Business Technology Innovation

IDC's view of the BI Tools Market 2008

Was reading the recent report by IDC on the BI tools space, below are some interesting points / takeaways or excerpts from the same, The report can be accessed here:

1. Regardless of the specific BI technology, in the short term, the executive mandate for most organizations will be to do "more with less." Although we continue to see healthy demand for BI functionality from business end users, IT departments and business end users alike are being asked to curtail costs.
2. As a result, incremental, small purchases, and deployment of BI technology will dominate the market in the short term. This trend is also likely to push more organizations toward SaaS and outsourced BI and analytics solutions that have a pricing model, which enables better allocation of direct costs to current profitability.
3. IDC is beginning to see evidence of greater interest in outsourcing of advanced analytics processes.
4. Standardization and the expected eventual commoditization of core reporting, dashboard, and OLAP functionality. This core QRA (Query Reporting Analysis) technology, which still forms the bulk of the revenue for BI technology vendors, has been available for decades. Although substantial feature and functionality improvements have been
   made to this software over the years, the lack of differentiating features will continue to drive down the cost of this software.
5. The logical conclusion will be the broad availability of open source or very low-cost commercial reporting,
   dashboard, and OLAP technology with a shift in spending from licenses to support services.
6. QRA tools, there will be an intermediate-term opportunity for some vendors to differentiate their ad hoc query and multidimensional analysis tools based on features and functionality that put a premium on simplicity and performance. This may include use of in-memory deployment techniques, interactive visualization, or associative data management structures
7. The next wave of innovation in the BI market will come from the expansion of the overall business analytics solution to include functionality for supporting:
8. • Unified access to and analysis of structured data and unstructured content
   • Collaboration during the process of decision making
   • Capture of knowledge learned in the context of decision making
   • Intelligent process automation, which combines BI functionality with that of business process management
9. In 2008, Oracle reaped the benefits of its investment in Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) — the company's BI platform and its different modules for query, reporting, and analysis.
10. OBIEE has emerged as a growth driver in the overall Oracle portfolio.
11. Oracle's 2007 acquisition of Hyperion has only marginally contributed to the company's BI tools revenue.
12. Oracle is well positioned to continue to benefit from OBIEE by selling it to its existing vast applications and database customer base.
13. SAP derives all of its BI tools revenue from the QRA market segment.
14. In 2008, the company's SAP BusinessObjects portfolio benefited from the vastly enlarged sales force and was able to sell BI tools to SAP's applications customers.
15. The company (SAP) ran into some resistance from customers to its pricing structure but was able to overcome this challenge partly through improved communication about its BI tools portfolio road map.
16. Although SAP's rationalization of acquired BI tools has not been completed, the company is well positioned to fulfill the future needs of BI technology purchasers.
17. SAP is also on the forefront of redefining the functionality of a BI solution by integrating traditional QRA tools with those for content access and analysis, collaboration, and event monitoring.

Source: IDC

Tags: bi - sap - obiee - business+intelligence - QRA - oracle

Prashanth Rai

(Cross posted @ cio-reinvented)

Oracle User Productivity Kit - A step in the right direction.

A Meta Group (now part of Gartner) study done with around 400 companies’ titled "ERP Competency Multi-Client Study" shows that 76% of the ERP users are sub-standard or failing with respect to their competency in using the ERP software. **

Is this observation surprising? Not really!!!

In this age of webinars and online trainings, why do we expect ERP users to learn how to use the software through class room training? It is obvious that we need to approach ERP training and enterprise application knowledge management differently. Oracle has taken a good step in this direction called the “User Productivity Kit” (UPK) which addresses this fundamental problem from multiple angles.

What is UPK?

“It is a collaborating content development platform for Oracle Suite of enterprise application products that can quickly create customized training and support material.”

In layman’s language it is a tool which helps you build your online user help and training content with multi-language translation capability. From an end user standpoint it provides for environment specific (client) online help and training content which can be used to better understand and use the enterprise application resulting in increased productivity.

Benefits:

The obvious benefits include better usage of the application resulting in increased productivity, better ROI, online training and single source for user training management etc. It is important for us to understand what could be the indirect benefit or the need for such a tool.

• User training on demand with no additional cost. For role changes, employee turnover (especially relevant in a shared services environment) where the training cost and the lack of the same is prohibitive this provides a mechanism to record, evaluate and then help the user in performing his tasks. The 4 modes which this tool supports “See It”, “Try It”, “Know It” and “Do It” helps in achieving the same.
• Reduction in support cost. Almost 50% of the support issues could be attributed to improper understanding of the application and this tool has a direct impact on the same.
• From a compliance perspective too, we are sure that only those users who are trained, tested and approved on the application have appropriate access to the menu options

We could obviously add more…

From an implementation stand point too, it is a tool which is easy to customize and implement and takes weeks and not months to implement.What more it is not a Third party tool and comes with the blessing of Oracle themselves and is supported by them.It is obvious that UPK is a tool which answers a lot of your questions relating to end user training management and helps realize the real ROI for oracle enterprise applications?

Krishnakumar (KK)

 

Why another Blog?

One of the sources of innovation according to the book "Innovation & Entrepreneurship" by Peter Drucker is Industry & Market Structures. The essence of this source is captured very succinctly in the paragraph:

"Actually, market & industry structures are quite brittle. One small scratch and they disintegrate, often fast. When this happens, every member of the industry has to act. To continue to do business as before is almost a guarantee for disaster and might well condemn a company to extinction. At the very least the company will lose its leadership position; and once lost, such leadership is almost never regained. But a change in market or industry is also a major opportunity for innovation"

This passage is very applicable to both sides of the house in the Enterprise IT industry, the internal IT departments & the service providers or vendors. Today there aren’t scratches but thunderbolts that seem to be attacking us from all sides. We have the economic winter which is forcing cuts in budgets etc , on the other side there are new tools, technologies emerging which show phenomenal promise like enterprise2.0, SaaS, PaaS, SOA etc etc & last but not the least the growing pressure on IT to deliver results and provide greater business alignment / efficiency / innovation - IT is fundamentally changing the way industry operate / do business - Explained very well in this post by Fred.

Our effort in this blog will be to document, understand, communicate and help implement some tools, technologies, processes etc that would help all the stakeholders in the Enterprise IT segment innovate.

Let’s start with a quick understanding of the title of this blog - "Business Technology Innovation". The blog will focus on the innovations that can be leveraged at the intersection of business process and technology solutions. We believe that the line between business and technology is disappearing leading to the emergence of a new breed of knowledge worker - The Business Technology Innovator. Who has a good understanding of the business process and its objectives and is able to use the technology tools and solutions to drive innovation and achieve the required business results.

Prashanth Rai