The Evolving BI Landscape
May 21, 2008
The BI Market is consolidating and continuing to evolve at considerable speed. The recent wave of acquisitions has resulted in 3 broad market categories:
1. Vertical Applications
2. Niche Value/Best of Breed Applications
3. Technology Platforms
The Vertical Applications market is evenly split between Oracle and SAP, both companies have acquired a multiplicity of BI tools and technologies and are focused on extending the value of the core applications offering.
Examples of niche/best of breed applications would be the newly emerging Qlikview or the Logi9 BI platform from LogiXML in the Reporting and Analytics space or Teradata/Netezza/Vertica in the high performance data warehouse space. Some of these products are new some have been around for a while and serve a particular niche well.
The third category Technology Platforms is dominated by IBM and Microsoft, both of these companies provide a complete ‘Information Server’ platform which can be used to source, package and deliver information to a multiplicity of different users.
Evolving in parallel to these 3 market categories is the open source BI movement, however despite offering a wide range of functionality at a compelling cost in terms of software acquisition. The costs which will be incurred over the full lifecycle of the solution are still far from understood.
However there appears to be a general reluctance among users of these platforms to deliver the end to end solution entirely from one vendor. The acquisition of the de-facto standard in enterprise reporting, Cognos 8, by IBM will definitely put this to the test.
Microsoft actively promotes both it’s own desktop/intranet focused tools and provides the platform for many niche players. An emerging alternative to the combination of IBM and Cognos in the coming year, will be the combination of the Microsoft ‘Information Server’ platform with the unified Business Intelligence offering from LogiXML, Logi9.
The successful entrance of Logi into this market was acknowledged by Gartner in the 2008 BI Quadrant.
Watch this space ………………….
