Comments on: Business Intelligence: Turmoil and Change Loom

By: Stephen E. Arnold

Stephen E. Arnold — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 01:18:17 +0000

Hello, dcunningham,
Thank you for your post. Excellent points, Please, feel free to revisit the squawking goose’s Beyond Search Web log. Glad you liked Mr. Carr’s study. Former Harvard Business Review wizards know how to nail a trend early and clearly.

Stephen Arnold, June 19, 2008 9 18 pm Eastern

By: Darren Cunningham

Darren Cunningham — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 18:01:16 +0000

Hi Stephen, I think the biggest turmoil and change will come from:

1) The shift from business analytics as an IT problem to solve to a business mandate (see the recent article by David Wells on Analytic Culture: http://www.b-eye-network.com/view/7572

2) The shift to SaaS / Cloud Computing (read The Big Switch by Nick Carr)

The business models of traditional enterprise software vendors – whether they are BI or application solutions providers, will have a very hard time addressing these shifts. For one, they’ll have to wean themselves off of maintenance fees and the consulting dollars that come from complex upgrades. This typically results in an internal civil war.

Meanwhile, newer SaaS vendors are focusing on end-user and set-up simplicity, delivering built-in domain expertise, and ultimately broader adoption and customer success thanks to the ability to track usage and share best-practices.

It’s an exciting time for analytic innovation right now, but don’t just look to the usual suspects and traditional approaches.

By: Stephen E. Arnold

Stephen E. Arnold — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 00:38:35 +0000

Andrew, thanks for writing. Keep me informed of Attivio’s success.

Stephen Arnold, June 18, 2008

By: Stephen E. Arnold

Stephen E. Arnold — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 00:37:03 +0000

My wording was sloppy. Aster enables some interesting business intelligence analyses. Thanks for taking the time to call this to my attention. Haste and a 64 year old brain makes for an untrustworthy essayist.

Stephen Arnold, June 18, 2008

By: Steve Wooledge

Steve Wooledge — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 19:51:09 +0000

Great post, Stephen. I especially agree with your comments about end-users being frustrated with complex tools as BI moves “down stream”. Having spent 6 years at Business Objects, I can vouch that part of this frustration is also because of the underlying database being queried is often slow to respond when a use asks an ad-hoc query which has not been cached (and the BI tool gets blamed).

As a point of clarification, speeding up data analysis is where Aster Data is focused. We are a high performance analytic database. We do NOT compete with BI vendors, but give them a better platform for fast queries, reporting, and analysis. We are in fact good partners with BOBJ, Pentaho, MSTR, and more. Check out more at http://www.asterdata.com

By: Andrew McKay

Andrew McKay — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 19:33:44 +0000

Great article and hits the nail on the head when it comes to the need for a “hybrid solution”. We at Attivio would certainly agree since this is our vision. And we are “cracking the problem” right now.