Information Builders
Analysis of Information Builders Inc. (IBI) and its business intelligence products. Related subjects include:
BI and quasi-DBMS
I’m on two overlapping posting kicks, namely “lessons from the past” and “stuff I keep saying so might as well also write down”. My recent piece on Oracle as the new IBM is an example of both themes. In this post, another example, I’d like to memorialize some points I keep making about business intelligence and other analytics. In particular:
- BI relies on strong data access capabilities. This is always true. Duh.
- Therefore, BI and other analytics vendors commonly reinvent the data management wheel. This trend ebbs and flows with technology cycles.
Similarly, BI has often been tied to data integration/ETL (Extract/Transform/Load) functionality.* But I won’t address that subject further at this time.
*In the Hadoop/Spark era, that’s even truer of other analytics than it is of BI.
My top historical examples include:
- The 1970s analytic fourth-generation languages (RAMIS, NOMAD, FOCUS, et al.) commonly combined reporting and data management.
- The best BI visualization technology of the 1980s, Executive Information Systems (EIS), was generally unsuccessful. The core reason was a lack of what we’d now call drilldown. Not coincidentally, EIS vendors — notably leader Comshare — didn’t do well at DBMS-like technology.
- Business Objects, one of the pioneers of the modern BI product category, rose in large part on the strength of its “semantic layer” technology. (If you don’t know what that is, you can imagine it as a kind of virtual data warehouse modest enough in its ambitions to actually be workable.)
- Cognos, the other pioneer of modern BI, depending on capabilities for which it needed a bundled MOLAP (Multidimensional OnLine Analytic Processing) engine.
- But Cognos later stopped needing that engine, which underscores my point about technology ebbing and flowing.
The two sides of BI
As is the case for most important categories of technology, discussions of BI can get confused. I’ve remarked in the past that there are numerous kinds of BI, and that the very origin of the term “business intelligence” can’t even be pinned down to the nearest century. But the most fundamental confusion of all is that business intelligence technology really is two different things, which in simplest terms may be categorized as user interface (UI) and platform* technology. And so:
- The UI aspect is why BI tends to be sold to business departments; the platform aspect is why it also makes sense to sell BI to IT shops attempting to establish enterprise standards.
- The UI aspect is why it makes sense to sell and market BI much as one would applications; the platform aspect is why it makes sense to sell and market BI much as one would database technology.
- The UI aspect is why vendors want to integrate BI with transaction-processing applications; the platform aspect is, I suppose, why they have so much trouble making the integration work.
- The UI aspect is why BI is judged on … well, on snazzy UIs and demos. The platform aspect is a big reason why the snazziest UI doesn’t always win.
*I wanted to say “server” or “server-side” instead of “platform”, as I dislike the latter word. But it’s too inaccurate, for example in the case of the original Cognos PowerPlay, and also in various thin-client scenarios.
Key aspects of BI platform technology can include:
- Query and data management. That’s the area I most commonly write about, for example in the cases of Platfora, QlikView, or Metamarkets. It goes back to the 1990s — notably the Business Objects semantic layer and Cognos PowerPlay MOLAP (MultiDimensional OnLine Analytic Processing) engine — and indeed before that to the report writers and fourth-generation languages of the 1970s. This overlaps somewhat with …
- … data integration and metadata management. Business Objects, Qlik, and other BI vendors have bought data integration vendors. Arguably, there was a period when Information Builders’ main business was data connectivity and integration. And sometimes the main value proposition for a BI deal is “We need some way to get at all that data and bring it together.”
- Security and access control — authentication, authorization, and all the additional As.
- Scheduling and delivery. When 10s of 1000s of desktops are being served, these aren’t entirely trivial. Ditto when dealing with occasionally-connected mobile devices.
Third-party analytics
This is one of a series of posts on business intelligence and related analytic technology subjects, keying off the 2011/2012 version of the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms. The four posts in the series cover:
- Overview comments about the 2011/2012 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms, as well as a link to the actual document.
- Business intelligence industry trends — some of Gartner’s thoughts but mainly my own.
- Company-by-company comments based on the 2011/2012 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms.
- (This post) Third-party analytics, pulling together and expanding on some points I made in the first three posts.
I’ve written a lot this weekend about various areas of business intelligence and related analytics. A recurring theme has been what we might call third-party analytics — i.e., anything other than buying analytic technology and deploying it in your own enterprise. Four main areas include:
- Business intelligence software OEMed to packaged operational application vendors.
- Business intelligence software OEMed to SaaS (Software as a Service) application vendors.
- Business intelligence software bundled into information-selling businesses.
