Fast forward a few months and another Gartner magic quadrant is out and again it’s looking at an area pretty close to Westbury: BI tools.

Our relationship with SAP Business Objects isn’t quite the same as our relationship with HP. After all, we’re an OEM reseller of Business Objects – it’s part and parcel of our Service Management Intelligence Suite product. But our solution is also somewhat platform independent when it comes to the BI tool – if you’re standardized on Cognos, for example, we can work with that, and SMI Suite is still very relevant.

So what’s the upshot from Gartner’s exercise in compare and contrast? Well, on their quadrant’s x-axis (“completeness of vision”), SAP Business Objects falls second only to IBM – quite an achievement in a field of fifteen big players. But on the y-axis (“ability to execute”) Gartner has it seventh – still good, but not as good. Overall this places Business Objects in the “leaders” quadrant.

On a more detailed level, Gartner says that “BusinessObjects’ reporting and ad hoc query capabilities continue to be cited as its top strength by its customers,” and that it provides “leading-edge capabilities, many [of] which complement its BI platform, in the areas of collaboration and decision support, text analytics, in-memory analytics, OnDemand BI (SaaS), search coupled with BI, data integration with lineage and impact analysis, and data quality.”

In the “cautions” column, however, Gartner warns that “customer support ratings for SAP are lower than for any other vendor in our customer survey”

Overall SAP comes out as one of the better, more established players, albeit with some areas to improve on.
Read the full report here: http://www.gartner.com/technology/media-products/reprints/oracle/article121/article121.html

Tom

But what does that mean: BI solutions that make life easier! Are customers looking for more out of the box reports, KPIs, analytics or for more functionalities within the BI tool? Or should the focus be on the back end of the BI architecture: the ETL layer and database? Of course, the answer is: both. However, looking at the number one priority according to “Gartner’s - 2009 CIO Agenda: improving business processes”, I’m convinced that in this economical downturn customers are most helped by making the back end as out of the box as possible.

The focus that I will have in my blogs is on the balance between adding value by improving the front end of a BI solution and the back end. Westbury’s focus has always been on making the BI solution for Service Management out of the box and to stay away from a datawarehouse architecture in which the dependency on SQL specialists and database developers is time consuming and expensive. But, again, what should be the right balance between out of the box capabilities for the front end of a BI solution and the back end? Does the CIO really care about the back end or is he or she only interested in the end results? Again, according to Gartner the focus of CIO’s will shift in 2009 to a more process oriented approach.

Keep you posted.

Floris