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Business Intelligence

SalesPanda Editorial Content

Buying Guide for

May, 2014

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Why this Guide?

This guide will help technology buyers understand the basics of Business

Intelligence and its relevance to different industries. It will guide the buyers on the

steps to be taken in evaluating the Business Intelligence solutions and finalizing

the right product and implementation partners.

Who can use this guide?

Any technology buyer who is planning to evaluate or implement Business

Intelligence for their organisation in the next 3 to 12 months would find this guide

useful.

What next after reading this?

The guide not only gives a framework for evaluation but also provides a repository

of content on SalesPanda for further research. For those who are in evaluation

phase the guide gives links to the products available and list of solutions providers

in the buyer geography for implementation or the IT evaluator can get in touch with

the SalesPanda team for a free architectural assessment and recommendation.

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Table of Contents

1. What is Business Intelligence

2. Business Use Cases

a. Reporting platform

b. Forecasting

c. Dashboard

d. Multidimensional analysis

3. Market Trends and recent events

4. Business Intelligence Evaluation Criteria

a. Capability

b. Integration

c. Choice of Vendors

5. BI Components and conceptual framework

6. Key Product Vendors

a. SAP

b. Information Builders

c. Microstrategy

d. SAS

e. IBM Cognos

f. Open Source

g. Others

7. Services Framework and Implementation Check Points

8. Pricing Guide

9. Summary

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1. What is Business Intelligence?

Business Intelligence, commonly known as BI is a collection of software

applications that are used to analyze an organization’s raw data and transform

them into a set of meaningful and useful information for business purposes. It

helps in interpreting large amounts of data.

Companies use BI to improve decision making.

It is also used to identify inefficient business

processes that can be re-engineered.BI is

capable of handling enormous amounts of data

in order to identify, develop and create new

opportunities that can be turned into a

competitive advantage and provide long term

stability to the organization.

2. Business Use Cases:

BI technologies are typically helpful in the following four fields:

a. Reporting platform: This is the most common use of BI. Business

intelligence technologies are used to build reports that show the actual and

also how the actual results sum up against the short term and long term

targets of the organization. Reports generated can be daily, weekly,

monthly, quarterly or annually according to the requirement.

b. Forecasting: One is never sure what the future holds. However, a little bit of

forecasting always helps as it is extrapolation of the existing data and is not

a complete guess. BI can be used to predict forecasts based on analysis of

the historical data.

c. Dashboard: The main purpose of a dashboard is to convey the data and

information at a glance. There is hardly any requirement for drilling down on

this data. BI is used to prepare such dashboards which are presentable and

easy to use.

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d. Multidimensional analysis: This is more commonly known as slicing and

dicing of the data. This offers an insight into the data at a more fundamental

level. A strong data warehousing/data mart backend along with skilled BI

professionals are prerequisites to multidimensional analysis.

3. Market Trends and recent events:

Visual data discovery: BI tools are based on the concept that the customer

can write his own query without

having to know SQL. Visual data

discovery has made the tools even

more easy and flexible to use when

it comes to reporting, building

dashboards and business query. It

increases the agility to manipulate

and then mash the data together.

Along with this it also offers

interactive, user-friendly visuals.

Cloud based BI: While cloud computing has been able to make dents in

every software segment, BI is still relatively untouched. As the cloud vendors

in this segment like Birst, GoodData and Indicee have remained niche

players. However, 2014 looks like the year where cloud could make a strong

hold in BI as many industrial changes are taking place in favor of it.

Mobile BI: Mobile will continue to drive the adoption of BI that will make the

latter more relevant to field and front-line workers as well as will also reignite

executive interest. Still in most of the organizations that have implemented

BI, mobile BI for the employees has been implemented on a relatively small

scale.

In-Memory becomes mainstream: Now all leading BI platform vendors

have in-memory solutions, with Oracle being the last to join the ranks with its

Exalytics appliance, which runs the TimesTen in-memory database. Kicking

off 2013, SAP announced the ability to run its core transactional (OLTP)

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applications on the in-memory database. Nonetheless, debate about when

to use in-memory or when to use an analytic appliance, columnar database

or disk-based data warehouse will continue, driven by constraints including

available expertise, analytic demands and cost.

4. Business Intelligence Evaluation Criteria:

While selecting a business intelligence tool there are certain key aspects that

should be evaluated:

a. Capability: This concerns the set of features offered by each tool.

b. Integration: It is very important that the BI tool is compatible with the

existing company environment; existing data warehouse tools, company

infrastructure as well as organizational policies. This ensures smooth

integration.

c. Choice of Vendors: These include the vendor characteristics which shape

the buying decisions like product vision, market share, track record, industry

experience, reviews and references and finally the most important of all

pricing options.

5. BI Components and conceptual framework:

This is a new platform through which customers can combine the capabilities

offered by business intelligence with that of cloud based services.

Source Systems

ETL System DW SystemReporting

System

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6. Key Product Vendors:

While there are abundant BI start-ups, the long term suppliers dominate the

markets. The biggest of them are.

a. SAP: SAP Business Objects includes a range of solutions for all company

sizes across all industries and geographies.

SAP has recently launched version 4.1 of the software which includes

industry focused visualizations and spatial analytics, Big data support and

increased access for Oracle’s Exadata, OLAP and Essbase.

