Dashboards - Business Intelligence

Teradata Scalability Enhancements in 8.2

Sep 30, 2006 BI News

Teradata announces scalability enhancements to the upcoming, 8.2 version of its proprietary database. Enhancements include:

* Teradata’s system can now create partitions in join indexes. Oracle 10gR2 has the broadest range of indexing schemas to support fast query performance. These include B-Tree indexes, B-Tree cluster indexes, Hash Cluster Indexes, Reverse Key Indexes, Bitmap Indexes, Bitmap Join Indexes, Function-based indexes, and Domain Indexes. Oracle has had Materialized Views for facts and dimensions with SQL rewrite since Oracle 8i, and bitmap join indexes since Oracle 9i.
* Teradata claims it has also made join indices more flexible, allowing them to be used in conjunction with database triggers that monitor events and act on data events to further improve query performance.  It claims better support for event monitoring, simplified systems management and high-system availability, all areas in which Oracle 10gR2 excels.
* Teradata has also added a Java Messaging interface for its data-loading utilities to make it easier for the system to pull in data from disparate data sources.  Pulling data from non-Teradata sources has historically been a significant weakness for Teradata, making it a nightmare for many customers to create analytic applications sourced from diverse data sources. In contrast, Customers have unlimited data source access with Oracle.

Comments:

* Needless to say, Warehouse 8.2 comprises of a suite of pre-bundled Teradata software, hardware, including the Teradata Database V2R6.2, Teradata Tools and Utilities 8.2, and the NCR 5450 Server that was introduced in early 2006, and consulting services, so a customer that wants the enhanced functionality, must go through an expensive Teradata upgrade, often equivalent in price to a brand new Oracle system.
* Teradata is giving its customers the privilege to prepay for Warehouse 8.2 today, but they can’t install the new system until next year. By all indications, Teradata needed something to announce at its user conference.

Retailers Show Signs of Intelligence

Aug 12, 2006 Other

Seventy-six percent of retailers use or have active, budgeted plans to use business intelligence in some form or another within their organizations within the next couple of years, according to a new report from Aberdeen Group. Yet only 21 percent of retailers indicated that they have had enterprise wide business intelligence systems for at least two years.

The report also finds that there still areas of opportunity many retailers have yet to address. For example, 11% of retailers are looking at business intelligence data on a near-real time basis. In addition, 42% of retailers use spreadsheets to manage their business- intelligence data, despite recognizing that such a practice is inefficient. Other internal data management challenges include decentralized data scattered through out the organization, lack of customer-specific information to generate valid results, and business processes not lending themselves to making use of information.

The report, “Business Cohesion in Retail: Bringing Cohesion to a Fragmented Enterprise,” states that average retailers have largely missed opportunities to make better decisions by viewing data on an ad-hoc basis, rather than at regularly scheduled intervals.

“Smaller companies have as many as 10 different data marts, while firms over $1 billion will have as many as 50 data marts within the company,” adds Leslie Ament, Aberdeen channel director for the customer intelligence practice. Large retailers tend to be near the upper end of this range due to the array of different suppliers.

You can read it the full article here

Behind SAP’s Business Intelligence Accelerator

Aug 7, 2006 BI News, Other

In an article published today, eWeek claims: SAP may have stumbled onto an Oracle killer: in-memory technology that could, in theory, quash the need for a relational database in some cases.

This Rather Incomplete eWeek Article Makes The Following Points:

With Business Intelligence Accelerator (BIA) SAP has sussed out a way to organize its business intelligence data in columns versus tables, storing and indexing the data in memory and then running it all on blade servers.
The result is faster queries than would be possible by tapping data stored in a data warehouse or relational database.
Coca Cola showed a 90 percent increase in reporting performance, with queries cut from 60 seconds down to 3 seconds in the case of Coca-Cola using BIA
SAP is working on in-memory data management capabilities that could go beyond BI to other areas of the application stack, replacing the need for a relational database in new software installations.
 

Either eWeek Didnt Do its Homework or Just Flat Out Neglected to Mention:

SAP uses the same column-based or vertical decomposition approach for data compression within BI accelerator that has been employed for years by Sand Technologies and Sybase.
SAP customers that want fast queries STILL need ONE BIA server and BIA software licenses for each instance of SAP NetWeaver BI, in addition to the underlying databases. 

