HP Gains BI and DW Momentum With Knightsbridge Deal

HP Gains BI and DW Momentum With Knightsbridge Deal

HP Gains BI and DW Momentum With Knightsbridge Deal

HP Gains BI and DW Momentum With Knightsbridge Deal

Informatica to Buy Itemfield to Augment Integration Portfolio

Informatica to Buy Itemfield to Augment Integration Portfolio

SAP - SAP Reports Significant Market Share Gain in Business Intelligence

SAP - SAP Reports Significant Market Share Gain in Business Intelligence

A Conversation With Cognos (AMR)

We recently sat down with Cognos’s CEO Rob Ashe, COO Les Rechan, and other company executives to discuss their views on the company’s market position, its go-to-market plans for the remainder of FY07, and its longer term outlook on the business.

Business Objects Acquires ALG (Line56)

Picking up activity-based costing and profit optimization specialist for $56 million; the enterprise performance management proposition

Business Objects Adds Some ABC to Its EPM Suite (AMR)

Business Objects is serious about performance management, acquiring privately held Armstrong Laing Limited—a.k.a. ALG Software—an activity-based costing (ABC) and profitability management vendor with a marquee list of customers. Here’s a look at the deal and what’s happening in the ABC market.

Oco Out To Map the Business Genome (AMR)

Since the late 1980s, Mr. O’Conor has been consumed with getting clean data out of existing systems without having to replace everything with a single monolithic application suite. In 1999, he started Oco to solve this problem. He spent five years developing his software. Today, he is one of the first providers of “On Demand Data Integration” and “On Demand Analytics.”

Deal Enables Oracle to Pursue Wider 'Decisioning' Opportunity (Gartner)

Buying Sigma Dynamics' assets moves Oracle beyond CRM-centric real-time analytics and into the broader decision management arena. But Oracle will need development partners and internal buy-in to capitalize on this move.

BI Goes Deep (Line56)

As business operations become increasingly more complex in the global environment, enterprises require enhanced business intelligence at the deepest level

Revenues Rise, but Net Income Dips for BI Vendors (RFG)

Revenues Rise, but Net Income Dips for BI Vendors

Lead analyst: John Van Decker

Actuate Corp., Business Objects SA, Cartesis, and MicroStrategy, Inc. announced mixed financial results for the quarter ended Jun. 30, 2006. In addition, Cognos, Inc. announced mixed earnings for the first quarter of its 2007 fiscal year, ended May 31, 2006.

Focal Points:

• Business Objects reported that total revenues for the second quarter of 2006 increased 12 percent year-over-year to $294 million. Revenue from licenses was down 1 percent compared to the year-ago quarter to $123 million. Specifically, license revenues from performance management solutions rose 69 percent over the second quarter of 2005 to $15 million, and license revenues from data quality and integration solutions rose 79 percent to $12 million. Meanwhile, license revenues from business intelligence (BI) solutions fell 12 percent year-over-year to $96 million, Business Objects said. The company also reported a dip in net income, from $23.1 million, or 25 cents per share, in the second quarter of 2005, to $7.9 million, or 8 cents per share.
• Actuate announced that total revenues for the second quarter of 2006 were $31.7 million, a 23-percent year-over-year increase. Revenue from licenses grew 27 percent over the same period in 2005 to $11.2 million. Net income for the quarter was $1.6 million, or 2 cents per share, said Actuate. This is compared to a net income of $3.5 million, or 6 cents per share, for the same period last year, Actuate added. MicroStrategy also announced results for the second quarter of its 2006 fiscal year. Total revenues rose 13 percent year-over-year, from $65.4 million to $74.1 million. According to the vendor, this marked the company's fourteenth consecutive quarter of year-over-year revenue growth. Revenue from licenses was $23.1 million, a 5-percent decrease compared to the $24.3 million reported in the second quarter of 2005, MicroStrategy said. Finally, MicroStrategy announced net income for the quarter fell from $17.6 million to $16.6 million, or $1.21 per share.
• Cartesis announced results for the fourth quarter of its 2006 fiscal year. The company claims record software revenues, with annual growth of 28 percent. Total license revenues for the fourth quarter grew 43 percent year-over-year, and international license revenue grew 114 percent year-over-year, according to the vendor. Cartesis also reported that 40 percent of license revenue came from new clients, and annual license revenue from performance management products grew 38 percent. Finally, Cognos reported that revenues for the first quarter of 2007 rose year-over-year, from $200.1 million to $217.0 million. Revenue from licenses was $73.7 million, compared with $71.1 million for the year-ago quarter, said Cognos. Net income was $14.5 million, or 16 cents per share, compared with $20.4 million, or 22 cents per share last year, Cognos added.

