Data Doghouse - performance management, business intelligence, and data warehousing

Business Intelligence/Data Warehousing Emerging Trends (but not breakouts): 9 for ’09

Just like Goldilocks and the Three Bears we are looking at what is too hot, too cold and just right. So far we have discussed our forecast for the top BI & DW trends for 2009 and the top hyped trends that will splash across industry pundits’ articles, blog posts, Tweets and white papers.

Now it is time to discuss the emerging trends for 2009. Some of these trends will be hyped while others fall below people’s radar, but the common trait is that these trends will make headway in being successfully integrated into companies’ BI & DW portfolios. Still, these trends will not “cross the chasm” and get into the mainstream.

Eventually many of these trends will become part of the industry’s mainstream, but it takes time for emerging processes, practices and products to make the chasm crossing. Constrained IT budgets along with layoffs or hiring freezes at many companies will further exacerbate the time it will take for these trends to become mainstream.

Advocates will claim that a recession is the perfect time to implement many of these trends. Although I generally concur with their arguments, you have to keep in mind that “you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink.” In tough times, the tendency is to play it safe and stay with what you know. The other tendency is to hold off on doing anything until the economy improves. Both of these tendencies constrain mass market adoption.

The 8 for ’09 emerging trends that will (continue) to emerge in our industry:

1. Data governance slowly continues to emerge
2. Moving beyond relational databases
3. Open Source Software (OSS) adoption increases
4. On-Demand Software interest expands
5. Excel becomes an accepted tool in a BI portfolio
6. Solutions rule over tools
7. DW appliances expand business analytics
8. Data integration services overtakes data services 
9. Data silos start to crumble (just kidding!)                

I’ll write more about each of these during 2009.

There will be companies that explore and adopt these trends during this year. As with anything new, there will be some successes and missteps. As the industry learns from these successes and the economy rebounds look for some of these emerging trends to near “crossing the chasm” (but not in 2009.)

Business Intelligence & Data Warehousing Fizzles (Too Much Hype): 9 for ’09

Break out the hype translation dictionary! Google the new term you just heard from your fellow colleague or consultant and you will see the industry PR machines have propagated it all over the industry press.

What is it? You're about to learn how this new thing solves everything that has been inhibiting IT systems for decades! Get onboard, the hype machine is leaving the station. 

When reading the 2009 predictions by pundits, analysts, columnists and some vendors, one is struck by the hype and blatant product (or services) promotion. There needs to be a counterweight to the hype. But when you suggest the “emperor has no clothes” those promoting the hype will say that you just can’t see how their product is the answer to information nirvana. If you do not buy into the hype then you must be a dinosaur who just is clinging to yesterday’s technology.

I do feel that the technology and product trends being hyped are often valuable tools for some customers, for some projects, for some business users and for some data.

However, I don't see any of them “solving world hunger.” None are THE solution to everyone’s information problems. In fact, I don’t feel any of them are a solution unto themselves, but are just enabling technologies that, coupled with data governance, meeting business requirements, business and IT working together, following good software engineering practices and utilizing proven project management techniques (to name just a few non-product oriented ingredients) may help businesses leverage information better than they do today. I’ll confess I am a nerd (my undergraduate degree is engineering) and love to play with new technology, but that is not enough.

The hype cycle begins with initial successful (exaggerated?) projects by companies who are innovators; then a lot of articles, podcasts, webinars and white papers; followed by a large growth rate (from a small customer base); and, then the analysts and pundits extrapolate these high growth rates out forever until the trend becomes pervasive. And the pressure is on to jump onboard the hype machine because the train is leaving the station. 

Then reality hits!

Sometimes the growth happens but most times it does not. But even when it happens it usually takes much longer than anticipated. Remember, we are dealing with the real world of limited or declining IT budgets, installed applications and business people who are trying to run the business (to make the profit that then will support salaries and the IT budgets.)

Even if the technology is terrific it takes companies a while to catch on and then implement. With a recession and IT budget pressures, innovation progresses at a slow pace regardless of how terrific it is..

The 9 for ’09 trends where PR and Hype outstrip their actual impact in our industry:

1. Cloud computing
2. SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) with a business ROI (return on investment)
3. Pervasive business intelligence (BI)
4. Managed data integration 
5. The next Excel-killer
6. MDM (Master Data Management) and CDI (Customer Data Integration) software goes mainstream
7. Data quality becomes easier
8. Real-time business intelligence (BI) 
9. Data warehousing is no longer needed

All of my Hype 8 for ‘08 proved to be correct. The hype machine kept churning but each of the items on my list remained more hype than reality. This year’s list has four repeats from last year because the hype just will not quit for these items.

