Mobile BI has been around for a long time. Starting in the late-1990s, the first SMS-enabled telephones became mainstream in Europe, with basic broadcasting of the latest figures available in your BI system (or email, fax, pager, etc.). By the end of the decade, the first telephones with WAP browsers were used to provide interactive BI, quickly followed by connected PDAs with basic HTML browsers.

Here’s what SAP BusinessObjects looked like on the Nokia 7110 in 1999, on a Compaq PDA running Windows Pocket IE, an AvantGo PDA, and a Japanese DoCoMo i-mode phone in 2001:

The arrival of all these new mobile devices was supposed to usher in a new dawn of mobile analytics. Here’s a slide from a presentation a decade ago by then-marketing-VP Dave Kellogg, including the heady prediction that “5-25% of companies indicated they already provide or will provide wireless access to BI within 6-12 months”.

Business Objects launched a big initiative to go after the mobile market, and managed to sell projects to customers including JP Morgan (Palm Pilots) and Zurich Insurance (a mobile extranet for risk managers).

But, clearly, the market didn’t take off – PDAs became more widely used, and phones got better, but they weren’t used much for BI. The user interfaces were too clunky and connection speeds were too slow. Interest in mobile BI did grow slowly over the decade, notably as RIM blackberry devices became ubiquitous, but it took the wide availability of 3G wireless and modern smartphones/tablets to provide truly usable interfaces.

Finally, a decade and a half after the first tentative steps, everybody seems to agree that this is the year that mobile BI will really take off.

2012 Is the Year of Mobile BI

Here’s a taste of the mountain of research data that’s been generated about mobile BI in the last few months:

• Boris Evelson of Forrester says mobile BI will go mainstream this year. “One needs to make decisions when and where they need to be made. Not ‘when I get back to the office,’ which may be too late.” He also says that “professionals must start evaluating and prototyping mobile BI platforms and applications to make sure that all key business processes and relevant information are available to knowledge workers wherever they are.”
• According to Gartner, “by 2013, 33 percent of BI functionality will be consumed via handheld devices.”
• A survey by analyst Howard Dresner indicates that BI has already become the third most in-demand enterprise mobile application, behind only email and personal information management apps such as calendars, and 68 percent of those surveyed rated mobile BI as “critical” or “very important,” up from 52 percent a year earlier.
• A recent survey by Information Week showed that 25 percent of organizations are planning to implement some form of BI this year.
• Sixty-one percent of the participants in a TDWI survey said that they expect users to spend more time accessing BI from mobile devices in the next 12 months.
• Business Intelligence and mobile are the top two technology priorities for CIOs in 2012.

Barriers to deployment

Not every organization is moving forward with mobile BI. Here are the main concerns:

• Security and administration: Organizations are concerned about data getting outside the organization, and the administration overhead generated by managing BI on mobile devices. A mobile device management (MDM) platform (not to be confused with the other MDM) like Sybase Afaria is key.
• Expectations-setting: An easy interface doesn’t mean that the data users want is readily available. New opportunities mean new requirements. Having the right data foundations in the first place, with a robust, standard BI platform in place makes it easier to react fast to user expectations.
• Platform choices: This is perhaps the biggest factor delaying widespread deployment. Just like the operating system wars of last century (remember IBM OS/2?), there’s no one obvious platform to standardize on for rolling out mobile applications. There are three main strategies, all with pros and cons:
  • Native applications—mobile applications written directly for iOs or Android. The advantage is optimal ease-of-use and access to the capabilities of the native device. The disadvantage is the cost and complexity of supporting multiple platforms and different user interfaces.
  • HTML—accessing mobile BI through a Web browser. The advantage is that you don’t care what device is being used to access the data – at least in theory. In reality, the disadvantage is that browser-based interfaces are generally far behind what’s possible using the native features. There are high hopes that the proposed HTML5 standard will help – but it hasn’tt yet reached maturity.
  • Hybrid solution—mobile enterprise platforms such as Sybase Unwired Platform. You create applications once, and then generate different versions of them optimized for different mobile platforms, including HTML. It’s an insurance measure against the turbulent real-life world of changing mobile platforms, but there’s some upfront investment.

An example of today’s mobile BI solutions -  SAP BusinessObjects Mobile showing the integrated Google maps pioneered by the Innovation Center.

Of course, most of us just want all these options to be available as part of the standard business intelligence platform – and that’s getting closer…

Next Steps

Gartner predicts that “by 2013, 15% of BI deployments will combine BI, collaboration and social software into decision-making environments”. In other words, mobile BI will become part of an “orchestrated” experience that combines accessing data with acting on it, and we’re starting to see this in the form of mobile medical analytics for doctors or mobile beauty advisor applications.

