Online Dashboards For Business Intelligence on Top of the CIO Wish List

At a time of a slow economy, when IT budgets are being slimmed and trimmed, Business Intelligence (BI) remains a top priority with CIOs and IT management.


Most organizations are already working with BI in some manner, but most have a vast number of tools and vendors spread around the various departments of the organization and are in dire need of product consolidation. The demand from small and medium-sized companies is also increasing, as well as supply of premium packaged solutions for this SME (small and medium enterprise) space.

With the advent of online banking and mobile devices, It is now becoming commonplace for companies to invest in IT solutions as an online rented service, or SaaS (Software as a Service). This type of 'cloud computing' offering, while accounting for a smaller marginal piece of the overall pie, will increase in double digits as a result of the the mindset of some companies to reduce some internal IT infrastructure.

Some ERP/CRM vendors are offering built-in BI tools, embedded in the applications themselves. While some ERP vendors (qad, IBS) have relied on solutions like IBM Cognos to provide 'best of breed BI,' vendors like Netsuite (ERP) and Salesforce.com (CRM) has impressive organic embedded BI tools, including dashboards and key performance indicators (KPIs).

In the global market, there has been a flurry of vendor consolidations about two years ago, where the dominators are Oracle, who took over Hyperion in February of 2007; SAP, who swallowed Business Objects in October 2007;and IBM, who acquired Cognos in late November 2007. These companies, in addition to Microsoft, together account for more than two thirds of the total market for BI. Other contendors include Infor Global Solutions and IFS.

Another trend worth noticing is that the the user experience is getting similar among the leaders. However, there is no doubt there are great differences behind the curtains, in terms of the different data warehouse solutions that usually is necessary to stitch the BI solution together. In that mashup segment, Teradata is one of the leaders in the Gartner magic quadrant on a global scale, but IBM Cognos, SAP, Oracle and Microsoft are advancing their positions as a clear result of their respective acquisitions in 2007.

Another strong trend is availability of appliance solutions, where hardware and data warehouse is packaged together in order to optimize performance and simplify configuration and maintenance. In this segment Netezza holds a strong position, challenged by Microsoft's acquisition of Datallegro. Oracle, who recently announced their data warehouse solution bundled with HP hardware, and IBMs bundling of their DB2 and Infosphere technologies.

Gartner predicts that sales of BI platforms will grow an approximated 8% until 2012. According to Dan Sommer, Gartner analyst, BI is a very prioritized agenda item among top level CIOs. However, the main difference from previous years is that large strategic projects are delayed in favor of the small and short term projects. Therefore the BI market will grow impressively, but instead of the strategic company- wide integration of BI, you may see some simple request for more matrix reporting and dashboard representation of key divisional data.

BI is a strategic application area, starting to explode in everyday acceptance.

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