2011 Readers' Choice: Business Intelligence
What's interesting about the companies listed in this category is the implied convergence of Business Intelligence (BI) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). Here, CGT Research Advisory Board Member and Cognizant Vice President Steven Skinner comments on the rankings and draws from experience to assess the state of the BI market.CGT: Can you comment on the survey results in this category?
Skinner: ERP vendors have lined up specific BI tools and are now being considered top "BI" vendors. Who would have imagined SAP, years ago, being ranked the top BI vendor in 2010? In turn, the BI and platform vendors have links to ERP and focused on industry-specific solutions to make them more immediately relevant. Plus, SAS continues to run an independent path, coordinating with key partners such as Teradata for in-memory analytics, but also maintaining its role as the de facto standard for analytics.
CGT: Is activity in this market picking up again? Why or why not?
Skinner: Cognizant saw a lot of activity in 2009 and 2010 with clients seeking to reduce and simplify their vendor choices in the BI space, primarily driven by licensing cost reasons but also by reduced training and support costs. However, this came with a one-time price of disruption in conversion. Smart clients took the opportunity to also re-think their reporting and BI strategy while seeking to converge on fewer systems.
CGT: What trends should CG companies follow in this market?
Skinner: One trend we promote is allowing analytical insights to drive user attention to certain patterns of data, rather than waiting for users to discover this data themselves. We think that relying on visualization, OLAP and "serendipitous discovery" runs the risk of missing key insights.
We are also seeing a systematic movement toward cloud-based analytical solutions that de-couple the need for large upfront capital investments. Companies are recognizing that the physical location of work is no longer a constraint. Therefore, the future of work will focus on allowing knowledge, analysis and work effort to flow to the geographical location that is most economical and efficient.
BREAKOUT FAVORITES
Customer Experience: SAS
"SAS delivers knowledge we can act on from our customer database of 1 million people who have interacted with us in the past."
-- Carlo Carli, Director, Fratelli Carli's Food Division
SMB Market: SAP
"People now have faith in the timeliness and accuracy of the data they use to make critical business decisions... our business users recognize the implementation to be an unqualified success."
-- Ron Hamilton, Director of Business Solutions, Johnson Outdoors Inc.