Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence and Analytics Platforms 2013

The emphasis from most of the market leaders is on Mobile BI, big data, and data discovery tools that are business-user-friendly. Next trend seems to be data-as-a-service which could significantly grow the market for BI and analytics platforms.

Read the full report here:

http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-1DYKLUU&ct=130206&st=sb

Source: Gartner (February 2013)

Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms 2012

As always, very informative report from Gartner analysing the BI vendors, tools and market. Highly recommended for anyone in BI world.

For me the highlights are:

Business vs. IT Driven BI. The conflict remains the same as before: business users demand easy to use, flexible products that put analytic power into their own hands, against IT's desire to maintain standards and create a supportable BI environment with predictable performance and quality data.

There are also other important features in this report, mostly around data discovery tools, Mobile BI, collaborative decision-making, new use cases and content types (real-time, big data, etc.), removing complexity, cloud services, predictive analytics, etc.

For more info:

http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?doc_cd=225500&ref=g_sitelink

http://www.qlikview.com/mq2012

Top tends in BI arena

I thought I’d share a few of my thoughts on the trends and technologies that are part of my daily life these days. From what I see in the market, the expectation from BI has changed significantly over the past few years. Now all size of companies are looking at investing in BI. They expect to spend less, get more ROI, more data accessibility, more insight into different levels of the business, more flexibility, and quicker response to the ever-changing business requirements.

Agile BI

Traditional waterfall design and development methodologies are too slow and too inflexible for BI. Many companies are now considering Agile for their BI implementations.
But don’t misinterpret what I am calling “Agile BI”, it’s not just about the Agile software development methodology, which is nothing new. IMHO Agile development by itself is not enough for BI, I think a different approach, technologies, and mindset are required to make BI more flexible
An agile software development process doesn't necessarily lead to agile BI, though it will speed up some steps in the process. The technology and processes (e.g. change management process) has to be made more flexible to really achieve agility.
Forrester defines Agile business intelligence as: An approach that combines processes, methodologies, organizational structure, tools, and technologies that enable strategic, tactical, and operational decision-makers to be more flexible and more responsive to the fast pace of changes to business and regulatory requirements.

Collaborative/social BI

Intelligence = Information + People

Collaboration and business intelligence have never been separated, but companies are just recently beginning to realize the benefits of the connection.

By introducing collaborative technologies to their business intelligence platform, companies are better positioned to utilize and take advantage of their employee data.

Collaboration is now becoming an essential part of the business intelligence. It enables crowdsourcing and in general the wisdom of the crowds tend to produce better decisions as organizations become increasingly complex.

Self-service BI

Let the business do it by themselves!
IT is always under one step behind from ever-changing business needs. The concept of self-service BI is to provide capabilities to enable business users exploring data and build their own reports. it may also enable analysts to publish and distribute their work to others.
Used in this way, the visual discovery tools become a nice tool for super users to create web-based reports and dashboards for colleagues. These reports are not static; they are “live” and interactive so casual users can analyse data just as business analysts would without the hassle of starting from scratch.

Predictive Analytics

"Predictive Analytics" is to analyse current and historical facts to make predictions about future events.

More and more vendors are attempting to make it more accessible to information workers and others without advanced degrees in statistics.
Data mining used to be mostly used by large enterprises (e.g. Banks) but these days I see companies in different sizes are started getting benefit from that.
There is also a trend in using social network data in data mining. It can be used to determine the trend, behaviour analysis and reduce customer churn.

Project Phoenix - ANZ

Project Phoenix, started by SQL Server MVP Arnie Rowland, is a program which awards software, tools and training materials to under/unemployed developers who propose a software project for a non-profit agency, school or church.

More info: http://www.rodcolledge.com/rod_colledge/project-phoenix.html

SQL Server 2008 R2 - free ebook

You can download this free ebook from Microsoft Press to learn about new features of SQL Server 2008 R2.

Introducing Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2, by Ross Mistry and Stacia Misner

Enjoy it!

