The BI Field: A Road Map

The business intelligence (BI) market is literally changing daily.

Last week, on the same day Microsoft hosted its first BI conference to push its upcoming PerformancePoint, SAP snapped up OutlookSoft, a well-regarded independent maker of planning and reporting software. Product lines are popping up and vanishing quickly, leaving channel partners scrambling to keep up with the moves.

All the consolidation hasn't slowed buying, resellers report. Smaller companies were long ago shaken out of the BI market, and those that are left have entrenched products and customer bases strong enough to survive ownership changes.

"The customers don't perceive risk that the product architectures will go away any time soon," said Sid Banerjee, CEO of Claraview in Reston, VA. "The vendors left standing are big enough and material enough to be a strong part of any acquirer's portfolio -- Hyperion, Cognos, Business Objects and MicroStrategy will stick around."

Below is an outline of some of the market's key players and the product lines they've launched or bought.

Business Objects

Business Objects has a history of growing through acquisition, and of doing it well. Its flagship BusinessObjects XI includes technology picked up through its buyouts of popular reporting software maker Crystal Decisions (in 2003), data integration developer Acta Technology (2002) and planning applications creator SRC Software (2005), among others. Its latest purchase is Cartesis, a European performance management software maker with a particular strength in financial planning and forecasting applications.

Like all vendors who build their portfolio by buying, Business Objects has some redundancy issues to sort out: David Jones, director of Cartesis partner Paragon Consulting Group, wonders which planning tool Business Objects will lead with, the one it got from SRC or the INEA software it takes over from Cartesis (which itself gained INEA through acquisition). The company says it will support both. Only time will answer the question of which gets the bulk of Business Objects' resources.

But when it comes to end-to-end BI and performance management, partners say Business Objects is the industry leader. "Business Objects is the most all-around player," Banerjee said.

Oracle

When Oracle bought Siebel Systems last year, most attention focused on the boost the deal gave to Oracle's applications line, which gained the industry's dominant CRM system. But Siebel was also a stealth player in the BI market, with a surprisingly strong and underrated analytics portfolio: A rueful Siebel CEO George Shaheen said Siebel's analytics software "was going to be my secret ticket back to the promised land." Instead, it became Oracle's secret ticket to its first $1 billion year for its Fusion Middleware, which posted 35 percent growth in new license sales in Oracle's last fiscal year.

With Oracle hungry for acquisitions and BI vendors watching out for suitors, the company was long expected to make a splash BI buy. The only question was, which vendor would it pick off? The answer came in March, when Oracle snapped up Hyperion. The deal closed last month, giving Oracle a powerful set of performance-management applications.

The big question hanging over Oracle is how it will move its hodgepodge of software lines forward once its new Fusion line rolls out next year. Dubbed "Confusion" by FUD-spreading rivals, Fusion is intended to be a "functionally" merged applications set, built atop a wholly new code base.

"They have to really start coming out with some clarity as to what their overall suite is going to look like," said INsolve Executive Vice President William Taylor, who sees increasing customer interest in Oracle's offerings.

Next: Microsoft, SAP and SAS Institute Microsoft

Microsoft may already be the industry's top provider of BI products -- if you count Excel, the application many smaller companies have swathes of corporate data tied up in. Up until now, Microsoft's BI strategy has relied primarily on marrying its SQL Server and SharePoint portal software. In 2005, it got a bit more formal about BI with the launch of its new Microsoft Office Business Scorecard Manager software, but the company's real push for the high-end BI market will begin later this year, when it releases its new PerformancePoint Server product.

PerformancePoint marries the ProClarity technology Microsoft acquired last year with Business Scorecard Manager (which is being discontinued) and other new functionality in a product partners say compares favorably with enterprise-class BI software like Hyperion and Cognos.

SAP

SAP has long offered tools for extracting analytical and forecasting data from its monolithic ERP system. "SAP have always taken this area seriously," said Paragon's Jones, who saw SAP cutting into Cartesis' sales recently.

But the company risked being outflanked by Oracle, which snatched retail BI powerhouse Retek away from SAP two years ago. Two months after Oracle announced its Hyperion buy, SAP countered by grabbing OutlookSoft, a smaller, privately held maker of performance-management tools. It plans to fold OutlookSoft's technology into its NetWeaver middleware platform.

SAS Institute

With revenue of $1.9 billion last year, SAS is the industry's largest BI vendor, topping even Business Objects. Thanks to its status as a privately held company, it tends to stay below the radar, and until recently, SAS had no reseller program or serious channel presence.

That changed in September, when the company launched its first reseller program and began a campaign to build its indirect sales. Partners say it's too early to judge the program's success, and SAS doesn't release detailed financial reports, making it hard to measure the company's channel sales. Still, it's signed on 50 partners so far, and is positioned to become a higher-profile player in the BI channel market. For the actual number-crunching underpinning statistical analysis, SAS is the premier vendor in the field, partners say.