So, BIA duplicates data from SAP NW BI into the BIA, adds another piece of hardware, and requires additional (optional) SAP BIA licenses. Net, Net, BIA adds complexity to already complex BW implementations.
SAP Business Intelligence Accelerator is SAPs workaround for poor performance and scalability of SAP NW BI systems.

SAP BW customers plagued by the notoriously poor performance and limited scalability of

SAP BW systems are now held hostage by SAP to purchase BIA as an expensive option to fix BWs performance and scalability problems.

SAP BW is already known to be the most expensive data warehouse to build and maintain (according to recent OLAP Survey). This additional set of costs only adds to the exorbitant TCO of SAP NW BI (and helps SAP recover lost SAP BW revenue streams from bundling BW for free with NetWeaver).
SAP BIA can only leverage SAP BW Info Cubes as a data source. It does not work with other SAP data sources such as an ODS, let alone other heterogeneous data sources. What happens when performance and scale are needed in a heterogeneous environment? 

 No surprise here - a SAP BW implementation in a heterogeneous environment is like Big Foot, we all hear rumors about its existence, but no ones ever seen one.
There is currently no failover mechanism for BI accelerator (i.e., if the system goes down, the indexes will have to be rebuilt from beginning).
SAP BIA is compatible with SAP NW BI 2004s, so customers must first upgrade to even have the opportunity to pay more and complicate their infrastructure in exchange for performance.
Oracle already has a huge leg up when it comes to in memory database technology as a result of its acquisition of leading in memory database vendor, TimesTen
There are no independent benchmarks for BIA to date, only claims from SAP.

Everyone Has a BI Search Engine!

May 25, 2006 BI News, Other

Cognos Announces Cognos Go! For my SAP and SAP BW

Cognos is furthering its integration with SAP BW, its value proposition as a front-end to SAP BW strategy and has done for SAP BW what SAP Netweaver does not do; it has announced the immediate availability of Cognos Go! Search Service support for SAP. This provides one-click access to BI and SAP data through single search solution. SAP’s current search technology within Netweaver, TREX, is a limited and cumbersome search engine that does not search BW elements such as BEX reports, infocubes, etc.. It searches standard document files, word, ppt, Excel, pdf, .rft.  You can use it to search reports that have been publish to SAP Enterprise Portal (as long as the TREX server is configured to do so), as well as other documents and web pages.

 

Key Features
Cognos has a proprietary indexing scheme that can fully index BI content and search key data fields, not just titles or report descriptions.
SAP customers can access Cognos Go! through SAP Certified iViews in the SAP NetWeaver Portal, and third-party enterprise search solutions including Autonomy, FAST, Google, and IBM Consistent security - Cognos Go! leverages the Cognos 8 Business Intelligence security model, which means SAP users will only see reports, metrics, and analyses that they have been given permission to view.
Cognos Go! can access SAP data across multiple versions and instances of SAP R/3 and SAP NetWeaver, independent of a company’s SAP upgrade plans.
These search capabilities are not natively available in SAP applications.
 

Comments
Post Cognos 8 introduction, Cognos has turned its attention to three areas: Enterprise/ BI search, Increased focus on support for SAP, increased emphasis on Performance Management, with particular focus on industry solutions, and Cognos is also placing increased emphasis on its packaged analytic applications with a focus on easy integration with Enterprise Applications, including Oracle. These packaged analytics are primarily Finance focused and are not yet well development across the other domain areas.
In contrast, Post XI2 release, Business Objects has turned its attention to Enterprise Information Management, Mid Market Solutions, and industry specific solutions, pitting it squarely against Oracle and IBM.
 

Cognos Partners with FAST for Enterprise Search

 

Last month Cognos and FAST announced their intention to partner for Enterprise Search for BI with little press reaction. While this announcement again reiterates the two companies intention to combine their respective products, the announcement does not make any mention of Cognos Go!, Cognos’s proprietary search capability that can currently leverage Google OneBox and IBM OmniSearch.

 

Comment
The slew of announcements by Cognos in Search, CPM and vertical solutions (all areas except Cognos 8), seems to be a desperate attempt by Cognos to deflect the market away from the realities slow adoption of the Cognos 8 platform.

 

IBM’s BI Search Capability

 The WebSphere Content Discovery for Business Intelligence, now a competitor to Oracle partner, Google Onebox, combines business intelligence applications with search for structured and unstructured information within an enterprise.

