It seems hard to believe that less than 10 years ago we had to start every presentation to a potential client with "What is Business Intelligence?".
In those days, we were first educating our clients on why they needed to make investments in this area. Only if they "got it", would we step into understanding their business and the underlying requirements and eventually determine and justify the project based on an ROI.
This took a lot of work to do. Some clients quickly "got it", while others took a few more years before they eventually did.
Now, looking at the consolidated landscape of the BI/BPM industry, and the full acceptance of "BI" and "BPM/CPM/EPM", it isn't a question of whether to invest in BI, but rather with whom.
Yes, it is refreshing not to have to explain the benefits of a BI Platform anymore. It truly has allowed us to focus on getting the job done for our clients.
But what does this mean for firms looking to implement a Business Intelligence solution who have been approached by a traditional ERP VAR of either Oracle or SAP?
It means they shouldn't be fooled by a generalist attempting to sell into this new space. We have seen many failed attempts from firms looking to enter this space without a solid background in the functional and technical expertise required to make it work.
Yes, there is good and bad when it comes to market acceptance. BI is now a generally accepted "makes sense to invest in" technology. But the same issues that have driven the need for specialists in this space continue to exist. The need for consultants to understand not just the bits and bytes, but the the real practical business drivers behind the effort and the project management skills required to gain full acceptance.
BI Projects are very different than your typical top down IT project. For example, they need to be tuned to end user needs in an iterative approach. It takes many design modification cycles with the actual report to determine what will truly be best for the organization to use.
At first glance, any new report or analytic application looks great. But the reality is, the sizzle wears off and without the proper iterative design up front, these systems do not produce the measures and underlying support (detail) data to support change and quickly lose their luster.
This is a just one area of the design and rollout that requires persons very familiar with BI project development to be involved.
OK, I'll get off my soap box now.
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The intention of Oracle’s (www.oracle.com) acquisition of Hyperion (www.hyperion.com) (see Press Release), is more complex than simply a technology acqusition or the purchase of a strong client list.
It is clear that Oracle stands to benefit in several areas. First, the best of breed financial applications of Hyperion will clearly remain intact and lead the BPM application charge for Oracle.
Second, access to Hyperion’s extensive SAP customer base will give Oracle access to the many finance departments who use Hyperion for consolidated financial statements from SAP and other systems.
The question remains, what will happen to the Hyperion BI tool product set.
SQR customers (Hyperion Production Reporting) will certainly be safe. With Oracle’s acquisition of PeopleSoft and PeopleSoft’s extensive use of SQR, the product finally comes home again to PeopleSoft customers.
With Interactive Reporting (the former Brio product), it is unclear as to whether Oracle’s Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition (OBI) (the former Siebel Analytics app) will win out. Or… (more likely) will IR be integrated into the platform for a powerful Analytic reporting tool.
The strength of the the OBI platform is in the datamart and strong integration with financial applications. Adding the Hyperion IR product to the stack will certainly make a very strong analytics platform.
If Oracle extends the OBI platform to include IR while leveraging Hyperion’s financial applications (Planning, Financial Management, Enterprise) while extending it’s BI reporting and analytics, and at the same time, leveraging Hyperion’s Master Data Management product, they will be a tough company to beat in the BI/BPM space.
And in a future discussion, we’ll talk about what will happen to Essbase.
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It should not be shocking that Oracle has acquired Hyperion, the leading provider of Business Performance Management (BPM) tools. Oracle has been acquiring technology “up the stack” for many years. What does this mean for choice in a very critical area of investment? Forward looking companies have been acquiring BPM solutions for budgeting/forecasting, consolidation/financial reporting, and dashboarding/scorecarding in order to give their front line managers an increasing forward-looking view of their organizational performance. This is not going to change as the future is far too important to these organizations. What is going to change is their choice is going to be a limited one.
The consolidation wave in BPM has been ongoing. Only recently the former Comshare MPC product line was acquired by Infor, the 3rd largest provider of enterprise software systems. Now Oracle’s acquisition leaves a much smaller field of “non-aligned” options. OutlookSoft, Cartesis, Business Objects, and Cognos lead the list. Choices can be deceiving though, with Cognos having the larger market presence, but already finding themselves forced into acquiring much of their critical BPM technology and thus living with lack of integration in their approach. At the same time, Business Objects has no functionality in many critical areas of BPM.
For Oracle-committed clients, Larry Ellison has pretty much made their choice for BPM. Oracle has acquired the “hands down” leader in the space. Hyperion technology will replace aging and flawed products such as OFA, FSG, and Enterprise Planning & Budgeting, as well as the newly released Financial Consolidation Hub. Oracle clients will see significant benefits as Oracle increasingly integrates a solution that already worked well with Oracle (the companies have many shared clients).
SAP clients face a tough choice as their vendor has “struck out” for many years with attempts to build support for BPM into their tool. Of course, some might continue to wait on SAP, but more will need to “cross party lines” in order to acquire the critical functionality their business requires in order to compete.
What will be most interesting is how much leverage Oracle receives from this acquisition. They have acquired the leading technology to assist multi-enterprise software clients (e.g. larger firms that have, say, both SAP and Oracle in-house) with BPM. How much additional ERP and database revenue will Oracle be able to acquire with clients increasingly interested in investing in single vendor solutions?
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