An aside prediction, many of these hyped items will be renamed in the future so that the hype machines can try again.

Business Intelligence & Data Warehousing Trends: 9 for ’09

“It’s the economy, stupid” will be the dominant theme for 2009. A recession, consumer and corporate anxiety, and constrained IT spending will challenge rational thought.

Although most IT budgets have been approved for 2009, don’t be surprised if they are spent cautiously in the beginning of the year. They may even be cut further if there’s panic in a company’s industry or about the economy in general.

Even with this backdrop of anxiety and budget constraints, business intelligence, data warehousing and data integration will continue to grow in 2009. Some will argue that because BI and DW provide such business value they will be exempt from the budget cuts.  But do not be naïve, if you are fighting to survive, even items labeled as essential in good times become luxury budget items in bad times.

Not every company is in dire straits though. Companies that are frugal but not fighting for survival may stick to their normal priorities. And some companies will use these times as an opportunity to invest in key initiatives to grow market share or revitalize themselves in the marketplace.

But, no matter what a company’s circumstances, the economy is challenging even healthy firms to do things differently. This is the second theme for 2009: IT behavior will be forced to change from its “buy and hold” strategy. What IT builds, how they build it and who they purchase from will be altered this year. This will significantly impact BI and DW in 2009. There will be some mistakes made along the way, as there are with any change.

These changes will not happen overnight, but will continue long after the recession is over (and it will end eventually!)

The important trends affecting our industry this year:

1.    Economic concerns distorts IT budget decision-making
2.    Business intelligence expands
3.    IT expands its BI vendor shortlist
4.    Data integration  continues healthy growth
5.    Data integration breaks out from the “Magic Quadrant”
6.    Incremental beats out big bang projects
7.    “Good enough” replaces best-in-class
8.    SMB BI demands outstrip a constrained adoption
9.    Industry consolidation continues

I’ll blog about all of these trends during the next few weeks.

It's Just a Little More Disk Space

Recently I bought a Maxtor OneTouch™ 1TB backup drive for my son’s PC. We had been using a 320 Gb hard drive for backups, but to keep a couple of full image backups with daily incrementals we were maxing out that drive. It is not surprising with the music, graphics files, games, social networking and maybe even a few homework files he would be the first in the family to need a 1TB backup drive.

When I was running later in the day I got to thinking about the fact that I just purchased a 1TB hard drive for a home PC! Not to age myself too much, but when I built my first data warehouse and data mart 21 years ago we had a disk farm of 150 Gb for the entire project. That disk farm consisted of 150 1-Gb drives which, at that time, was the largest that my high tech employer built. We thought the storage that we had available was abundant for the needs of our company which had $10 billion in sales.
 
Then I thought about how not too many years ago 1TB data warehouses were at the high end of corporate efforts and many of us were impressed with the sizable amount of corporate data that was being made available to businesses.

The good news is that data warehousing and business intelligence has been very successful at many companies, but the bad news is that business needs keep expanding beyond what we have built and beyond what we thought previously was a massive amount of data.

No sooner did we get data from ERP (enterprise resource planning), CRM (customer relationship management) and other enterprise applications that we had to reach out beyond the firewall to suppliers, partners and customers. We have started to tap the data shadow systems (or spreadmarts) that exist in huge pockets in most companies. And we have not really begun to target the untapped, but high value, unstructured data that business people use daily to make decisions.

A 1TB backup drive for a home PC! This indicates about how far we have come - this would have seemed to be enough disk storage in the past to store an entire enterprise-wide data warehouse (DW) but now it’s just enough to backup a home PC - and how much more business data we have yet to incorporate into our data backbone for analytics, performance management and operational reporting.

Notes from TDWI Boston Chapter Meeting

The Boston Chapter of TDWI had its quarterly meeting yesterday with a theme on Master Data Management (MDM). We had a keynote presentation titled “Master Data Management (MDM): Data Salvation or Your Next Data Silo?” We also had a terrific panel discussion on MDM with representatives from IBM (IBM), Business Objects/SAP (SAP), Oracle (ORCL) and Kalido.  The panel consisted of an interesting mix including sales management, a CTO and two representing field organizations.

In keeping with the general nature of TDWI events we limited the hype and sales pitches. I moderated and have to compliment the panelists on keeping the focus on providing the attendees with the successes of MDM experiences along with the cautions and dangers that one may encounter.

