and investment on new data management technology like appliances, specially designed databases, query accelerators that are part of new architectures or patches to wearing infrastructure. While many of these can shave time and costs from existing approaches, the question is whether they are on track to deliver high quality and consistent data on a timely basis. Just reducing cost or avoiding it is good but might not be where savings or investments should be made.

How do you know if you are on a good path in IT and ensuring you are delivering value to business and your IT organization? Make sure you have well defined objectives that can link to business and, just as importantly, to the information and interaction with it across the enterprise. Remember that good management of data assets in a cost effective manner is one small component of the BI and information management issues in the enterprise.

Let me know your thoughts.

Why Business Should Be Mad as Hell at IT

4/21/2008 5:36:37 PM

The state of information adequacy across business has never been worse. The percentage of IT budgets allocated to improving decision support and business intelligence for business and the underlying information management technologies is now miniscule fraction of total spend by IT for business. Even worse, the time it takes to implement improvements is dire. The cycle time has gone beyond normal response and in many organizations can be measured in years. How is this possible? Well, IT is not spending enough time and resources on assessing the situation and has become fully out of touch with the user and functional requirements for information and process needs.

Where is the discussion on this problem? Well, it is being swept under the rug as status quo and is not acceptable. Yet, at the same time we see in the broader industry blogs and industry pundit conversation has technology supplier discussion about BI now as a commodity or that it has become pervasive. Of course this is an oxymoron if you look at the situation in business or the lack of rigor and focus in IT to support analytics and BI. Unfortunately, business has nothing close to true BI but instead has a plethora of spreadsheets, presentations, reports and thousands of emails that have little context or focused support for BI.

This is now the situation in operations, sales, HR, supply chain and finance as found in our research across thousands of organizations. From assessing business it is clear that organizations have managed through the situation and extra cycles of review are required safety nets to achieve acceptable levels of performance. With IT spending the majority of their time keeping the lights on with their data centers, networks, computers and the never ending CRM and ERP deployments, business should not expect much improvement in the short term.

The current situation should have business mad as hell and fed up. With so much of an organization’s IT budget being spent on technology, but the situation in business having gotten a whole lot worse, now what? I would recommend that business either take back control of their BI destiny or just write them off as educational experiments. Another choice is to develop a new strategy built on the demands for information and analytics that might need to completely bypass IT and outsource to a supplier that provides software as a service (SaaS) and just requires data feeds to populate their analytics and BI capabilities.

Are you fed up? Are you looking for alternatives to your current information anarchy? Let me know.

Let me know your thoughts.

HP Software Advances and Transforms

4/2/2008 12:34:37 PM

An HP Global Analyst Summit for the Technology Solutions Group (TSG) held in early April detailed the continuation of transformation led by Mark Hurd, CEO, Ann Livermore, the head of TSG, and Tom Hogan, the top HP Software executive. The motivation for change is to remain relevant in not just hardware, with servers, storage technology and related services and outsourcing aimed at helping CIOs to transform infrastructure to drive improvements in the efficiency of data centers. The question is how relevant HP Software will become in enterprises considering the growing role of enterprise software providers like IBM, Oracle, SAP and even Microsoft.

HP Software's focus and investments are oriented to virtualization, operational BI, digital content explosion, content management convergence and data center transformation. HP Software has grown from 3,500 to 9,000 people over the last two years and from $1 billion to over $2.5 billion in revenue. The change in HP Software is quite significant, as it was just three years ago a collection of technologies like HP OpenView, which has since disappeared into lower-level capabilities. More than a dozen acquisitions, including Mercury, Opsware, and the recently announced Tower Software, have since been integrated into HP Software's two divisions: Business Technology Optimization (BTO), for IT management, and Business Information Optimization (BIO), for information management and business intelligence.

HP's intention is for the BIO division to get more serious about data management. This effort is led by NeoView, which is the data warehousing technology that has gained adoption by organizations including Canon, Bon-Ton Stores, 3M, Walmart and others. NeoView is a data warehouse appliance that is designed for large-scale, high-volume data processing. HP also looks to gain a larger position in areas like event management and business process management, and it has stepped into the document and records management arena with the acquisition of Tower Software, which will strengthen HP's position on managing different types of content within the enterprise.

The challenge in understanding HP's emerging position is that it uses words like "business intelligence" when its focus is really more on data warehousing (with NeoView), and its definition of "information management" is really about document and records management. These definitions differ from the way the industry and majority of other software providers describe their products and categories, which will lead to a bit of confusion in the short term as HP positions their focus as a subset of the larger market.

Although the advancements by HP sound great, the mission of HP Software is to optimize business outcomes with business technology. For HP this starts at the infrastructure and data center level and then moves up to the management of content, data and applications. The idea is to help IT management reduce the complexity of technology and systems in the enterprise. HP is still working on articulating a strong position on helping businesses to utilize documents and data for better outcomes through tools and applications. HP has not yet fully articulated its role and whether this is business intelligence or performance management or just the usage of information in enterprise portals and search. HP is working on its strategy and evolution while trying to partner with software providers like Business Objects a SAP company, Cognos an IBM Software division, Microsoft, MicroStrategy and others to integrate across the enterprise.

As HP works to become even more relevant in enterprise software they are trying to underscore the importance of HP tools and applications while rationalizing the current dependence on partners to delivering the software for the critical last mile of value for business. To fully deliver on business outcomes and reduce cost, time and risk while i

SaaS – New Economic Pressures Increase Focus but Are You Prepared?

3/12/2008 1:13:08 PM

The economic environment has placed increased pressure on organizations to ensure they are even wiser with their IT budgets and resources in order to respond effectively to business. As organizations find methods to reduce and avoid costs, the dilemma of installing and maintaining software and applications continues to be a place for examining alternatives. These software as a service (SaaS) alternatives could be a great opportunity to deliver business value more immediately and avoid long IT cycles that may conflict with the time pressures of your organizations. But nothing comes so easily without precautions and warnings.

Now, you must realize that by having your application operate outside of your organization, your data being created or integrated is not under your supervision and in many cases, it is not even under the provider’s supervision. Therefore, it is important to ensure that the provider has complied with industry compliance standards in how they manage your data and who has access to the data in their hosting company and organization are controlled in their access to your data. This is why there is a lot of discussion and focus on SAS 70 Type I and Type II compliance as outlined by the AICPA and conducted by auditors. This can help ensure that processes and policies are defined and managed to ensure the protection of your system that you are using in a software as a service (SaaS) manner by the actual provider or their hosting partner. You should examine your potential SaaS provider certifications and who conducted them to ensure the right level of security and that it is being maintained and reviewed on an annual basis.

Now, what is additionally important is to ensure that you can access your data in the application for other business purposes that are critical for you. In many organizations the re-integration of data from an SaaS provider into a centralized data mart or business intelligence system is needed to gain a complete view of your employees, customers, sales, etc.. In fact, the access and integration of that data over the Internet needs to connect to other SaaS provider offerings that you may be using as well. Of course, conducting this is in a safe and secure manner is critical. So does your service level agreement allow you to do that? Do you own your data or do they? Many early adopters of SaaS applications have found they are not in the right position to negotiate their SLA when they did not establish the contractual guidelines properly at the beginning.

I hope you think and analyze carefully through these issues as pointed out as these and many others need to be considered as you evaluate software as a service options. You must ensure you are not just finding the fastest path to avoid IT cycles or cost savings but are prepared to manage and provide oversight to SaaS choices you make. You will need to be responsible for ensuring that your business applications and data, whether rented or owned, is being managed properly and can be leveraged effectively as part of your business.

Let me know your thoughts.

Why Bad Research Could Jeopardize Your Business

3/11/2008 2:51:17 PM

Unfortunately, the value of market research is being jeopardized as many supposed research providers are not actually research firms but just plain old capitalists and surveys for hire companies. We have found over the last three years that many magazines and associations who now operate online are doing online surveys and calling it research. Even worse and potentially more dangerous is that technology providers are spending more cycles doing their own surveys. In fact, these surveys, which provide you are usually just a set of questions to answer are nothing more than a process to quickly generate a list of contacts for the sponsor’s sales needs rather than for market research or educational purposes.

Unfortunately, in most cases, these surveys are not just bad and poorly designed, but the providers actually let anyone respond (including me). Though I appreciate getting the free incentive (usually a coffee card from Starbucks) and the report, I am not a qualified participant and should not be used in the analysis or receive an incentive. In fact, the majority of these surveys include software vendors, consultants and others who are not valid to be considered in the analysis of the topic. The issues are even worse when you have individuals who fake being valid participants just to get the incentive and while this is all part of doing research, purported surveys that have no quality processes in place will generate bad results. I know the complexity of research processes and quality as it is what we do on a daily basis. Without the required critical steps, time and investment, the research process is bound to fail miserably.

I recommend that next time you take a survey, make sure the survey is backed by a reputable research firm that is focused on the outcomes of the research for education purposes. It is easy to find this out by just going to the source provider and see if they are a research firm and determine whether they provide you information on their focus in research. Do they comply with basic privacy rules that the research industry operates under (you may not realize it, but the personal information you provide in the survey could be just passed onto the sponsored software company)?

No matter how good the incentive, the question is whether your time is being used to improve the industry or just help a software company get closer to their next transaction. By participating in surveys from organizations that are not research firms and do not leverage a research methodology and generate analysis and educational value from the research, the value of market research is being diminished. Most importantly, by actually using the output from these surveys for important business and technology decisions, your business will be impacted. The results are not usually valid or statistically significant and could be used to sway you in the wrong direction.

Let me know your thoughts.

Why Research Matters for Improving Performance

3/11/2008 2:50:43 PM

Decisions are easy but ensuring the highest confidence in gaining the best results is not so easy. I am repeatedly asked why research matters in making decisions on technology suppliers, best practices and even how research relates to issues in performance management processes and why it matters. Simple questions with a simple answer – research arms you with the trust and confidence you need to deliver results for your organization. Having research that analyzes similar situations across hundreds if not thousands of organizations can provide you with sound references for optimizing your decisions and results.

