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Is BI in the Belly of the Beasts?
By Jim Sinur | November 13, 2007
Sometimes things happen quicker than expected. On October 11, 2007 I was quoted by the E Commerce Times/CRM Division as saying “It is just a matter of time before Cognos gets acquired,” said Jim Sinur, chief strategy officer at Global 360. (Is Cognos next?)
I certainly did not realize that a transaction was being crafted by IBM to purchase Cognos. The New York Times published an article yesterday, Nov 12th stating that IBM announced its intentions of buying Cognos.
Can the Remaining Independents Thrive?
Market needs will always drive the creation of independents. The remaining large independents, IBI, Microstrategy, and SAS, are run by super strong personalities, so the likelihood of another acquisition is low unless the remaining power vendors, like HP, Sun and Unisys have the appetite and can seduce the strong leaders of the remaining BI vendors to sell. I would give it a low probability.
The remaining core of BI will thrive, but not have the momentum it once had unless these vendors are able to morph faster than the power vendors can integrate their BI purchases into their stacks and out-market the power vendors.
What is the Future of BI?
Though BI has a powerful set of capabilities that helps management in their decision making processes, and helps track the progress of business activity, the problem with BI is that it is focused on the past. In a world where near real-time response is linked to process activity, BI will need to expand to look at intelligent, complex events and project future downstream effects.
Since the power vendors deal with process events, they see the value in combining BI with real-time activity. I have not seen this vision with the BI vendors to date, but certainly some of the complex-events processing and BPM vendors are catching the scent of this potential.
Bottom Line: BI has to Morph.
If the remaining BI vendors embrace process-based, complex-events processing, they will continue to thrive and enjoy traditional growth rates. If they do not, then over time, the power stacks will take up the slack and/or a new market around real-time decision making will emerge.
There is already activity brewing around enterprise decision management (EDM) in the Rules Forum, process intelligence (PI) around a few vendors, intelligent process management (IPM) in Gartner and intelligent process activity (IPA) in IDC.
Topics: BPM |