Mobile business intelligence — real business value or just a snazzy demo?

I discussed some mobile BI use cases in July 2010, but I’m still not convinced the whole area is a legitimate big deal. BI has a long history of snazzy, senior-exec-pleasing demos that have little to do with substantive business value. For now, I think mobile BI is another of those; few people will gain deep analytic insights staring into their iPhones. I don’t see anything coming that’s going to change the situation soon.

BI-centric collaboration — real business value or just a snazzy demo?

I’m more optimistic about collaborative business intelligence. QlikView’s direct sharing of dashboards will, I think, be a feature competitors must and will imitate. Social media BI collaboration is still in the “mainly a demo” phase, but I think it meets a broader and deeper need than does mobile BI. Over the next few years, I expect numerous enterprises to establish strong cultures of analytic chatter (and then give frequent talks about same at industry conferences).  

Business intelligence for mid-market enterprises is problematic

Given the saturation of the large-enterprise BI market with supposed enterprise-standard BI systems, it would seem that smaller enterprises comprise a large part of the BI growth opportunity. However, the large-enterprise and mid-range BI markets are very different. For example:

• Large enterprises typically have tough challenges in data integration; smaller enterprises may truly start out with their data in only a few systems.
• There are many reasons for large enterprises not to do their BI in the cloud, such as bandwidth, internal politics, or the unsuitability of most cloud infrastructure for analytic DBMS scale-out. Smaller enterprises, however, may prefer SaaS (Software as a Service) BI.
• The BI market for smaller enterprises is heavily OEM. But unless you’re buying some kind of data/analytics bundle, the large enterprise BI market still seems overwhelmingly standalone.
• Large-enterprise BI tools incorporate much of a DBMS-like technology stack; at smaller enterprises, BI can often stick to its specialized-application-development-tool knitting. But on the other hand …
• … large enterprises almost always already have a data warehousing infrastructure. Mid-range BI buyers may not have a separate analytic DBMS. Therefore …
• … BI/DBMS bundles make more sense in the mid-market than they do at large enterprises.
• Each large enterprise has a unique infrastructure, and  commonly a unique competitive situation as well. Thus, the idea that you’ll pre-build most of an analytic application for a large enterprises — because you know what data model they need to do their BI — usually turns out to be silly. But smaller enterprises can be more homogeneous, and so for them pre-built analytic applications can actually work.

I don’t know of anybody who’s really cracked the code on mid-market BI. Crystal Reports (long owned by SAP Business Objects) has huge OEM share, but somehow hasn’t parlayed that into a comprehensive mid-market BI presence. Various SaaS or on-premise vendors have cool product ideas — e.g. Gooddata, Endeca, or my clients at PivotLink — but none seems to have set the world on fire to this point.

Departmental BI is doing better

The news is happier in a related market — business intelligence for departments of larger enterprises. However, this is a hard market to analyze, for at least two reasons. First — as is often the case — the distinction among large-enterprise-wise, smaller-enterprise-wide, and departmental BI is not a clear one.* Second, “departmental BI” has at least two major strains:

• Simple, pedestrian BI, implemented quickly.
• Investigative analytics.

*In particular, it has been the case since the 1990s that BI tools first get sold to departments, hopefully for fast implementations — think 4-6 weeks as a base case — and then spread out internally after their initial successes. I am frequently amused by vendors who claim to have pioneered that sales model sometime over the past decade, or even within the past few years.

That said, there are two main kinds of reason to do your BI departmentally, at arm’s length from central IT.

• Perhaps, for good reason or bad, IT is being insufficiently helpful at managing the data.
  • This can be a straightforward matter of politics and priorities — IT controls the data, but is slow about giving you access.
  • Also, you may want to include data that’s outside IT’s purview, be it third-party or just purely departmental.
• Further, you may want functionality that corporate-standard BI doesn’t offer. Potential examples include:
  • Cool analytic visualization.
  • “Real-time” data visualization.
  • The ability to play nicely with particular kinds of data sets.

I have a lot more to say about those points — but not in a post that’s already as long as this one.