 The software can also display within BI applications contracts, spreadsheets, project plans, scanned images, audio, video, email and other correspondence, to provide context for business decisions. Cognos has integrated the IBM product (in addition to the Google Onebox product) with Cognos 8 Business Intelligence via a proprietary indexing scheme. The new product delivers in search results information from BI systems, including reports, scorecards and dashboards.

 

By combining unstructured information with BI, the new product, for example, could extract data from call center and warranty notes and make it available for use with BI-generated quantity, sales and return rates for products, IBM said. Together the information could help uncover reasons why return rates are high.

 

Hyperion Claims to Have BI Search by Adding Business Word Search Features to System 9

OK, Hyperion seems to be claiming a really desperate “me too� with this release!!! Of course word search on reports is NOTHING NEW and in no way resembles the Google OneBox capability adopted by Oracle and for that matter other BI vendors. Google OneBox gives corporations secure access to information in any application within the enterprise from the Google search box.

 

Comments
Hyperion claims that reports will contain links to related topics, categories or reports. WOW, what a concept!! Oracle Enterprise BI (AKA SBA), offers extensive guided analytics capability, where not only are links to related or relevant reports suggested to the end user, but also filter context is also passed between reports that are linked together. Hyperion Interactive Reporting, part of Hyperion 9, doesn’t even offer linked reports, with context or otherwise. All related content must be included in a single file.

 SAS and Google OneSearch

Following in the footsteps of BI rivals like Information Builders and Cognos, SAS has also partnered with  Google Inc to allow joint customers to perform context-based searching across SAS-generated reports, analyses and dashboard information. SAS will give users contextually relevant search capabilities with Google to explore metadata, but also to look at the business views (SAS Information Maps) that have been defined by SAS clients.

 

A Discussion of Google’s Impact on BI

It seems as if the business intelligence pure-play vendors are taking fire on all fronts.

From Oracle, IBM, MSFT and SAP, all of which are placing a greater strategic emphasis on BI and Enterprise Search capabilities of their own, and now from Google, which for now is a complement to add more user friendliness to BI platforms and expand their potential user base.

 Google claims that Google Search Appliance is a distinct improvement over the portal interface, which many BI vendors have pushed as a means to drive broader user adoption.  This remains to be seen. Search and Portal seem complementary to me; I’m not sure the two are mutually exclusive.

 While Google claims the search engine will hide the complexity of the underlying data, e.g. if a user searches its repository for adapters and returns IBI’s iWay adapters, users themselves aren’t necessarily aware that they’re accessing WebFocus or other IBI data, Best of breed vendors don’t seem to worry about potential brand dilution. Cognos for instance claims that they will brand their BI content in the file name, e.g. Cognos Scorecard, or Cognos Report.

 

There’s another upshot of the search phenomenon, howeverâ€?it could mean the end of per-seat BI licensing agreements.

 

 

NextAction Migrates from SQL Server to Oracle!!

May 24, 2006 BI News, Other

NextAction Migrates from SQL Server to Oracle!! Proof that SQL Server not There Yet for Enterprise DW  - Thanks to Bill Nee for sending. 

 

   

The Bottom Line Results from the Migration 

• 8X faster application development 
• 12X faster data loads 
• Exponentially faster updates (1.5 days then crash, down to 10 minutes) 
• Significantly lower hardware costs ($2MMM to $40,000) 
• 8 instances to 1 
• 30 TB down to 5 TB (lower disk costs) 
• Data mining results down from 8 days to one 

  

Situation: 

• In 2004, the company’s 13TB data warehouse was spread across five Microsoft SQL Server 2000 databases. 
• But within a year, the fast-growing firm’s database had grown to 30TB spread across eight instances of SQL Server 2000. “My guys were working 70 to 80 hours a week,â€Â? he said. “We were dying on the vine.â€Â?  
• NextAction’s data warehouse was growing too fast to easily manage on SQL Server, said Helle, and it would crash so often that the process of mining data for retailers grew from three and a half days to eight days — a major problem, since the data mining took place weekly. “That’s what really impacted revenue, the fact that it failed quite often,â€Â? Helle said. 
• Partly because the rest of NextAction was mostly a Microsoft .Net environment, Helle tested the then-beta version of SQL Server 2005 against Oracle 10g, both of which had 64-bit versions. 

