A consultant I have worked with off and on over the years recently formed a software company called Xlerant. His mission is to deliver what he and his backers are calling 'guided business intelligence'. The intent is to make BI more accessible to more users by putting a wizard-like front-end on it. His first area of focus is Business Performance Management (itself a front-end of sorts to BI).
More specifically, he is focused on the exploding are of budgeting and planning. Many vendors offer excellent planning solutions today, but their focus is on enterprise-wide collection, consolidation, and reporting. BudgetPak from Xlerant is targeted at the individual cost center manager charged with creating their annual budget. Unlike the Finance managers, budgeting is not something they deal with on a regular basis. The product is designed to walk them through the process with intelligent prompting, displays of data and rules from HR, and an overall workflow. The end result should be a timely, less painful creation of a more complete and accurate budget. Will this company succeed? Will this expand to other aspects of BI? I do think 'guided business intelligence' is useful and there is a market for it. However, the end user expects this to come from the primary BI/BPM vendor himself as part of the core product. There is a gulf today between client expectations and vendor realities which Xlerant can address. Over time however, it must be the vendors themselves that make their products easier and more accessible through their own development efforts or by acquiring/partnering with third-party developers like Xlerant.
Posted October 22, 2005 8:09 PM
Permalink | 1 Comment |
talk about insight!