I find many organizations are looking to gain access to information about their struggles and potential solutions, but in most cases they are simply leveraging their consulting firms and their judgment from their implementations. Having fact based research instead of opinions should be the basis for making decisions in critical areas like business intelligence and performance management. Making sure the right decision is made for how your organization applies information technology for managing and improving performance should be the cornerstone from where you ensure you are on the right path.

I am of course biased since our firm does a significant amount of market research. However, the fact remains that volumes of software and services purchased are not meeting their full potential for many reasons. Poor usability and just bad planning on where and how these tools will be integrated and leveraged for business purposes are top among the list. While the use of market research has been around for decades, the usage and application of it has been declining as organizations make quick decisions under pressure without understanding the full life-cycle use of the investment and ensuring it can be used for the intended purposes. How do you know if you are ahead or behind your industry if you do not compare to an industry benchmark? How do you understand pitfalls and issues from other organizations that should not be repeated?

Of course, as many organizations get wrapped up in their own world of activities, the time and consideration for using market research can be forgotten. But if you do not make the right set of decisions as you advance your organization on an initiative over a two to three year timeframe, then what is the cost of the decision and opportunities that might not be considered with the right information. Can you afford that loss?

Let me know your thoughts.

BI Market Changes Expose Stark Reality

3/10/2008 8:10:12 AM

Now with the acquisition of Hyperion, Business Objects and Cognos been completed by Oracle, SAP and Oracle respectively, and the integration of people and products of these technology suppliers continue to move forward, now what? Where does the BI market go and what is missing in organizations today?

I hear many ask this question and even worse many in the line of business are not sure they are ever going to see true BI. Unfortunately the day to day needs of business analysts and management to access consistent business metrics, adjust plans and forecasts and understand impact to goals in a shared and secured environment continues to be non-existent in most organizations. Heck, just have a common information system with business metrics that can be used on a daily and weekly basis would be great. The reality is that BI should provide all of this and more but does it?

IT organizations have not been balanced in addressing the BI needs and performance management processes of business. I have seen a lot of activity and focus on BI filling out the technology portfolio and addressing architectural needs but little on ensuring that business can operate effectively. This focus by IT and pressure on large BI suppliers has shifted the priorities of many of larger BI suppliers as they must satisfy IT requirements.

How does business advance beyond spreadsheets and email? This should be a simple task but from our research we have found that we have barely scratched the surface when it comes to transforming organizations to enterprise BI and enabling performance management. I hope that as you examine your BI technology choices you spend ten times more time understanding the business user and usage requirements as you do looking at technology demonstrations and the features of the products. You might be surprised that you better align BI to the business needs of the business.

Let me know your thoughts.

BI Market Chaos Accelerates with SAP and Business Objects Combination

1/22/2008 10:14:28 AM

SAP announced they achieved an ownership milestone to move forward with their acquisition of Business Objects and the formation of new subsidiary of SAP focusing on business user needs like BI and Performance Management along with Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC). SAP acquisition of Business Objects has enabled SAP to accumulate significant number of customers and technologies and bring new scale to their efforts. The market demand for supporting management processes has finally become front and center importance for SAP and their future growth as it has for other large enterprise software providers IBM, Microsoft and Oracle.

SAP in their press announcement highlighted their market leader position with now accumulated market share position from acquisitions and revenue they collect from you and your business. SAP is already claiming the leadership position in the market as Oracle had recently in 2007. Does any of that matter to you?

I do not believe that a market leadership position should be based on how much software you sell and how many customers you have through growth and acquisition. It should be based on the goal of supporting the purpose for BI and Performance Management in a uniform and cost effective manner. This larger market need is faced by growing technology complexity which has been a historical complaint by organizations using SAP. The shadows of customer satisfaction and trust with SAP on these types of applications and technology will not go away quietly with newly acquired software and management in charge. This is something that they and you will need to assess as you decide which technology will strategically meet your management needs.

As previously pointed out Business Objects technology integration into SAP has significant challenges depending on the application or tool you are evaluating. Today, Crystal Reports 2008 is the best BI option for unified integration into SAP R/3 and SAP BW and one of the better options in the market. On other products from Business Objects, there will be a longer process to get integration of technologies into SAP which would give them a competitive advantage. Of course SAP offers many methods to extract data out of their applications and place into a data mart that could be used by SAP any third party technology provider. SAP also announced new packages for organizations that you need to assess the ‘gotchas’ in these offerings. Do the products in the package have multiple and overlapping administrative tools and user capabilities, do they require more consulting to make operate effectively?

What can you do about these changes? I would recommend that you really investigate how well you can leverage these packages and products to support your performance management processes. Can you enable your business users to navigate across common needs for reporting, analysis, metrics, planning, goal and target assessment without having to switch between user interfaces and context. Do they require significant IT or business analyst support at every turn of managing performance.

How much from SAP can meet your required performance management capabilities and can operate on one uniform platform. My current analysis is that Business Objects and SAP are not close to having a uniform platform for supporting BI and Performance Management together. You will need to ensure you understand these details and their products and requirements to ensure you know the level of administration and integration of technology that is required. Knowing the ongoing total cost of ownership to achieve benefits desired is not a nice to have but an imperative for your budget and necessity for your business.

I have already seen many organizations that once used Business Objects and SAP adopt alternatives due to complexity of the future of their organization and prod

Microsoft: The Road Ahead Without Bill Gates

1/11/2008 4:03:41 PM

Bill Gates’ last keynote stage presentation at Consumer Electronics Show this week provided some reflection on the advancements from Microsoft in software and technology over the last decade, as well as some perspective on the results of this innovation and dominance on the industry. His vision and leadership of Microsoft in the 90’s created what they called the digital decade and has made positive contributions to the productivity of business. But can the past of personal computers and personal productivity transition to business productivity and effectiveness?

The digital decade in business has created a widespread use of emails, spreadsheets and presentations and information overload – resulting in I refer to as the decade of business digital chaos. The personal productivity revolution has created chaos in the enterprise due to the vast amounts of unmanaged and unsecured digital documents.. Personal productivity software used for business activities and processes has sidetracked? The priority of investing in tools for centralized visibility and control to reduce the risk of potential business mistakes is important to address. Business should not be using Microsoft Office in this fashion and should take the majority of the blame but leadership and a roadmap from Microsoft could be much easier to understand.

With the departure of Bill Gates and his passion for the continued dominance of Microsoft Office as the center of business activity, the industry will see a void of leadership. The challenge for users will be to determine how you should really use from a personal productivity suite like Microsoft Office in a business environment.

Can other Microsoft executives provide clarity and leadership on what business should do with this software effectively? Time will tell, as the future of Microsoft Office will require more leadership than what we have seen. Organizations have not been convinced they need to continue the high costs of upgrades and infrastructure investments. The need to demonstrate value for business and why it is important to rationalize the digital mess should be at the center of Microsoft’s vision.

Microsoft is continuing to be pressured by other approaches such as software as a service (SaaS) or hosted solutions from Google and salesforce.com; peer software providers IBM, Oracle and SAP that are bulking up through acquisitions; or solutions from hundreds of smaller software providers that can operate from within the web browser and do not require Microsoft Office or an upgrade are continuing to challenge conventional wisdom. As business goes more mobile, innovations like Apple iPhone and Blackberry has already begun a new revolution of business productivity that Microsoft will have to really determine if they can catch up and beat with Microsoft Windows Mobile.

What you do next could impact the road ahead for Microsoft. You will have a voice in their future as your purchasing power reflects your decisions on how you clean up the digital mess and provide clarity in accessing and leveraging information. Should you bet on Microsoft at the key to resolving your dilemma or should you establish a vendor neutral footprint for your business?

Let me know your thoughts.

Happy New Year: Be Skeptical about BI Predictions and Trends

1/2/2008 2:28:28 PM

Have you ever wondered why each year in December we hear new BI predictions and trends for the following year? Should you invest your time and energy to listen and believe in them? After being in the BI market for over 20 years now, I have become more skeptical than optimistic about much of this hoopla. While these prognostications might sound appealing, you should clearly examine the sources of information. If they come from a technology vendor executive, do they result in pushing their company’s agenda? If they come from a consulting firm, is it helping to market their services? Don’t allow these predictions and trends to limit your perspective - yes, Business Intelligence has become more complex, but the opportunities for what it can do for your business are endless.

Sure, I could be creative and come up with “Ventana Research’s Top 10 BI Predictions and Trends of 2008” but I honestly do not believe it would help you. After many years of conducting BI research across thousands of organizations, and examining the IT and different line of business needs, I can assure you it is not that simple. A strong cup of caffeinated coffee and a mirror in front of your organization would be a better recommendation. Understanding your reality and accepting the fact that you might be trailing your competitors in using information from BI is a good first step.

So, instead of offering BI predictions or trends for 2008, let me provide you with some timeless facts.. The technology suppliers will continue to consolidate, there will always be new suppliers that provide a faster, better, newer and cheaper approach and there are always places you and your organization can improve dramatically by applying BI better. Most importantly: Are you able to help lead your organization forward with BI or are you willing to accept what you did last year as the best viable option for the future? With these simple observations, I hope you find this year to be the one that exceeds your expectations and that you can leverage BI to advance your opportunity to effectively manage performance.

Let me know your thoughts.

Oh Oracle – Let’s Be Honest Now

11/14/2007 2:24:47 PM

This week is Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco and it is one of the largest enterprise software conferences in the industry. But not just that their conference has taken over the city of San Francisco but that is has over 25 press releases and announcements in three days. The keynotes at the conference from Oracle and industry executives provide some good opportunity to understand the operations and direction of Oracle and also where they feel more than confident. Highlighting a lot of the hard work they have made with Oracle 11g information management platform and rationalizing of their applications. Clearly Oracle celebrating their 30th anniversary has a lot to be proud of in their rise to one of the largest software companies in the world.