Interestingly, one brand new area of opportunities is the integration of mobile with voice-controlled interfaces such as Apple’s Siri. Business Objects was WAY ahead of the curve with this one, with the project codenamed “Ariel”. It sadly didn’t take off, but anybody who saw it demoed will have fond memories…

I’ll confess upfront that I’ve always been slightly dubious about the assertion that “sustainability is about making money”. After all, if it’s about making money, it’s something that companies should be doing anyway – it’s only when there’s a tradeoff between sustainability and money that there’s room for interesting debate about to what extent it should be one of the goals of the organization.

However, as Diversey’s CEO Curt Johnson points out:

“CO₂ is waste, so if you minimize CO₂, you minimize waste and you maximize efficiency and increase profits”

It turns out that putting in the effort to calculate the carbon footprint of the entire supply chain, from raw products to final consumption, is a great opportunity to identify savings that might previously have been missed by more step-by-step, siloed efficiency efforts.

Walkers Crisps is a great example of this. The company sells potato chips, or “the UK’s favorite crisps” as they are known locally, and is part of Frito-Lay, which is in turn a division of PepsiCo. In 2007, Walkers became the first company in the world to display a carbon reduction logo on their product, and discovered considerable savings in the process. From The Economist:

“The process of calculating the carbon footprint for Walkers crisps revealed an unexpected opportunity to save energy. It turned out that because Walkers was buying its potatoes by gross weight, farmers were keeping their potatoes in humidified sheds to increase the water content. Walkers then had to fry the sliced potatoes for longer to drive out the extra moisture. By switching to buying potatoes by dry weight, Walkers could reduce frying time by 10% and farmers could avoid the cost of humidification. Both measures saved money and energy and reduced the carbon footprint of the final product.”

The report doesn’t mention what products and procedures were used to do the carbon footprint analysis, but “Business Objects is the key database for Walkers” for reporting, according to the PepsiCo UK web site. You can read more about the carbon footprint of a packet of cheese & onion crisps on their web site.

Viewed in this way, calculating the carbon footprint of your products is “just” another form of efficiency analytics. If you’re interested in doing this for your organization, you can read more about the business case for sustainability, SAP products that can help you calculate your carbon footprint and view SAP’s own Sustainability Report.

There are only three matches left in this year’s World Cup, and the competition is wide open after a series of upsets have knocked out some of the big international players, including the winners of the last three world cup tournaments: Italy, France, and Brazil.

To enhance your enjoyment of the game – or simply to see a real-life example of what you can do with business intelligence technology, check out the suite of tools offered as part of the SAP BusinessObjects 2010 Football Experience:

The site lets you:

• Easily review historical data from matches going back nearly 50 years to gain perspective on the game.
• Check out details on the teams and players as they compete for the title.
• Analyze match information, such as shot location, to search for patterns of play and success.
• Gain insight, spot trends, and use the information you uncover to make better decisions.
• Receive live commentary during the matches so you can stay informed.

In order to get answers to questions such as:

• What positions typically score the most points?
• What is a likely final score?
• Does being the host country influence success?
• Which teams consistently make it to the final rounds?
• Which players have previous tournament experience?
• Is there a particular area of the goal that a goalkeeper is less successful in defending?
• Is one player or team receiving more yellow cards than the others?

Trivia contest

Once you have the hang of the different tools below, why not take part in the Trivia Contest? Each week day a game is on, there will be a question tweeted about from the @businessobjects Twitter account, and the first correct response is the winner!.

The first thing to do is register with the site (you can still access some of the functionality without doing this, but you won’t get the full flavor).

You can then go to the main screen and choose which of the seven main areas you’d like to explore:

• Go Explore! World cup statistics with SAP BusinessObjects Explorer
• Predictor: Predictions using SAP BusinessObjects Xcelsius
• Goal History: Reporting using SAP Crystal Reports
• Social Network Analyzer: The relationship between teams, matches, players…
• Team Information: An Xcelsius dashboard of team information
• Goal History by team: Reporting using SAP Crystal Reports
• Jive community space: Join in the conversation!

Go Explore!

