How do I get this intelligence called "BI"?

When somebody says, "Well, you know ERP but you need to know Business Intelligence", doesn't this sound being told "you are still a dumb person"? Whatever it means!

Let's start with, who is making us more intelligent? The best place I found was the report published by Gartener. I have following Gartner since 1995, when we took the decision to buy SAP software for CyberTech. One of the best business decisions of my career. Gartner had predicted the success of ERP packaged solutions and specially SAP's leadership position. Everything predicted has turned out to be very accurate.

Now Gartner has given their predictions of which vendors will succeed, which technologies will rise and fall. I am giving below, my observations. If you would like to read the full report, then send me a message. I don't know if I am allowed to share it with you, but probably we will be able to figure out a way.

1) Rise and Fall of SAP BW: SAP Business Warehouse was never very easy to use (like every other SAP product!) I had my share of pain at THQ BW project. Generally you start a BW project with a pilot and then initial implementation and then again modify and re-implement and again and again until after 3/4 years you get your users to give up asking any more changes. The you propose SEM will solve all your problems. When SEM does not solve all problems you keep hoping SAP will do something. And SAP gave new hopes in the form of Business Objects. SAP Customers are already disgusted by SAP's demand for increase in annual maintenance fee from 16% to 23% every year. On top of that increase, now SAP is asking all customers to dump their investment in SAP BW and buy Business Objects licenses and consulting. If you are one of these customers, then please let me know, how you are dealing with this.

2) Mergers and Acquisitions: We are now realizing that for our careers we need to add BI to our ERP but the ERP vendors had realized that BI is a way to go forward to survive in this market 2 years ago. Small independent BI vendors were gobbled by big ERP vendors. The leaders Business Objects was acquired by SAP, Hyperion by Oracle, Cognos by IBM. There are other BI vendors waiting to get bought out. QlikView is one of them, but we will talk more a little later.

3) In-Memory Analytics: This is a new technology for BI solutions. (whitepapers.technologyevaluation.com/.../In-memory-Analytics-Leveraging-Emerging-Technologies-for-Business-Intelligence.pdf) The main driver for this new technology is the introduction of 64 bit PCs and Operating Systems (Windows 7 and Vista) in the market. Now you can have RAM in excess of 4GB and practically, bring the entire R/3 or ECC6 database into RAM for generating reports. We had to spend all our energy to convert those normalized RDBMS databases from ERP to datawarehouse tables just to make it fast to extract reports. Now if we can bring the entire database in memory the report extraction even from the same ERP tables will not be too time consuming. All BI vendors recognize potential of this new technology. Microsoft came out with PowerPivot an add on to the world's most popular BI tool, the Excel! It also integrates with Sharepoint, making it a corporate level 'in-memory' BI tool. Business Object has Xcelsious. Even, SAP's BW on it's death bed is providing an in-memory add-on specially for large planning scenarios!

4) BI comes to SME: BI used to be an expensive complex project and usually considered necessary only for very large enterprises. But now, it appears that BI will be popular with SMEs as well.

Finally, like me there are many others who blog and offer advice for free. Check out this blog about status of BI technology and Gartner's report. http://www.dbms2.com/2009/01/22/gartners-2009-magic-quadrant-for-business-intelligence/

Ok. So today, I started blogging about this Gartener report and could never get to the main topic, "How do I get this intelligence called BI ?"

Let's do it next time.