Dashboards, Reporting & Business Intelligence

The Winter ‘07 release will offer “unlimited customization” for analytics and BI tools, including Business Objects Crystal Xcelsius. According to the “Future Visionâ€Â? presentation given by SF.com, what that loosely means is that “users will have the ability to fully componentize the on-demand CRM application’s analytical dashboards so they can mash up or bring together components of different vendors’ business intelligence (BI) software, which they can then share and manage. Users will be able to engage in a wide range of BI activities that can be displayed on their dashboards within Salesforce, including supply chain analysis, complex what-if scenarios and profitability analysis.â€Â? So far, only Business Objects is signed up.

Comment:

* This is an intention announcement; actual product is likely to vary from the vision.
* While SF.com claims 13 BI vendors, including JasperSoft are expected to support the project, only Business Objects and JasperSoft are mentioned by name.
* Since BI spans the enterprise, and customers are likely to have a broader range of enterprise applications, and therefore analytic requirements than CRM, why would a company create an analytic island on salesforce.com?

Pentaho announced the latest in a string of open-source project buys, with the acquisition of the Weka data mining and predictive analytics project developed by the University of Waikato in New Zealand.

The move follows the startup’s previous purchases of the Mondrian OLAP engine, the JFreeReport Java reporting library, and the Kettle ETL project.

So far, the start-up doesn’t provide customer numbers for its commercial software, but on the open-source side, Pentaho saw 85,000 downloads of its offerings in August.

According to the company, making money is not a priority. The CEO was quoted as saying, “Monetization is about fourth or fifth down the list in terms of our priorities.”

Pentaho plans to compete against Cognos and Business Objects and other open-source BI players like JasperSoft, in addition to SPSS and SAS.

Comments:

* While the company is filling out its BI stack, there are no identifiable customers for the commercial version of its software. It is clear that enterprise customers are still leary of betting the farm on an unproven product, not matter how low the cost. Downloads are not an accurate measure of customers, as they include multiple downloads, evaluations, etc. No matter how much the company claims that money is not important, their $6MM in venture funding will only go so far. Eventually, paying customers will have to fund ongoing investments in development/acquisitions and sales.

Pentaho announced the near-term availability of Pentaho Open BI Suite 1.2, which they claim offers significant ease-of-use enhancements and the broadest open source BI offering available. Upgrades include report templates, new chart types, drag-and-drop BI workflows, and a variety of enhancements to increase administrator productivity.

Pentaho Open BI Suite 1.2 contains numerous enhancements to the Pentaho Design Studio, where administrators create and maintain BI applications. The user interface has been streamlined and now supports drag-and-drop creation of BI workflows with a new design panel that provides a graphical, flowchart-style view of BI workflows, including report bursting, business logic and more.

According to Ventana Research, “Our research shows that having a complete BI offering is the most valuable feature in an open source BI offering. Users are clearly looking for more than just reporting in open source BI offerings.”

Comments

* While Pentaho appears to be the farthest along in offering a complete BI stack, than other open source offerings, there are still no identifiable customers, let alone any proof points at enterprise scale. For customers looking for proven scalability, enterprise security and integration with enterprise applications, open source, at whatever price will not be a viable option at this point in time.

SAS has released SAS for Marketing Performance Management, new software to help solve the problem of calculating marketing’s contribution to an organization’s bottom line.

The solution is integrated with SAS’ suite of customer intelligence solutions and provides predefined marketing focused scorecards for measuring and tracking marketing results.

Key Features:

* Standard marketing KPIs that comprise marketing best practices, including marketing program metrics, customer metrics, business/financial metrics and marketing process metrics with drill-down ability – this is the core product
* Predictive analytics, correlation analysis, trending – these are optional
* Data cleansing tools to ensure consistency, accuracy and reliability – these are optional (DataFlux tools)
* SAS’ performance management offerings are all built on the SAS Enterprise Intelligence Platform. This platform offers unmatched data integration, storage, business intelligence and analytics, so you can always be confident that your choices will deliver the expected results.
* SAS can provide activity-based management to understand the profitability of products, customers and channels, but this is optional – see the ABM handson analysis above

Comments

* This offering is essentially the SAS scorecarding product with some predefined scorecard content. All other capabilities that are positioned as features and benefits of this offering, such as analytics, data quality, activity based costing, and the platform itself are all additional licensed components (the platform is a required component).
* A customer must also buy the R9 platform, which locks the customer into SAS’s proprietary and expensive technology and ongoing leasing license model, for which the customer must pay at least 33% per year in lease payments.

http://www.tdwi.org/News/display.aspx?ID=8106

After decades of executing exclusively with direct sales, SAS Institute is launching its first reseller program, giving participants access to parts of a product line.

It is offering its partners margins not only on initial product license sales but also on the recurring revenue stream it derives from annual maintenance renewals. If partners meet criteria such as certification and customer-satisfaction goals, they will receive 25 percent of the renewal fee each year on deals they landed, SAS executives said.  Other BI vendors do not give partners a cut of the maintenance fees.