• Sybase’s main businesses are:
  • Classic OLTP DBMS (Sybase ASE, for Adapative Server Enterprise, unless I’ve missed yet another name change).
  • Analytic technology — mainly Sybase IQ, but more generally Sybase RAP.
  • Mobile technology. (The frequently renamed small DBMS SQL Anywhere was the foundational product of and still is included in the mobile division.)
• SAP’s thoughts on in-memory database management are interesting. However, I think SAP’s oft-repeated claim that it has a lot of important in-memory database technology to bring to Sybase (or for that matter SAP customers) is mainly smoke and mirrors. Cool data access methods, good niche database products, and broadly applicable multi-domain DBMS innovations are three different things. Granting that SAP probably has the first and thinks it has the second is not the same as giving it much credence for having the third.
• SAP claims that, 15 years after its refusal to support Sybase turned Sybase into a DBMS also-ran, it by now is “relatively simple” to port SAP’s apps to Sybase ASE, and that they will make that happen. I actually believe that SAP’s apps will soon run on Sybase ASE, where by “soon” I mean “in a couple of years for no-apologies general availability.” (Certifying a DBMS for SAP is a long process.) The main missing features — e.g., row-level locking — were already put into Sybase back in the last millenium. Nor could there be fundamental architectural problems that keep SAP from supporting Sybase ASE, or else SAP couldn’t have supported Microsoft SQL Server (which, long ago, was a Sybase fork).
• I don’t see any market or competitive dynamics that would lead the SAP acquisition to hurt Sybase’s ASE or mobile businesses. General merger management mishegas is, of course, always a possibility.
• SAP Business Objects partners with Sybase IQ’s competitors. That could be a problem. However, coopetition is pretty strong in the business intelligence market. I don’t think any of SAP Business Objects, IBM Cognos, or Oracle Business Intelligence are much held back from partnering by competitive dislike of their parent companies.
• The rest of SAP might be able to drum up some extra business for Sybase IQ.
• It would be natural for IBM/Cognos to now buy a columnar DBMS of its own. Vertica is an obvious first choice. ParAccel would surely come much cheaper. Since ParAccel has little chance of surviving as an independent company — too immature and too little differentiation to overcome that — I’d expect ParAccel’s board to jump at the chance to sell out.
• It would be interesting if SAP Business Objects would revive the CEP-based BI idea.
• I gather Sybase’s AnswersAnywhere concept network/object model-based natural language/speech recognition technology never went anywhere. Unsurprising (it seemed like it needed too much hand-building to scale semantically), but regrettable even so.
• I don’t see anything in this acquisition that would revive PowerBuilder (Sybase’s Visual Basic competitor), Sybase’s CASE (Computer-Aided Software Engineering) tools, and so on.
• And on the personal side — I’ll probably lose Sybase as a customer due to this merger, but it could have been worse. A lot of vendors smaller than Sybase are bigger customers for Monash Research.

Edit: Right after I posted this, I saw email from Sybase clarifying that Sybase’s in-memory technology, while slightly influenced by some ANTs IP Sybase bought non-exclusive rights to, is essentially home-grown. That’s what I thought, but the call sounded like it was saying something different.

Further coverage of SAP/Sybase:

• SAP believes in database proliferation
• More quick reactions to SAP/Sybase
• Technical basics of Sybase IQ
  

February, 2011 edit: Here’s a partial link that works right now.

Of course, some parts do make sense.  E.g.:

• Business Objects’ completeness of vision seems to have been downgraded because of its new affiliation with SAP’s ever-confused Netweaver strategy.
• Microsoft’s completeness of vision is dinged for — well, for not being very complete.
• SAS, which unlike other vendors actually gets customers to integrate BI and predictive analytics, gets top marks in “completeness of vision”.
• IBM/Cognos leads the way overall.

Parts I find more dubious include:

• Whether or not vendors have strong international sales presences affects their “completeness of vision” scores. Huh?
• In-memory analytics are hugely emphasized, to the point that TIBCO Spotfire gets very high “completeness of vision” scores despite being just a portion of an overall BI product line. Yet vendors who get similar performance from allowing drilldown within reports don’t seem to get the same credit.
• Endeca isn’t included, while Spotfire is.
• Despite criticizing Microsoft for not delivering on promised products and Oracle for not doing much at all, Gartner gives both better “ability to execute” marks than are given to Information Builders and Microstrategy.
• While Gartner correctly points out in the commentary that company size is not a strong indicator of ability to execute, this awareness doesn’t seem to have been reflected in the actual chart.
• Gartner’s supposedly rigorous numbers seem sloppy. LogiXML is seemingly cited as almost making the $20 million product revenue cutoff, despite being a company with $7.3 million in overall revenue.

I don’t doubt that Gartner has done good research in support of this article. Indeed, I learned things from reading the supporting commentary. But the actual Magic Quadrant presentation methodology is, as always, fatally flawed.

Among the companies they cited, you can find topical categories here for IBM (and Cognos), Informatica, Microsoft, Netezza, Oracle, SAP/Business Objects (both), SAS, and Teradata; QlikTech; Cast Iron, Coral8, DATAllegro, HP, ParAccel, and StreamBase; and Software AG. On Text Technologies you’ll find categories for some of the same vendors, plus Attensity, Clarabridge, and Google. There also are categories for some of these vendors on the Monash Report.