Click the Explorer button to open up a choice of information spaces: either the full statistics, or a view of other people’s predictions (see next section) (note, if you only see one choice, check again that you’re registered / cookies are enabled)

Click on the first one and start investigating – e.g. one of the semi-finals is Germany vs. Spain – here’s the result of the previous time the two teams met:

There’s also a set of shortcuts that you can use to get an idea of what kinds of questions are possible:

• What unlucky player has hit the goal post on 4 separate occasions in a single World Cup tournament? ANSWER
• Jürgen Klinsmann is an former player who is now working as an ESPN commentator. When did he play, and how many goals did he score? ANSWER
• What Italian goal keeper has had a remarkable 69 saves in World Cup play? ANSWER
• I heard that Real Madrid is a good club. How are the players from that team in this year’s World Cup?
  Has anyone scored? ANSWER

Predictor

Using Xcelsius, you can predict the scores of the different matches, and then see how good your prediction record is over time:

And then you can access a leaderboard report that gives you the top predictors, overall, or by round, as a pdf document:

(and remember, you can do exploration of the same data by opening the other information space in the explorer section above).

Goal History

The goal history section opens up a Crystal Report with detailed data about exactly where and how goals were scored during matches:

And you can drill down on information by different teams – here’s Germany’s scoring pattern in the last world cup, for example – something that Spain might like to look into before their next match…

World Cup Social Network Analyzer

The SAP Social Network Analyzer aggregates existing enterprise data to display and discover organizational relationships. It automatically generates useful social networks that can be used:

• to find and connect people,
• to take actions based on individual/organization/company information,
• to send an email, meeting request or call a person,
• to build the right team,
• to better manage and control processes,
• to understand the relationships between suppliers and buyers,
• to analyze people’s information and organization using BI tools,
• to integrate social network information inside any application…

All the data from the world cup has been fed into the online prototype, to give you an idea of how the players and their teams relate. For example, here’s the network of matches played by the USA over the years:

Here are some same views:

• Player with current national team, coach, number of goals in world cup, size, height, position or jersey number
• Teams with their respective players and coaches
• Players who scored during a world cup still in 2010.
• Who scored the most
• Previous world cup matches between two teams

Team Information

This section gives you access to an interactive Xcelsius dashboard that shows information about the different teams, e.g. by location:

And by previous team experiences in the world cup:

And the players involved:

Goals per Team

Another example of a Crystal Report, this time using the Crystal Reports Viewer plugin.

Jive Community Space

Join in the discussion! Will the Dutch be able to set the pace in the next match?

Other Dashboards

Other folks have also taken the plunge and used the SAP BusinessObjects tools to create useful dashboards… here’s a nice one from the MyXcelsius.com web site, using the great Google Maps 2.0 plugin for Xcelsius:

SAP Football Ad:

If you’re into football, you’ll enjoy this SAP Ad from 2008, courtesy of www.danielfreestyle.com (filmed entirely around San Francisco, which does a pretty good job of looking like a trip around the globe!)

Here is a season’s greetings dashboard that shows off some of the latest features of Xcelsius 2008 SP3. Tweet the color you’d like to see in the garland. The dashboard updates every 30 seconds. How long Twitter search takes to recognize the tweet can be pretty variable – but most of the time, it’s less than a minute.

How it works:

1. I set up an Excel XML Connection that grabs a feed from Twitter using the search term “#twitterlights”.
2. The top three (most recent) tweets are parsed to identify the color, using a vlookup table of the first three characters (if no color is found, it defaults to red / lime / yellow)
3. The SAP greetings card images are shown using the Slideshow component
4. The buttons launch a browser window, using an URL that automatically presets a Twitter status update, ready to be tweeted (starting the tweet with @votebytweet means that followers don’t see it by default, but you can leave it out if you want, and you can use the rest of the tweet to tell people how awesome/useless this demo is… )
5. I use two timers, to cycle the colors around the image and to change the slides. I wracked my brain for ages trying to do this, but then realized there was an easy and elegant method using the history component. You simply chose an input cell and single output cell, then put a formula in the “input cell” such as “=output cell+1”, and set the timer. Every interval, the contents of “input cell” are put into “output cell”, so the contents of input_cell will tick up by one every period.

Here’s a copy of the XLF file if you’d like to see how it works. Have fun!

A recent cryptographic breakthrough made by Craig Gentry that potentially has huge consequences for business intelligence.

One of the big problems plaguing the use of on-demand business intelligence has been concerns over data security.

As Forbes and others have reported, the new techniques could reassure companies who want to take benefit of cloud computing for analysis (at a cost of massive computing power).

As IBM Research VP Charles Lickel notes in a blog post:

Using the solution could help strengthen the business model of “cloud computing,” where a computer vendor is entrusted to host the confidential data of others in a ubiquitous Internet presence. It might better enable a cloud computing vendor to perform computations on clients’ data at their request, such as analyzing sales patterns, without exposing the original data.

The new techniques might also help in another area: extranet business intelligence. In today’s connected ecosystems of customer and partners, it’s essential to be able to share information for the good of all. But although extranets have been around since the earliest web-based BI tools, they are still not as widely used as one might expect.