RFG believes the business intelligence (BI) and business performance management (BPM) markets will continue to see major investment from leading enterprises through 2010. Many firms have not been able to get the full expected value out of their ERP investments. Those companies have therefore invested in reporting and analysis tools to get critical actionable information into the appropriate hands within the enterprise. That investment is now shifting away from one-off reporting tools to more analytical suites for metrics management, planning, and reporting, including components for data quality and BPM. Meanwhile, although many vendors are announcing increased revenues, they are not necessarily seeing the same growth in net income. RFG believes that is due to several common factors. Most notable among these are increased marketing required to maintain differentiation over competition, increased integration and development costs for newly acquired solutions, and more money spent on research and development. The next major wave in BI and BPM will be to integrate business process management within these suites. IT and business executives should develop a plan for BI and BPM within their business application architecture and seek to replace disparate reporting tools with more enterprise-wide approaches, adding new functionality as appropriate, such as planning, metrics management and process management. (See the RFG Research Notes "Understanding the Consolidating BPM Landscape and How to React," Parts One and Two, and the RFG Research Brief "Examples of Business Process Management (BPM) Solutions and Vendors.")

Raising the Bar on Data Quality and Management? (RFG)

Raising the Bar on Data Quality and Management?

Lead Analysts: John Van Decker

Business Objects SA announced its BusinessObjects Data Quality data quality software suite, while Evolutionary Technologies International, Inc. (ETI) released its latest data quality product. Teradata, a division of NCR Corp., also announced that it has entered the master data management market with both product and consulting expertise.

Focal Points:

• Business Objects Data Quality XI is based on the data quality product set the company acquired with its purchase of Firstlogic, Inc. earlier this year. The new tool allows enterprises to scale their data quality solution deployments into a single corporate implementation, to establish a "single version of the truth," according to the company. The product features a centralized repository that enables rapid creation and consistent application of business rules, the company added. Data Quality XI works with solutions from Informatica Corp., Oracle Corp. (including those from the former PeopleSoft and Siebel), and SAP AG, Business Objects said. An automated watch list can be established with the new tool, to support USA PATRIOT Act initiatives and help avoid situations that would put corporations at risk, according to Business Objects. Improved integration with Business Objects' popular Crystal Reports tool promotes easy statistical analysis, while a new match wizard helps administrators fine-tune data quality strategies, the company added.
• ETI released its latest data quality tools, ETI Data Profiler and ETI Data Cleanser. Both are intended to extend the capabilities of the company's ETI Solution V5 software and ETI High Performance Connectors, according to the company. ETI Data Profiler automatically discovers content, quality, and structure patterns from a variety of data sources at the outset of an IT project, according to ETI. The tool features automated discovery and analysis, and tracks data quality improvement actions and problem resolution progress through its issue management feature, the company added. ETI Data Cleanser helps resolve data conflicts and inconsistencies via matching technology based on fuzzy logic, and uses advanced algorithms to correct replacement, transposition, and semantic error types, the company said. The tool can run concurrently with production systems, or offline in batch mode, ETI added.
• Teradata announced the availability of its Master Data Management (MDM) product, which enables companies to classify customer, product, and supplier data shared across the corporation, according to the company. Teradata is also developing new suite of MDM applications intended to deliver additional value. The first of these, Teradata Product Information Management, is available now, the company said. Complementary modules, including Customer Data Integration, will be released later, Teradata added. The company also announced that it has acquired additional development and consulting expertise to help meet enterprise data management needs.