Still, such calls are joyful events, full of strategic happy talk. If one is really lucky, there may a virtuouso tap dancing exhibition as well. On today’s IBM/Cognos call, Cognos CEO Rob Ashe was asked whether he thought Cognos’ independence or lack thereof was as important today as he said it was after SAP announced its BOBJ takeover. Without missing a beat, he responded that there were two kinds of openness:

1. Database openness (not important)
2. ERP/business process openness (indeed important)

Hmm. I’m not so sure I agree. To begin with, there aren’t just two major points of potential integration. There’s also a whole lot of middleware: obviously data integration, but also app servers, portals, and query execution acceleration as well.

Let me spell out that last point a little bit. NetWeaver has been SAP’s integrated BI/app server. Oracle’s app server has data caching built in. Crystal Reports had a custom app server when Business Objects acquired it. BI is increasing integrated with portals, and portals are integrated with app servers and other middleware.

And that’s just today. Futures include a whole new technology stack to revolutionize dashboards, with better integration of “alerting” UIs (on- and off-screen alike) as part of the package.

Also, when query resolution goes memory-centric, the boundaries between BI/report servers and DBMS get really blurred. E.g., I’m not sure there’s a huge fundamental difference between what ParAccel sells today and what SAP has long described as a reasonable (albeit very hypothetical) path for the evolution of BI Accelerator.

And by the way: I really don’t think that BI/business process integration is far enough along for any kind of closedness in that regard to much matter — more’s the pity.

So on the whole, I think I don’t agree with Rob Ashe’s analysis on that particular issue.

In fact, I think one of the most exciting things about this merger is the potential technological integration among many different IBM product lines. In saying that, I’m looking a loooong way down the road — but eventually it could be very cool indeed.

Technorati Tags: IBM, Cognos

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1. Ironically, IBM just put out a press release describing a strong-sounding reseller partnership with Business Objects. The deal specified that

Business Objects will begin distributing and reselling IBM DB2 Warehouse with Business Objects XI and CFO Performance Management solutions. In addition, IBM will include a starter edition of Business Objects XI with DB2 and DB2 Warehouse.

Jeff Jones of IBM told me that they also had a partnership with Cognos, but with different details. I guess Cognos will eventually take over that deal, which is an obvious negative for Business Objects.

2. More generally, I can see where Cognos will now likely gain share at DB2 sites, and IBM/Ascential at Cognos sites. I can’t as easily see why Cognos would now lose share at Oracle or Teradata or Netezza sites, or why Ascential would lose share at SAP/BOBJ sites. So there seem to be some genuine synergies here, albeit perhaps modest ones.

3. Thus, I think the negatives in this deal for the remaining independents (Microstrategy, Information Builders, Informatica, etc.) will somewhat outweigh the positives.

4. I’m not a big fan of Cognos’ management, former CEO Ron Zambonini and a few other freethinkers excepted. So from that standpoint I don’t think they have a lot to lose being taken over by Big Blue.

5. Obviously, with most of the dominoes now fallen, the big question is about the future of BI as it – potentially – gets integrated into much larger enterprise technology suites. And I think the answer to that depends a lot more on technology than most people seem to realize. More on that subject later, but here’s one hint:

I think fixing the disappointment that is dashboards will involve taking query volumes up by at least 2 to 3 orders of magnitude. So as great as recent innovations in analytic query performance have been, I hope and trust that so far we’ve only seen the tip of the iceberg.

Links:

1. eWeek on the IBM/Business Objects deal.
2. Press release on the IBM/Business Objects deal.
3. Press release on the IBM/Cognos deal.

• Vertica’s claim to have “50” customers includes a bunch of unpaid licenses, many of them in academia.
• Vertica has about 15 paying customers.
• Based on conversations with mutual prospects, Vertica believes that’s more customers than DATAllegro has. (Of course, each DATAllegro sale is bigger than one of Vertica’s. Even so, I hope Vertica is wrong in its estimate, since DATAllegro told me its customer count was “double digit” quite a while ago.)
• Most Vertica customers manage over 1 terabyte of user data. A couple have bought licenses showing they intend to manage 20 terabytes or so.
• Vertica’s biggest customer/application category – existing customers and sales pipelines alike – is call detail records for telecommunications companies. (Other data warehouse specialists also have activity in the CDR area.). Major applications are billing assurance (getting the inter-carrier charges right) and marketing analysis. Call center uses are still in the future.
• Vertica’s other big market to date is investment research/tick history. Surely not coincidentally, this is a big area of focus for Mike Stonebraker, evidently at both companies for which he’s CTO. (The other, of course, is StreamBase.)
• Runners-up in market activity are clickstream analysis and general consumer analytics. These seem to be present in Vertica’s pipeline more than in the actual customer base.

