Choosing BI Platforms

CHOOSING BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE PLATFORMS

June 2011

Prepared For The:

Microsoft Business Intelligence User Group of New York City

Scott [email protected]+1 (609) 937-6107

Page 2© 2011 InsightSPI - Not For Distribution

How Do Companies Choose BI Platforms?

Features/Functionality

Cost

Vendor Roadmap

Incumbency & Vendor/Customer Relationships

Alignment With IT Strategy

Business Solutions

The MS Business Case



Features / Fuctionality

Cost RoadmapIncumbency

& Vendor Relationships

Alignment With IT

Strategy

Business Solutions

The Business Case for MS

MS does well when leading with analytics AS is a superior mix of scalability and analytical functionality

Competitors do well at the “high end” Advanced Visualizations Data mining “Big data” Data quality

Features/functionality no longer a big factor in BI platform decisions All BI vendors are comparable There are no weak vendors any more




RoadmapIncumbency


Alignment With IT

Strategy

Business Solutions


Cost

Current economic climate requires minimal “time to value” Doing more with less Companies looking for quick wins (3 months) w/tangible results Mandate to deliver projects that drive immediate bottom-line results i.e. this fiscal year “Defend the Spend” with Self-funding incremental ROI Focus back on Departmental BI

The rise of Self-Service BI

MS platform ~1/5 cost of competitors Many already own it i.e. SQL Server, SharePoint, Office

MS TCO Less complexity in implementation

1 to 4 ratio of implementation man-hours compared to Hyperion, Cognos, OBIEE, others

M&S costs ranging from 15% to 25% of the license fee annually

Microsoft BI skills investment are ‘incremental’ to most organizations

MS “low-cost” plays well for… Cost-constrained industries e.g. retail, healthcare BI ‘re-starts’ or second surgery When competing vendors enforce pricing changes


Case Studies: Investment Optimization & Analysis

Challenges Couldn’t easily analyze impact of investment/discretionary spend on income statement &

balance sheet Financial and customer transaction data in disparate systems Hyperion Planning/BI systems were

too rigid took years and many millions to deliver

weren’t likely to rip and replace …however didn’t want to invest more

Oracle was offering expensive data “connectors” requiring constant customizations and extensive config/dev

Solution Owned SQL Server & minimal incremental cost for SharePoint Implemented MS BI solution

Extract and integrate financials and customer data, in weeks, not many months Designed models than plan/analyze their discretionary spend and enable investment

optimization across the business• Used across 40+ American Express business segments• Has enabled the reallocation of tens of millions of dollars within and across the company






Alignment With IT

Strategy

Business Solutions


Competitor’s acquisitions and industry consolidation has created uncertainty

MS roadmap messaging is strong

BI for the Masses, not the Massive

Futures look good, SharePoint/Excel/SQL

Blurring the boundaries between Data Integration, Analytics, Reporting, Dashboards, and Office Productivity

Competitor acquisitions make MS BI look more like an integrated platform

MS Issues/Gaps

ProClarity successor, PPS mis-steps, etc.

Gap in “Big Data”

Perception that MS is not enterprise-ready

Business value, align with vision

Innovation/Dependency on Office.next

Cloud is a wildcard

?



Vendors & Their Users in a Recessionary WorldVendors & Their Users in a Recessionary World

Creative financing deals from vendors

Maintenance revenue is increasingly important for vendors

Pricing pressures and bundling

Infrastructure-light BI will benefit

Users will look at what they already have

Open source and SaaS will get a push

Repurposing of BI: Focus on the bottom line

Uncertain users investing tactically

Negotiating power is high (for customer) during initial acquisition; low for subsequent transactions




Cost RoadmapAlignment

With IT Strategy

Business Solutions


Incumbency & Vendor

Relationships

Typically Bad for MS if the business drives the decisions Oracle/Hyperion and IBM/Cognos have strong relationships with Finance SAP/Oracle have strong industry relationships

ERP Vendors are now BI Vendors e.g. SAP, Oracle “Own” the data Selling BI into their install base

Interoperability of a vendor’s product lines should not be assumed

Align with customers’ vendor consolidation strategy

Typically good for MS if IT drives the decisions IBM/Cognos is there too

Ubiquity of SharePoint in the enterprise Significantly decrease barriers to entry

As long as they own it



“Typical” Global 2000 Company




Business Solutions


Alignment With IT

Strategy

“Typical” Organizational View of BI/PM . . .

Reporting: Crystal

Scorecarding: Excelsius

Reporting: Siebel

OLAP: Oracle

Query: Qlikview

Reporting: Actuate

Forecasting: Hyperion

Data Mining: SAS

OLAP: Cognos

Reporting: Crystal

Excel Hell!!






