Practical Business Intelligence

The more people I talk to about the BI Tool Vendor Grudge Match we conducted last month, the more interest there seems to be in putting more vendors in the ring for another round. So, I created another poll to get your input. Whether you’re in Chicago or not, I’d like to know …  If you could assemble any three of these vendors in a room to square off in a no-holds-barred confrontation about whose tool is tops in the BI space, who would they be?

• Select any three.
• Feel free to write in an “other”.
• Remember, if you vote for SAP, Microsoft, Pentaho, or IBM then you’re voting to bring these guys back for round 2.  (Read more about the first round with these four vendors: Original BI Tool Vendor grudge match.)

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-

Part 1 of 2:

Part 2 of 2:

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.