A few key points:

MDM needs to be a business-driven endeavor. The business must feel the need and participate for success. IT cannot build MDM without business.

The MDM effort needs to be focused on delivering real business value and solve specific business problems (top-line improvement or bottom-line cost reductions.)  Justifying a MDM program with a declaration of achieving a "single version of the truth" or "360 degree view of the customer" just won’t do anymore. This “Field of Dreams” scenario is too nebulous.

As one panelist said “MDM is for life, not just for Christmas.” MDM is not a onetime project but an ongoing program. And the successful programs just keep getting more to do.

The best candidates for MDM are those companies that have felt the pain and are already educated about how difficult it is to get master data defined and blessed by the business. In analytical MDM efforts, the best candidates are those that have been doing enterprise data warehousing for awhile and have already started some form of data governance even if it is only in its infancy.

MDM is about people, politics and processes rather than technology. Actually, I said that not the panelists, but they agreed with me.

Although it was a little tough to get them to admit it, they all agreed that MDM were not small projects in terms of time, people or budgets. They kept telling us that you could start on a small scale but it probably did involve millions of dollars. The early adopters they mentioned though generally spent a good deal on their initial efforts.

It was a very interesting and informative afternoon.

Ease of use versus functionality

  The Wall Street Journal article “Business Software's Easy Feeling” yesterday discussed how “Many vendors have "consumerized" their corporate software and online services, making them easier to learn and navigate by borrowing heavily from sites such as Facebook or Amazon.com. They have also tried to make their products more intuitive by shying from extraneous features -- a lesson learned from simple consumer products such as Apple Inc.'s iPod.”

Three of the firms we cover in the On-Demand Index (ODI) are featured in the article: SuccessFactors Inc. (SFSF), Omniture Inc. (OMTR) and Salesforce.com Inc. (CRM.) The applications offered by these companies are varied: writing performance evaluations (SFSF), providing Web-analytics (OMTR) and sales force management (CRM.)

Although these applications are available as software-as-a-service (SaaS) or on-demand software offerings, the article did not address the pros or cons of that approach but rather why people found these products easy to use. When selecting an application (or investing in the application company itself) it is important to examine what the application offers to business people, what are the competitive alternatives and will business people actually use it in their jobs.

Every IT group and consultant worth their salt knows how to conduct a product evaluation. And industry analysts’ supporting that activity routinely publishes their top picks in various product categories. These evaluation processes are skewed towards the products that have the most features. (They also are biased towards the companies with the most customers and are the biggest in size but that’s another discussion.)

Is it the most features-packed product that a business person will use productively and generate a business return-on-investment (ROI)? If a product isn’t used there is not any business value returned.

The product has to be both easy to use and perform useful functions. That is why iPod/iTunes succeeded where so many portable music players did not. That’s what the products mentioned in this article offer.

The cautionary note to those companies and others that provide easy to use products is to watch out for being seduced into cramming additional features into your products. This inevitably results in complexity and may become a drag on business people using your products. It is easy to want to add more features to your product and get caught up in trying to win those product evaluations. But sit back and resist! More is not always better.

Part of the appeal of various BI products from SaaS, open source software (OSS) and other “small” software vendors is that they are easy to use and get the job done. This is in contrast to BI products that may win classic product evaluations but are overloaded with features and products stuffed into a BI suite. Feature-rich may win evaluations but not necessarily business users if the offering is too complex.

“Best” is most often defined differently by business people versus IT, consultants and industry analysts. Techies usually associate best with the most features. Business people define it as the best fit matching the functionality they need with its ease of use. Too many features often mean not much use.

Some IT people will tell me that their business people ask for everything so that’s what they try to give them. First, the IT group probably talked to “power” users who are more techies than business people. Talk to the people you want to really use it. Second, just because you ask for everything does not mean you are willing to pay for it (either in dollars or your time learning it.) A lesson many people learn in sales and one IT needs to understand.

Ease-of-use gets mentioned every few years as critical to business adoption and then the vendors fall back into the classic approach of stuffing features into their products to win those evaluations. It is not just the vendors fault, they are goaded into it from IT, industry analysts and competitors.

Disclosure: No investments in any of the stocks listed in this post

BI & DW Trends: 8 for ’08 - Data Integration will Break out of the Silo

(This is part of a series of posts on business intelligence & data warehousing trends for 2008.)