SAP has also launched a cloud-based, self-service BI solution called SAP

Lumira cloud which helps in better analysis and collaboration of data. It is

primarily aimed at small and

medium organizations and

departments within large

organizations.

Personal editions of

Business Objects BI start at

99$ per user with online

purchase. Other costs are

tailored to the requirements

of the organization.

b. Information Builders: This

supplier has been in the market since 1975. This year the company has

come up WD two new products: WebFOCUS Social Media Analytics which

uses data from social media interactions to provide insights into sales and

marketing, customer responses.

CLOUD Hosting services: This is a new platform through which customers

can combine the capabilities offered by business intelligence with that of

cloud based services.

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WebFOCUS is generally priced based on the servers that software runs on,

so customers usually pay more when the number of concurrent users

exceeds the capacity of the server on which they are running.

c. Microstrategy: In 2010 Microstrategy started offering mobile on the iPad

and iPhone and followed it up with two cloud offerings:

Microstrategy cloud-

i. Launched in 2011.

ii. It is an enterprise version

iii. Data and analytics software

are hosted and results are

provided to portals or to

mobile apps.

iv. Data volume is unlimited.

Microstrategy Cloud Express-

i. This has a monthly

subscription model, priced per user with a capacity based

annual contract.

ii. Data volume is limited to 1 GB per user.

iii. Launched in October 2012.

d. SAS: SAS holds a 12.7% share of the business analytics market, 9% share

of the overall BI and 35.25 shares of the advanced analytics. It has two key

offerings:

SAS Enterprise BI Server-

i. Integrates SAS analytics and SAS Data management.

ii. Report delivery through mobile services.

iii. Easy to use interfaces

iv. Tailored to different types of personas such as power users,

analysts, information builders and decision makers.

v. Price is based on the server group classification on an annual

fee basis and also includes technical support.

SAS Visual Analytics-

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i. Easy access to both descriptive and predictive analytics.

ii. Conduct ad-hoc data analysis , visually explore the data,

develop reports, dashboards, KPIs

iii. Share insights through web and mobile tablets.

iv. Addition of features like decision trees and scenario analysis.

v. Currently runs on Linux servers with the next version also

supporting 64 bit Windows.

vi. Price is based on the total no. of cores in the cluster on an

annual fee basis and also includes technical support.

e. IBM Cognos: IBM Cognos 10.x suite:

It includes several versions ranging from entry level ones for a

desktop to enterprise versions -

i. The enterprise edition runs on AIX, HP ITANIUM, HP-UX, L

INUX, SOLARIS or Windows.

ii. Analyzes databases, spreadsheets, unstructured data and Big

Data.

Cognos Express -

i. For workgroups and mid-sized companies.

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ii. Consists of four modules- Reporter, Advisor (analysis and

visualization), Xcelerator(Microsoft Xcel Analysis) and

Planner(Planning, Budgeting and Forecasting).

iii. All the modules can be purchased separately as well as a

complete suite.

f. Open Source: Pentaho and Jaspersoft offer reasonably capable open

source versions as a stepping stone to commercial offering.

g. Others: Other popular BI tools especially in the area of Data Discovery /

Visual Analytics are Qlikview, Tableau etc.

7. Services Framework and Implementation Check

Points:

Some of the key implementation Check Points while selecting an implementation

partner are:

Source System- Identification- Mapping- Business

Metadata Creation and

Standardization

ETL and DQ-ETL Jobs-Data Quality-Standardizations-Transformations

DW/MDM System-Data Models-Schemas-Metadata Management

Data Services-Definition-Standardization-Maintenance

Reporting-Report Definition

Predictive Analytics-Statistical Model-Forecasting and Prediction

Information Management Strategy & Architecture

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Team size - The size of the team should be determined by optimization of

manpower utilization and billing rates.

Number of years they have been in business - The track record and

experience of the implementation partner should be carefully gauged and

examined.

Domain knowledge and product understanding of the team that is in charge

of executing the project.

Key clients - Who have been there impactful clients in the past as well as the

present.

Types of implementation partners - Whether they are consultants or

resellers or system integrators etc.?

8. Pricing Guide:

Component Entry Level Mid-range Enterprise Class

0-10 Users 2-3 Lakhs 5-15 L 20L+

10-100 4-5 L 10-20 35L

Core Based 50L-1 Cr. (16 Core) 1-1.5 Cr.

Annual Support 15-20% 20% 100% (very few products)

Implementation 30-60% of License cost depending on complexity

(Currency is INR)

Reports and ETL work is segregated into low, medium and high complexity and

typically assigned 1, 2 or 4 days respectively – this is typical, some reports/jobs

can be more complex.

While Open Source software is free, it does not have much capability and might

have support issues. The Business Analysis and service fees are anyways

required in case of Open Source BI implementations as well.

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9. Summary:

According to a leading market research firm on technology products, companies

spend about $79 billion a year on BI software and services and this spending is

supposed to increase to $146 B by 2016.

The above guide summarizes the basics of business intelligence, various vendors

in the marketplace and their key offerings.

In short, BI can help an organization to enable global operations, streamline data

delivery, drive profitability, increase customer loyalty, accelerate decision making,

tapping business insights, ensuring transparency and accountability and a host of

other operations by better understanding and analysis of the raw data.

The key players in the market at present are SAP, Information builders,

Microstrategy, IBM Cognos and SAS. Increasingly, vendors are coming up with

solutions in the cloud and Mobile space.

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