Recently BIinAction.com and ebizq.com organized a webinar on Business Intelligence (BI), which was conducted by Boris Evelson of Forrester Research. The webinar: Current State of the Business Intelligence Market gave a very good overview on BI space covering the following: Definition of BI, Solution components of BI, Market players, and the future trends. It is a very good resource for beginners as well as experts on BI.
Here are the key takeaways:
1. BI stack consists of 50+ solution components grouped under 8 layers / areas - Data, Discovery Integration, Analytics, Metrics Management, Presentation, Supporting Apps, Others, and PSO.Out of these first 6 are technology areas, while the other 2 are non technology areas - delivery framework (others) and professional service offering (PSO) related to BI.
2. Obviously no vendor provides one single platform addressing all BI solution areas, however, SAS and Business Objects offer the most compressive BI solution.
3. BI solutions are maturing to include the following:
- process both structured and unstructured data
- integration of data and process
- visual analysis
4. Key recommendations:
- Data governance is critical to BI
- Take baby steps
- Plan for explosive data growth
5. Expect consolidation in the BI market. Pure-play vendors will vanish and Big 4 of software industry - Microsoft, IBM, Oracle and SAP - will be the major players.
Showing posts with label BI. Show all posts
Showing posts with label BI. Show all posts
Sunday, July 08, 2007
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
BI & BPM Buzz - Just another hype?
Business Process Management (BPM) blogosphere is buzzing with discussions on integration of BPM & Business Intelligence (BI) infrastructure. Some of the bloggers and analysts have even predicted consolidation of BPM and BI offerings into single product.
Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) is considered to be an integral part of modern BPM systems. BAM makes BPM system a complete process life-cycle management infrastructure by enabling user organizations to manage process life-cycle end-to-end in terms of "Define - Execute - Control - Monitor - Improve". In my opinion, BAM is nothing but process intelligence functionality which is a sub-set of BI and hence I find this sudden surge in BI & BPM integration discussions indeed very surprising as it always existed.
BPM vendors have gone about addressing the BAM need of their users / customers in two ways:
1. Creating BAM functionality within the BPM system
2. Integrating their BPM system with a provider of BI system provider
The key question is as to how should user organizations enable the BPM implementations with BI capabilities? This largely depends on two factors:
1. Whether the BPM system being implemented by the user organization have BAM capabilities, and
2. Whether user organizations have implemented BI system
If user organizations already have or intend to implement BI system, then they should leverage their BI implementations by integrating BPM with BI system.
I strongly feel that in time to come large software vendors such as IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP will combine their infrastructure system offerings under one solution. Such infrastructure software will include BPM (Workflow), Business Rules, Content Management, BI, Portal, and Integration functionality. However, these offerings will be available as separate components and user organizations will have options to pick and choose components depending on their need. So do expect acquisitions and consolidations across these software domains. And hence needless to say that IT managers and leaders will have tough time in making choices while selecting systems and vendors for implementations across these software domain areas.
Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) is considered to be an integral part of modern BPM systems. BAM makes BPM system a complete process life-cycle management infrastructure by enabling user organizations to manage process life-cycle end-to-end in terms of "Define - Execute - Control - Monitor - Improve". In my opinion, BAM is nothing but process intelligence functionality which is a sub-set of BI and hence I find this sudden surge in BI & BPM integration discussions indeed very surprising as it always existed.
BPM vendors have gone about addressing the BAM need of their users / customers in two ways:
1. Creating BAM functionality within the BPM system
2. Integrating their BPM system with a provider of BI system provider
The key question is as to how should user organizations enable the BPM implementations with BI capabilities? This largely depends on two factors:
1. Whether the BPM system being implemented by the user organization have BAM capabilities, and
2. Whether user organizations have implemented BI system
If user organizations already have or intend to implement BI system, then they should leverage their BI implementations by integrating BPM with BI system.
I strongly feel that in time to come large software vendors such as IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP will combine their infrastructure system offerings under one solution. Such infrastructure software will include BPM (Workflow), Business Rules, Content Management, BI, Portal, and Integration functionality. However, these offerings will be available as separate components and user organizations will have options to pick and choose components depending on their need. So do expect acquisitions and consolidations across these software domains. And hence needless to say that IT managers and leaders will have tough time in making choices while selecting systems and vendors for implementations across these software domain areas.
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