RFG believes data quality and management solutions will become increasingly important to more enterprises through 2006, with additional ramp-up from 2007 through 2010. Business intelligence (BI) solution vendors have deemed this valuable for their platforms, and it is also an important capability for transactional systems, such as those used for ERP. Business Objects has made major investments during the past couple of years to extend its reporting capabilities, through the acquisition of Crystal. The company has also extended the functional capabilities of its solutions, through acquisitions such as that of SRC Software. These latest data quality announcements further extend the company's solution set, and represent the state of the art in integrated BI/business performance management (BPM) suites. The ETI announcement, meanwhile, underscores the value of solutions that help to achieve and maintain high levels of data quality. Overall, data quality can improve automated discovery and analysis, as well as major enterprise initiatives such as regulatory compliance. The addition of MDM capabilities to the Teradata product set is another acknowledgment of the enormity of the corporate data management challenge. IT executives should seek opportunities to improve BI, BPM, and operational solutions with data quality and management initiatives, and consistent, enterprise-wide data architectures. IT decision-makers should also consider both suite-based and standalone best-of-breed products when seeking solutions to improve enterprise data quality and management capabilities. (See the RFG Research Note "Data Architecture: The Key to Information Services.")

BI and BPM (Line56)

The Marriage of Insight and Action

Actuate 9: Expanding the BI Footprint (AMR)

BI vendor Actuate has ripped a page out of its open source playbook and brought the concept of a collaborative development methodology to its enterprise reporting suite. The new product suite, Actuate 9, is in beta testing now, with general availability scheduled for 3Q06.

SAP releases BI accelerator (InfoWorld)

Engine brings SAP closer to 'Holy Grail' of providing analytics to the masses, Agassi says

BI Competition Heats Up Around SAP (AMR Research)

With SAP’s SAPPHIRE conferences taking place over the next month, we’re sure to hear a lot of news about super-charged analytic and reporting capabilities that will become available later this quarter. But best-in-class business intelligence (BI) providers aren’t sitting still. Many of their customers—and an increasingly large number of their prospects—use SAP for some or all of their enterprise application backbones. It’s essential for these vendors to do whatever they can to make integration to SAP as easy as possible and to deliver value quickly.

Open source BI tool to target enterprise customers (InfoWorld)

Executives claim package is ready to play with the big BI boys

The open source software model will continue its assault on traditional applications deployed by the enterprise when Pentaho unveils Business Intelligence Professional Edition Platform next week.

Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms, 1Q06 (Gartner)

The BI platform market is a mix of midsize pure plays, mega software application vendors and small, innovative niche players. The pure-play vendors currently dominate the market, but demand for all three vendor types is strong.

Microsoft Acquires ProClarity (Red Herring)

The software giant leverages its investment in business intelligence by buying ProClarity.

Business Intelligence (BI) Portal (DMReview)

This portal sponsored by

Information fuels the new economy and plays an essential role in developing and maintaining a sustainable competitive advantage. The demands on a business today - increased global competition, lower barriers to entry, lower profit margins - are creating an ever-increasing need for access to data. The ability to get the right information to the right people at the right time is, therefore, more important than ever; however, the sheer volume of available data makes such a proposition more challenging than ever. Organizations that are the most successful at collecting, evaluating and applying information are consistently the leaders in their respective industries. The ability to act faster and more effectively than the competition can be the defining advantage in today’s marketplace and the means for successfully managing customer relationships in the long run.

Oracle Delivers BI Suite:Integrated Siebel Analytics with Fusion Middleware (DMReview)

New York - Oracle held an event in Manhattan Wednesday to roll out the new Oracle Business Intelligence Suite, with three editions for different users and a roadmap of products for users of PeopleSoft, J.D. Edwards and the Oracle Business Suite.