  

The Results in More Detail 

  

• Microsoft treated Helle well, putting NextAction into a special program for extremely large databases that included plenty of support. But within two weeks, the results were clear to Helle. “SQL Server has made great strides in the past couple of years. But like I told the Microsoft guys, it’s hard to match [Oracle’s] 15 years of evolution,â€Â? he said. 
• Not only was Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g much more stable, it was also much faster, Helle said. “We ran about 20 benchmarks. Creating applications was, on average, eight times faster on Oracle. Loading data was about 12 times faster. An updating statement that died after 1.5 days on SQL Server without completing took one hour and 10 minutes to finish on Oracle.â€Â? 
• The weekly customer data mining now takes only one day. That is in part because NextAction uses Oracle Partitioning to run more than 1,100 partitions, one for each customer. 
• That 30TB database was shrunk to just 5TB after being rewritten — and it was moved to one Oracle instance from eight. For backup purposes, NextAction is using Oracle’s Data Guard, which sets up a mirror with a second, identical Oracle database. 
• Although the majority of databases Helle had run involved Oracle on Unix, for speed and cost reasons he chose a Hewlett-Packard Co. DL 585 server using four AMD Opteron processors with Novell Inc.’s SUSE Linux operating system. That configuration cost about $40,000, versus $2 million for the prior SQL Server-based system. 
• “SQL Server has made great strides in the past couple of years. But like I told the Microsoft guys, it’s hard to match [Oracle’s] 15 years of evolution,â€Â? he said. 
• Not only was Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g much more stable, it was also much faster, Helle said. “We ran about 20 benchmarks. Creating applications was, on average, eight times faster on Oracle. Loading data was about 12 times faster. An updating statement that died after 1.5 days on SQL Server without completing took one hour and 10 minutes to finish on Oracle.â€Â? 
• The weekly customer data mining now takes only one day. That is in part because NextAction uses Oracle Partitioning to run more than 1,100 partitions, one for each customer. 
• That 30TB database was shrunk to just 5TB after being rewritten — and it was moved to one Oracle instance from eight. For backup purposes, NextAction is using Oracle’s Data Guard, which sets up a mirror with a second, identical Oracle database. 
• Although the majority of databases Helle had run involved Oracle on Unix, for speed and cost reasons he chose a Hewlett-Packard Co. DL 585 server using four AMD Opteron processors with Novell Inc.’s SUSE Linux operating system. That configuration cost about $40,000, versus $2 million for the prior SQL Server-based system. 
• That price doesn’t include the storage, which Helle acknowledged was expensive. But it is also large: The HP StorageWorks XP1200 disk array can store 330TB, which Helle thinks should easily last him five years. Just in case, though, the HP can manage a total of 3 petabytes via auxiliary systems. 
• Helle is also testing Oracle RAC (Real Application Clusters) to help ease future growth. 

Microsoft

May 24, 2006 BI News

Microsoft  

  Microsoft Plans to Close Business Intelligence Product Gap and Shift Competitive Position With ProClarity – Gartner Group, Bill Hostmann  

   

artner makes the following observations regarding Microsoft’s acquisition of Proclarity: 

Questions remain regarding product integration and “fit” into Microsoft’s overall BI and business performance management product road map. 

  

Proclarity has been a departmental solution, there are significant questions regarding the products ability to support enterprise implementations. “..the average deployment size for ProClarity tends to be departmental, smaller and less expensive compared with companies such as Business Objects, Cognos, or Information Builders and Panorama.â€� 

  

ProClarity, Microsoft will have the potential to improve the development tools for Reporting Services. “(Several developers using Microsoft Reporting Services said that it was difficult to get multidimensional results sets into the form they wanted for their reports, and were struggling with the current Reporting Services development tools.)â€� 

  

Reporting and Analysis in SQL Server 2005 are not yet fully integrated, “The ProClarity platform also will enable Microsoft to link (drill down) reporting and analysis, as well as scorecards (its own and the new Microsoft Business Scorecard Manager) and analysis — a hole in the Microsoft BI portfolio, which probably was not going to be closed until late 2007, with the release of Excel 12 server-based edition.â€� 

“Some Microsoft and ProClarity products overlap in key areas, such as development and administration tools and dashboards. These offerings and overlaps will need to be explained in a product road map after the acquisition closes.â€� 

  

Pricing and packaging will need to be mapped out for customers. “Proclarity has more typical, although less expensive than best of breed vendors Cognos and Business Objects.â€� 

  

“It is also unclear what strategy changes, if any, Microsoft’s BI partners — such as Cognos, Business Objects and Panorama — will take in response to this proposed acquisition. We expect that these partners will feel increased pressure from Microsoft as a competitor and will pursue new opportunities and strategies, such as packaged analytical applications and process embedded capabilities/applications, to rise above the emerging BI battlefield being shaped by increasing investments in BI from Oracle, SAP and now Microsoft.â€Â? 

