Blog: Claudia Imhoff

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December 27, 2007

It's Been a Most Interesting Year

For my last blog of the year, I want to wish each of you Happy New Year! The year, 2008, promises to be as good a year for Business Intelligence as 20007 was...

Indeed, for 2007, we in BI had a banner year. It started off with all sorts of surveys of CIO's stating the BI was either number 1 or number 2 on their list of must-have initiatives. That stimulated all aspects of our industry from incredible innovations from vendors to job security for consultants to report after report from industry analysts.

Here are some of the highlights I remember from 2007:

1. The stock market took note of two new high profile entrants: Teradata and Netezza. Both became public companies to much fanfare and ringing of the stock exchange bell.

2. This was the year of the major merger -- Hyperion, Business Objects, and Cognos all acquiesced to high ticket bids for them. This opened up room for many of the smaller, privately funded companies to strut their stuff.

3. The Data Warehouse appliance arena got more crowded with the entrance of Dataupia, ParAccel, and InfoBright. These bright new technologies have given BI a shot in the arm in terms of low-cost, highly scalable and performing environments.

4. Open source BI starts to get real traction. Pentaho, JasperSoft, Actuate, Open BI, Talend, and a whole slew of other vendors are making in-roads into the BI mindset (see number 2).

5. Operational BI not only gets attention but also gets good technological underpinnings -- Cognos' Celequest acquisition is a good example of the technology available for this new form of BI.

6. Software as a Service comes to BI. In keeping with the pressure to reduce the costs of BI environments, many new and old vendors turn to SaaS as an alternative pricing model. New entrants here like LucidEra and Xactly sit side by side with older BI companies like Business Objects and Cognos in offering this appealing alternative.

7. HP comes out swinging with its offering of NeoView. With the annoucement of this version of a Data Warehosue Appliance along with the acquisition of Knightsbridge, HP declares it is in the BI business. Mark Hurd and Randy Mott -- both hard core BI executives -- let the world know that they plan to storm the traditional BI beach heads.

These are a few of the outstanding movements in our ever changing world. Please add your own thoughts to this blog on what 2007 meant to you.

Many thanks for your support of me and my blog. I do truly appreciate all your comments and ideas -- please keep them coming.

Have a safe and fun New Year's!

As always, yours in BI success,

Claudia

Technorati Tags: Business Intelligence, BI Trends, 2007 Trends, BI acquisitions open source appliances

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