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Real-time has caught the imagination of the industry. From data capturing to sales force automation, everything is happening in real time or is well on its way to happen in real time. In the face of this scenario, if there is one application that has gained momentum in adoption, it is business intelligence (BI). In the past one year, BI has been the buzzword in the industry as it moves from informing to analyzing.

And the BI space itself is displaying a lot of activity. In January, 2008, SAP completed its acquisition of Business Objects and IBM completed its acquisition of Cognos. The acquired firms were two of the largest in the market and had arguably been the defining suppliers in the space. Their absorption into larger entities (along with Hyperion into Oracle six months earlier) seemingly marked the end of BI platforms as a predominantly stand-alone, best-of-breed buying decision.

Buying Behavior
The purchase trends in the BI space have also undergone some significant changes. There has been a growing bifurcation of buying preferences. Broadly, there are two types of buying behaviors evident. In the first one firms see their BI platform as an extension of their enterprise middleware and require the platform to fit into more heterogeneous data and application sources, and then there are those with an inclination for pre-integration of a BI platform into a stack of data and application sources from a single vendor.

Both these types of buyers, have sparked off the integration drive amongst the mega-vendors, and their road maps are inevitably pointing at integrating the acquired technologies into their existing portfolios. While the first phase of BI was wrought with implementation challenges, in the latter stages, BI seems to have come of age.

There are enough reasons to counter the failure of some BI implementations in the initial stages and the inability of some to see the light of day. According to Sanjay Deshmukh, country manager, Business Objects, SAP India, In the earlier times, every user had a different idea of what they meant by BI. There was a lot of confusion in that space.

However, most of the buyers now agree that the older definition of BI is now dead. As per Ashit Panjwani, director, marketing, Alliances & Channels, SAS India, BI doesnt exist as it used to before. This statement brings out the massive evolution that the BI domain has seen over the past couple of years or so. From being just a data gurgling system, BI is now a data analysis system. BI has moved to data analysis rather than just data organization. We no longer call it Business Intelligence. We call it Business Analytics, he says.

The Trends
Till about a few years back, the focus was on data generation. Now, it is about utilizing the generated data effectively. Analysts havent predicted an ERP style growth for BI without a basis. Some of the major traits that BI is displaying are business customization, increased levels of interactivity and heightened real-time operations.

Moreover, the maturing of Microsofts lower-cost BI portfolio, the application of Web 2.0 techniques, the availability of data warehouse (DW) appliances, the growth of open-source BI and the ongoing emergence of software as a service (SaaS) offerings have continued to make BI capabilities increasingly accessible and more affordable.

Mehak Chawla
mehakc@cybermedia.co.in

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