Listening into one of the keynotes by Thomas Kurian, Senior Vice President, Fusion Middleware of Oracle on Tuesday where he reviewed a broad range of what is happening with their technology platform. There were many positive advancements and points in the presentation of Oracle’s Fusion middleware but one point that should not be left without comment.

On slide 30 of Thomas presentation is a competitive differentiation chart of Oracle Fusion Middleware in BI and Performance Management compared to Business Objects and Cognos on 10 dimensions of capabilities and applications. Maybe a slip on Oracle’s part but they checked off all 10 for them and gave the other vendors nothing. These include “Single, Integrated EPM System”, “Real Time Financial and Operational Planning”, “Enterprise Financial Consolidation”, and others which Oracle can not really believe this can they?

I do not believe or endorse the chart and it is clearly not factual from my perspective. In my previous points in July’s blog Oracle Boasts Leadership Position in BI & Performance Management – Should We Believe Them they tried to claim complete and integrated system. If you fully evaluate the Oracle BI Enterprise Edition Plus which is the combination of Oracle and Hyperion BI products together they still have a long way to go to make it complete and integrated. Oracle has extended this and even made more claims that are not factually true when looking at the other vendors. Maybe Oracle should leave the comparative analysis of the vendors to us who track them and can provide a more neutral and factual comparison. In fact our latest version of our 2007 Midyear BI and Performance Management Scorecard provides this type of detailed comparison where we compare vendors and at least Business Objects and Cognos opted to participate in the process.

So what does this mean for you? Well, some further marketing and sales noise from Oracle to ignore. Let’s get back to the BI and performance management business at hand and build a business case and evaluation of what you need for your organization. Then you can determine if Oracle or hundreds of other vendors are best fit for your requirements.

Let me know your thoughts

Teradata: New Tiger in Analytics and New Choices Ahead

11/12/2007 10:13:32 AM

An important milestone occurred last week with Teradata completing the spin out from its parent company, NCR. This milestone was over a year in the making and gives Teradata the ability to more independently operate as a public entity. The company also announced third-quarter revenue of $375 million, which puts it well on the way to being a $1.5 billion technology provider in 2007.

I'm sure you all know the Teradata brand and its dedicated focus on data warehousing, but the company has also been building — through acquisition, organic efforts and acquisitions — a robust set of analytics solutions that span line-of-business and vertical industries. In October, Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) won the Financial Performance Management Leadership Award from Ventana Research on the strength of its ability to meet deep, domain-specific customer requirements — a capability richly supported by Teradata.

Teradata has built its strong position on customer loyalty, dedicated solutions and a services organization that is well respected in the industry. Others, like IBM, Oracle and Microsoft, have tried to attack and diminish Teradata for more than a decade with little success. In October at the Partners conference run by the Teradata user group, there were many key announcements, including a green initiative for energy-efficient, right-sized hardware. Teradata CEO Mike Koehler and SAS CEO Dr. Jim Goodnight announced future integrations of their respective technologies. The results of this announcement will take time to determine as it will hinge future technology releases by both organizations.

Teradata has tough choices to make as the rest of the BI market is being consolidated by the likes of Microsoft, Oracle and SAP. This will place more pressure on Teradata to provide deeper BI solutions that compliment its platform. Now that the company is a public entity that has more direct control over its destiny, there are many M&A options with other global providers, like Actuate, Information Builders, MicroStrategy and many smaller technology suppliers that are all great candidates. Of course, Teradata will not be alone, as HP may also get into the BI market to reenergizing their competition with Teradata in data warehousing. IBM just announcing their planned acquisition of Cognos.

With the company's improvements in total cost of ownership over the last several years, customers are gaining significant benefits from Teradata deployments, and the ROI equation is strong for organizations using the company's solutions. In short, it's clear that Teradata is a tiger to be reckoned with and has some new choices and opportunity ahead.

Let me know your thoughts

IBM To Digest Cognos – Maybe Not So Stubborn

11/12/2007 10:04:04 AM

Today breaking news is that IBM announced a definitive agreement to acquire Cognos. Just last week I called IBM stubborn for not addressing BI seriously at its annual IBM Software Group analyst summit. Well for a good reason, IBM was avoiding the BI discussion as they have been working rigorously on the details on this announcement. This finishes the years of rumors and the fall of Business Objects, Cognos and Hyperion into the hands of large enterprise software providers. Making the announcement today is strategically an interesting time as Oracle launches its annual OpenWorld conference and highlights its progress with the acquisition of Hyperion. IBM is smart to act now or be left out of the strategically important BI and Performance Management market.

IBM plans to add Cognos to its Information Management division, which is a precarious position to place the company as this group is not well versed on the BI market, as I have previously written. Considering that it has placed brands like Tivoli, Rational, Lotus and WebSphere at the same level, IBM is spending a lot of money to place Cognos under Information Management, which is focused on middleware technology and infrastructure. There are some great synergies with Cognos BI and IBM Information Management group where they have a great place to have deeper integration but will impact Cognos current agreement with licensing competitive Informatica data integration technology.

The challenge will be for IBM to not diffuse the momentum Cognos has had with applications selling into finance and operational line-of-business areas. It has a much broader reach than IBM has had with Information Management, so it might need to rethink this structure as the battle for BI requires full attention to the details required by buyers.

IBM, who also reviewed the opportunity to acquire Business Objects, is now making its move with Cognos. SAP, which recognized the value and potential of Business Objects, says it will make its planned acquisition a subsidiary to ensure that it gets the opportunity to maximize impact in the market. As I have pointed out, this will be a rocky year for organizations as they work through the transition to new ownership over their software investments. Oracle, which made Hyperion part of its middleware technology division, is still working through the challenges in managing finance, operations and IT focused efforts in one division. All of these activities have impacted existing customers of these organizations and Cognos will be no different. This move by IBM will present challenges for Cognos customers, who are used to a certain type of service and support — support that has advanced Cognos' position in the market over the last decade. This will definitely have impact to the market in 2008.

IBM who obviously could not miss out on the software and services opportunity has made a reversal on their position about buying into the BI market. They will clearly go through a large learning curve to understand the full potential and nuisance of this technology segment. As well the applications that Cognos delivers for performance management will have some new twists for IBM who has historically refused they will get into the applications business like Infor, Oracle and SAP. The Cognos organization will now have to drive the value of their brand through a much larger organization like IBM which will have its challenges as other acquired companies will attest. My predictions for IBM is that they will in 2008 see they will need to re-organize their planned acquisition of Cognos and placement under Information Management into a separate brand or into a new unified brand that highlight

IBM Software Group Analyst Summit – Visionary, Conservative and a Little Stubborn

11/9/2007 3:07:55 PM

This year's IBM Software Group global industry analyst summit brought the traditional annual update of the company's progress this year and its direction in the year ahead. Led by the head of the Software Group, Steve Mills, the event focused on the theme of integration from business to IT and across the software reference architecture of IBM products. This whole area is clearly a continuing challenge for most IT organizations and the technology landscape is becoming more complex. Integration is part of IBM's core approach, and it capitalizes on the company's very strong portfolio of middleware and services. With dozens of product releases this year and a lot queued up for 2008, IBM is one the software companies that you have to watch.

IBM's Software Group is very profitable and it has grown consistently, thanks in large part to more than 50 technology supplier acquisitions since 2000. These acquisitions have blended into the existing IBM software brands of Lotus, Tivoli, WebSphere, Rational and Information Management, and they continue to drive new capabilities and introduce technology innovations. IBM is clearly a very large and dominant provider of application, collaboration, data management, and middleware technologies that compete with those from large providers like HP, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and plenty others. Despite heated competition from a vast array of software providers large and small, IBM is still very conservative about talking up any technological advantages it may have in the market. Touting size and stability as a strength is good, but it would round out the company's position if executives could articulate why IBM's products and approaches superior to those of other vendors in terms of capabilities and architecture.

What we industry analysts do is research the needs of IT and business and then assess what providers like IBM are doing or not doing to meet those needs. IBM presents its software portfolio and brands but it's not always the most progressive vendor in the market. IBM has a tendency to take either a very high-concept approach to markets or a technology/product-up perspective without truly addressing the pragmatic top-down CIO/IT management role and requirements for supporting line-of-business functions.

In some technology segments, such as business intelligence, IBM is quick to discount the needs of organizations. As I have pointed out from IBMs comments BI is either just desktop reporting or applications that they don't plan to address. BI wasn't even discussed at the analyst summit, which is amazing considering that its strategic importance is pretty clear. With the last year of consolidation in BI, how could you ignore it?

Data warehousing appliances, like those from Teradata, Netezza and now even HP, are diminished by IBM as toasters, and they claimed many times in 2007 that this is not an important area of focus while having a pre-packaged approach called Balanced Warehouse. Are you confused? I am and with hundreds of organizations that have spent a significant amount of time and money on appliances. I remember Larry Ellison commenting in the mid 90's that Teradata was a mere passing fad, but that is clearly not the case now is it at over 1.5b in revenue this year.

In the areas IT management, IBM is still focused on brands like Tivoli for operations and Rational for development life-cycle without having a strategic, top-down approach for providing software for overall IT management responsibilities, as found in HP's, PlanView and others.

So what does this mean for you? Well, in some of these areas, you can't consider IBM as your strategic supplier, so you have to look elsewhere or count on consulting services to help fill in product and technology gaps. IBM has a lot more potential in the industry, as even IBM executives recognize, and it now has to

Business Objects – Innovations and Looming Challenges with Future in SAP

10/26/2007 11:36:38 AM

My recent trip to the Business Objects user conference revealed many good surprises and many large questions yet to be answered. Of course I went into the conference with some large skepticism as pointed in SAP Shakes Up Market with Business Objects. The pending acquisition of Business Objects by SAP became part of the opening of the event, October 16 in Orlando, Fla. Introductory comments by founder and chairman Bernard Liautaud quickly transitioned to those of SAP CEO Henning Kagermann (by way of a videotaped message) who shared a welcome message and a commitment to the importance of acquisition. This turn of events was well in the works as my promotion of the acquisition rumor in September with Business Objects for Sale? had been in discussion since July of this year and came to a reality rapidly in October. Of course, with a road of many forks in the path likely to be ahead for customers and partners of Business Objects, the SAP video created more uncertainty than comfort. Of course SAP BI & Performance Management strategy has changed dramatically since the departure of once beloved Shai Agassi who I believe looking back was holding SAP strategy steady and avoiding acquisition chaos as I pointed out in Oracle and SAP - Fur Flying and SAP Executive Jumps or was Bumped.