There are several reasons for this – not least the ubiquitous data quality problems that companies are reluctant to expose outside the company’s firewall. But one big reason is that companies don’t necessarily trust their partners to look after the information.

Today, there aren’t great mechanisms in place for both sharing and protecting information. It’s easy to share information information outside the firewall using today’s web-based BI systems, or an on-demand platform like that of BusinessObjects. But how can you stop people from taking the information and using it elsewhere?

In many ways, this is analogous to letting people buy a CD, but not letting them make a digital copy of it. Although the music industry has tried to introduce and enforce digital rights management, it has proven woefully inadequate.

The health industry is a great example of the “data governance” issues that this problem creates. Individual health records are sacrosanct – nobody wants to have their colonoscopy results freely available on the web. But at the same time, being able to analyze the detailed data of large numbers of patient treatments and outcomes is essential if we’re going to improve medicine as a whole. So we have to be able to protect data and share it in aggregate, and various methods have been proposed to try to achieve this in bodies such as the UK’s national health service (which handily has a lot of data under its control, unlike the US health system).

Other example is industry data. Each participant in an industry benefits by having aggregate information about the industry as a whole, and a lot of middlemen and agencies have sprung up to collect information from companies (retailers, broadcasters, software companies, etc.) and then sell it back to them at a markup. In theory, these middlemen could be made obsolete, with people volunteering data to a central body, with strict controls on what data was made available to each participant. But too often, there isn’t enough trust, and no mechanism for associating payments with data value (this is what killed the “net market” phenomenon of the 90s).

Could encryption be part of the answer? I’m no expert, but so far, it seems like this particular breakthrough only applies directly to large-scale data mining issues, where you can do the analysis in “black box” fashion. The next step would be to allow companies to upload encrypted data sets that could still be linked at the raw data level (using some sort of public-key encryption?) – since this is what would be required for meaningful data analysis.

I’m convinced that we’re going to spend the next couple of decades on these problems – building the equivalent of the world’s monetary system (and look at the problems that has generated recently!) for data. Anything that can help, such as this encryption breakthrough is a step along the way…

So each time I have my coffee and croissant, some of the 7 million or so visitors to the tower each year come out of the metro and consult this map of the 7th Arrondissement to try to help them figure out which way to go.

Here’s a close up – the Eiffel Tower is at the top left of the map below:

Let’s do a simple test of your information-processing skills. You’re a tourist, and you want to visit the Eiffel Tower. Should you turn left or right?

I’ll give you the answer, and some commentary about the implications of this on corporate decision-making, after the break: a bunch of photos of tourists doing the real-live test (it took only ten minutes to take this series, on a slow day)

The answer is: you turn to your right (personally, I’d recommend walking through the Champs de Mars, via the green trees on the right-hand side of the top picture).

Because the map is “upside down” (you are facing south as you read it), this is deeply unintuitive for most people, and they spend several minutes puzzling over it, sometimes eventually wandering off in the wrong direction, only to reappear a few minutes later with sheepish looks on their faces.

So how does all this relate to real-life decision making?

Missing the big picture. You see a map, so you use the map to try to figure out where to go. But look at the top picture again, at the signs on the left-hand side. See the one that points explicitly to the Eiffel Tower? You already did? Congratulations! – almost none of the tourists do.

In business, too, one of the big issues with analyzing data is starting in the wrong place, and getting so concentrated on a particular type of analysis that you miss that other techniques might be more important. For example, a company might put a lot of emphasis on financial analysis, but forget to do any customer surveys.

For example, an enterprise software companies might try to to ascertain product “worth” by calculating revenue by product. But since the products are not sold independently, but are instead bundled into large deals with lots of other products, the calculations are (worse than) useless.

More concretely: if, say, Xcelsius is allocated $10,000 of revenue from a million-dollar deal, but I would have lost the deal to a competitor without it, the product is “worth” way more than $10K, and I should plan my future investments accordingly. In this case, the “softer” customer survey data of why they purchased would be more reliable and valuable.

More information needed. Your first reaction to the test may have been “I don’t have enough information”.

But the placement of the red dot is very clear. You can only be at the corner of avenue Bosquet and avenue de la Motte-Piquet, facing out into the center of the Place de L’Ecole Militaire. In theory, the average person with enough money to travel to Paris should be more than capable of visualizing themselves on the map and making the right choice within a few seconds.

But this is not what happens. The average tourist reaches up and puts their finger on the big red dot and spends at least a minute looking around wildly for some other guidance. I’m guessing this is because (a) it takes effort to rotate a map in your head (and they’re on vacation) and (b) they are looking for a second opinion.