Is Hyperion Desperate for Some Positive Coverage?

May 24, 2006 BI News

Hyperion and MSFT Announce Great Collaboration; In the Face of Horrible Q1 Results, Is Hyperion Desperate for Some Positive Coverage? 

  

ccording to Hyperion, integration of Microsoft SQL Server technologies with Hyperion System 9 BI+ to will enable interoperability for mutual customers.  

  

Collaboration plans include four initiatives that integrate Microsoft SQL Server 2005 technologies — including SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services, SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services and SQL Server 2005 Integration Services — with Hyperion System 9 BI+. 

  

This announcement is a bit puzzling and seems like a desperate attempt to gain attention on the part of Hyperion. Hyperion 9 includes Ad hoc analysis, Reporting, OLAP (Essbase), as well as Planning and Budgeting, all of which (except for Planning) overlaps in functionality with SQL Server 2005 BI.

Hyperion

May 24, 2006 BI News

Sluggish Sales for Hyperion System 9 Continue Due to High Price Tag and Migration Cost; No Relief In Sight from Upstream Acquisition or Upcoming BPM Architect Product 

   

yperion is projecting a 10%, or $28 million, in fiscal 2007, which is seen by many in the financial community as a major disappointment, given the September 2005 launch of S9, upcoming releases such as BPM Architect, and recent acquisitions including Razza Solutions (which brought the Master Data Management product, Hyperion’s fastest-growing product). First Analysis Securities Corporation estimates that UpStream and MDM combined can contribute 5%, or $14 million, in incremental license revenue in fiscal 2007.  That leaves only $14 million from incremental sales of System 9, not a very rosy picture, indeed. 

  

According to First Analysis Securities, high license fees and lengthy migrations are a significant hurdle for customers considering an upgrade to System 9. They comment, “Our key takeaway is that System 9, like many of the integrated BI platforms, is a step function improvement in performance and usability. However, that benefit carries a high price tag of a long and complex implementation process and sales cycle, making the timing of customer upgrades somewhat uncertain. Despite earnest customer interest in the new product capabilities, we don’t see this cycle ramping results in the near term.â€� 

  

Poor Hyperion Q3 results seem to confirm that System 9 sales are suffering from technical issues and/or the new license (i.e. migration) fee. According to First Analysis, “We talked with one of Hyperion’s larger international customers at the event that “continues to struggleâ€� with the S9 license fees. First Analysis also spoke with Hyperion customer, Norway Post, which incurred licensing costs in excess of $1 million to migrate to S9 and purchase additional products. In spite of this, they are articulating a strong valuation proposition for the product. 

  

In a confirmation of Hyperion’s challenges with System 9 sales, according to a First Analysis Hyperion User Conference Report, three important partners (each located in the three major regions, east, central, and west) focused on the business intelligence platform business have not yet completed more than a handful of migrations in total.  They said, ‘While we did hear from partners about improvements with S9 in the area of configuration and trouble-shooting, negative comments focused on a lack of S9 documentation, as well as a shortage of pre-sales talent and in-depth knowledge across the entire offering (i.e. relational and OLAP).â€� 

  

BPM Architect  

The fall release of BPM Architect (part of version 9.3) will likely be a major release and innovation for application customers. BPM Architect will allow Hyperion customers to build and maintain applications (e.g. Planning and HFM) in a single environment with shared dimensions and properties, as well as data synchronization. Hyperion claims that like Essbase 7X, System 9 will have slow and steady growth until sales pick up in 12 –24 months. Hyperion also claims that BPM Architect will help to accelerate this growth. Question is, how much and how complex will the migration path be from the current set of completely disparate development environments, AND how much training will be required?? No doubt, this will add to the challenge of moving to System 9.   