For some reason the Business Objects conference had a drop in attendance from the previous year's event but the 1,800 people at the conference got a good spectrum of knowledge on what is new and innovative in BI and Performance Management from Business Objects. Not to miss the opportunity to demonstrate innovation, Liautaud orchestrated a series of demonstrations on next-generation technologies called "full-spectrum BI." Reinforcing the company's vision for BI 2.0 from last year and its focus on user, platform, network, applications and community areas, Business Objects provided context on where it sees the BI market heading. An example was offered in a demonstration on the integration of search and dynamic selection of attributes and data, and it appeared to be much easier than the current approach in BusinessObjects Enterprise. Another example demonstrated the unification of text analytics technology from the Inxight acquisition, into what is now BusinessObjects Text Analysis, to help find associations and relationships of text from a broad range of documents, email messages and content. These examples were very powerful, but they now have to be examined carefully in light of the planned acquisition. Will Business Objects continue to innovate and move quickly once it's part of SAP?

One of the big highlights of the event for me was the showing of a powerful use of the Internet and business computing. Business Objects had already announced its on-demand offerings, but last week it had an opportunity to wow the audience. The vendor demonstrated how you can bring together third-party information with enterprise data to show the full value of BI — an approach that clearly has a big future. With Crystal Reports OnDemand, Business Objects is off to a strong start in on-demand with a base of 35,000 who have tried it and about another 35,000 who have paid for the service. Expanding the options on how you can access and use BI and information, the vendor has great potential to expand into line-of-business plays that demand information immediately and that can't wait for long IT project cycles.

Pleasing the many BI managers and developers in attendance, the long-awaited release of CrystalReports 2008 was unveiled. This release brings new interactivity and scalability to the well-known reporting product. Addressing the need

SAP Shakes Up Market with Business Objects

10/9/2007 10:32:18 AM

I guess SAP acquisition of OutlookSoft and Pilot Software were not enough as they announced their intention to acquire Business Objects to bulk up in the BI and Performance Management markets. What does it mean to you who might be a customer of Business Objects or SAP? If you are in the middle of evaluating SAP or Business Objects products in analytics, BI and Performance Management products you should take heed to the rocky future. Organizations that are evaluating SAP should stop and perform a thorough review before proceeding on new or existing projects. SAP current products like SAP SEM, SAP NetWeaver BI, SAP BW and even newly acquired OutlookSoft are part of the overlap with Business Objects. Those of you that are Business Objects customers or evaluating their products should take a deep breath and evaluate the impact to your existing and planned deployments. While SAP plans to have Business Objects as a separate organization the reality is that there will be significant changes to existing products to ensure they integrate effectively with SAP.

As pointed in my recent blogs on Business Objects For Sale? and SAP Improves Outlook on Performance Management where I pointed out the changing market conditions and impact to your organization. The announcement today provides proof to many changes in strategy and plans at SAP and their desire for a larger market position. Despite their recent “tuck in” acquisitions, SAP with Business Objects will gain a large portfolio of customers, products and revenue. SAP will not get a free ride as the significant overlap of products will not be as easy to rationalize with experienced customers and those of us who know the details. In fact with SAP recent acquisition of OutlookSoft and Pilot Software are just small examples of future overlap as Business Objects had competitive products as part of their portfolio. And for Business Objects who recently acquired Cartesis who had a complete suite of consolidation, planning, budgeting and reporting applications for finance where they competed with OutlookSoft and SAP among many other vendors.

If you think that this does not impact you in either business or IT, well you are mistaken. Even if you do not own technology from Business Objects or SAP the products you do own have probably been consolidated and acquired in the last two years. Cognos, Infor, Microsoft and Oracle all have made acquisitions and are also quite ready to battle for your IT dollars in BI and Performance Management in finance and out into operational departments. All of these acquisitions increase the time required by the vendors to support tighter integration for applications and platforms.

The significant number of acquisitions demonstrates the heightened focus on the market potential and what is clearly being done in the best interest of shareholders and improving financial performance of vendors. I know that many of technology suppliers in Financial Performance Management believe that their new position will reap new market potential in 2008. Unfortunately this belief is greatly flawed as finance only looks for application replacements and upgrades when absolutely needed and not on an annual basis. I do know that finance is investing into applications and BI that can provide greater visibility and control points in operational areas like sales and operations planning, sales compensation management and workforce analytics.

Hold onto your seat as 2008 will be a year that you might not like as many of your technology suppliers in BI and Performance Management will be under “new management” and they will all be knocking on your door looking for new projects and contracts. There are still plenty of alternatives so do not feel

SAP BusinessByDesign – One Step at a Time

9/21/2007 9:41:54 AM

SAP publicly announced the new software as a service (SaaS) business application suite called SAP BusinessByDesign, filling a gap in their market offering. Marketed as the big event, SAP is adding another branded application suite to their portfolio that goes beyond the three on premise suites they already have for large, medium and small businesses. The applications suite focuses on 100 to 500 employee sized organizations and provides a new area for growth both directly and through channel partnerships. Yes there is more fanfare as the application suite is not ready for primetime yet.

Only a small number of early customers have used the application suite and SAP believes they can transform the industry but the applications are only available through invitation in US and Germany. It will become more readily available when the applications are ready for more broad use, and when reported performance issues are resolved. The suite will still need further validation and testing to see if it can work across a variety of industries and the channel partners become qualified to help organizations of this size with the offering..

SAP has taken an “all or nothing” approach to their pricing, with full suite of CRM, SCM and ERP applications priced at $149 per employee per month with minimum number of users. Though attractive if you are ready to switch your entire company, it does not reflect the reality of how organizations operate in adopting applications when they are ready to transform their people and processes to a new application. SAP believes their complete solution compared to individual and best of breed approaches along with their pricing is very attractive, but we will have to wait to see how popular it becomes.

SAP still has a lot of work to do to compete against others like Intacct, NetSuite, salesforce.com providers along with new ones like Workday. SAP is only focused on a very specific and smaller employee size segment. While SAP works through issues to get SAP BusinessByDesign complete, larger organizations are continuing to migrate to on-demand from on-premise or just completely outsource the business process due to the complexities and costs of business applications.

The real business question is why a CFO and CEO in an organization with 100 to 500 employees would want to adopt the SAP BusinessByDesign suite directly or from a channel partner. Is the business case sufficient and beyond the efficiencies will it enable you to be more effective? Beyond the suite of applications and price, does it make sense to convert your entire company to SAP? Be sure you know the answer to many of these business question before you accept their invitation. SAP is always persistent and eventually delivers on what they set out to accomplish but the short term could be a serious challenge for you as an early adopter.

Let me know your thoughts

Can Salesforce.com Make the Dream Reality?

9/19/2007 8:33:25 AM

This week, salesforce.com (NYSE:CRM) had their annual conference, Dreamforce 2007, with over 7,000 attendees and 200 partners. They highlighted the next steps in their mission to conquer the enterprise applications and platform computing market. Beginning as a software as a service provider for contact management moving to sales force automation (SFA) and then on to a CRM suite in the last 10 years, salesforce.com and their dyanamic CEO & chairman, Marc Bennioff, are at it again. They are positioned to take on the vast majority of the broader enterprise applications and platform software market. Directly competing with IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP and others, they are challenging the conventional wisdom of the on-premise approach of purchasing, installing and configuring software across large, medium and small sized organizations. In fact now they are taking on the broader platform market opportunity.

At Dreamforce, salesforce.com formally announced their platform as a service called force.com, which enables any organization to build custom applications. Validated by companies like Disney and Electronic Arts, they are demonstrating their ability to reach new potential for the rapidly growing software company. In addition, they announced Visualforce, a value-added visual development environment to enable design and deployment across any platform including multitude of browsers and devices. Taking significant leap forward, salesforce.com is clearly destined to be a different type of technology provider for your organization in 2008.

Not leaving their existing customers behind, they announced the upcoming release of “Winter 2008” which has incremental features for their marketing, sales and service application. While nothing earth shattering in these releases, salesforce.com has a very large ecosystem of partners who fill the holes in capabilities and applications need like sales compensation and incentives. The upcoming content management application dramatically improves the potential to integrate any document into their suite of applications and platform - a significant need in order to provide immediate access to information created in Microsoft Office or Adobe Acrobat. The idea or customer facing application called salesforce ideas will provide organizations a systematic approach to gain electronic feedback onproducts and services.

What does this mean for you? salesforce.com is now moving towards a larger market position as a broader platform to help in development of applications in a software as a service approach. While still maturing their CRM applications to meet larger enterprise needs, they are bringing brand name customers as validation of their new capabilities. A threat to the larger application providers like Oracle and SAP, salesforce.com is a force to be reckoned in the market. The question is whether salesforce.com can survive in the larger software market wars and not become stretched into too many software segments leaving their base, while holding their first-to- market advantage in software as a service in SFA and CRM. With SAP announcing their on-demand mid market offering and Microsoft coming forward with a subset of salesforce.com offering today there will be a new wave of technology suppliers looking for your budget dollars.

Salesforce.com has anticpated these larger technology supplier moves and plans on keeping them on the run and leveraging their mometum and partner ecosystem. With brand names like Cisco, Dell, AON, Merrill Lynch and many others in large scale deployments with salesforce.com it will be difficult for the on-premise suppliers like Oracle and SAP to get them to switch to their new offerings. Now what you buy and where you invest will determine the fate of these vendors strategies. Think carefully as your business performance and processes will depend on your decision.