This is true in business, too.

First, you shouldn’t make people work too hard to understand the data. For example, you should never show an audience slides that just show charts, with no conclusions.

Instead, prove to them that you didn’t just stick the data on the slide without even considering it (sadly, all too common, at least in marketing). Put the key points you think the data shows, next to the numbers, and then the audience can use their thinking time and effort to agree or disagree with you, and consider the implications, rather than pointlessly redoing your analysis.

And second, like the tourists, I want more than one data set. I’m much too cynical about data quality, so you should attempt to gather some other form of information (a survey, say) that comes to the same conclusion.

Limited collaboration. The tourists often talk among themselves about the decision (I saw one poor preteen kid that had to explain it to his parents five times in a row before they understood) – but they rarely actually ask somebody outside their group (such as anybody nearby not dressed as a tourist).

The same happens in business. The small team has been tasked with the analysis. They feel that it’s their job to go and get numbers from people, but they rarely discuss the decisions or data outside the small team, even if there are other non-executives that may actually have strong insights into the correct answer.

For example, a classic marketing analysis gaff is to do analysis and and start executing a plan without actually asking the sales people their opinion. They have their own biases, but they will often point out that some aspect of the plan is perfectly stupid.

Making it overly-complex. Just in case there are some super-geeks out there: yes, you can work out the right way to turn by assuming, correctly, that it’s morning (the coffee and croissant) and that the light is coming from the East, so West is to the map-reader’s right. But let’s face it, if you managed to spot all that, I suspect you’d read the map right in the first place.

Presentation is important! One morning, I volunteered directions to several folks that had spent a long time looking at the map, only to find that they didn’t want help. The difference? I was dressed in shorts and a t-shirt and hadn’t bothered to shave before my morning run. To the tourists, I looked like a walking, talking data quality problem, and not to be trusted.

This is why technologies like Xcelsius, that present the data in a very attractive way, are so important. It shouldn’t matter, but it does. Even if you don’t need Xcelsius for the whole company, I strongly recommend you buy a single standalone copy for when you need to present to the board or executive team — it’s worth its weight in gold.

Fixing the Problem

It drove me nuts watching all these people. So I bought a two-euro indelible marker pen designed for CDs from a store opposite and drew some arrows on the map: “you are facing this way”, “your left”, “your right”, and “behind you”.

The results:

(1) It didn’t seem to help much. You still have to “rotate the map in your head”. A few people clearly attempted to follow the advice (e.g. craning to look upside down), but even then some of them went the wrong way.

(2) So many people put their fat fingers on the sign while they were trying to figure it out it that the arrow wore off in less than a day.

Interestingly, I was in London a few weeks ago, and I’d noticed that they had spent considerable time and effort on exactly this problem.

At the Legible London site, they explain what they’ve done to make it easy for tourists to find their way around. They’ve added clear direction arrows on the edge of the signs to major destinations, and extra information like walking times and distances.

And, in particular, they use “Heads-up” mapping:

Rather than having north at the top, on-street signage maps are ‘heads-up’, which means they’re orientated to face the same way as the user is facing. This helps people understand their immediate environment more easily.

Here’s an example from the site:

How does this relate to corporate decision-making?

The basic analysis is the same — YOU might understand that chart at a glance, but it’s very easy to overestimate the analytic skills of your audience, even if they’re highly educated!

Keep it simple and clear. As with the “heads-up” maps, this may take extra effort (London had to work out in advance where the maps were going to be installed and which direction they were going to face).

You have to not only spend time coming to conclusions from the data, but also spend time and effort to make sure that the analysis is clear to others!

And this is even more true in situations where you’re trying to give ad-hoc analysis tools to people. It’s almost impossible to imagine just how simple it has to be in order to be clear. Recommended best practice is to start with the simplest possible set up, and slowly, slowly introduce new features as people get comfortable.

As we’ve seen, it’s more than worth the extra effort. How many hours of confusion and frustration could the city of Paris save if they adapted the same types of maps? How much would it increase visitor satisfaction?

According to the company web site, on-demand BI vendor LucidEra was formed:

“to shake up the stagnant business intelligence industry and traditional approaches to corporate information access and analysis by delivering business visibility as an on-demand service.”

