Practical Business Intelligence

Post 4 in a series of 4, in which I share my thoughts on how our vendors did at the BI Tool Vendor Grudge Match last week, and on the details of their presentations. You might also check out my summary post earlier this week on PBI.

Company: IBM Cognos
Presenter: Paula Doyle, Account Executive
At IBM: Unknown
In BI: Unknown
Gift selected: Capstone Bag

Winner of the “Best Breakfast Award” at the roundtable!!!

IBM has only owned Cognos for a little over a year.

Paula rightly pointed out that as long as data is just sitting on a hard drive, it’s a liability. It has to be intentionally converted into knowledge assets that inform practical decision-making, which is what business intelligence is all about. Bravo!

IBM’s focus has been data management. Without Cognos, they had no presentation layer; hence the impetious for purchasing Cognos. However, Paula didn’t really elaborate on why Cognos specifically was chosen. That said, I would offer that Cognos is a fantastic tool for presenting data, if you know how to use it. It’s certainly not an “easy” tool to use. It falls squarely in the category of “powerful and complex,” in my opinion, and as with many such tools, the more powerful it is, the steeper the learning curve to truly master it and make it an effective choice for your enterprise.

Paula explicitly said that Cognos permits IBM to help users present their data as knowledge assets without requiring them to convert to an all-IBM infrastructure.

The speaker dodged technical slides repeatedly, which was uncomfortable and not what I’d hoped for in the grudge match. However, they did bring useful literature and the technical resource IBM brought with them did great in the panel discussion.

She also mentioned using BI to improve productivity and reduce headcount. Paula said that Cognos helps companies “improve productivity of workers using reporting, analysis and finance by 20% and … reduce asset levels by up to 15%.” Uh … okay. I’m inherently skeptical of numbers like these, but even if it’s true, that would leave me cold if I were the guy analyzing tools for my fledgling BI initiative. Of course, there are huge efficiencies to be gained with business intelligence, but I don’t think the strength of the principles and concepts of business intelligence are in a reduced cost of payroll. Rather, it’s in empowering your employees to work smarter not harder. BI allows businesses to do more with their staff; to allow them to be what and who the company needs them to be (and what they want to be), rather than spending all their time manually pushing data around in spreadsheets.

Paula very briefly mentions IBM’s “TM1 solution,” claiming that it helps increase ROI, but doesn’t elaborate at all. She’s referring to their in-memory OLAP cube solution which allows quick access to massive amounts of data. It increases performance and makes accessing large datastores more convenient, but I’m not sure it’s on my top-10 list of selling points for the business value of Cognos.

She also talked about the universal delivery platform that is Cognos. This is definitely a strength of the tool, allowing authors / creators of reports and other analytic tools to present valuable BI tools through a great many channels. But this is hardly “author once, deploy anywhere” as is suggested by the speaker. You have to keep lots of things in mind to deploy something on the web vs on your Blackberry.

Lastly, Paula referred to a single metadata layer as a strength of the Cognos tool. Although Cognos does a great job sitting on top of an enterprise data warehouse and presenting a semantic layer through report authoring tools, it’s the architecture and model of the data warehouse that will lead to a single source of the truth before the tool somehow magically gets that done for you.  As with many BI tools, if you use Cognos well, it is powerful and productive tool, but it doesn’t do the hard work of BI for you.

Overall, I grade this presentation: C

Unfortunately, IBM has requested that their video not be shared with a public audience. I’m working to get their permission to put it out here, but for now, nothing.

Post 3 in a series of 4, in which I share my thoughts on how our vendors did at the BI Tool Vendor Grudge Match last week, and on the details of their presentations. You might also check out my summary post a couple weeks ago on PBI.

Company: Pentaho
Presenter: Lance Walter, VP, Marketing
At Pentaho: 4 years
In BI: 19 years
Gift selected: Capstone Bag

Pentaho has existed for 5 yrs. Lance was VP of Product Marketing for BusinessObjects before Pentaho. Before that at Siebel, Hyperion, and Oracle.

Pentaho is an open source solution to BI. Lance touted the depth and breadth of the team assembled at Pentaho from many other BI companies with many years experience, talking a bit about awards for Pentaho and their customers.

He mentioned that it was important to focus on what it means to be successful in BI and cited slides from TDWI, but didn’t really spell much out. He did admit that a single tool isn’t going to be a silver bullet. He said, “You can succeed or fail with any tool.” Kudos! Love that honesty.

Lance’s “angle” (his word) is that Pentaho requires very little investment (being pretty much free and all), so return is easy to come by.

Pentaho spends a lot of time handling in-bound sales calls and little on marketing and pursuing out-bound sales. Interesting.

Lance sees a lot of “requirements distortion” in other vendors’ proposals. He feels many other vendors view their solution as a hammer, so every problem becomes a nail. I think there’s a certain amount of truth to that. But he did little to differentiate why Pentaho was different other than just saying it is.