Reuters was that Business Objects had hired Goldman Sachs to find a buyer of the billion dollar plus business intelligence (BI) provider. Is Business Objects, who has recently made acquisitions in financial management, data quality, search and other technologies to extend their portfolio of platform and application capabilities, ready to be consolidated? Is this report just more of the continued discussions of market consolidation in BI market and finding the best return for shareholders or just accidental leaks from normal business operations? Does HP, IBM or SAP want to get more serious about the BI market to compete against Cognos, Microsoft and Oracle? No comment of course from official channels at Business Objects, but clearly something is brewing.

It is difficult to know what Business Objects’ status is, but there is a clear understanding that the enterprise software segment called BI has great opportunity for expansion and profits. Gaining more rapid access to information to understand and manage the business is a high investment priority for organizations. Even with this growth, BI is still a small fraction of the technology spend in organizations and has yet to reach broad workforce deployments. More is possible in supplier growth and is why we see market consolidation like this one to further the channels of distribution to reach you.

Is the BI market ready for more mergers and acquisitions? Maybe, there has already been enough for most of you to deal with in the last year. For you, this may mean, you will experience the slower product release cycles and innovation which is typical of large software providers. Business Objects is looking to mitigate these risks by providing BI on Demand as announced today. The On Demand approach might have you caught in the middle of a major transformation as this new approach to BI simplifies technology adoption. The deployment approach of on-premise BI technologies continues to be consolidated forcing organizations like yours to re-evaluate the variety of approaches. Tread carefully, as clearly the rumors of Business Objects being on the market to be sold might come true and then effect your investments as they could rapidly become a branded product line of some larger enterprise software company.

Let me know your thoughts

Oracle and SAP – Can They Help HR?

9/17/2007 10:03:43 AM

The last couple of years have been difficult for HR organizations as the demand to retain and improve workforce talent is increasingly difficult. While processes for improving recruitment and workforce performance have steadily advanced, most HRMS have not. Providers such as Oracle and SAP have bundled HRMS in ERP suites and with long product release cycles have not driven innovations at the pace needed by HR organizations.

The need for these vendors to balance capability advancements with broader application suites, and platform integration requirements requests continue to be key barriers to their advancements. As HR becomes more strategic for organizations a new generation of solution providers is answering the call for new capabilities. HR organizations are now demanding integrated solutions for recruitment, performance, compensation, competency and succession

Can the incremental improvements of Oracle and SAP coupled with long and arduous upgrades to their existing deployments give their HR customers what they really need? With HR under pressure for continuous improvement of talent and workforce performance, the quick deployment of software as a service solutions are not just viable and desirable but mandatory to keep pace with business. Will Oracle and SAP step up and make HR a priority?

Let me know your thoughts

Microsoft – Can PerformancePoint Perform for You?

8/21/2007 11:19:39 AM

Microsoft is on the final leg of their journey to release their dedicated BI technology to support Performance Management. This enterprise level move has been expected for some time and with the multi-year pre-marketing of the technology there are high expectations of its potential. Will it perform?

Microsoft PerformancePoint is a platform and set of tools which include the long awaited version of Microsoft Excel Server - and many components are aimed at the BI and performance management markets. The group of products is a critical first step towards becoming an enterprise class provider, but is it a large enough first step? I’m not sure yet, but let’s take a couple of examples and see what you think.

The Microsoft global BI conference in May gave potential partners and customers a deeper insight into the product direction. There is a lot of excitement about what is possible with the technology, which offers everything from score-carding to centralized enterprise spreadsheets to broader dashboards and interactive analysis capabilities. While good, there are challenges in the required dependencies of SQL Server and Microsoft Office to make the product perform at its fully marketed capabilities. This complexity inevitably adds to the cost of ownership of the Microsoft approach to BI and performance management.

It’s not clear whether Microsoft PerformancePoint has been designed to address the simpler needs of the small to medium sized organizations, as the technology appears to be more geared to the needs of larger enterprises, which require customization and configuration. While Microsoft channel partners will appreciate the consulting required, the complexity of their platform and technologies is really no different than any other enterprise BI technology. No simpler and no more complex - Microsoft has not gained an advantage to other BI providers in this area.

Microsoft is aggressively marketing their ability to make BI pervasive. We have heard this before, but at this point the expectations are high, and I am not sure Microsoft is prepared to make BI pervasive or even be competitive.

With their broad portfolio of technologies - from mobile to collaborative - Microsoft should prepare to expand BI through mobile technologies like Microsoft Windows Mobile or collaborative technologies like Groove, which is part of the Microsoft Office family. Oddly, Microsoft has not reached the same level of capabilities or vision as other BI providers like Business Objects, Cognos, Information Builders and MicroStrategy who have already ship mobile BI capabilities and expanded into collaborative capabilities.

Upon further investigation of Microsoft’s understanding of the mobile elements of BI and millions of devices already in business today (BlackBerry, Palm, etc.), it appears they have no strategy Personally, I use a Microsoft Mobile device from Verizon, which I thought would be a great place to see Microsoft BI work, but nothing is available and my six-month old phone has memory management and form factor design issues and will probably not integrate with Microsoft PerformancePoint.

At the core of Microsoft strategy is the next step in utilizing spreadsheets in an enterprise fashion. The basic challenges of business today in managing, delivering and auditing spreadsheets, simplifying the access and interactions on information at all levels in an organization and determining where to extend BI into line of business functions is not yet full ready with Microsoft PerformancePoint. While the products provide a key first step forward, many of the technology providers in this space have advanced significantly, providing more Microsoft empowered capabilities than Microsoft themselves. Though the first release of their products are coming out later this year it will not be easy for you. Understanding the next major release and what dependencies of other infrastructure like Microsoft Offi

Oracle 11g – Universal All Over Again

8/7/2007 8:49:33 AM

Release 11g of the Oracle database, now generally available, differs from earlier releases in that it contains significant advancements pushing the leading enterprise database further ahead of the competition. But is it a database anymore?

Improvements in performance, scalability and ease of administration that any major new version should have, Oracle has expanded the capabilities in information management for items such as documents, text, files and other unstructured data, including XML, and by doing so, continues to encroach on the territory of content management systems.

In reality, though, what has caught the attention of OLAP and BI insiders is that in release 11g, Oracle completes the embedding of multidimensional access and storage capabilities from the Express technology it acquired 12 years ago. It’s an interesting bit of timing - Oracle now has to decide what to do with recently acquired Hyperion Essbase, a long-time rival of Express. This adds more OLAP to the Oracle portfolio that yet needs to be formalized. Oracle appears to look to further implant this database as part of their global BI efforts and differentiate it to the database level OLAP option.

In 11g analytical improvements in data mining and management of data warehouses provides Oracle with the potential to regain some traction taken away by data warehouse appliance vendors such as Netezza, not to mention Teradata, which NCR is spinning off as an independent company and continues to grow new business and extend their customer relationships. Oracle who has longed to decrease Teradata role in the market has still yet to significantly impact their success.

Further crowding this landscape are Oracle partners HP and Sun, which recently have decided to support alternatives to Oracle on their hardware platform. HP recently released NeoView, a next-generation appliance that it hopes will provide more robust solutions in data warehousing to compete against other options including Oracle. Sun is now marketing with Greenplum, an open source data warehouse database as an alternative to Oracle. Not to be left behind, Oracle has started its own program to work with appliance hardware providers looking to provide more integrated systems that can work with their hardware partners or even other not as well known hardware providers.

Oracle overall continues to face competition from IBM, Microsoft and SAP, who also resells or promotes Oracle database licenses over the last decade to support their enterprise applications and middleware. Oracle, for its part, has a significant opportunity to place its new database with a large number of customers pulled in through its many acquisitions over the last five years. Moving beyond applications and transactions, Oracle 11g is capable of managing very large volumes of data by incorporating capabilities from Oracle Data Guard, Oracle Total Recall and Oracle Files.

Once again, Oracle continues to push the envelope of what a database is and can deliver for transactional and analytical processing, while adding utility capabilities in areas such as information search. Oracle has positioned 11g well against its traditional database competitors; beyond that, it will have to ensure its product is not seen as too complex for specific uses in data warehousing, content management and search, and analytics. The question for most organizations will be whether you are ready to utilize all of these capabilities or if you have the resources that need to be trained how to utilize it efficiently.

Let me know your thoughts

Competency and Compensation: Building Blocks for Talent Management

8/3/2007 8:55:08 AM

As the battle intensifies to identify, attract and retain talented people, two tools haven’t received enough attention, in my view. Competency and compensation processes and technologies are part of the secret sauce, the required ingredients that your organization should examine.

On the front end – hiring and promotion – a focus on competency can help you understand the capabilities your workforce needs. By defining jobs in terms of specific competencies, you can create performance profiles. HR and hiring managers can match profiles to applicants or current employees to determine who’s right for a new position or who needs more training to succeed.

Once the right people are in place, targeted compensation policies and practices can ensure that you are paying individuals for their performance. Most HR organizations still base compensation recommendations on performance appraisals that look at job levels and impressionistic reviews rather than more methodical measures based on competency and performance. Making such a change may sound complex, but it will be worth the effort it takes to transform HR processes.

Improving the effectiveness of your workforce is essential to ensuring both continuity and productivity. If you haven’t done so already, I urge you to undertake a strategic review of this, your most valuable asset, and look for methods and tools that enable you to innovate your workforce processes.

Let me know your thoughts

Is the BI Battle Over?

8/1/2007 1:13:25 PM

There is a large technology supplier battle in the BI market. For many of you, it might result in new sales people showing up from large and small vendors pitching you on why they have better products. For others, you may see innovation in technology or delays in product releases. Many of the larger enterprise software vendors like Microsoft, Oracle and SAP might make you think they have everything you need for Business Intelligence (http://www.ventanaresearch.com/blog/commentblog.aspx?id=2341 ). Unfortunately the maturity of the BI market and these vendors technologies have yet to evolve to have any one of them be the total answer to your complete set of requirements. You will see more marketing and yet-to-be proven statements from the BI vendors - be somewhat skeptical but appreciate the focus and attention give to this critical technology segment.