  

Other Announced Enhancements  

As per the recent user conference, Hyperion will focus on the following areas in the upcoming release: 

• Business language search for simplicity and ease-of-use (see below) – OK, like everyone else.. 
• Prescriptive metrics for guided analytics – not sure where and how they will do this… 
• Adaptive visualization for personalization – Again, not sure what this means, but everyone is improving visualization. 

  

 

Skinny on Upstream  

Hyperion’s acquisition of UpStream provides financial data quality. UpStream provides a data readiness and guided workflow application for tracking the movement of financial information from source to report. UpStream software supports data collection and transformation, internal control, repeatable financial processes and audit trails back to the source systems. UpStream’s data quality workflow platform — WebLink DM – allows organizations to control and track data utilization back to source systems. WebLink DM automates business workflow processes that incorporate strict integrity controls required for verifiable financial data quality processes. WebLink DM moves data from multiple source systems, transforms the data, and then loads it into a customer’s analytical applications — including Hyperion BI applications – through a repeatable, defined workflow. The product provides a comprehensive audit trail to address Sarbanes-Oxley requirements. 

  

The acquisition fills a key capability gap for Hyperion in data quality and auditing capability needed for SOX compliance. While Oracle and Business Objects have their own robust and broad DQM capabilities, which can match the functionality provided by Upstream, this acquisition provides niche Financial Data Quality Management capabilities, specifically, which will be attractive to Hyperion’s traditional Finance target customer base. Hyperion hopes that the purchase will accelerate migrations from Enterprise to HFM. It is unclear whether or not Hyperion/ Upstream will continue to support 3^rd party data quality tools. 

   Upstream Acquisition Positive Comments 

• Focus on the Financial DQM problem and provides enabling capability specifically for SOX and HIPPA 

• DQM offering for business users 

• Complementary to other Hyperion products; little overlap 

• Upstream supports both process-oriented compliance (i.e., automation of financial data-quality workflows) and also feedback-oriented compliance (i.e., provision of a comprehensive audit trail on these workflows) 
• Adds a differentiator for Hyperion CPM products 

   Upstream Acquisition Negative Comments 

• With this acquisition, there are potentially multiple workflow technologies/ environments in Hyperion’s portfolio. Hyperion has not yet announced plans to rationalize these. The existence of multiple environments (BI, CPM, MDM) would make achieving a single source of truth difficult. This would constitute a significant rearchitecture and future migration issues for Hyperion customers 
• No indication of whether or not the Upstream will continue to support 3^rd party DQM products 

·         The niche financial data quality offering confirms Hyperion core target customer base, Finance. The acquisition does nothing to rescue Hyperion’s relatively unsuccessful attempts to make inroads into other departments within the organization, which has effectively limited Hyperion’s applicability as an enterprise CPM platform.

BOBJ Results

May 24, 2006 BI News

BOBJ announced their results and Sent Shares South by over 12%; only 10% of Customers Have Upgraded to XI2   

    

usiness Objects announced its quarterly profit fell 18% as expenses, including those for stock options, rose to more than offset a 12% increase in revenue. 

  

According to SG Cowen, “We Remain Cautiously Pessimistic. We believe fundamentals at BOBJ are 100% tied to the current XI product cycle. Our FY06 earnings model is predicated on the assumption that this is the year BOBJ sales reps sell back into loyal accounts that have been starved for product for years. While XIr2 product cycle may be two years long, we expect preponderance of license sales to be closed in FY06, putting growth in FY07 at material risk. Three other factors also worry us: 

1. SI partners continue to grumble about encroachment from BOBJ’s Services arm, which appears to be alienating an important part of the ecosystem. Co will have a hard time driving rev growth if partners start moving away from BOBJ to other BI vendors. 

 2. Despite co’s comments on growth from the SRC acquisition, we aren’t hearing about it in the field. If co doesn’t plant Performance Management seeds as it sells XIr2, it’s going to be hard to harvest that revenue stream next year. 

3. ORCL’s BI efforts have had new life breathed into them with Siebel Analytics, SAP’s mediocre offering has the benefit of a massive installed base, and MSFT continues to provide the low cost alternative.â€Â? 

  

Comment  

They should also be worried about the fact that customers are slow to migrate..According to (see above) BOBJ CEO, only 10% of BOBJ customers have taken on the cost and expense of migration.