Gartner Magic Quadrant for BI Platforms 2010

Once again, Microsoft has been positioned in the Leaders Quadrant of the Gartner Magic Quadrant for BI Platforms (Gartner RAS Core Research Note G00173700 - 29 January 2010)

The full report can be accessed on Gartner’s web site here:
http://www.gartner.com/technology/media-products/reprints/oracle/article121/article121.html

Figure: Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms

Microsoft BI in 2010 – and my New Year’s resolution!

It’s the first week of 2010 and people have got great intensions to stick to their resolutions (I’ve been to the gym once since 1st Jan which is a good start!)

But what about the “Learning” resolutions?

I have been learning about SQL Server 2008 R2 these days and found that there are lots of new things happening in MB BI space. Whether you are a techie who loves learning new stuff, passionate about MS BI, or just want to add weight to your CV, it would be worthwhile watching out these MS technologies in 2010.

1) Master Data Services

• Master Data Services
• Nick Barclay's posts about MDS 

2) PowerPivot

• PowerPivot website

3) PerformancePoint Services for SharePoint Server 2010

• What's New: PerformancePoint Services

4) SQL Azure and Cloud Computing

• SQL Azure website

5) Excel Services, VISIO Services and other BI related components and APIs in MOSS 2010

• What's New: Excel Services

And in terms of "Methodology" and delivery approach, I believe we will hear more about "Agile BI /Data Warehousing" due to the reduced IT budgets in this economy. I'll talk about it in another post.

PowerPivot & Visio Services for SharePoint 2010

Gemini has got a new name: PowerPivot

Microsoft revealed that it officially branded Gemini as Microsoft PowerPivot for Excel 2010.

“With PowerPivot, users and IT departments can: Integrate massive amounts of data on the desktop from virtually any source; Perform lightning-fast calculations and analysis on large data volumes; Share and collaborate on user generated analysis through integration with SharePoint; Monitor user generated applications,” the SQL Server team representative noted.

Couple of points to consider:

• PowerPivot for Excel only works with Excel 2010.
• PowerPivot for SharePoint will require SQL Server 2008 R2 and SharePoint 2010.

For more information about "Managed Self Service BI" and PowerPivot see:

http://www.powerpivot.com

http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2008/en/us/powerpivot.aspx

Visio Services: a great visualization tool which allows real time data to be shared on a SharePoint site for those without the Visio client.

Diagrams can connect to an OBDC source such as a SharePoint list, Excel spreadsheet, or SQL Server database. However it can not be used with SSAS or PowerPivot (which is a bit disappointing for BI developers). That's a great feature and I think we may be able to build fancy looking BI dashboards using Visio in near future.

Self-Service BI?!

We keep hearing about "SELF-SERVE" functionalities in new versions of BI tools specifically with Microsoft plan to delivering BI to the masses.

SQL Server 2008 R2 introduced some self-service options to allow business units and users to create and share BI solutions. Here is what MS says about them:

• SQL Server Project "Gemini” Add-in for Excel

Enables Excel power users to create BI solutions by streamlining the integration of data from multiple sources enabling interactive modeling and analysis of massive amount of data and by supporting the seamless sharing of data models and reports through Microsoft Office SharePoint 2010

• SharePoint 2010 based Operations Dashboard

This SharePoint managed service enables front-line operators and administrators to monitor access and utilization of analyses and reports as well as track patterns of hardware usage to help ensure the right security privileges are applied and user generated solutions are available, up-to-date, and managed in a consistent way.

• SQL Server Reporting Services Report Builder 3.0

This updated ad-hoc reporting client accelerates report creation, collaboration and consistency by allowing users to create and share report components that can be accessed via the shared component library and by enabling the rapid assembly of comprehensive business reports using these shared components.

• Rich visualization of geospatial data

New support for geospatial visualization including mapping, routing, and custom shapes can help your end users create customized reports that leverage existing content objects, such as queries, data regions, and charts and graphs. You can also enhance location-based data reports with Bing Maps in Report Builder 3.0.

