Panorama Business Intelligence

In her Post, Hannah Smalltree summarizes some of the highlights from Gartner’s BI summit.

I read through it and found some points I thought would be interesting to comment on:

The industry continues to move beyond basic reports and metrics toward “process and strategy-driven” BI, according to the study by the Stamford, Conn.-based analyst firm. Process-driven BI is the concept of embedding pertinent reports and analyses in daily workflow, while strategy-driven BI ties data to planning and corporate performance management (CPM) initiatives. With the convergence of BI and CPM well under way, Gartner now expects BI vendors to mingle more with business-process management companies. But other technological trends could change the landscape even more. 

There is no doubt that BI is moving from a user centric set of applications to becoming much more at the center of the organization…. Think about it as the “brain” of the organization that sits in the center and manages, orchestrates, triggers and routes complex business processes.

When you come to think about it, many activities today require users to start by exploring their BI reports, find the insights in a reactive way, leave the BI system and go run a process.

In so many cases the user is actually performing routine tasks. By connecting the BI system to the process centric tools the organization can start automating routine tasks and make BI much more effective, strategic and liberating for users that deal with those routines.

Another way of thinking about the value of connecting BI with processes and workflows is that BI can all of a sudden become truly actionable.

“BI is actionable” but only at some extent as no BI tool provides the ability to take structured actions from within the BI tool…. This is an area that Panorama is actually leading the way by already shipping a solution that lets users take immediate action through a workflow process.

It found that immense infrastructure vendors such as Microsoft, Oracle and SAP have increased their focus on BI, which could trigger other big players to follow suit…

That said, the traditional BI pure plays remained the leaders in the Magic Quadrant…

It is interesting also to see the 2 opposed trends, the big platform players such as Microsoft push BI from the platform side while the big players such as BOBJ And Cognos keep leading the MQ.

I truly believe things will change, those leaders will find it very difficult to compete with their own respective platforms when solutions such as SAP ship their own platform that is optimized for their own application.

So what is the future for BI players?

I know I am biased but the rules of the game will change and the applications will become the differentiators between vendors whereas the world will end up standardizing on the big platforms from SAP, MSFT, etc.

In that sense I see Panorama on a good track, we are making a bet to innovate and move fast on existing platforms as opposed to building our own that is redundant and does not give customers what they are looking for.

In a post titled “Evolution not revolution” I wrote a few months ago you can read more about how I see the world of BI as moving towards a standardization on the application vs. the platform making a bet on the big winners on the platform side.

Would love to hear your comments