Information Week Business Intelligence Article

I just finished reading the Information Week IN DEPTH article on Business Intelligence, which focused on the big 4 BI vendors, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP.

The article provides a nice overview of their respective BI capabilities, with the focus on their recent acquisitions and efforts to integrate these products into their BI offerings.   The author provides a summary of next steps for each vendor product, and pros and cons for each platform. One piece of information she failed to provide was an overview of their specific product offerings, which I’ve filled in with the attached report from my FullView vendor database (360DegreeView Research).

In general I agree with the author’s summarization of the 4 vendor’s product suites.  Her bottom line is that customers should benefit from tighter integration between the various acquired products, for instance IBM integrating the Cognos with the DB2 database platform.   And she correctly points out that the biggest bang will be in tighter integration between business intelligence and data integration tools with enterprise applications such as SAP and Siebel. 

While this is a boon to those companies that have gone to a one vendor enterprise solution, I feel that this could be an issue with the majority of buyers with a heterogeneous environment.  This goes beyond the obvious question of cross-company product support (e.g., Cognos, recently acquired by IBM, on an Oracle 11 database).  The bigger question in my mind is the future investments in these various acquired products, with the inevitable pull towards making investments in integration versus innovation of the product itself.  It also raises the question of who will pay for this increased integration, and will this impact the cost to those customers buying the standalone product.

Bottom line, I think these integrated product suites will be a viable option for Fortune 500 customers, but I feel this will prove a boon to open source and best of breed point solutions.

This entry was posted on 17. April 2008 at 14:49 and is filed under Vendors. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.