• Fraud detection comes up as a specific application in multiple customer segments.
• RDF isn’t a big deal for Vertica yet. However, Vertica does have some RDF pilot projects in the biological research area.
• A lot of Vertica customers use Business Objects and/or Informatica. And as part of QA, Vertica’s product is tested against other major business intelligence tools as well.

As for the HP/Vertica appliance deal:

• Here’s the link to Vertica’s database appliance product page. Note that it mentions 10 terabytes of user data as a representative case.
• Vertica reports that a significant minority of its customers/prospects wanted an appliance alternative.
• HP now has what it surely perceives as a high-end/low-end pair of offerings – Neoview and Vertica. Similarly, Sun has what it perceives as a similar pair – Greenplum and ParAccel. Of course, neither Vertica nor ParAccel would wholly endorse that “low-end” positioning, but they’re glad to have the big-company partnerships even so.

Edit: For more on the data warehouse appliance market overall, please see this December, 2007 post on data warehouse appliance fact and fiction.

There’s a more substantive disagreement as to whether the features deleted from BOBJ’s product due to the injunction are actually important in the marketplace. I’m looking into that subject, and hope to post about it in the near future.

There has not yet been any appeal. There is no new decision. And BOBJ had no choice in accepting or rejecting the remittitur – what the BOBJ rep referred to as the “judge’s new proposal.” Only Informatica, the prevailing party in this case — has the option to accept or reject the remittitur.

To save a round of “he said, she said,” let me head off at the pass another point BOBJ may proffer. While the judge found that the $25 million dollar award was appropriate and supported by the evidence, the remittitur reduced the award to $12M because case law had changed as a result of AT&T v. Microsoft. The ruling in that Supreme Court case came in after the INFA v. BOBJ verdict and held that the jury could not include damages for sales of copies made outside the United States. Specifically, the case resulted in a legal change that holds that plaintiffs relying on US patent rights can only go after US damages and would not be entitled any international damages. The decision had a binding effect on our case and the Judge, therefore, gave Informatica the choice to retry the issue of damages again next year (and assume all of the costs associated with this – and be limited to only evidence of US damages) or take a reduced damages number of $12.2 million.

We want to be clear that: 1. Informatica could have asked for a new trial to determine a new damages amount; 2. Though Informatica may have obtained even more in a new trial, $12M for BODI’s sales in the United States represents a very substantial royalty of approximately $20,000 per infringing sale.

In summary, the reduced amount had nothing to do with the merits of the case or any “appeal”’ by BODI – it only had to do with unfortunate timing of the AT&T case and that decision and the fact that given some administrative issues a final order had not yet been issued when the AT&T case came down. There is no new decision – the jury’s verdict stands (other than the amount) – the patents are valid, BODI willfully infringed those patents and Informatica was awarded an injunction against BODI.

The final order will be entered in the next few weeks and then they will appeal the decision – which given the facts in this case – will be a tough road ahead for BODI/SAP.

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Technorati Tags: Informatica, Business Objects

The beginning of the talk astonished me, as the presenter seemed to be saying they were doing all this on Oracle. Hah. Oracle is what they moved away from; instead, they got Greenplum. I couldn’t get details; indeed, as a BI guy he was far enough away from DBMS to misspeak and say that Greenplum was brought in by ‘HP’, before quickly correcting himself when prompted.

Perhaps not concidentally, Reliance may be a big Sun customer in general, based on a Sun podcast (McNealy Minute #7, at about the 7 minute mark).

Based on all that, I don’t think there’s much reason for optimism about SAP’s system software futures, except perhaps for those that are placed wholly under the control of the Business Objects division. NetWeaver? Already a creaking omnibus. MaxDB? They didn’t get it right the first time around; what will be different now? BI Accelerator? That one actually could do well under Business Objects. The dream of other kinds of appliances? Not likely to achieve take-off. TREX? They weren’t really enhancing that much anyway. The rest of the search-related vision Dennis outlined for me? That’s another one that actually could thrive under Business Objects, but I expect a considerable number of false starts at best before they work out a coherent new strategy.

The high-end app business, the new SaaS business, the new Business Objects subsidiary — any and all of those could do well. But the attempts to become a broad-based system software player rivaling Oracle, Microsoft, and/or IBM are looking a lot less healthy than they used to.

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Technorati Tags: SAP, NetWeaver, Business Objects, TREX, BI Accelerator