Open Source TCO is often assumed / rumored to be very high, This is because in the old days there was no single throat to choke, no accountability, few standards, etc. Many of these risks have been fairly well mitigated. Pentaho’s for-profit corporate umbrella and support contracts serve to significantly address these concerns. I, for one, am far less leery about leveraging the Linux’s, Pentaho’s and MySQL’s of the world now than I was 10 or even 5 years ago.  Lance made this case with a story that demonstrated how little evidence there is remaining to make this kind of high TCO case against Pentaho. All good, and I think his story is telling.

Of course he highlighted the strength of having an open-source community continually working on improving their software. And I do think that’s a strength, especially given that Pentaho is managing/prioritizing requirements, performing quality control, and leading (supplementing) the community with paid on-staff development teams. Plus, when the community submits code back to Pentaho, then Pentaho is on the hook to support it, maintain it, update it, etc. Very beneficial symbiosis.

“IDC has talked about how open source is the most significant IT trend in the last 20 years … bigger than client-server, bigger than thin-client applications, etc.” I gotta say, I’m not sure I buy that. But whatever. I put only limited stock in the analysts and the pundits anyway.

Gartner found that Pentaho customers rated them very highly for customer satisfaction. Impressive, and flies in the face of the old perspective of open-source as “built in someone’s garage.”

Gartner also has evidently validated the Pentaho model as a good strategy for penetrating a market that’s continually trying to decrease TCO.

Lance touted the interoperability of Pentaho’s tool suite with other vendor’s tools. This is great. I’m all for primary integration at the data warehouse level, not at the presentation tool level. However, there’s a real concrete cost to having multiple tools in-house. Many companies have a hard time getting their people up to speed on one tool, let alone two.

I thought the most devastating blow he landed on the competition, though, was when he talked about how the customers of other vendors would receive maintenance invoices for the coming year and suddenly be highly motivated to consider Pentaho as a potential replacement to the systems they have in-house. Obviously, there would be much more involved in that kind of switch than just deciding to pay a bill or not, but it does give you pause … as well it should the big “expensive” vendors.

Overall, I grade this presentation:  A-

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Post 2 in a series of 4, in which I share my thoughts on how our vendors did at the BI Tool Vendor Grudge Match last week, and on the details of their presentations. You might also check out my summary post earlier this week on PBI.

Company: SAP BusinessObjects
Presenter: Shawn Blevins, Global Group Director
At SAP: 5 years
In BI: 15 years
Gift selected: Capstone Hat

Using the banking system of late, Shawn said, “It’s not enough to provide volumous access to information, and expect good decision-making to happen as a result.” AMEN!!! This was the best statement made during the presentations made at the Grudge Match. I agree 10,000%.  I feel like SAP focused more on the solution of BI than on a product, and while that was a little off topic (per se) for a Tool Vendor Grudge Match, it still “made my heart happy.”

He says “Context” is what is missing from BI today, which is exactly in line with what we’ve talked about over and over: turning “data” into “actionable knowledge assets.” It takes more than just context and getting context takes a lot of people, process, policy, data, and technology, but he’s definitely on the right track … especially for a vendor presentation.

“The problem is not BI and it’s not the tools, it’s that we’re [backwards] in the way we think.”

Love the analogy to the airplane he uses. BI should provide automation in the way that most of the time the plane flies itself while the pilot reads. Only when something happens that the computer can’t deal with does the average pilot kick in with all his expertise. Also, he referred to the black box … full of information, but it’s a little late when you’re “fishing it out of the lake.” Great stuff. Analogies are your friend in helping lay people navigate the complexity in concept that is BI.

The “Excel drug” …  beautiful … Shawn claims that BusinessObjects will help get your business users into Excel rehab, so that they’re less likely to break off pieces of data and create new data sources, and more likely to use the system to get what they need from data that remains connected to the single source of truth in the enterprise data warehouse.

He claims that SAP is “other vendor neutral” … that it’ll work with whatever you have in house. This is a tall order. “Why go with the market leader?” he asks. “More support for a wider set of architectures, worldwide services and support, a bigger ecosystem, etc. We work with everybody.” His point is that BusinessObjects is designed to sit in front of any solid foundation of data in the backend. To an extent, of course, I agree with what he’s saying, but there are definitely pitfalls associated with the BusinessObjects product that he’s glossing over. It certainly does not support every complex query you could conceive of in the independent way he’s describing, for example. Also, BusinessObjects has a tendency to silo your data in universes. As long as the universe is truly universal (which it almost never is), then you’re fine. But end up with 100 universes, one for each department (a common destination for firms that build “bottom-up”, btw), and you’re in big trouble. Integrating those universes is definitely not the seamless fun that he’s making the product out to be.

So, not perfect by any means (what is?), but definitely a great presentation, exactly on target conceptually, and SAP does have a very powerful, very significant product.

Overall, I grade this presentation:  A

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Post 1 in a series of 4, in which I share my thoughts on how our vendors did at the BI Tool Vendor Grudge Match last week, and on the details of their presentations. You might also check out my summary post earlier this week on PBI.