If you have already made a lot of investments into a variety of BI technologies, be aware. You might be told that a particular product roadmap direction is the best one and cover all of your needs. Before you make a decision on any of these statements or vendor sales pitches on their superior position, do your due diligence. In many cases the marketing has significantly overtaken the product reality at this moment. And quite often, what their existing customers have done in their deployments is a lot more complicated than you might think.

Bottom line:
The battle for BI is much larger than the vendors who have the most sales people, number of customers or other numbers that are so large that differentiation is hard to distinguish. Focus on average number of users deployed, benefits achieved and at what costs. You will have to move beyond the vendor discussion and focus on how BI can work in the maturity of your organization and individuals within the business and management processes to ensure your investments are leveraged wisely.

Let me know your thoughts

Oracle Boasts Leadership Position in BI & Performance Management – Should We Believe Them?

7/31/2007 1:29:45 PM

Oracle has gained a lot of weight in the BI market with their recent acquisition of Hyperion, including many new customers, and large number of experienced employees. Since their acquisition of Siebel, which was the source of their current Oracle BI Enterprise Extended Edition (EE) technology, Oracle had achieved critical milestones on their product roadmap. With the completion on the acquisition and now the integration of Hyperion, Oracle now has a new challenge of integrating another large collection of BI technologies and financial management applications. The company is now aggressively pushing their new agenda with the inclusion of Hyperion products and stating their differentiation as having the first and complete integrated end to end enterprise performance management system.

I am not sure what their definition of “complete and integrated” is, but at best it is loosely coupled with different generations of BI technologies and performance management applications yet to be fully integrated with the Oracle BI EE technologies and portfolio of Oracle’s applications. Oracle has committed to technology integration, but we should understand like any acquisition that integrating technologies takes many years and releases. It’s important to also realize that Hyperion was on a multi-year integration roadmap with their BI and performance management products. For customers or potential buyers of Oracle and Hyperion BI or performance management applications, this means an investment of your time and money will be required until the products are integrated.

The complete and integrated Oracle BI and Performance Management applications and technology is a work in progress so proceed cautiously until we see more product releases that demonstrate the integration of technologies. If you look under the covers of their products today, you will see that it is not so easy to navigate across the different applications and tools. There is a significant difference in the look and feel of products that will need to be rationalized further for simpler use by you. For now, and over the couple of years, it will require consultants and infrastructure updates to make the Oracle BI and Performance Management work as an integrated and end to end system.

Oracle is focused on making BI a more integrated component of the IT infrastructure as they have demonstrated with Oracle BI EE. Now with the challenge of integrating Hyperion BI technologies including Hyperion Essbase and the financial applications like Hyperion Planning and Hyperion Financial Management, they will have to demonstrate progress over time. This will create an impact to Oracle’s ability to innovate, but they have told us they are committed to doing so. Oracle has made a large commitment to BI and Performance Management with a dedicated sales, services, product, and marketing organizations - a new move for the large acquirer of technologies. This commitment appears to be larger than their peer rivals Microsoft and SAP while on par with dedicated providers, Business Objects and Cognos.

Oracle will not get a free ride and market leadership takes time especially since the old Oracle BI and performance management over a decade did not deliver the most robust technology or applications. Building new trust is happening and Oracle will have to earn their way back into IT. Oracle appears to be on a much more solid course with the acquired employees and products from Siebel and now Hyperion and while they need to navigate over the product roadmap bumps, Oracle potentially could be a significant factor in the market.

Let me know your thoughts

Talent Management Tailored for the Midsize

7/3/2007 9:14:55 AM

Companies are investing in human capital management, as evidenced by sales growth for suppliers of talent management software like Softscape, SuccessFactors, Vurv and Workstream. These applications address recruitment, compensation, performance, incentives, competence assessment and succession planning. Vendors often offer these applications on demand over the Internet in the form of software as a service (SaaS). This model allows customers to avoid expanding their own IT infrastructure or updating their in-house systems for enterprise resource planning (ERP) or human resources management. At the same time, advances in certification of security for data are reducing the risks of applications that hold sensitive data beyond the traditional company firewall.

I find it particularly interesting that these applications are readily available for midsize organizations (with 250 to 1,000 employees), which now can have access to applications that in the past would have been affordable only for large organizations that could license and maintain the software on their own premises. For example, Workstream has reduced the cost and complexity of its product to meet the needs of midsize organizations that have fewer employees but the same performance expectations as their larger competitors. I expect we’ll see more of this from other suppliers that until now have targeted larger enterprises. As well, Halogen has long focused on midsize organizations, and Saba and Softscape also have turned to this market with new expansions to their suites of applications. When you’re competing for talent, it is important to use the right processes and systems, no matter what your size.

Let me know your thoughts

Informatics? What is This All About?

7/2/2007 10:35:33 AM

There has been much discussion over the last year of the word Informatics. This is a practice that is well-advanced and adhered to in the life sciences industry, where this focus actually applies science to information and the automated processing of it is a reflected in regular daily activities. The need for dealing with information more scientifically can be pretty obvious in many organizations working to re-establish information management strategies and processes, where there often seems to be more art than science. The science of managing information assets should be a priority for CIOs, CFOs and heads of operations in environments where the information is essential for improving processes and performance.

The convergence of computer science and management information systems should be a high priority, but frankly it has fallen behind in priority in both business and academia. I believe there needs to be significant improvement in the education available in this field, but academia has not always followed the needs of corporations. In my view, Informatics has a very significant intersection with information management; better science should be applied by CIO and IT management to improve the creation, maintenance and use of information. As information management grows in importance unquestionably there will be a lot of failures – failures that highlight the lack of process and scientific rigor in the automation of data processing to yield meaningful information. Here’s hoping you can develop more repeatable processes and structure for your information so that you can improve the value of your information assets.

Let me know your thoughts

Sales Performance Management Deserves More Attention

6/29/2007 9:59:37 AM

I’m of the opinion that understanding the role of sales personnel is critical for improving a company’s operational performance. But neither understanding nor the next step, aligning sales objectives with performance, is easy. That alignment requires effective forecasting, and in many industries the focus of sales organizations on quotas and commissions distracts them from improving sales forecasts.

From this vantage point, the answer is a step that few organizations have taken: investing sufficiently in information and systems that link sales operations to performance targets. Lagging organizations try to piece together solutions using spreadsheets and presentations, neither of which is designed to track or improve sales performance. But the product landscape is changing. Recently software providers including Callidus, Centive, Strategix, Varicent and Xactly have released products designed to improve sales processes by bringing together relevant but disparate business information. Products such as these are finding a new sponsor in finance executives, who need better visibility into and control over sales-related revenue, expense and compensation data.

I see management in Sales and Operations starting to share responsibility for sales performance management processes and systems with Finance, and I applaud it; we believe that doing so can improve the quality of sales information and metrics and executives’ confidence in them. If your company has not looked into this, it would be smart to do so. Both your sales performance and regulatory compliance could benefit.

Let me know your thoughts

Data Discovery: A Tool for Information Management

6/28/2007 11:04:56 AM

We all need to understand better how to establish high-quality, cost-effective information management strategies. As part of this effort, we need to identify methods and technologies that can automate and improve data processing.

Yes, data processing and other basic tenets of management information systems (MIS) from the 1980s are cycling back to the forefront of business and the desk of the CIO. The silos of data generated over the last decade continue to proliferate today and to challenge organizations as they look to gain a consistent view of their operations, both historical and ongoing.

How can you improve your efforts to gain a single version of the truth? Many of you probably have some collection of tools to deal with data integration, data quality, database, message queues and the like. We still need to improve many such areas to streamline the process of integrating data from across the enterprise. Of course, the task is not just moving some data from point to point any more; we have enormous volumes of data and have to perform transformations on them. This is complicated by the fact that usually the people who have domain knowledge of various data are not database developers.

To begin to address this challenge, maybe we should look again at a traditional method from the MIS days. Data discovery is one way to identify data that should be assimilated into a common definition for processing into other systems and integration with contemporary information management architectures. Data discovery is the ability to discover associations and meanings in data that can be used for processing into applications, databases and even data integration and master data management technologies.

Data discovery is important. It can help by preprocessing master data management and business intelligence data to reduce the time needed to associate data efficiently and increase the quality of the process. Part of maturing your information management efforts is to find methods and technologies that can help with tasks that are time-consuming, such as discovering relationships among data and proposing associations for mapping into a common data definition and repository. Data discovery can help eliminate a lot of labor-intensive steps, but just as importantly can be a standard workbench tool for data stewards supporting data governance and information management initiatives.

Let me know your thoughts

Your IT Portfolio Could Be Bleeding Dollars

6/27/2007 4:05:15 PM

As we consider the issue of IT budgets and the competition for funding between the tasks necessary to keep the lights on and investments for innovation and improvement, we start to appreciate the bind CIOs and IT managers find themselves in. The sheer mass of technology required to keep organizations operating has grown significantly in the last decade, and so have the maintenance demands to keep everything running. As CIOs and IT management come under pressure to invest in the future, they’re finding they need an even more thorough knowledge of their own IT portfolios, what they can do, where they fall short and their worth to the company. Yet I find that many IT managers do not have enough information – about what technologies they actually have, how well they are performing and how much they cost – to make wise decisions about budget allocations. What is sad about this situation is that applications like that from HP and PlanView have been readily available for many years.

We all hear about the vendor consolidation that is ongoing in enterprise IT. It’s important to realize that the acquiring companies are seeking not only customers but the stream of maintenance dollars you pay to keep these applications operating. If your organization is one of those customers, you will likely conclude that you need to take care of your company’s interests by putting pressure on your suppliers to ensure not only that you get the most value from the applications but also that you are paying appropriate amounts for maintenance on current contracts. I have spoken to organizations that are spending many dollars on maintenance contracts for technology that they intended to deploy fully but never did.

