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 ordered 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 ordered a DVD last week and have not yet received it» In 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...