And LucidEra has indeed been innovative, developing deep expertise in the area of Sales Pipeline analytics with a 48h Pipeline Healthcheck service that in the words of Phil Wainwright, aims to “deliver return *before* investment”:

“In just 48 hours the LucidEra Pipeline Healthcheck will identify opportunities and risks in your sales forecast. We’ll analyze the health of your pipeline, sales people, and overall sales process to help identify ways to increase revenues, decrease pipeline risk, and get more predictable sales results. Plus, we’ll provide an interactive analysis so you can dig deeper into the results. We’ll quantify the results of our findings and show you the impact that on-going business intelligence as a service can have on your sales revenues.”

But unfortunately it looks like the storm clouds may be gathering for the company. This weekend, LucidEra’s Founder and CMO Ken Rudin informed friends and colleagues that:

“my email address is changing and I am no longer using the email address krudin@lucidera.com”

And now competitor GoodData has put out a press release claiming that LucidEra is “offering to sell its intellectual property after almost four years of operations” and announcing a “program to offer existing LucidEra customers free access to its innovative on-demand analytics service” with six months of free access to applications.

There has been no confirmation (or denial) from LucidEra so far [update: see below]. If indeed it is the end of an era, there will inevitably be a post-mortem discussion of what factors led to the company’s problems, and what it says about the on-demand BI market in general – particularly since various surveys and analyst postings at the start of this year predicted a rosy future for business intelligence software as a service in 2009.

The current rumor is that the company’s problems are primarily a result of bad timing, with the company needing another round of financing in a tough market, despite good products and pipeline.

My position has always been that on-demand business intelligence is an essential part of the market, but that some of the claimed benefits have been over-hyped.

In particular, I don’t think the debate should be about about choosing between on-demand and on-premise: customers should be able to seamlessly and easily move between one and the other according to their needs, using the same technology platform. This has been the position with SAP BusinessObjects’ business intelligence on-demand offering (www.ondemand.com), that use the standard BusinessObjects platform, in the cloud, on a multi-tenancy platform.

In the meantime, let me point out that Darren Cunningham, LucidEra’s excellent VP of Marketing writes an interesting, entertaining, and valuable “Keep it Simple” blog, and Darren just posted the list of all-time most popular posts:

1. 9 Holes of Sales Analytics Best Practices
2. Sales Analytics for the Board of Directors
3. What is Your Data Actually Telling You?
4. SaaS BI – Analytic Aspirin in a Difficult Economy?
5. What’s in Store for Business Intelligence in 2008
6. Guest Blogger Alert – The LucidEra Opportunity
7. We Couldn’t Get the Answers
8. Everything is a Platform
9. What’s in Store for Business Intelligence in 2009
10. Transforming Marketing’s Traditional 4 P’s into SaaS’s 5 A’s
11. Take the SaaS BI Survey
12. Sales 2.0 Data Points and Anecdotes
13. Using Analytics to Avoid Wasting Time
14. The Call for Basic Numeracy
15. What is an Analytic Application?
16. What is Cloud Computing?
17. IDC Predictions for 2009
18. Ashe on SaaS
19. A Visionary Who Thinks Clouds will Cloud His Vision
20. The Power of Pie Charts

I wish all the best of luck to Ken, Darren, other employees and customers of LucidEra…

Update: the rumor is now confirmed:

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business intelligence (BI) provider LucidEra will cease operations by the end of this month, a company executive has confirmed.

The vendor sent an email to customers on Thursday with the news and pledged to help customers wind down their relationship with the company and its SaaS-based BI products by the end of June, said Darren Cunningham, vice president of marketing at LucidEra, in a phone interview.

LucidEra’s decision to shutdown was brought about by a lack of funding, not a lack of interest in its products or in SaaS BI on the whole, Cunningham said. He would not go into details regarding LucidEra’s financial problems other than to say, “It was a matter of funding or being acquired. And neither of those things happened.”

LucidEra’s prepackaged BI reports focus primarily on Salesforce.com-based data. The company’s last round of funding came nearly two years ago in August 2007, when it raised $15.6 million in Series B funding, according to LucidEra’s website.

Technology is indeed the answer!

Or at least, that’s what is suggested by a new report from the Economist Intelligence Unit, Staying the course? Technology decision-making in turbulent times. The study shows that the current climate provides a good opportunity to drive through major initiatives, that business leaders are looking to technology as in important instrument to prepare their firms for recovery, and that the key importance of better information systems is to better understand customer behavior.

Key findings of the study, which was sponsored by SAP BusinessObjects, include the following:

CIOs are not losing their place at the table. Where they have gained a voice in major business and technology decisions, CIOs positions are not being undermined as a result of the current economic crisis. Very few survey respondents believe that the influence of CIOs in technology investment decisions will decline in their firm over the coming year. A sizeable minority, meanwhile, expect the CIOs involvement in high-level business strategy discussions to expand.