The BI Suite is open, standards-based software that the company says is also "hot-pluggable" to any number of third-party applications and databases. The suite grew from the combination of Oracle (Fusion) BI middleware and Siebel analytics. "Our middleware business is doing great and we're going to roll our BI business in alongside of it," Oracle President Charles Phillips told a crowd of about 500 customers, investors and analysts in a midtown hotel ballroom. He later told reporters BI presented a potential "billion dollar business" for the company.

SAS/Veridiem Deal Will Benefit Both Companies' Customers (Gartner)

By acquiring Veridiem's marketing resource management (MRM) solution, SAS Institute could develop a broader marketing performance management solution linked to its corporate performance management (CPM) solution.

Performance Management Spending Nears $23B in 2006 (AMR)

Enterprise performance management (EPM) spending remains strong in 2006, with nearly $23B planned for software, hardware, labor (internal and external), and integration services. This is according to the results of a detailed survey AMR Research conducted of more than 200 companies across all industry sectors within North America. The data reflects each organization’s plans for expenditures and technology deployment, as well as their goals and objectives for EPM. The details of this study will be published in AMR Research’s Market Analytix Report “Trends in Enterprise Performance Management, 2006” in the next few weeks.

Performance Management Spending Nears $23B in 2006 (AMR)

Enterprise performance management (EPM) spending remains strong in 2006, with nearly $23B planned for software, hardware, labor (internal and external), and integration services. This is according to the results of a detailed survey AMR Research conducted of more than 200 companies across all industry sectors within North America. The data reflects each organization’s plans for expenditures and technology deployment, as well as their goals and objectives for EPM. The details of this study will be published in AMR Research’s Market Analytix Report “Trends in Enterprise Performance Management, 2006” in the next few weeks.

Microsoft unveils mid-market BI software (InfoWorld)

Microsoft unveiled new business intelligence (BI) software Wednesday that was designed to let mid-market companies use analytics and scorecards to study business data through various organizational roles.

Oracle Makes Aggressive Moves in Open Source (AMR)

Oracle chief Larry Ellison indicated last week that more acquisitions were in the offing, specifically for middleware and business intelligence (BI) software. Immediately thereafter, the open source community was abuzz that Oracle was targeting three acquisitions in that space: JBOSS, a middleware provider; Sleepycat Software, an embeddable database provider; and Zend Technologies, maker of a PHP development tool for server-based HTML scripting.

Focus on Data Quality in BI Motivates Business Objects Buy (Gartner)

By buying Firstlogic, Business Objects will expand its data integration offerings. But the vendor's positioning of the purchase begins to take it outside its comfort and credibility zone of business intelligence (BI).

Business Intelligence Software Market to Reach $3 Billion in 2009, Says Gartner (Tekrati)

New license revenue in the worldwide business intelligence (BI) software market is poised for constant growth through 2009 when the market is projected to reach $3 billion, according to the latest forecasts by Gartner, Inc. The analysts estimate the BI market will reach $2.5 billion , a six percent increase from 2005.

'Analytics' buzzword needs careful definition (InfoWorld)

Definition of analytics is a broad one, leading to confusion among enterprise users

Gartner forecasts growing BI market (InfoWorld)

Licensing revenue for BI (business intelligence) software is expected to rise from $2.5 billion this year to $3 billion by 2009, with the fastest growth in Latin America and Asia, Gartner said Tuesday.

CIOs will see pressure for BI from executives (InfoWorld)

The enxt five years will a ten-fold increase in the amount of information businesses see from IT systems, Gartner predicts

The Financial Impact of Business Analytics (IDC)

Businesses are undergoing a fundamental shift in the way they make decisions. In today's
environment, decision making occurs more frequently and at all levels of an organization. It is no
longer a semiregular senior management activity.