Two dozen resellers have already signed on with SAS since the program’s April launch.

SAS wants its resellers to target midmarket companies with less than $1 billion in annual revenue. According to SAS, the company’s internal sales team will be compensated very competitively on deals done through the channel, receiving commissions on 50 percent of the software’s list price.

SAS aims to sign up 50 partners this year and 150 by the end of next, concentrating on selling to midmarket customers with revenue of less than $1 billion.

Comments

* In spite of SAS’s already initially favorably priced BI Server platform with a direct sales force, up take of the R9 platform has been slow. An estimated 90% of SAS revenue comes from renewal revenue, and most of this from its flagship data mining and statistics products. Customers aren’t buying into SAS because the products aren’t best of breed, are difficult to use, are proprietary, and require a large yearly renewal fee. Offering incentives to channels is unlikely to changes this reality.
* Let’s not forget that SAS recently laid off employees, very much against its corporate culture. And, much like the other pure play vendors is trying new ways to bolster growth and remain profitable in the face on intense competitive pressure from Oracle, Microsoft and SAP.

In a last ditch effort to save itself from oblivion in the data warehouse market, with the help of a series of acquisitions, Sybase has cobbled together a data integration platform. The acquisitions first started with EII vendor, Avaki Corp., and then German ETL and EII vendor Solonde AG.

Sybase announced Sybase Data Integration Suite (SDIS), which is intended to integrate the acquired assets together. It is intended to provide a common set of modeling, design, development, and administration services for Sybase’s data integration tools.

Comments

SDIS will not be a panacea for Sybase in the data warehouse market:

* While Sybase PowerDesigner does support modeling, data design, and metadata management in SDIS 1.0, Sybase’s re-branded version of the former Solonde Transform On Demand product�i.e., Sybase ETL�won’t be incorporated into SDIS’ modeling, design, metadata, and administrative purview until Sybase delivers version 2.0 of that product, which isn’t expected until late next year.
* According to Mike Schiff, a principal with data warehousing consultancy MAS Strategies,  “If Sybase can find a way to get developers interested in more than just their mobile [SQL Anywhere technology], in IQ or what they’re doing with data integration … then maybe they could make a modest comeback,â€Â?
* The composite suite, while new for Sybase, delivers little, if anything, in the way of new data integration functionalityâ€�while the EII capabilities are there, due to the acquisition of  Avaki, the suite still lacks an integrated ETL component.  The separate Sybase ETL tool itself is little more than just a re-branded version of Solonde’s On Demand ETL product.

Sybase IQ 12.7 includes functionality that will enhance loading and ease of data migration from operational systems and analytics including additional online analytical processing (OLAP) functions.

Comments

* Much like other niche vendors like Netezza, Sybase IQ can only provide strong performance in a limited set of analytic scenarios: When the number of columns in a table that is queried are limited. As the number of columns increases, the database must reassemble rows, which results in slower performance compared with a large query in a row-based system.

Unlike Oracle, Sybase has two different databases, one for OLTP (ASE) and one for DW (IQ), which complicates an organization’s infrastructure. This added complexity is the same as having Teradata or Netezza in addition to Oracle for OTLP.

Hyperion announced its own play in Enterprise Search with a partnership with Google OneBox. However, Hyperion claims that its integration is differentiated from most others because it gives users and ability to construct BI queries right from the native Google OneBox search box, and not just to pull up pre-existing, indexed BI reports and information.

“If report or view does not exist for a search query then our software fires off SQL and MDX against Essbase or other MDX-compliant sources like SAP BW,” Hyperion said.

Hyperion Integrates Tableau into Hyperion 9 Via OEM

Hyperion announced that it is integrating Tableau Software into Hyperion 9 via an extension of its OEM agreement with Tableau, in the form of a new version of Hyperion Visual Explorer. Hyperion claims that this new version is expected to provide enhanced capabilities in predictive and statistical analytics.

Under the terms of the OEM agreement, Hyperion would offer Tableau’s latest technology to its customers, including a range of new visual analysis capabilities that were not previously available.

BI News from SAP TechEd: SAP announces Enterprise Search as part of BIA; Nothing New its TREX!

SAP Enterprise Search, touted as an application that allows SAP users to leverage search capabilities across their enterprise and then relate that information to specific business context, was unveiled. The new application reportedly goes beyond text-based searches by considering the enterprise’s schema and data model, as well as the role, preferences, and intentions of the person conducting the search, according to Antone Gonsalves of TechWeb. SAP Enterprise Search will be available next year.

Comments

SAP appears to be trying to jump on the bandwagon of integrating BI with Search technology. TREX is already part of SAP’s Business Intelligence Accelerator. It is an antiquated, dinosaur of a technology that requires a complete SAP Tech stack and is extremely resource intensive.