Opportunistic firms are receptive to renewed technology investment. A large minority (44%) of the firms surveyed say that they will be “on the business offensive” in the coming year, looking for acquisitions or openings to take market share from weakened rivals. These firms are more likely than those adopting a “defensive” stance to consider selective new investment in technology. Investment proposals will not enjoy an easy ride, however. More executives are now involved in the approvals process, and the volume and detail of information required is increasing. Higher rates of return are demanded, and projects with shorter return periods are being favored.

Most firms are averse to suspending existing technology projects. Less than one-quarter of survey participants believe that major existing technology-led projects should be suspended until business conditions improve. Indeed, many believe the crisis presents a good opportunity to drive through such initiatives. Few executives, however, even at growth-oriented firms, believe that now is a good time to launch entirely new IT projects. CFOs themselves support the continuance of major existing projects, but it is unclear how often spending requests in such areas will stand up to competing investment priorities in the business.

The focus of investment continues to be on improving customer relationships. Customer service will remain the priority area for IT investments during the coming year. This is for good reason, as evidence mounts from several sectors that customer loyalty is eroding and customer churn increasing. Information management will also be high on the priority list, especially when it comes to projects designed to improve firms’ understanding of customer behavior.

The full results of the study are available free of charge at www.eiu.com/sponsor/sap/technologydecisions

Wolfram|Alpha is a product from Wolfram Research (famous for its beautiful Mathematica software) that has been generating a lot of buzz. It’s a “computational knowledge engine” that gathers information from databases on the web and makes it available through a streamlined and elegant interface. You can type in a question and Wolfram Alpha will interpret it and return information relevant for a particular context. For example, if you ask for “MSFT vs SAP” it will give you financial comparisons, if you ask for “2 cups OJ” it will give you nutritional information, and if you ask “what is the gdp of france / italy”, it show you a chart of that ratio over time (see diagram below).

The basic premise reminds me of the early “natural language query” pioneers of fifteen years ago, Business Objects’ own ill-fated “intelligent query” prototype a few years ago, or Semantra or EasyAsk today, and as I mentioned in an earlier post, Google has started linking searches to charts. But Wolfram Alpha is offering a much more intuitive and flexible interface (based on the screencam, at least).

As Nigel James points out in his post “The alpha computer. A new kind of science”, it’s interesting to speculate about how existing technology will interact with products like Wolfram Alpha in the future, as both inputs and outputs:

“We have heard SAP executives recently talking about how 50 percent of all the worlds financial transactions end up in an SAP system.  What value could that offer as an input to a ‘Computational Knowledge Engine?’"

And of course you can use the results as a starting point for further analysis. A big part of the goal of BI is to “help you answer questions you didn’t know you had”. You want direct answers to some questions, but people will still want to be shown what correlated data exists, and be able to browse through it intuitively (the new SAP BusinessObjects Explorer product excels at this).

If you’re in an appropriate time zone (2 am Saturday morning for me, so I’m not going to make it), you can connect and watch the live WolframAlpha launch broadcast

Finally, as a lapsed Brit (I left 20+ years ago), I have to say I love the bald heads, English accents and the low-key delivery (while still being very effective hype) – a welcome change from all those US-car-commercial-voiceovers!

Will there be a ”domino effect”?

A commentary in Business Week sums up the “domino effect” opinion (more prevalent among financial analysts than industry analysts) that the deal will lead to the purchase of the remaining large independent players. Here are some of the key quotes:

“The question is which makers of so-called business-intelligence software… will be acquired next.”

“The dam has burst in this sector,” says Murray Beach, president of Boston Corporate Finance, an investment bank that advises technology companies. “Business Objects can’t be far behind”.

“Bankers and analysts expect business-intelligence software makers Business Objects (BOBJ) and Cognos (COGN) to be acquired this year.”

Other commentators have taken this a step further, and talked about the end of independent BI as a category. E.g. Tony Baer of OnStrategies Perspectives:

“…BI has little reason to remain a standalone market.”  (See the excellent serious about consulting blog for a direct reply to this)

As Dave Kellogg, former Marketing VP of Business Obje ts, has noted in his blog, the business intelligence industry has been remarkably unconsolidated up until now. How long can this last? And if companies like Business Objects and Cognos are purchased by bigger players, does that also imply that there is no longer a future for independent BI?

Is independent BI no longer needed?

There are three main schools of thought that say that it has outlived its usefulness:

1. BI should be integrated into business applications (the Oracle/SAP argument). People want to access information as a seamless part of their operational applications. Vendors such as Oracle and SAP offer BI tools and data warehousing environments preconfigured for their applications.