Business Objects Extends Enterprise Offering with Data Integration (IDC)

The major business intelligence (BI) vendors are extending their footprints with packaged analytic applications on the front end and data integration facilities on the back end to compete for enterprise-level sales in BI, data warehousing, and the emerging business performance management (BPM) space. With its acquisition of extract, transform, and load (ETL) vendor Acta Technologies, Business Objects now has the end-to-end metadata management and packaged data mart capabilities that it needs to fully implement its analytic applications strategy and provide an enterprise data warehouse solution. IDC believes that this acquisition was a good strategic move for Business Objects ...

Business Objects Rated Top Analytic Application Vendor (Bloor)

BPM pulls IT and finance together (vnunet)

IT Week: As director of industry solutions for business performance management [BPM] vendor Cartesis, can you say how demand is growing? ...

Portal Excellence Awards (DMReview)

Each year at DCI's Portals, Collaboration and Content Management Conference, customers and their solution providers compete in the Portal Excellence Awards. At the November 2005 event in Miami, winners were announced in four categories: Best Customer or Partner Portal, Best Employee Portal, Best Content Management System and Best Knowledge Management System.

Customer Intelligence: Suddenly, It's 2006 (DM Review Magazine)

Last year, when I had my first child, someone said to me, "The nights are long and the years are short." Well, the nights were extremely long, and they were loud, and sometimes they smelled really bad. Long nights typically led to long days, and I thought I would never get eight hours of sleep again. But I didn't truly understand the second part of the statement until I woke up on November 24 and realized that it was already Thanksgiving. Where did the year go?

Magic Quadrant for Customer Data Mining, 1Q06

SAS and SPSS are the leading vendors of data mining capability to support a CRM initiative. However, a large number of niche vendors offer complementary or better solutions for specific aspects of customer data mining.

Business Intelligence - Week of 01/19/2006 (Analyst Views)

According to Gartner, "The mission of Business Intelligence (BI) is the access to and analysis of quantitative information sources to deliver insight that empowers decision makers." Forbes states that Business Intelligence is a $15 billion industry. Gartner has identified BI as CIO's number two technology priority in 2005, in 2004 it was at number 10. InformationWeek showed that only 10% of companies it surveyed plan a decrease in BI spending in the coming year. Clearly this is a market on the move. The activity in the market is driven by a number of things, most prominent among them are: the amount of data and its increasing complexity, the number of data sources, an increase in the number of BI users within organizations, and the need for accurate real-time delivery of detailed analysis.

Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms, 1Q06
Gartner, January 9, 2006
We expect the BI platform market to continue to grow at a solid pace during the next five years, with new license revenue experiencing a compound annual growth rate of 7.3 percent. Organizations are increasing their spending, particularly as BI evolves from its reactive, departmental roots to become more pervasive and strategic. The long-term prospects for the market look solid, especially as large organizations embrace corporate performance management and work to comply with various government regulations, such as Sarbanes-Oxley.

Actuate's performancesoft Purchase Is Small but Significant (Gartner)

The acquisition of performancesoft by Actuate, which focuses on enterprise reporting applications, confirms that the business intelligence (BI) and corporate performance management (CPM) suite markets are converging.

Gartner Release Its BI Magic Quadrant

The analyst firm expects the business intelligence market to experience sustained growth as the technology includes more users within an organization.

Business Objects Positioned in the Leader Quadrant in Business Intelligence Platform Magic Quadrant (TMCnet)

SAN JOSE, Calif. & PARIS --(Business Wire)-- Jan. 10, 2006 -- Business Objects (Nasdaq:BOBJ)(Euronext Paris ISIN code: FR0004026250 - BOB), the world's leading provider of business intelligence (BI) solutions, today announced that it has been positioned in the Leaders quadrant in the most recent Gartner Business Intelligence Platform Magic Quadrant, published this week.(1) According to Gartner, "leaders" are vendors who are performing well today, have a clear vision of market direction, and are actively building competencies to sustain their leadership position in the market

Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms, 1Q06 (Gartner)

The BI platform market is a mix of midsize pure plays, mega software application vendors and small, innovative niche players. The pure-play vendors currently dominate the market, but demand for all three vendor types is strong.