- Stakeholder-facing analytics, which usually is just BI allowing customers (or suppliers, investors, citizens, etc.) to look into one of your databases.
| Categories: Business intelligence, Business Objects, Information Builders, Intersystems and Cache', Jaspersoft, Pentaho, Software as a Service (SaaS) | 1 Comment |
The 2011/2012 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms — company-by-company comments
This is one of a series of posts on business intelligence and related analytic technology subjects, keying off the 2011/2012 version of the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms. The four posts in the series cover:
- Overview comments about the 2011/2012 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms, as well as a link to the actual document.
- Business intelligence industry trends — some of Gartner’s thoughts but mainly my own.
- (This post) Company-by-company comments based on the 2011/2012 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms.
- Third-party analytics, pulling together and expanding on some points I made in the first three posts.
The heart of Gartner Group’s 2011/2012 Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms was the company comments. I shall expound upon some, roughly in declining order of Gartner’s “Completeness of Vision” scores, dubious though those rankings may be. Read more
Advice for some non-clients
Edit: Any further anonymous comments to this post will be deleted. Signed comments are permitted as always.
Most of what I get paid for is in some form or other consulting. (The same would be true for many other analysts.) And so I can be a bit stingy with my advice toward non-clients. But my non-clients are a distinguished and powerful group, including in their number Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, and most of the BI vendors. So here’s a bit of advice for them too.
Oracle. On the plus side, you guys have been making progress against your reputation for untruthfulness. Oh, I’ve dinged you for some past slip-ups, but on the whole they’ve been no worse than other vendors.’ But recently you pulled a doozy. The analyst reports section of your website fails to distinguish between unsponsored and sponsored work.* That is a horrible ethical stumble. Fix it fast. Then put processes in place to ensure nothing that dishonest happens again for a good long time.
*Merv Adrian’s “report” listed high on that page is actually a sponsored white paper. That Merv himself screwed up by not labeling it clearly as such in no way exonerates Oracle. Besides, I’m sure Merv won’t soon repeat the error — but for Oracle, this represents a whole pattern of behavior.
Oracle. And while I’m at it, outright dishonesty isn’t your only unnecessary credibility problem. You’re also playing too many games in analyst relations.
HP. Neoview will never succeed. Admit it to yourselves. Go buy something that can. Read more
Business intelligence notes and trends
I keep not finding the time to write as much about business intelligence as I’d like to. So I’m going to do one omnibus post here covering a lot of companies and trends, then circle back in more detail when I can. Top-level highlights include:
- Jaspersoft has a new v3.5 product release. Highlights include multi-tenancy-for-SaaS and another in-memory OLAP option. Otherwise, things sound qualitatively much as I wrote last September.
- Inforsense has a cool composite-analytical-applications story. More precisely, they said my phrase “analytics-oriented EAI” was an “exceptionally good” way to describe their focus. Inforsense’s biggest target market seems to be health care, research and clinical alike. Financial services is next in line.
- Tableau Software “gets it” a little bit more than other BI vendors about the need to decide for yourself how to define metrics. (Of course, it’s possible that other “exploration”-oriented new-style vendors are just as clued-in, but I haven’t asked in the right way.)
- Jerome Pineau’s favorable view of Gooddata and unfavorable view of Birst are in line with other input I trust. I’ve never actually spoken with the Gooddata folks, however.
- Seth Grimes suggests the qualitative differences between open-source and closed-source BI are no longer significant. He has a point, although I’d frame it more as being about the difference between the largest (but acquisition-built) BI product portfolios and the smaller (but more home-grown) ones, counting open source in the latter group.
- I’ve discovered about five different in-memory OLAP efforts recently, and no doubt that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
- I’m hearing ever more about public-facing/extranet BI. Information Builders is a leader here, but other vendors are talking about it too.
A little more detail Read more
| Categories: Application areas, Business intelligence, Information Builders, Inforsense, Jaspersoft, QlikTech and QlikView, Scientific research, Tableau Software | 8 Comments |
Database SaaS gains a little visibility
Way back in the 1970s, a huge fraction of analytic database management was done via timesharing, specifically in connection with the RAMIS and FOCUS business-intelligence-precursor fourth-generation languages. (Both were written by Gerry Cohen, who built his company Information Builders around the latter one.) The market for remoting-computing business intelligence has never wholly gone away since. Indeed, it’s being revived now, via everything from the analytics part of Salesforce.com to the service category I call data mart outsourcing.
Less successful to date are efforts in the area of pure database software-as-a-service. It seems that if somebody is going for SaaS anyway, they usually want a more complete, integrated offering. The most noteworthy exceptions I can think of to this general rule are Kognitio and Vertica, and they only have a handful of database SaaS customers each. To wit: Read more