How’s this for irony: a lot of integration projects create more silos!

How can this happen? It’s because companies implement integration technology and products on a project-focused basis. The integration projects concentrate on specific applications and processes, in other words they integrate silos. Each tactical integration task is completed, and eventually the company discovers that they need to integrate the silos they created with their integration projects. 

The bad news is that many companies have already created these integration silos. The business groups that invested in these integration projects are now back to using spreadsheets, i.e. data shadows systems, to reconcile the conflicting numbers coming out of these silos.

The good news is that many IT and business groups are educated consumers, i.e. they have seen the result of their myopic integration efforts and understand they need to change their ways.

The Integration Sea Change

What should you do if you find yourself in this situation? Step back from the tunnel vision of tactical data integration projects and design an overall integration architecture. After you have this overall architectural blueprint you can then design your individual projects, fitting them into this overall blueprint. Just like you hand your house blueprint to various contractors so that everything fits together, you need your data integration blueprint to get things to work together too. This blueprint encompasses architectures for data, technology, product and information (business data transformed.)

Enterprise Data Management (EDM) is the blueprint (or holistic approach in consultant lingo) that people should be striving for. Integration efforts, be it enabled using EAI (Enterprise Application Integration), SOA (Service Oriented Architecture), EII (Enterprise Information Integration) or ETL (Extract Transform and Load) technologies, all involve integrating data.

Data integration processes involve mapping one or more data sources to a data target and transforming the data along the way. Regardless of whether you are using messaging, services or batch-driven technologies you are performing the same processes (just the transport is different.)

But rather than taking a common approach most integration projects start with an entirely different set of technologies or products. However, these products and technologies overlap and, more importantly, the data they integrate overlaps. The result is silos and business people manually reconciling the data they just spent a lot of money and effort integrating.

Fortunately, if your company is in this situation you are not alone (misery loves company!) and great options have emerged in the market. First, there are best practices to design your data integration framework (DIF) or blueprint. Second, there are proven program and project approaches that incrementally build an EDM and migrate from your silos.

Finally, some of the top ETL (extract, transform & load) vendors have recognized the need for comprehensive approach and have transformed their ETL products to data integration suites. These suites have expanded beyond batch-oriented ETL to include EAI, EII and SOA. In addition, it is becoming increasingly common for these suites to offer data profiling and data quality functions. No longer are you forced to buy separate best-of-breed products supporting niche technologies.  You can find products that will support your DIF.

The market leaders, according to Gartner Research (Magic Quadrant for Data Integration Tools, 2007), are Informatica (INFA) and IBM (IBM). Both companies have expanded their data integration capabilities through acquisitions; most notably IBM’s Information Server obtained a significant portion of its functionality from its acquisition of Ascential Software.

Forrester Research, , concurs with the leaders (The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise ETL, Q2 2007)  but feels that Oracle (ORCL) (via its Sunopsis acquisition) and SAP (via its BusinessObjects acquisition) are catching up. I’d also watch that smaller competitors such as Pervasive Software (PSVW) and Sybase (SY) are busy putting together their own suites.

Conclusions

Change is in the air! Companies need to shift from their tactical, project-focused approach to integration to an enterprise perspective. Many in the industry are realizing that they need to make their integration efforts provide comprehensive and consistent business information, not create yet another silo to then reconcile with your other silos. The will and ability (products) are in place. This trend will gain more momentum this year providing case studies and knowledge to expand beyond technology’s early adopters.

fyi: This post was originally titled “No Quarter: Data Integration Suites enable EDM (Enterprise Data Management)”. I have heard that some of my readers are not Led Zeppelin fans and a few have not even heard of them, making my obscure references a bit confusing.

 

Suites (BI, data integration or data modeling): Boom or Bust?

Microsoft (MSFT) vaulted into dominating PC applications when it developed its Office Suite concept a long time ago. Before this suite people bought best-of-breed applications for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations and personal databases. Microsoft arguably did not have the best of any of these applications but had a set of “good enough” applications that (kind of) worked together and were simpler, as well as, cheaper than buying the best-of-breed products. Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect and Aldus where the best products once but they have long since faded from most people’s memories. Since becoming the dominant player, Microsoft has increased its Office Suite’s functionality and complexity over the years.