I know many people are excited about them and especially about project Gemini, here are some quotes I found on the net:

• Gemini enables end users to work with business data
• 100 million rows on a laptop with Office 2010 Excel
• Slicers and spark lines in Excel 2010 are bringing BI to everyone
• Excel 2010 provides BI for the masses by making it easy to build your own charts/graphs on and offline

I agree with all of them, BUT, the question is: are we missing the main goal of BI: “single version of the truth”. Is Gemini leading us to the next generation of “Spreadmarts”? Does having Excel and access to source data make a BI solution?

From my experience, if you ask business-users to do something which requires more than 1 minute of technical training, most probably they get confused, and in most cases, anything more than 5 clicks away is considered as “too technical” and won’t be adobted by business users. So how do we expect them to get this toy and build a BI solution?!

I believe the idea of "Self Service BI" is like a double edged sword, though it can be useful in the same way as we do self-service check out in supermarkets: do it yourself when you don’t have many items, so you can save time, but you will be responsible for that and if you get confused about something, that’s OK, you may ask a staff to help you out with that, but it may take more time than standing in line in the first place.

However, it’s a quick way to discover the underlying data, and can be handy in some cases such as the following scenarios:

• If a business analyst needs to see what data is available in data sources
• To analyse source data and create simple reports when underlying data is clean and in simple structure
• To create a prototype for a reporting solution
• BUT, when you are dealing with complicated logics to bring data in, or when there are too many data sources and you are not a BI specialist: forget about it!

I don’t want to be negative; I like Microsoft and their BI toolset, but is it the right way to go? Does it lead us to the “BI for masses” idea or towards “messy BI”?!

I’d like to hear your thoughts.

New MS BI Burger - Delivering BI to everyone in the organization

After Microsoft announced that Office PPS 2007 would be folded into Microsoft Office SharePoint Server Enterprise 14 - which was officially death of PerfomancePoint Server - there's been slight changes on the famous "Microsoft BI Burger".

The new burger was designed to deliver Business Intelligence to the masses via SharePoint based under idea of "Delivering BI to everyone in the organization".

Farewell PPS!

"There will be no future version of PerformancePoint Server."

Microsoft will consolidate PerformancePoint Server (PPS) with its scorecards, dashboards, and analytic capabilities into SharePoint as "PerformancePoint Services" with the release of SharePoint 14 in late 2009.

http://blogs.msdn.com/bi/archive/2009/01/23/microsoft-bi-strategy-update.aspx

Not a good news at all for MS BI world! I'm not surprised about "Planning" module as I believe it was NOT successful, but embedding "Monitoring & Analytics" into SharePoint, mmmmmmm?!

Other links:

http://performancepointinsider.com/blogs/bsm/archive/2009/01/22/just-call-me-performancepoint-services.aspx

http://nickbarclay.blogspot.com/2009/01/rip-performancepoint-server.html

Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence Platforms, 2009

Gartner is an information technology research and advisory firm which provides research analysis and advice for IT professionals, technology companies and the investment community.

The "Magic Quadrant for BI" by Gartner, presents a global view of Gartner's opinion of the main software vendors that should be considered by organizations seeking to develop business intelligence (BI) applications.

See the full article here: http://mediaproducts.gartner.com/reprints/sas/vol5/article8/article8.html

2008 CIO Technology Priorities

According to a survey by Gartner "Business Intelligence Applications" is the highest priority for CIOs. Here is the top 10 result:

SQL Server 2008 RTM

Download SQL Server 2008 Enterprise 180-day evaluation from here:

• Trial Experience for Developers
• Trial Experience for IT Professionals

SQL Server 2008 Feature Pack (August 2008). It contains 17 new redistributable and backward compatibility components and add-on providers. Download it from here:

• SQL Server 2008 Feature Pack - Aug 2008

Have you ever wondered what the last meeting before a product ships is like? Have a look at inside the SQL 2008 ship room!.

SQL Server 2008 - CTP 6

The latest Community Technology Preview of SQL Server 2008 is available.

SQL Server 2008 CTP6 is "feature complete," which means that Microsoft won't be adding or removing features between now and RTM later this year.

SQL Server 2008 February CTP 6 can be downloaded from here

Microsoft Positioned in Leaders Quadrants in Magic Quadrant for BI Platforms

Congratulations Microsoft!

You can read the press release on the news here.