What BI vendors have to offer

The BI and analytics market is dominated by a handful of large vendors, chiefly IBM, SAP and Oracle. But BI does not begin and end with these IT giants – there are dozens of other suppliers with products that many businesses find are more suited to their needs.

How does a CIO pick his way through this field? At first glance there appears to be little to differentiate between the big three, and some of the other vendors, such as Microsoft, are equally well established and have comparable products.
Gartner’s Neil Chandler says IT departments face a challenge simply to keep up with what is a fast-moving market.

“The recycle time for BI is much faster than traditional business software. There are not many standards, and a lot of new technology is emerging. You should embrace that technology and use it not for its own sake, but leverage it for business value,” he says.

The good news is that organisations need not be restricted to one vendor, as most BI platforms can be augmented with capabilities from other vendors. Indeed, a central pitch of many vendors’ marketing strategies is ease of interoperability with their competitors, or “co-opetition” as Stephen Brobst, CTO of data warehousing firm Teradata, puts it.

Chandler says there are two fundamental types of mega-vendor in the BI market. There are the platform or technology stack-centric mega-vendors, such as IBM and Microsoft, versus the business application-centric vendors such as SAP and Oracle. But he adds that the lines between these convenient definitions are now blurring quickly, as all the mega-vendors seek to become full, end-to-end providers.

“The mega-vendors are likely to become mega-solutions providers in the longer term because they will provide the hardware, and also the services relating to the software and the content,” he says.

Chandler adds that vendors are increasingly more differentiated by their appetite to innovate or acquire, and more often than not, that comes down to size. He points out that a lot of the innovation happens at the smaller providers.

“There will always be edges that smaller, more nimble vendors can exploit. A lot of the innovation happens at those vendors, and a lot of the integration happens at the bigger guys.”

If this innovation is successful, often a larger vendor will acquire the smaller company, standardise its technology and give it a commercial platform to which it would not otherwise have access.

For example, IBM added data mining to its portfolio with the acquisition of SPSS in 2009. In late 2010 it acquired Clarity Systems for its financial governance technology, a move that was mirrored a few months later by SAP when it acquired Cundus, another financial governance specialist.

While IBM has announced it expects to spend a further £12bn on acquisitions by 2015, Oracle has certainly not been quiet, most notably with the acquisition of Sun Microsystems in January 2010, together with several smaller purchases.

But are the larger vendors homogenising themselves by attempting to cover all bases? How do they go about differentiating themselves?

Paul Rodwick, vice president of product management at Oracle Business Intelligence, suggests his company’s background in software gives it a unique strength.

“With our applications background, Oracle can be a BI tool vendor, and also offer pre-built analytic solutions. We invested in a suite called Oracle BI applications. This comes with an intrinsic understanding of source systems, such as E-Business Suite and Peoplesoft, and we recently introduced adapters to bring in SAP content.”
He argues that this tool is designed for an organisation that is new to BI.

“Best practise is built in, which is useful for an organisation that is earlier on its BI journey, and may not have that expertise. Second, it can be implemented in eight to 14 weeks, whereas the classic, start-from-scratch, build-your-own database data warehousing can take a year or two before it delivers any value to the business.”

IBM highlights the ease of upgrade of its Cognos BI tool as its unique selling point.

“We provide a seamless upgrade from our previous release to Cognos 10, something other vendors still struggle to deliver,” says Harriet Fryman, business unit executive for BI product marketing at IBM Business Analytics. “We have also built collaboration right into the product to enable the decision-making process across people and teams,” she adds.

SAP claims to be the only vendor that integrates BI with enterprise information management capabilities.

“This means that metadata is integrated across both the information management layer and BI, enabling end users to see easily where the data comes from and how up to date it is. This gives the user more trust in the information,” says Richard Neale, head of business development at SAP UK.

While there are undoubtedly minor differences between the offerings from the mega-vendors, they each provide the main functions most enterprises would expect. For example, real-time analytics is currently a hot topic in BI, with end users anticipating capabilities that will enable much faster decision making. SAP calls it Hana (High-Performance Analytic Appliance), IBM calls it Ramp (Real-Time Analytics Matching Platform) and Oracle RTD (Real-Time Decisions), but the point is that theyeach offer it.

When choosing a BI vendor, the fundamental tools may be similar, but one may simply suit an organisation better than another. As Chandler explains: “The evaluation a client needs to make is which ecosystem do they want to work with? Then the decision can be driven by the technologies they need to consider.”