In data warehousing and business intelligence, software companies have introduced suites for various categories of software including BI, data integration and data modeling. Each category of suites were created after software companies initially developed best-of-breed products that targeted specific or niche BI, DI or data modeling tasks. The vendors expanded each of these niches until they overlapped other niches. Over time, either through internally developed product extensions or very commonly via acquisitions, companies developed software suites that provided the functionality of many niches. BI pure-play vendors such as Hyperion Solutions, Business Objects and Cognos developed their BI suites and extended their footprint by acquiring dozens of smaller companies and absorbing their niche products. These companies were themselves bought by the software titans: Oracle (ORCL), SAP (SAP) and IBM (IBM). Besides BI suites, these same software titans have also put together data integration and data modeling suites.

The conventional wisdom is that the suites sold by the software titans will dominate their markets. Based on industry analyst market evaluations and the amount of press released on these products you would think history was repeating itself, i.e. these products are dominating their software category just as Microsoft has done with Office in the desktop application market. There are similarities. The most obvious is that these suites do eliminate the need to buy multiple best-of-breed products and then integrate them together. But the flip side is that these suites have, as they have expanded functionality, gotten more complex and costly.  Microsoft Office has also gotten more complex and costly but there is one significant difference between Office and these new suites: Office because pervasive first and then got more complex and costly. Microsoft captured the market and became the only viable option for companies. It did that by saving companies time, money and resources. BI, data integration and data modeling suites have not become pervasive and there are plenty on options for companies to deploy. History may not repeat itself.

Companies are looking for BI and data integration software that provides the functionality they need but at a reasonable cost in terms of people, skills (both IT and business user), time and budget. The suites may be the most features packed offerings available in the market but that does not mean they are the best fit for everyone. These suites have not become pervasive for a key reason: too high a TCO (total cost of ownership). This provides a market opportunity for software vendors such as MicroStrategy (MSTR), Actuate (ACTU), SAS, Dimensional Insight, QlikTech, Information Builders, SAS and others. In addition, TCO is a prime driver for the interest being shown in open source and On-Demand (or SaaS software-as-a-Service) software offerings for BI and data integration.

Will the software titans win as conventional wisdom implies? Will it become Microsoft’s market based on its dominance of the Office applications, in particular, Microsoft Excel? Will some company breakthrough and become pervasive by offering BI and data integration at a reasonable TCO (of course they will likely be acquired before they become pervasive!)?  Or will the market continue to be fractured?

The journey will take time. There will be hype and surprises.

Features alone will not win the battle.

BI & DW Hype: 8 for ’08 The death of the independent software firm

(This post is a continuation of a series on  BI & DW Hyped trends).

The death of the independent software firm is greatly exaggerated.

MicroStrategy (MSTR), SAS, Informatica (INFA), Actuate (ACTU) and Teradata (TDC) are just some of the independent firms that are probably getting tired of hearing that they are no longer viable. And their long-time and happy customers are probably wondering what the industry analysts and pundits are smoking when they proclaim that the software titans have taken over the world of BI and DW.

After all, the titans did not take the market over, but rather they acquired companies – Business Objects (SAP), Cognos (IBM) and Hyperion (ORCL) - who were the market leaders. If, as the pundits proclaim, IT departments are only buying from the titans because they want “one throat to choke” then why were Business Objects, Cognos and Hyperion kicking the titans’ butts before they got acquired?

And, do the pundits examine IDC market share numbers? The titans and their acquired companies only had 37% of the market in 2006. That means nearly two-thirds (!) of the market is not buying the titans-only purchase plan. And most market share studies under-represent open source, on-demand software and emerging technologies provided by innovative independent software companies.

Rather than opinion and anecdotal feedback (primarily from the software titans themselves and their systems integration partners and customers), the market place, i.e. what the customers are buying, shows that they continue to purchase solutions from independent software firms. The independents will continue to be alive and well.

Many companies have long-standing relationships with these firms and are not dropping successful implementations because pundits tell them that they should. Their business people are quite happy and productive, so why migrate? Companies like SAS, Information Builders and Dimensional Insight (to name just a few) have been providing successful solutions to their customers for more than a decade.  Why is that going to change?

Innovative companies and emerging technologies generally come from independents and new ventures rather than the titans. On-demand software, open source software, data visualization, industry specific performance management solutions are just a few areas where the innovation is coming from the independents. And it seems companies are willing to buy that software from them.

Another reason why independents will continue to thrive is, besides innovation, they often provide a much lower TCO (total cost of ownership) that the titans. First, as the titans acquire and absorb companies and products the resulting product lines are almost always more complex and costly to use. The titans will point to increased functionality, but there is no free lunch to gaining that functionality; the customer pays for it in many ways.

