MicroStrategy charts its own course amidst BI consolidation
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At a time of dramatic consolidation in the enterprise BI (business intelligence) market, MicroStrategy sees great opportunities as an independent vendor, the company&#39;s chairman, president and CEO Michael Saylor said Wednesday.Unlike competitors that become part of larger IT vendors, MicroStrategy retains the freedom and flexibility to support a broad variety of third-party products without having to weigh the competitive considerations of a parent company, Saylor said.&quot;Our view is to be Switzerland in this business and to make sure we protect your investment when we give you the ability to tap into lots of different vendors and technology architectures to achieve your goal,&quot; Saylor said during a keynote speech at the company&#39;s MicroStrategy World 2008 event in Miami.For example, it&#39;s natural for Business Objects to prioritize making its products work better with the applications of its&#160;new parent company SAP&#160;-- a $6.7 billion deal -- while Cognos will do likewise once its $5 billion&#160;acquisition by IBM&#160;is completed, he said. The same story will play out with Hyperion, recently&#160;acquired by Oracle&#160;for $3.3 billion.Even as Saylor was giving his speech, it appeared that the enterprise software market would be further consolidated, with Wednesday morning news announcements that&#160;BEA has agreed to be acquired by Oracle&#160;for $8.5 billion, and that&#160;Sun Microsystems would buy MySQL&#160;for $1 billion.By contrast, MicroStrategy can continue to chart its own course for supporting a wide variety of complementary, third-party products, such as Web browsers, operating systems, processors, databases and application servers, based on the needs of its customers and on market dynamics, Saylor said.&quot;The market needs a vendor that provides the flexibility we can provide,&quot; Saylor said.Another benefit from the latest round of consolidation is that it lowers the noise in a market that 12 years ago was very crowded with over 60 BI vendors competing for attention. This makes it easier for MicroStrategy, founded in 1989, to get its message out to potential customers.This year, MicroStrategy will focus on a number of technology and business priorities, including strengthening its BI products so that they can effectively analyze even larger data sets -- whether they be in data warehouses, data marts or transactional databases -- resolve queries faster, generate higher volumes of more interactive and sophisticated reports and support increasing numbers of users, he said.MicroStrategy will also continue to improve the performance for global and decentralized deployments of its systems, while striving to continually simplify and enhance its front-end software.The vendor will also improve its software&#39;s support for mobile devices, and make &quot;profound investments&quot; in global services, in order to beef up its partner roster of qualified MicroStrategy consultants and practitioners worldwide, he said. MicroStrategy also plans to increase the amount of end-user training and education it offers globally.While those are some of the priorities for 2008, MicroStrategy has drafted long-term goals, looking out 10 year and 20 years, which it plans to continue pursuing as an independent company, he said. &quot;We just keep plugging away, like the Little Engine that Could,&quot; Saylor said.
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The fragmented  software business is growing up.
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Data hubs â also called data repositories or master data records â are the next evolutionary step in solving the problem of data integration.
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NOVEMBER 15, 2004 (SNW ONLINE) - Since the late 1990s, leading data storage technology vendors have adopted a myopic and largely self-serving approach for addressing the two central challenges of enterprise storage: resource provisioning and data
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Oracle introduced a new BI platform yesterday, Business Intelligence 10g that rolls up into one solution all of their BI tools. However, more interesting than the nitty-gritty details of what is included is the back story taking place at the same time.
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Business Objects, an SAP company, unveiled today the next iteration of its business intelligence platform, XI 3.0.Bigger and in some ways better than previous versions, it includes so many features that it may be a bit daunting to some users.Leveraging Business Objects' acquisition of InXight Software in May 2007, XI 3.0 ties together structured information with unstructured information."Now you can read through e-mails, Web pages, and documents to understand text and extract sentiment from text," said Franz Aman, vice president for business intelligence platform, product marketing at Business Objects.Josh Greenbaum, principal at Enterprise Applications Consulting, called the ability to include unstructured data a significant improvement in the platform. "It is an acknowledgement that data comes from all kinds of applications and all kinds of formats," he said.The technology parses and organizes unstructured data so that users can apply more traditional, i.e. more statistically-oriented, methods to the data.Greenbaum said that although it is a "somewhat artificial" structure, it does lend itself to data analysis, and he called that an enormous improvement for businesses that have grown so much more complex over the years. "ERP used to be about one activity, closing the books every quarter," he saidTraceability is another key feature in XI 3.0. The technology can trace back the so-called lineage of data in order to give users better insight into how the data was created, what transformation it might have gone through, and whether or not is was merged with another data set.While knowing the lineage of data is a must-have for regulatory and compliance, it is also essential to good business, said Greenbaum, noting that it is a vast improvement over the old days when executives sat around arguing over the data in a single cell in a spreadsheet.The lineage capability is only available to those who buy the optional Business Objects Data Services that combine Data Integrator and Data Quality components.Another significant improvement in the platform is a technology dubbed Polestar that gives non-technical users the ability to do complex searches and to make natural language queries. "You don't have to be a special user with SQL knowledge to find information," said Aman.??However, Greenbaum said that while XI does a good job in elevating the accessibility and comprehensiveness of BI it is also a "bit of a Swiss Army knife." "What haven't they put into this product?" he wondered.Nevertheless, it should also replace all the departmental one-off solutions that are typically floating around a company, according to Greenbaum.While XI 3.0 was in development long before Business Objects was acquired by SAP in January 2007, there are some unique linkages between XI 3.0 and SAP applications, said Aman. For example, XI is more tightly intertwined with the SAP Business Warehouse and offers faster performance when users tap into data that comes from R3 or the Warehouse than if the data was from a non-SAP source.Also, XI can tap into SAP's use of metadata so that if a user in North America searches for Total Revenue, and a user in France is looking for the same information, despite the fact that the French use a phrase other than Total Revenue, both will get back the same information because of the metadata layer.Business Objects 3.0 will be available later in the first quarter. Later in the year, it will also be available as a SaaS offering.