Business Solutions


Alignment With IT

Strategy

Standardization historically hasn’t worked Business User Adoption/Rejection

Organizations need to focus standardization efforts more on defining the use case (i.e. how the tools should be used and why) and less on stipulating which tools are allowed

“More than half of enterprise BI users said they were dissatisfied with IT’s ability to deliver business intelligence functionality” (ComputerWorld, 5/4/2011)

Cost prohibitive & high entry barriers for enterprise deployment Requires comprehensive data management strategies

MS vision for PERVASIVE BI Increase BI usage from 20% to 80% in the enterprise

BI as a “feature”, not a specialization

Convergence of BI w/collaboration, search, content management Address user adoption issues w/familiar tools i.e. Excel & SharePoint Cost is no longer a barrier to entry …still need to fill some gaps e.g. metadata, tool integration


Case Studies: Program Performance Management

Challenges IT “standardized” on IBM/Cognos Low business adoption

Unnecessary complexity i.e. overkill Dependence on IT support Low perceived ROI

Consequently, using “Clipboard” approach to program management Unable to adequately sense & respond to Program issues “Brute force” stovepipe management of financials, technical metrics and resource

planning

Solution Needed something between “clipboard” and “IT standard”• Low-cost scalable solution

• Integrate with existing program rhythm• Provide visibility and enable program optimization

• Already owned SQL Server & SharePoint• Rapid user adoption with familiar tools e.g. Excel • SharePoint dashboards + SQL Server MSAS + SQL Server MSIS for data integration• Extendable across the org, planned for implementation as “single view” of Program metrics



Other MS negative IT perceptions . . . Other MS negative IT perceptions . . .

Low-cost = “cheap”

Still new to BI

Emotional IT bigotry

The usual suspects…scalability and security



Role of SharePoint in MS BI decisions . . .

Overwhelmingly Positive

Differentiation for Microsoft BI

Large SharePoint Install Base

leveraged for BI Upsell

Enables enterprise or large

BI deployments

Mitigates competitive

entrenchment

Barrier to entry when

customers do not own it






Alignment With IT

Strategy


Business Solutions

Microsoft has a weak sales model for business solutions Focus on IT, not BDMs

Need to shift conversations away from pure technology

Competitors out-spend MS, invest in sales cycle Perception around competitor’s industry and functional solutions Demo-ware positioned as industry “templates”, data models and “accelerators”

Finance/CFO often drive BI decisions with Performance Management MS doesn’t sell to finance

PPS Planning failure

MS partner eco-system can be very effective Planning/budgeting vendors like Tagetik, Prophix, SAP BPC (OutlookSoft)

Industry solutions & functional expertise

Departmental BI i.e. Shadow IT Self-Service

QlikView is user-friendly with mature feature tools and visualization Mega-vendors following, Tableau is getting there PowerPivot catching up (but require upgrades, compatibility)

Creates huge data governance/management challenges for IT Cloud/Hosted opportunities, particularly for industries with lots of data sources


Case Studies: Financial Analysis & Reporting

Challenges Recently merged west coast and east coast companies

2 financial transaction systems Thousands of financial reports Manual process for planning, budgeting, forecasting did not scale

Catch-22 Finance rejected IT ‘standards’ and would not give up Excel for reporting IT could not provide timely data access without enforcing standards

Solution Robust integrated reporting and analysis

MS Integration Services + SME for data integration and data warehousing Excel-based tools (SAP BPC e.g. OutlookSoft) for Planning/Budgeting Integrated with dynamic reporting toolset

• One version of the truth across the business• Aligned Business & IT Goals for flexibility, timeliness and standards-based approach• Linked corporate strategy to operational performance

• Provided platform to plan/manage/analyze the business• Architecture enables other data sources to analyze profitability and productivity






Alignment With IT

Strategy

Business Solutions


The current landscape for BI software vendors Comes with high cost, high complexity and relatively long delivery and time-to-

value

Targeted at a small set of users across the organization

Most are more sophisticated than Microsoft in their sales motions w/customers

Mega-vendors are already entrenched with their customers e.g. ERP

MS BI platform lowers barriers to entry & risk Pricing and TCO is massively better than competition

Increase user adoption (#1 success driver and reason for BI project failures) with delivery of powerful solutions through familiar tools used in every-day business processes i.e. Office (the #1 business tool) and SharePoint

Incremental ROI i.e. quick time-to-value solutions and not “big bang” high-cost high-risk long timeframes like many competitive solutions

Robust third party ‘eco-system’ to round out MS solutions for specific functional areas of the org and specific industries



Questions?…Comments?

Scott [email protected]+1 (609) 937-6107

Technology

Choosing BI Platforms