Butler Group Report: Business Intelligence

Waves PR, September 28 2009

The Butler Group BI report is a thorough piece of work, aimed primarily at vendors of BI systems and their customers.

Their analysis of the drivers of BI purchases covers the likely contenders: competitive pressures, changing markets, regulation, and risk and performance management.

One of the report’s biggest takeaways for me as a PR professional is trend towards CPM: Corporate Performance Management, which is, by all accounts, where BI is headed. With the major players, IBM, Oracle and SAP headed in this direction, and with CPM extending its tentacles into new areas, I would be disinclined to bet against it at the top end of the market.

Some things never change – data quality remains an issue for BI users (my very first IT acronym, in an early early ‘computer studies’  module, was GIGO: garbage in, garbage out), as does integration.

All in all, the usual suspects, the big players, continue to both dominate the field and to be Butler Group’s major ‘shortlist’ recommendations. One wonders whether this will continue to be the case in future years – the report refers to various areas of ‘innovation’: SaaS (‘pay per use’) and packaging hardware/software packages notably, but it’s almost impossible to imagine that current on-line trends wouldn’t impact.

Over half of those companies with BI systems boast at least five separate systems. I would have liked to have seen Butler Group asking why.  And although there was mention within the report of mashups, widgets and gadgets, there must be ‘threats’ to the big players in  emerging technologies. There are any number of hugely capable developers with pockets of expertise that could impinge, nimbly and capably, on the big players ‘turf’. I would have liked to have seen deeper analysis of this.

However, purchasers of BI systems tend to have corporate sized issues, and the report does, in areas, address the move of the market towards the middle ground. So perhaps, the report works well in highlighting the potential for smaller players to capitalise on Web 2.0, nip in and clean up at the small end of the market. It’s final profiles of players other than the ‘big boys’ highlight strengths in niche areas, well worth examining for information hungry managers in mid-sized/smaller companies.

I can’t help feeling, however, that the innovation is about to heat up in this area, as people work out ways to process the huge amount of information available on the web for internal as well as external purposes.

The Butler Group report – Business Intelligence: Corporate Performance Management - is a Technology Evaluation and Comparison Report, written in April 2009 and supplied for review in September 2009. It can be obtained from the Butler Group for £1495.

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