Market consolidation reaches absurd new heights! Many thanks to Piet Loubser for forwarding a link to this DM Review article by David O’Connell of Nucleus Research:
Oracle’s recent acquisition of best-of-breed performance management vendor Cartesis means that ERP vendors want to take their BI-related functionality up a notch.
Wait! Didn’t Business Objects buy Cartesis?!
The article should of course read “…performance management vendor Hyperion…”.
Apart from this “data quality” issue, the article does talk about some key BI truths:
(1) It’s about maximizing benefits, not minimizing costs. Price isn’t the number one criteria. BI is highly leveraged — it’s what unleashes the value of the millions of dollars that you’ve invested in your information systems. So a product that’s even just a little more powerful or easier to use is worth the extra cost.
(2) The benefits and use of BI are hard to predict in advance (“you don’t know what you don’t know”) — so choosing a vendor with a broad set of functionality can be a smart move.
(3) User adoption is key. Just implementing BI provides zero value — it has to be used, and has to result in changes to the business, and ease of use is necessary for wide usage (although not sufficient — training and change management skills are also essential)