Company: Microsoft
Presenter: Dan Vandercar, Technical Presales
At Microsoft: 4 years
In BI: 15 years
Gift selected: Capstone Hat

Dan’s presentation focused a lot on Microsoft Office as the end-user delivery vehicle for Microsoft-based BI. This has obvious pros–the almost universal proliferation of the Office product, universal look-and-feel/common interface, and extremely advanced analytical features, particularly in Excel and even more so in v2010 than in v2007. And Excel 2010 is going to be even more powerful in this role, as it will support an infinite number of rows, more tools for data mining and cleansing, etc.

But this is actually where my concerns lie as well. I don’t particularly like Excel’s impact on BI. Of course I understand that business users are addicted to it and that it’s very powerful. But when business users export a CSV from their favorite database or tool, roll it into their meticulously crafted Excel spreadsheet, and evolve it over weeks, months, even years … it becomes a source system. Achieving a single source of truth is harder, and integration of these Excel-based “systems” and the business logic they contain back into the data warehouse is extremely difficult. So, if Excel is the big value-add for Microsoft (and it was certainly the cornerstone of this presentation), then I become concerned. They even went so far as to point out that the integrated ETL features of SSIS make it even easier for users to pull data from the data warehouse (where it belongs) into Excel. This doesn’t make me warm and fuzzy.

Dan rightly pointed out that SQL Server has really “grown up,” now in v2008 truly a contender in the large dataset arena. Terabytes in SQL Server 2008? No problem, according to Microsoft. And that’s long overdue. He also mentioned that MS spent $9B in R&D last year. Rock on! I like hearing that.

I like that PerformancePoint is now rolled into MOSS, giving it dashboarding features out of the box. I don’t have much PerformancePoint exposure, though, so maybe someone with more experience here can comment further.

Last, one of the most significant points in this presentation is the number of partners, VARs, consultants, whole companies, etc. that use Microsoft tools to implement BI solutions. That gigantic developer community plays a very significant role in the ongoing evolution of the tool and in the ready availability of the help end users need to be successful with it.

Overall, I grade this presentation:  B

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BI Tool Vendor Grudge Match

Yesterday’s ITA BI Roundtable was designed to be a face off … cage match … smackdown … between popular BI tool vendors. According to those who observed the carnage first hand, it was a great session. Gene Gladell, a regular participant at roundtable sessions, said that “this totally exceeded my expectations.” That’s good enough for me.

IBM, Microsoft, Pentaho (popular open source BI solution), and SAP were invited to attend. As roundtable chairman, I organized the event on behalf of the ITA and Capstone Consulting.

Thought I’d toss out a bit of a summary of the event. I charged participating vendors with …

Vendor Presentations

Make a brief presentation to the group addressing the question, “Why does your tool yield a greater ROI than the other tools represented?”  We limited them to 12 minutes each, and each laid out their case for being the best business value to their customers. We video taped the whole thing, and I’ll get it posted soon, along with summaries of their most salient points. In the meantime, if you attended the session, you should take my poll on LinkedIn and let me know whom you feel “won the debate.” I gotta say I’m curious what you think. Also, stay tuned for much more info.

Presenters where (in order of their presentations; which was randomly selected before the session):

• From Microsoft, Dan Vandercar, Technical Pre-Sales
• From SAP BusinessObjects: Shawn Blevins, Global Group Director
• From Pentaho: Lance Walter, VP Marketing
• From IBM Cognos: Paula Doyle, Account Executive

Best Breakfast Award

Bring breakfast. Everyone brought eats, and I had attendees vote on who got it right. IBM walked away with the “Breakfast Best Practices” award for the day. Hats off to the IBM Cognos marketing team!

Book Giveaway

Bring books to give away. To the members who brought the most new folks to the meeting (sounds like a 12-step program when I say it that way, doesn’t it? – sigh!), we gave out prizes. Good prizes, in fact. Four attendees walked away with brand-spankin’ new books on implementing BI solutions with each vendor’s stack.  Congratulations to …

• Tim Strudeman got first pick, he selected the Microsoft Data Warehouse Toolkit
• Jordan Martz scored Pentaho Solutions: BI / DW in Pentaho and MySQL
• Our very own Louis Giokis ended up with an IOU from SAP for a book to be named later — gotta work on those guys
• And Joan Matz made off with the IBM Cognos 8 BI Official Guide

Panel Discussion and Comparative Product Matrix

Answer questions from the group. Participants (both before the session and during) submitted a whole heap of questions targeted at our participating BI vendors. Capstone distilled these down to 36 solid questions. We asked 9 of these in a one-hour panel discussion in our session yesterday after vendor presentations. Each vendor was given 60 seconds to respond. They’ve all also committed to answering in writing. Once completed, I’ll be publishing this tomb for reference to the BI community. I think this will be a valuable tool; can’t wait to get it done.

Another Session Required?

There was so much interest and participation in this session that we’re considering doing another one. MicroStrategy, Information Builders, and InfoBright have all already expressed interest, and I think Oracle should be involved at some point. Besides, the only thing better than a comparative matrix of four BI tools is a comparative matrix of eight BI tools, right?  What do you think?  Good idea to rinse and repeat with new vendors? Maybe in the Spring?

Feedback Welcome

If you attended this session, you should post your comments. I’d love to hear your feedback on the Grudge Match, and suggestions on how we could improve it.