Second, as a former software engineer, I am inclined to believe that as your product line continues to be expanded through acquisitions and products “integrated,” these product lines have increasing amounts of “kludges” to get the those products to work together. I know you can use SOA and services to “integrate” products, but these can be used as a modern band-aid to integration. Finally, the titans’ licensing schemes always seem to expand with each release and acquisition. The independents can much more easily under-price the titans.

Mergers and acquisitions (M&A) have always been part of the software industry. As any industry matures, M&A activity increases and consolidation is inevitable. You can make a persuasive case that software independents are unlikely to grow to be multi-billion titans themselves before they are acquired. But it is tough to make the case that many independents cannot exist and grow in this marketplace. The evidence does not support that case.

In addition, at various times in the last couple of decades pundits made the case that IBM, then Microsoft and then Oracle so dominated the landscape that independents could never grow and thrive. But somehow companies such as Business Objects, Cognos, Hyperion, PeopleSoft Seibel and many others grew to be large and then got acquired. And there are still many successful tech firms such as Google, SAS and SAP. And we have dozens of successful independents providing solutions that are being bought by companies across all industries.

Just look at the large pharmaceutical and medical device companies. They are behemoths that continue to grow organically and by acquisition. No one in that industry is declaring the biotechs dead just because they often get acquired. In fact, the biotechs are often the innovative companies.

The BI, DW and performance management industry is maturing and the titans will continue to grow both organically and through acquisition. But the death of independent software companies is greatly exaggerated.

BI & DW Trends: 8 for ’08 The Song Remains the Same: Data Shadows Systems Continue to be Pervasive for Reporting and Analytics

I co-authored the TDWI report Strategies for Managing Spreadmarts: Migrating to a Managed BI Environment. In a survey we conducted in the fall of 2007 we found that the medium number of data shadow systems at an enterprise was 30. According to the survey, data shadow systems are prevalent in all industries, companies of all sizes and throughout various business functions in the enterprise.

In short, they are everywhere!

BI may not be pervasive, but spreadsheets are. And reporting and analysis are prevalent in every business – that’s how the business operates and grows – so that means that people are using spreadsheets to do that reporting and analysis.

Just ask any analyst or manger in finance, marketing or sales how they do their forecast, compare actuals to budget and, in fact, prepare the budget to begin with.  Chances are they are using a spreadsheet. And even if they are using a BI tool or application, probe a little more and you’ll see spreadsheets augmenting the tools they are using.

Several trends will continue to foster spreadsheets and the creation of data shadow systems:

• Business people know how to use Microsoft Excel and have it on their desktops
• BI tool vendors have improved Excel integration, ironically resulting in an increase of data shadow systems
• Now that the “major” BI players (Business Objects, Cognos and Hyperion) have been acquired by the software titans IBM (IBM), SAP (SAP) and Oracle (ORCL), they will be in product transition, i.e. product roadmap phase, delaying large-scale rollouts in existing BI customers
• An economic recession, or concerns about an impending recession, will most likely delay or cancel large-scale rollouts
• The Microsoft (MSFT) juggernaut continues, particularly in the small to medium businesses (SMB), to establish a compelling TCO (total costs of ownership) proposition to customers. Microsoft is slowly but surely expanding and converging the capabilities of SQL Server (database, Integration Services, Analysis Services and Reporting Services), Performance Point, SharePoint, Microsoft Office (especially Excel and Pivot Services.) This product set may be looked down upon by the industry “elite” (most likely with ties to the software titans) but it’s the people, i.e. customers, that decide what is best for them (rather than what is the best tool in an esoteric product evaluation.) It’s the cost, ease of use and familiarity that tips the scale in Microsoft’s favor.
• Other lower cost options compared to the software titans, such as on-demand software, open source and some innovative BI software firms will continue to grow, but spreadsheets will be part of the deployment strategy with these tools.
• The growth of performance management applications will also increase the use of data shadow systems because, despite PM vendors’ claims, their solutions in general will spur business people to use data shadow systems to either customize their solutions or be the duct tape that gets the PM solutions to work with their business environment.

In short, “The song remains the same.” Spreadsheets and data shadow systems keep providing the reporting and analysis needs of business people. There may be better ways to deliver those needs, but business people have to operate the business day to day regardless of how elegant the BI solution is around the corner.

(Download the free TDWI report: Strategies for Managing Spreadmarts: Migrating to a Managed BI Environment and view the on-demand webinar.)