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As usual French people are showing the trends ;-)
For the first time in Europe and perhaps in the world, a real conference day focusing on Open Source Business Intelligence will be hosted in Paris on March 18th.
Hosted beside the French Computer Museum in Paris business district of La Defense, this conference is very close to the « traditional proprietary conferences ». I mean: it’s free to attend. And despite to Steve Ballmer’s statement «Free software means no free soda », free coffee and free lunch will be provided!
How is this possible? Just because Open Source companies everyday looks more and more like traditional companies with marketing and sponsorship budgets. And for this first ever main conference about OSBI all main vendors have decided to sponsor: SpagoBI, Ingres, Jaspersoft, MySQL, Talend, Pentaho… and tomorrow others.
If you are in Paris in March and if you don’t agree with the much closed vision of Gartner about Open Source Business Intelligence just join us! Of course you need to learn French before ;-)
Registration is available on: http://www.amiando.com/forumbiopensource
After a year of consolidation and the birth of four main leaders in BI market (IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP) Gartner see a new birth of young and innovative companies. Here is the list of companies you should follow in 2008 with links to their web sites:
FractalEdge: www.fractaledge.com
PivotLink: www.pivotlink.com
Oco: www.oco-inc.com
1010Data: www.1010data.com
Endeca: www.endeca.com
Advizor Solutions: www.advizorsolutions.com
Illuminate: www.i-lluminate.com
LucidEra: www.lucidera.com
Panoratio: www.panoratio.com
Greenplum: www.greenplum.com
SAP and IBM announced yesterday a new product codenamed Atlantic. In this world of coopetition Atlantic appears as an answer to Duet, previous software developed between SAP and Microsoft. Both software have the same goal: to create an easy connection between desktop environment and corporate databases to access from the desktop to processes, reporting and analytics. Duet is for Microsoft Exchange and Atlantic will be for Lotus Notes. It’s amazing to realize that despite to the large common customer base between SAP and Microsoft, they didn’t yet propose a collaboration tool developed together. Perhaps SAP was more “Microsoft oriented” during the last years… And perhaps an increased competition on ERP for small and medium companies between SAP and Microsoft has changed the game… Anyway you can remember that SAP has been founded by people coming from SAP… it was more that a couple of decade ago… It could be enough to re-launch some rumors between SAP and IBM!
Hot day for acquisitions! BEA finally acquired by Oracle and now Sun put $ 1 billion on the table to catch the Swedish company MySQL and its thousands of customers.
What could be the consequences for BI market?
Nothing direct I think. But on a middle term basis we can imagine that this announcement is seen as a signal for a new step in vendors consolidation. MySQL is not really used in BI applications. Large customers don’t really trust yet in an open source database to store terabytes of strategic data from their corporate data warehouse. But with the cover of a trusted brand like Sun bringing a partner network, large support organization, and strong local presence in many countries… things could change. And if MySQL is seen as a new competitor in the data wrehousing area, I am sure that other vendors including Pentaho or Talend will revise their strategy and search for their next step.
As a professional writer involved every day in looking for and reviewing news and trends in Business Intelligence market for our French readers, 2007 was a fantastic year. A year of which you can say: things have changed. Even if I am sure that 2008 will bring a lot of news I will certainly remember 2007 and…
January: Teradata and NCR separate into two different companies
March: Oracle acquire Hyperion for USD 3 billions
March: SAP acquire Pilot Software a pioneer of BI
April: Cartesis is acquired by Business Objects
May: SAP acquire Outlooksoft
July: Data Mirror is acquired by IBM
September: Cognos acquire Applix
October: SAP acquire Business Objects
November: Cognos is acquired by IBM
Who is missing? We will certainly hear in 2008 news from HP, Microstrategy, Microsoft, Information Builders, QlikTech…
Let me share with you an IBM research project I discovered today at IOD 2007. It’s called Linkage Discovery and will perhaps be the missing list between your existing CRM system and all the valuable unstructured data you collect every day about your customers. This is the real Business Intelligence…
Every day you receive thousands of emails from customers who don’t really like all the structured data you need to identify their needs like customer number, transaction reference, product code… Without modifying any part of your IT system, Linkage Discovery will just intercept all email, IM and other text messages. The software will connect in real time to databases of your company and document the message received from the customer. If your customer send a message just saying « my name is John Smith and I order last week a DVD player and didn’t receive it yet »; the software will search in the database all orders from a John Smith placed last week; will add customer ID, transaction ID and all necessary information before giving the hand back to your email management system which will forward the request to an operator. It will even be able to « understand » the content and create information about the sentiment of your customer.
Much better the same system is actually on test with live audio conversation from call centers. Running during the first seconds of the call the software identify the customers with the first words he will say on the phone « Hi, I’m John Smith. I order a DVD last week and not yet received it ». On real time the operator will receive on his screen all the structured information available about the customers.
And of course all these unstructured data like emails or phone calls will be saved in the database for future purpose. These associations between emails or voice conversation and structured data from the IT system will be available for traditional BI tools.
Who are your Platinum customers who contacted yesterday your customer service to complain? Tomorrow you will be able to have this report on your desk every morning.
I just registered this morning for the IBM Information On Demand 2007 conference in Madalay Bay Convention Center, Las Vegas. It will be a huge conference for the little French guy I am! As I know you love figures here are some: conference bag is around 4 lbs with all documentation inside; conference directory is a book of 240 pages; technology is almost everywhere including in the conference badge with a RFID tag; Donna Summer (yes, the real one) will perform on Tuesday; more than 700 conference sessions… It will certainly be a busy week.
Following my note dated October, 8th regarding Larry’s reaction to SAP’s offer on Business Objects… we had the answer today with this unsolicited offer on BEA for more than $6 billion. Direct consequence: financial analysts imagine that this announcement is a confirmation that Oracle will not come over SAP with a better offer on Business Objects deal. Anyway if Oracle really wants to acquire some BI vendors we have some names to suggest…
Perhaps just a business oriented metadata layer… This « thing » made the fortune of Business Objects creating an intermediate layer between business people talking about invoices, customers, margin… and IT people more focusing on tables, indexes and SQL orders.
All open source BI tools have been made by IT people and were keeping a very technical way of seeing queries.
Pentaho just announced the release 1.6 including for the first time this famous metadata layer. I didn’t check it yet but it could be a signal for more business oriented BI users to imagine a migration to BI open source solutions. Anyway just for an intellectual comparison you should look at it.
I would like to be Mickey Mouse in Larry Ellison’s house when yesterday afternoon he heard about the announcement of SAP regarding the 4.8 billion Euro they put on the table to acquire Business Objects.
We are all actually waiting for a reaction. It could be:
- No way! I don’t want this deal to be closed! I put 10 billion on the table!
- No problem! I will buy another BI vendor! Call me Cognos CEO!
- OK Henning! You want to play that game! I will buy you next month!
More seriously, this acquisition is a sign. A sign of a new consolidation step in Business Intelligence market. A sign of a new race! If you are a BI vendor you should very quickly find an exit for your company. In a couple of years they will be only one place or two for an independent BI vendor. All the other majors will be acquired by Enterprise Framework Vendors (EFV – a new acronym I just invented…). Targets will be Cognos, Information Builders, Microstrategy, perhaps Teradata… and smaller like QlickTech. Big players will be IBM, HP, Oracle and a couple of others.
Two many BI vendors for a small number of EFV… Be the first to join or run after the train…
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