What should you do in such a case? Renegotiate, obviously. But the first step is to know your IT portfolio and assets, both software and hardware, and make sure each is linked to some tangible business activity or IT operation. For any that is not, look at decommissioning it. This can go a long way to freeing up your budget for forward-looking investments.

Let me know your thoughts

Are You Ready for Location Intelligence? Google Enterprise Says It Is

6/25/2007 10:49:53 AM

Google is offering its mapping capabilities as a potential source of enterprise-class business intelligence in the area we refer to as location intelligence. Google has made its Google Maps for the Enterprise available at a low cost while providing telephone and email support. Now the challenge for Google and for you is to decide whether this offering can meet your enterprise needs. (Being a dominant player in the consumer world does not mean a tool instantaneously has value on the business side.)

As we’ve all learned, supporting your business needs is not easy. The business use of a map is not just for presentation but as a way to help you understand the activities in your business. Displaying what potentially could be hundreds of data points – customers, prospects, suppliers, warehouses, or whatever – and ensuring that the resulting map is useful to sales, call center or customer operations should be thought through. Working with information in map form can be a tedious process if it hasn’t been well designed and integrated with the real time and historical data in your enterprise.

Deploying and integrating enterprise-level information technology is not a plug-and-play undertaking, no matter how good the API. We have seen this many times before – with SQL, for example, and with XML. And providing not only the integration but the services and support required to derive real value from locational and geography-related information is not so simple. Using location and geography as critical operational metrics and integrating them with related context from internal BI and CRM systems and data repositories requires a deeper level of capabilities than what’s needed to map your house or route a trip.

The value of location intelligence is not just being able to see a custom map or a selected location, but is the incorporation of relevant locational business information from within and outside of the enterprise into business processes. If you are considering a location-ready technology or application, I’d recommend that you determine what will be needed for it to drive better performance in your business processes. Google Maps may look easy, but it is not as easy as it looks. And supporting your enterprise requires not just technology but an organization and a set of technologies ready to meet your business needs.

Let me know your thoughts

Microsoft Gets Serious about Master Data Management

6/15/2007 9:21:18 AM

Microsoft has acquired Stratature, whose master data management (MDM) technology provides tools with which to define, share and maintain reference data. Stratature has sold its product, called +EDM, to customer organizations that are trying to manage analytic master data related to finance, products and customers. Microsoft has lacked a strong technological approach to managing master data and has been under pressure from competitors and customers to supply MDM as part of information management initiatives. I outlined this in an earlier blog posting (Microsoft Missing MDM in February, http://www.ventanaresearch.com/blog/commentblog.aspx?id=2026). Microsoft previously had only produced white papers that described the problem or explained how to use Microsoft SQL Server to address it; now it can offer a technology to address it.

Our research on information management shows that MDM is essential to improve the consistency of data and eliminate errors. Even Microsoft, which has been slow to recognize that information management is a priority for CIOs and IT management, now has decided that MDM is a critical link in getting its own BI and performance management products to interoperate. This acquisition shows that Microsoft finally has recognized that its SQL Server database is not a Swiss army knife that can be used for all data-related requirements, and certainly is not well-suited for those that require involvement by business users. Reasonably enough, it plans to integrate Stratature with the Microsoft Office division, which focuses on the productivity of knowledge workers.

This acquisition didn’t surprise me. IBM, Oracle and SAP already have defined their MDM strategies and completed their first customer deployments. In addition, there are a number of standalone MDM providers in the market, among them Initiate Systems, Kalido and Siperian. Microsoft needs to catch up. The challenge it faces will be to rebrand the Stratature product as soon as possible. It will need to position it as a key capability across Microsoft’s BI and performance management products. I don’t think this will be too difficult, since Stratature as an independent product supported SQL Server and that company has experience with MDM for finance and operational line of business departments.

Of interest, and something to watch, given who Microsoft is, is how effective it is in developing a roadmap for supporting heterogeneous environments. After all, organizations deploy MDM to define and manage master data across the entire range of information technologies, not just those from one company. Microsoft will need to release the product under its brand, which I estimate will happen early next year.

What else is Microsoft missing? Well, next on the list is data quality, which also needs to be addressed to enable it to compete to satisfy enterprise requirements.

All in all, this is an important acquisition for Microsoft, and over the next 12 months we will see whether it can deliver on the promise of MDM for the whole enterprise.

Let me know your thoughts

When Blogging Goes Bad

5/31/2007 5:22:27 PM

Blogging has become a key tool for communicating personal opinions, for collaboration and for debate on any topic over the Internet. Of course, most people expect that if you blog, you should not only give your own opinion but also receive unfiltered feedback, too. Sadly, not everyone realizes blogging is a two-way interchange. A recent bad example of this was a blog that made over-the-top allegations about our research and objectivity. Of course, anyone is free to comment on our research, in any form, and we are always open to discuss it. Unfortunately, the points in this posting were not based on facts or even the text of the article the blogger criticized. This makes me wonder if the blogger is driven by other issues. Read it for yourself: http://andyonenterprisesoftware.com/2007/05/how-do-i-love-thee-let-me-count-the-ways/.

Naturally, I responded to this attack. But it appears that this blog or its review process does not allow immediate posting of feedback. Or perhaps it has a filtering process that suppresses negative feedback or corrections. In any event, five days later, I’m still waiting to see my response there as I post this. Filtering blogs is a well-known practice, and there are some good reasons for it – preventing the posting of libelous or inflammatory statements directed at religious or ethnic minorities, for example. But it also can be used, as it appears in this case, to withhold comments that correct factual errors in the blog’s content or challenge the opinions of those who run it. This type of filtering makes blogging a one-way rant rather than a conversation. More importantly, it inhibits true collaboration and the give-and-take that is one of the Internet’s best attributes.

It is a fact of life on the Net that some blogs are meant only to grab attention for a blogger who may have no other outlet, not to discuss issues of the day. That is the case here, and I had to respond to an unwarranted, outrageous attack on the character of my company and the analyst who wrote the article. Below is my response to this blog entry, for those who want to read it in case it is never posted on that site.

Dear Andy:
It is unfortunate when individuals like you do not read research notes and portray the proper context. Maybe you should read again. And if you do, you would find you our research and primary research on MDM and the words in our research note to be contextual, factual and accurate. Our firm supports both users and vendors in our business model and provides education on how enabling information technology can support business and IT requirements in areas like Master Data Management and Information Management. In fact we have helped many organizations help utilize your previous employer Kalido’s DW and MDM products, as you very well know.

Dave Stoddard’s pieces do not “gush” on Informatica and do not equate data integration, data quality to Master Data Management. To quote from Dave’s research note, “Informatica’s products now provide a strong platform to support master data management (MDM).” Yes, integration and quality of data are required for MDM, and Informatica plays a role in that.

If you actually read our primary research that we have conducted over thousands of companies, you will find the real facts on MDM. It is that MDM is not one application but a framework of information technologies that support the process of master data management that supports data governance processes.

Your points and comments are quite inaccurate and you are someone who has a lot more to add to the industry than banter on research perspectives that are founded on fact and research. Our work is not based on one vendor or another but on facts that information technology from multiple vendors including Informatica can support MDM and Informa

Do BI Vendors Want SOA Now?

5/30/2007 8:23:24 AM

It was interesting to see at the IBM Impact 2007 event on service-oriented architecture (SOA) that the only business intelligence (BI) vendor exhibiting to demonstrate interfaces to IBM’s SOA technology was Actuate. We know that other BI vendors also have begun evolve their platforms to support Web services and XML, along with some other advancements in the service-oriented direction. But few have been motivated to go beyond the fundamentals; the BI market seems a little insulated from the SOA and enterprise architecture transformations.

Ventana Research completed a major study on SOA and BI last fall (http://www.ventanaresearch.com/BISOA/bisoa.aspx?id=1757), and we found organizations service-enabling their BI technology stack, but most are not yet fully engaged in this paradigm. To sell new deployments to business users, the BI industry has to make it simpler to access and analyze data, to collaborate and to make business decisions. BI is more direct for business analysis and has less challenges for the architectural support for SOA and will be probably be late in undergoing the transformation to SOA.

Is this good? I am not sure, but as long as customers don’t make it a major requirement, the vendors seem to be thinking, why rock the boat? BI has a strong appeal to both business and IT people, and while architecture is important for large deployments and reuse of interfaces and application components, it is not as crucial as it will be once BI is more pervasive in the enterprise. For now, if you want more SOA in BI, you will have to ask for it. And if you want interoperability of SOA across vendors, you will have to ask very loudly for that.

Let me know your thoughts

Business Impact from SOA? Yes, SOA.

5/29/2007 8:05:11 AM

In an article two years ago (http://www.intelligententerprise.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=57701456), I wrote that service-oriented architecture (SOA) was technobabble, not strategic technology. In 2006 I noted that SOA was moving beyond chatter. Well, in later May IBM hosted Impact 2007 – an SOA event where people finally talked about it not only from an IT perspective but as real customers who have used SOA to deliver business value to their organizations. That’s good progress. Also CIO Magazine recently did a survey that found that CIOs who have embraced SOA earn higher compensation and have larger budgets as a percent of company revenue than those who do not support it.

So something is finally happening. We are starting to see software utilizing SOA technology and architectural principles. And the first wave of early adopter organizations is demonstrating their promise and potential. Are you ready for it?

Just about every vendor claims to have an SOA “solution,” but many organizations still are not sure what to do with it. The rationale for moving to SOA is obvious – to connect business more nimbly with its processes, information and people. But getting there from many established IT environments isn’t easy. I have seen many organizations struggle to adapt their IT planning to a service orientation. A decade of developing GUI-based applications for the Web, along with buying and deploying application suites for enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM), have left little room for reuse and the design principles of SOA.

