Result Data Newsletter - www.resultdata.com

What's Coming in 2007 for Business Intelligence?

by: Tom Meers, President and Principal Consultant

This year will bring substantial change in Business Intelligence (BI) and a growing base of organizations seeking to leverage reporting, analysis and data visualization technologies. Among the largest areas of anticipated growth is the mid-market where smaller companies are beginning to invest in advanced reporting and analysis technologies. Both Business Objects and Microsoft are targeting this sector with excellent reporting and report distribution solutions. We are anticipating at least some new releases, either in the form of service releases or full upgrades, in Crystal Reports and Microsoft Reporting Services this year.

We are also expecting Reporting Services to gain strong adoption in organizations that have traditionally been reluctant to invest in enterprise class BI platforms. Because Reporting Services is available at a low cost and because the widespread adoption of Visual Studio, Microsoft’s software development tool, we believe many smaller companies and departmental units will leverage Reporting Services to address core operational reporting needs. This will include such things as parameter driven reporting and automated report distribution via email and Web sites. Reporting Services is beginning to mature and the acceptance of it as a primary reporting platform in some accounts is showing that it will have an impact on the BI landscape over the next several years. It is still weak in providing the more advanced ad hoc analysis for which tools like Business Objects Web Intelligence are well known. However, it can provide solid operational reporting and respectable management and summary reporting. Result Data is planning a one day workshop covering the basics of report design and deployment with Reporting Services for the second quarter. We are also somewhat surprised at the continued growth of Crystal Reports and see both solutions as viable for years to come. In many cases they appear to address different customer segments.

While Reporting Services will likely bring many new customers into the first level of Business Intelligence, we don’t see it having a significant impact on larger organizations that have already standardized on Crystal Reports. These companies have a significant investment in content creation with Crystal and continue to leverage the Business Objects Enterprise platform to provide more advanced data analysis with features like contextual linking of operational reports to analytical documents and dashboards. Business Objects is also continuing to release enhancements like its Web Query technology that allows the Business Objects Universe semantic layer, which makes pre-aggregation and business friendly presentation of data work within an established data security model, available to any application that can consume a Web Service. The “opening” of the Business Objects semantic layer will have significant impact on how customers can leverage the BI platform in customer applications, third party software and Web sites. Business Objects is due to announce an interim release which we hope will add new functionality to Crystal Reports, Web Intelligence, Dashboards and the platform while improving some foundation and integration issues. We expect to see most of the Business Objects and Crystal customer base upgraded to the XI platform by the end of the year.

Other innovations that we see as strong potentials for this year include the marriage of the Crystal Xcelsius product, which provides interactive dashboards, with third party data sources like Reporting Services and SharePoint. This combination of Business Objects and Microsoft products offers a very cost effective way to create and deploy interactive data visualizations that can present real time data to users without expensive platform architecture. This is another factor that will drive departments and mid-market organizations to implement BI in 2007 for the first time.

Another new, but important, aspect to how BI is centered on the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) concept. Business Objects currently offers a Web based BI solution that allows Crystal Reports customers to publish and distribute reports via the Web (crystalreports.com) without a BI platform. Recent acquisitions and announcements by Business Objects suggest that this capability will be significantly enhanced in the next few years. We are anticipating the service to grow and include more advanced data analysis features and greater customization capabilities. Microsoft has also begun to show signs that Web based BI is coming. While there are no current SaaS offerings from Microsoft in the BI space, the recent release of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS) includes the ability to publish Excel files so that Web users can view and interactive with them. A SaaS solution from Microsoft or a third party hosting service that provides the servers, support and infrastructure for doing this is likely around the corner.

By the end of 2007 I believe we will see stronger BI integration, standardization and more Web oriented BI capabilities from both Business Objects and Microsoft. Please consider one of our free quarterly seminars to see how these technologies are evolving and to get a firsthand look at what they can do.

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