2. BI should be integrated with standard user productivity tools (the Microsoft argument). People want to access information directly from Microsoft Office. Excel is arguably the most widely-used BI tool today, and Microsoft aims to provide a robust set of BI tools across their Office suite and applications.

3. BI should be integrated with search (the Google argument). Most corporate information is stored in unstructured format, and surveys show that users would like to be able to access their BI reports using the same easy-to-use search interfaces. Google has deals with all the major BI vendors, has purchased www.gapminder.org and is making some moves in the mobile consumer BI market.

Does this combination of pressures spell doom for the independent vendors? Not necessarily. 

• First, note that there is clearly some truth to each of these scenarios, but they are mutually exclusive — i.e. if BI is a standard part of Office, then it cannot also be a standard part of your SAP environment. This already implies that there’s room for independent players who can blend the best of each approach.
• Second, healthy BI market growth means that success for one set of vendors doesn’t have to imply failure for the others: everybody can expand as the “BI balloon” grows.

Is there a future for Independent BI?

The real question is “will there continue to be a competitive advantage for independent BI tools in the future?” I believe the answer is yes, for the following reasons:

Variety is the spice of life. Organizations will always need to access and analyze information from many different systems.

• Across the organization. Even in the rare cases where an organization has a single “standard” for their applications, much of the information that executives care about comes from a variety of smaller operational systems. And this situation is not going to go away. The search for competitive advantage through new and innovative systems (e.g. RFID…) means that a single source of data for the entire organization is an unreachable nirvana (if you ever get close to having a true standard, I promise you’ll merge with another organization and have to start again!). In addition, companies are reluctant to have only one strategic supplier and lose all bargaining power, and the vendors do everything they can to remain in accounts. One of the reasons Oracle gave for buying Hyperion was its strategic position in SAP accounts — i.e. to make it harder for SAP customers to completely standardize on their main vendor.

• Across the ecosystem. Today’s organizations are part of complex chain running from raw materials to the final customer. It’s rare to find an organization that doesn’t outsource part of their activities to specialists. You share operational information with your largest customers on a daily basis (although sadly often only via phone or fax). Even if your operational systems are with one particular vendor, you’ll need to be able to access information from across the ecosystem to get a true view of your operational activities.
• Across the industry. Business executives increasingly need external information as part of their BI environments, including industry statistics such as market share, customer satisfaction, and benchmarks against their competitors.
• Data integration isn’t enough. Data integration technology alone cannot solve this problem. There will always be some data sources that require too much time or cost to integrate into the data warehousing environment, and users will always need to integrate and analyze information from multiple sources on the fly.

Vested interests are important. There is no technological reason why Oracle cannot continue to provide excellent support for, say, Hyperion in SAP environments. In practice however, Oracle is in fierce competition with SAP and is unlikely to act with strict neutrality, particularly with regard to embedding BI into the operational workflows of SAP. The vendors protest that they are open and will do what’s best for their customers, but there’s a reason that sports teams and referees are discouraged from betting on the matches they play in.

Focus leads to expertise. Ten years ago, the benefits of buying a BI tool from your database vendor were just as obvious as the benefits of buying one from your application vendor today, but that didn’t stop the success of independent BI vendors. Focus comes down to what one cares about. Independent BI vendors care about their customers’ BI success. Oracle cares about beating SAP and selling more applications and databases. So far, the history of the industry indicates that vendors focused on BI are likely to provide a more innovative, customer-focused solution than those that view BI primarily as a means of selling their platform, databases, applications, or middleware.

BI is highly lev
eraged. BI is the final layer between business people and the millions of dollars you have invested in your information systems. A small difference in BI effectiveness can have a large effect on the overall return on IT investment.

Who’s the best customer for independent BI?

Organizations that:

• Have a combination of Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, and other domain-specific applications, and use MS Office.
• Are in fast-moving industries, may need to purchase or merge with another company one day, or otherwise need flexibility in their systems.
• Work closely with their ecosystem of partners, would like to share information with them.
• Use external information for benchmarking and need to share information with market and regulatory authorities.
• Care about using information to help turn strategy into execution at all levels of the organization.

In other words, just about everyone…

Maybe Oracle, SAP, and Microsoft will deliver on their promises this time. Maybe “good enough” is as much as most people need. Maybe Google will upset the whole industry. But I’m hoping that BI is strategic enough for independent BI to live up to its theoretical potential.

Finally, will Business Objects or Cognos get purchased? 

Who knows. Both are a public companies and the executive teams hold only a minority of the stock, so ultimately the potential suitor and the shareholders would decide. But any purchaser would lose a large part of the value of the company overnight, since it would no longer be independent, with all the advantages above.