Blog: Shawn Rogers

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Gartner Business Intelligence Summit UK

I thought I'd do a bit of a recap on the event so far. Its my first visit to London so everything here is a bit new. I can saw however that there is a certain element of comfort in that I have gotten to see many of my friends at the event. The attendance is great over 600+ and the content is reasonably solid as well. I say reasonably only because they are forced to span the advanced to the elementary in many of the talks so its difficult to keep all of us happy all the time.

Andreas Bitterer kicked things off yesterday and shared his latest research: Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms, 1Q07. The leaders quadrant continues to contain Business Objects, Cognos, Hyperion, Oracle and SAS. New comer to the report is Spotfire who was included due to it's "innovative analysis capabilities and positioning".

Microsoft's Alex Payne spoke in a session yesterday to a standing room only audience as he presented the importance of pervasive business intelligence. An interesting point was discussed during the session concerning pricing. The bottom line being that low cost or "cheap pricing" doesn't always mean that a product isn't enterprise quality or feature rich. Alex drove the point home by unveiling the new pricing options available and it caused a few gasps in the room. In short, enterprise ready business intelligence at extremely aggressive pricing has officially arrived.

Several people left the room in a rush after the slide went up, its possible not everyone in the space is pleased with the new pricing?

I hope to have more on the Microsoft piece today.

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