No one has the budget to SOA-enable everything, but evolutionary steps can gradually modularize your systems for more streamlined IT and business efficiency. Keep in my mind, however, that in the short term some of your existing information technologies will not interoperate in an SOA environment. About 60 to 70 percent of IT budgets are spent on labor, so companies we must find methods for improvement. SOA can build repeatable processes and reuse of developed interfaces and components of applications to help escalate new applications or changes.

SOA has come a long way in two years, from technobabble to business-based discussion about refocusing existing IT investments and providing systems and applications that can accelerate the efficiency of your business processes. The question is whether SOA software from IBM, Oracle, SAP and other providers can really work together without significant integration and interfacing – more systems complexity when organizations would like less. I will be keeping an eye out for examples of this really happening.

Let me know your thoughts

Taking the FUD out of Open Source BI

5/23/2007 4:19:22 PM

There seems to be some FUD - fear, uncertainty and doubt – being circulated about open source business intelligence (BI) and its legitimate place in large and midsize companies where developers want to embed BI within their applications in order to reach more users at a much lower cost than for traditional deployments. I have found that many organizations do not understand that open source BI is more than people uploading their contributions to commonly shared code; in fact, it comes from suppliers that provide enterprise-level support and services directly and through partners. Like other software vendors, these seek to deliver software that can meet your specific needs. The idea of “free” software is attractive, of course, but the reality here, as elsewhere in business life, is that nothing is free. The practical value of open source software is that the community-driven model allows release of new capabilities in a much faster cycle than traditional BI, whose vendors often take years between releases.

Companies such as Actuate, JasperSoft and Pentaho, as well as the Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools (BIRT) project, are making significant advances, and early adopters are utilizing open source BI for important projects. While especially strong at supporting developers, the newer releases from these suppliers are providing capabilities directly for end users for ad-hoc reporting, analysis and publishing of data, just as established enterprise BI vendors do. If you think you are not ready to examine open source BI, please reconsider; I think you will be impressed at the approach, capabilities and benefits it offers today. Don’t let your thinking be influenced by the biases of others. Picking the right information technology for BI is your organization’s choice. Open source BI could be a viable option.

Let me know your thoughts

BI Is Not Performance Management

5/22/2007 7:26:23 AM

There is some industry banter <Industry Debate on BI and Performance Management> in the blogosphere on the question of whether business intelligence (BI) is the same as performance management. Even many of the vendors confuse the terms as the same thing, hoping to grab your attention and potentially increase new business. In some case just the approach suggested – BI is for IT and performance management for Finance – is not accurate either.

In fact, bottom-line, all of this is nonsense. They are not the same, and the difference should matter to you.

Business intelligence is both a business concept and an information technology that facilitates the transformation of data into meaningful information through an iterative process, with the purpose of serving business objectives. This process provides more effective access to actionable information. BI includes traditional reporting and analysis as well as newer capabilities such as providing access to information through portal and search technologies.

Performance management, on the other hand, is a discipline and process for managing a business; it links people, processes, information and technology as a bridge between business units and IT support. Its goal is to improve results – that is, performance. While BI can enable and support performance management, other applications, tools and technologies also support it. Ventana Research conceptualizes the performance management process in three steps – align, optimize and understand – that set the business context and capabilities to manage and improve performance. In this context, you should set goals, plans for how to achieve them and metrics that can track and compare your historical, present and potential future performance based on your current path.

I have seen BI used for a broad variety of purposes beyond managing performance, such as providing self-service access to information. And while IT groups definitely are focused on BI, they are beginning to understand the broader business context that is required to enable performance management. My point is that it does no good to confuse two distinct but potentially complementary strategic tools. Separately, and more importantly together, BI and performance management are important for every organization and provide greater benefit when they are more tightly linked.

Let me know your thoughts

Mobile BI Is Ready. Are You?

5/18/2007 8:33:11 AM

The 2007 Cognos Forum, the annual user conference in Orlando, offered me an opportunity to see what‘s new in BI. One particular development that caught my eye is BI for mobile phones. Cognos showed some sophisticated yet simple capabilities for the RIM BlackBerry device, allowing it not only to access information but to interact with it productively. Cognos 8 Go Mobile provides a significant step forward; individuals can see and act on information from wherever they are. And they have access to more than static reports or charts in the form of live, interactive information that is easily deployed from Cognos 8 BI platform. This might seem easy, but re-sizing and making a dashboard and report useful in a BlackBerry is not a simple task.

Mobile BI has been developing for 10 years, but only now is there a solid business case to be made that investment in it can improve the efficiency and effectiveness of a mobile workforce. I believe Cognos made the right choice of BlackBerry as the first device to support; large organizations have not yet adopted the Microsoft Windows Mobile platform in significant numbers, and performance, stability and administration challenges in Windows Mobile 5 leave it not yet ready for BI. Believe me, I know; I have one of these devices. Cognos is pushing the potential of BI well beyond the desktop, to wherever people operate their business and whenever they want it.

Are you mobilizing your BI deployment? Tell me about it! And if you’ve decided not to right now, please let me know why.

Let me know your thoughts

SAP Improves Outlook on Financial Performance Management

5/17/2007 8:48:21 AM

Another day, another headline. SAP has decided that it needs to retool its financial performance management offering. Why? The reason is the business software giant’s announced acquisition of OutlookSoft, which I predicted when Cartesis, the other possible buyer, was taken out of play by itself being acquired by Business Objects. SAP has tried before to update its applications, but this time may be different. OutlookSoft comes with a strong Microsoft-based technology approach and capabilities for budgeting, planning, consolidation, reporting and analysis, all designed for finance departments. If it can harness these, SAP has the potential to be a significant player for financial performance management. In fact, OutlookSoft has not only a good foundation of customers but also a significant head start on Microsoft, which will be releasing the first major version of its technology for performance management at the end of the year.

The historical challenge for SAP has been to offer a first-class performance management platform that its customers can implement and use without having to make significant changes to the existing releases of their applications. With OutlookSoft, it may now be able to craft a finance offering that will get it onto organizations’ short lists more often. But first SAP will have to make some tough decisions about its product roadmap. SAP BW has been a foundation component for the Strategic Enterprise Management (SEM) initiative, which overlaps substantially with OutlookSoft’s offerings. Whichever apps it chooses to retain and develop further will need to be tweaked to integrate more directly into SAP’s R/3 and Financials applications to meet customer expectations for a technology product from SAP.

Then there’s the challenge of integrating into this next-generation performance management offering SAP Analytics and SAP BI, which are also on a different technology infrastructure than SAP SEM, as well as providing an integrated technology stack that will operate across Finance, Operations and IT. And there’s the need to educate its services units and partners to meet a new cycle of demand for implementation and deployment. Nonetheless, despite the challenges the company faces, organizations using SAP ultimately are likely to find themselves with a much better solution set for financial performance management. With the recent acquisition of Pilot Software, SAP is rapidly catching up to compete effectively against Business Objects, Cognos, Infor and Oracle for the attention of large enterprise CFOs.

Let me know your thoughts

The Promise of Workday

5/11/2007 9:51:42 AM
We have all heard promises that new business application suites will provide a better way to do the same activities faster. Sometimes this is true, but too often it is just a ploy to get 30 minutes of your time for a sales pitch. It remains to be seen which is the case with David Duffield’s newest company, Workday.
Duffield established PeopleSoft as a people-driven company and built a culture and focus on HR that integrated all of an organization’s HR activities into one system. Then the human resources management system (HRMS) market rolled into the enterprise resource planning (ERP) market, and PeopleSoft was rolled up into mega-supplier Oracle, which competes with SAP in the large-enterprise market.

Today Duffield, working with a number of smart and talented individuals, is building Workday on the promise of a better way to work for HR. Is this value proposition significant enough to deep-six your current investments in favor of Workday’s on-demand service? Although many providers of talent management software (that is, the next generation of the HRMS) already have large customer bases, Workday believes there is room for one more. The company also plans to offer customer relationship management (CRM) and financial applications.
So far I have not talked directly to anyone there, but from what I have heard and read, it is not clear to me that Workday is anything more than another provider in the already crowded talent management market. Yes, Workday offers an on-demand, and thus less intrusive, software model, but so do plenty of others. We will have to see if it can convince users to spend their HRMS – and CRM and Finance – dollars with the descendents of PeopleSoft. Given the other options already out there, customers should clearly define their needs and make sure that Workday addresses those needs.

Let me know your thoughts

New Definition for CDI: Customers Don’t Interface

5/10/2007 9:40:32 AM

What is commonly known as customer data integration (CDI), which allows business users access to integrated customer data across disparate systems, has had a positive impact on businesses in streamlining customer-centric processes since it first appeared about five years ago. Of course, proper management of customer data is not a new imperative for IT and business, but it continues to elude organizations that have not figured out how to apply horizontal information technologies for purposes such as data integration and data quality. The need to provide consistent customer data across lines of business and applications is only one piece of the equation; the analysis and decision support that CDI can provide are just as important. As you and we have found, customers don’t interface well with systems and processes, and so CDI was on the right track. But of late it has been evolving beyond its core focus.

Meanwhile, the universe of large CDI technology suppliers is shrinking. Many have been acquired by major corporations such as IBM. Still, smaller ones are finding the market ripe with opportunity; according to our research, customer data integration and management ranks as the most critical data management issue today for businesses and the IT groups that support them. Unfortunately, I have noticed that just as the market is maturing, many of the remaining independent CDI vendors are losing their focus and migrating their products to support broader technology sets such as master data management (MDM). If this represented a broadening of focus without dilution, it would not necessarily be a bad thing. But CDI suppliers have yet to address what I view as one of the most important needs of their customers today: to integrate their own customer data into call centers and finance operations. As CDI vendors grow themselves into data-focused software companies, they are evolving beyond their roots. No company prospers by ignoring customer needs. They ought to think twice before they lose the base that made them.

Let me know your thoughts