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A Business Intelligence Competency Center (BICC) is a permanent formal organizational structure that exists to advance and promote the effective use of business intelligence in support of the organization's business strategy. This white paper explores the value that an organization can receive from a BICC. You will learn about organizational implications, how to fund such an effort, and how SAS can help ensure a successful BI strategy. The paper also includes a brief case study.
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With consolidation at a fever pitch in the enterprise BI (business intelligence) market, it would be understandable if MicroStrategy customers felt nervous, given that the vendor remains as one of the market&#39;s few independents.After all,&#160;Business Objects now has the support of new parent company SAP, thanks to a $6.7 billion acquisition, while&#160;Hyperion is now part of Oracle, which spent $3.3 billion to buy it. Meanwhile,&#160;IBM is expected to soon finalize its $5 billion purchase of Cognos.Yet, MicroStrategy customers interviewed at the company&#39;s MicroStrategy World 2008 conference in Miami expressed confidence in the vendor and said its independent status gives it certain advantages over Business Objects, SAP, and Cognos.In particular, several customers said they like that MicroStrategy will remain free of pressures stemming from having to prioritize supporting complementary products from a parent company and, conversely, diluting support for similar products from competing companies.Lindsey Aubuchon, MIS director at W.E. Aubuchon, which operates hardware stores in New England, said her company likes to have flexibility to mix and match IT products as it sees fit, creating multi-vendor environments to achieve its desired implementations. &quot;My company likes to have openness to choose what they want,&quot; said Aubuchon, whose employer has been a MicroStrategy customer for about seven years.Consequently, she nodded in agreement when MicroStrategy&#39;s CEO Michael Saylor said in his keynote at the event that the vendor strives to be agnostic and neutral with respect to making its products work with complementary wares from other vendors.&quot;Our view is to be Switzerland in this business, and to make sure we protect your investment when we give you the ability to tap into lots of different vendors and technology architectures to achieve your goal,&quot; Saylor said.He predicted that Cognos, Business Objects and Hyperion will see their product roadmaps re-routed based on competitive considerations handed down by their new parent companies.As an independent, MicroStrategy will continue to support a wide variety of complementary, third-party products, such as Web browsers, operating systems, processors, databases and application servers, based on the needs of its customers and on market dynamics, Saylor said. &quot;The market needs a vendor that provides the flexibility we can provide,&quot; he said.Phillip Julian, sales operations and senior data management analyst at Inspire Pharmaceuticals in Durham, North Carolina, is all for product agnosticism and flexibility in IT vendors. The company recently acquired the MicroStrategy software to generate better, more interactive and visually appealing reports, he said. Until now, Inspire had been analyzing data with SAS Institute data-mining software and creating reports with Microsoft&#39;s Excel.&quot;We&#39;re doing it so we get into really good technology that would help us grow,&quot; Julian said. &quot;I want to move us into another generation [of reporting software] where we&#39;re looking at something that&#39;s more graphical, more visual. We need to have something that the VP of sales and the sales force can understand.&quot;Similar expectations led Robeks, a chain of fruit juice establishments, to make a hefty investment in the MicroStrategy platform, which it is in the process of implementing. With most of its presence in the U.S. West Coast, Manhattan Beach, California-based Robeks is looking to grow significantly in other parts of the U.S. and the world in the coming years, and, to support those efforts, it needs better reporting and analysis tools than the in-house ones it currently uses.&quot;Being able to analyze [sales and marketing] data more accurately will help us grow the business. We&#39;re in a very quick growth mode right now,&quot; said IS Director Pete Carvajal.As a new customer, he was interested in hearing Saylor address the recent wave of market consolidation to find out what MicroStrategy&#39;s position is. &quot;Them emphasizing that they&#39;re one of the players in the market that&#39;s not in the middle of all the turmoil of all the consolidation was good to hear and to understand what the future is,&quot; he said.&quot;It&#39;s important for them to come out and indicate the whys and whens of their business model moving forward. This is a huge investment for my company, and the last thing I want to do is spend all this time and money in an application that gets absorbed by a bigger company and maybe disappears,&quot; Carvajal said.
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InfoWorld - Business Objects has started to roll out a full suite of business intelligence (BI) software in the form of an online service, initially for customers using Salesforce.com applications.
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