Quick Takes for the Week of July 6

July 13, 2009

July 10: This certainly is more techie than the material this site usually covers, but worth a look for business people who want to stay in touch with – or be exposed to — the fundamentals. Aaron Alton, a Microsoft Certified IT Professional, writes at The HOBT about his preparation for the Microsoft certification exam on SQL Server 2008 in business intelligence development and maintenance. The post, which won’t mean much to most of us, is a good reminder of the complexity and demanding nature of BI technology.

July 9: Doug Lautzenheiser writes about job at the SmartData Collective. He opens with comments about software jobs in general – the news isn’t good – and then focuses on BI jobs. His forecast is that the total will be down 10 percent from January through June. Crystal Reports, he says, had 35 percent fewer job postings at Monster. The rare piece of good news is Business Objects, which saw 2 percent growth in postings. There are many numbers in the report. Leader SAS, IBM Cognos and Microsoft Reporting Services all are down, according to Lautzenheiser.

July 8, 2009: OStatic’s Sam Dean offers a commentary playing off the site’s coverage of the North Bridge Partners’ 2009 Future of Open Source Survey. Dean says that survey respondents tabbed business intelligence as an application that is “highly likely to cause disruption in the next five years.” Dean subsequently ties this to an interview he did with Forrester Research analyst Jeffrey Hammond, who pointed to Jaspersoft, Pentaho, SpagoBI and Actuate as open source BI companies that are excelling.

July 7: Information Management’s Rene Muiyser takes a look at the tug of war between users of BI platforms and IT. The key is that the role of IT departments is shifting. Muiyser said that in the past IT was clearly a support organization. Now, however, IT has “started to operate like independent companies within a company.” Related to this are efforts of IT to take over BI projects. Muiyser goes into great detail on the ramifications of the evolution of IT’s role and its impact on BI.

July 6: ebizQ’s David Linthicum discusses the growing availability of data sets that don’t belong to the organization. This mountain of data adds valuable context to the data that the company owns. Linthicum acknowledges that supplementing company-owned data has been a standard operating procedure for years. The difference is that the proliferation of independent data sources means that companies that resist reaching out in this way are at an increasingly dangerous competitive disadvantage.

–Carl Weinschenk

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Quick Takes for the Week of June 15

June 19, 2009

June 19: BI is a particularly good candidate for implementation in a software-as-a-service scenario. This InformationWeek piece by Mary Hayes Weier describes why that’s so. The piece, which largely is based on input from Host Analytics, suggests that BI operations can be segregated from those of on-premise software systems, thus avoiding tricky integration issues. PivotLink and QlikView also are mentioned in the story.

June 18: The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act–The Stimulus Package–can be a great boon for the business intelligence sector, says Dr. Ramon Barquin, the President of consulting firm Barquin International. He writers at the BeyeNETWORK that there are at least four “hooks” for BI. He says that the ARRA mandates that work be done on information systems, and that education and health information technology systems be upgraded. Requirements for general reporting systems also are spelled out in the act. Each of these mandates, Barquin argues, can be seen as an opportunity for BI platforms.

June 17: IndustryWeek has an interesting Q & A with Keith Henry, the VP of Manufacturing Global Industry Solutions for Teradata. The first question puts the size of a petabyte in perspective: It’s 1 quadrillion bytes, or 1,024 times a terabyte. Henry says that some of Teradata’s customers have 10 of these laying around. The goal is to sort through this almost unimaginable amount of data and make the salient tidbits available to decision makers on nearly a real-time basis. An example is predictive asset maintenance, which is the identification and servicing of at-risk gear before it actually breaks down. Companies that are most adept at using their data to do such things have a significant competitive advantage.

June 16: Merv Adrian, the Principal at IT Market Strategy, discusses the relationship of BI and cloud computing at CIO. The piece is based on Greenplum technology, but there is no reason to think the lessons are not more widely applicable. Adrian points out that cloud computing is giving smaller companies access to more data and increasingly potent tools, while bigger companies may be hemmed in by their legacy gear. Among his suggestions: Use commodity hardware for data analytics, employ savvy provisioning to drive server utilization and buy capacity on an as-needed basis.

June 15: Gartner released its report on business intelligence last week, and it offered a lot of good news. The influential firm said that revenues reached $8.8 billion last year, a 21.7 percent increase over 2007’s $7.2 billion. The top five vendors—SAP (23.8 percent), SAS (14.6 percent), Oracle (14.6 percent), IBM (11.3 percent) and Microsoft (7.7 percent)—accounted for more than 70 percent of the market. Gartner says that the analytics applications and performance management sector grew 24.3 percent and the BI platform area grew 20.4 percent.

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