Blog: William McKnight

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Business Objects in Business Week online

There is a nice high-level overview of business intelligence in this interview in Business Week online with Business Objects CEO Bernard Liautaud. It's always interesting to see how the major press picks up business intelligence issues as it is doing more and more these days.

This article brings to mind a couple of points. One is about industry consolidation. We have only seen the beginning of business intelligence consolidation. I believe Hyperion, Microstrategy, Cognos, Informatica and yes, Business Objects are in play to the current and future industry titans.

I don't see a mad rush for this consolidation to happen however. These companies are doing quite well and Hyperion, Informatica and Business Objects have recently (past 2 years) created full lifecycle stories of their own. BI is already big enough to support at least one $1B company (Business Objects.)

Furthermore, though there's some consolidation amongst the vendors, we are merely on the cusp of business intelligence penetration. Sure, every company has some business intelligence, but how many programs are as efficient and consolidated as they need to be? How many have figured out how to get past first targets and extend BI to the enterprise? How many have developed differentiating analytics that are tracked by BI? How many have the elusive "single version of the truth" - with clean data?

From my perspective, BI spending is strong and hardly being moved by the macro factors of high oil prices, rising interest rates and Katrina. There's an amazing number of new or revamping efforts happening in DW/BI. Budgets are certainly allocated to BI enough to make this a record year for BI.... as long as the budget spend is the natural follow-on to the budget allocation!

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