The New Adventures Of Old Business Intelligence

"The VARs that have the domain expertise are vital to the vendor and vital to the end customer," says Bob Vander Woude, vice president of sales and marketing at Preferred Strategies, a Soquel, Calif.-based solution provider that resells Business Objects' software. The company integrates those products with ERP applications from JD Edwards (now owned by Oracle), developing reports and graphical dashboards that give managers visibility into their financial and sales processes. One income statement report developed by Preferred Strategies has some 800 formulas behind it--an example of the kind of expertise a BI vendor could never provide. The company is expanding its expertise to other ERP systems and could adapt its technology to other vendors' BI products if it chose to do so, Vander Woude says.

Perhaps the biggest demand driver for BI technology is the realization by business executives that spending thousands, even millions, of dollars to implement ERP, CRM and supply chain management systems has given them very little visibility into their business processes.

"The business intelligence market is so early in its life cycle compared to ERP and CRM," says Jeff Finken, business intelligence practice director at Madrona Solutions Group, a Seattle-based solution provider. Madrona builds BI systems that tap into Microsoft Dynamics CRM applications using the reporting and data analysis capabilities built into the Microsoft SQL Server database and third-party products like Tableau Software's tools for building visual analysis reports and dashboards. (Tableau developed a version of its software for Microsoft Dynamics CRM that's sold through 600 Microsoft channel partners.)

Dashboards are in great demand by big companies deploying BI to large numbers of managers and workers, and by small companies with limited IT resources.

"Ease of use is a big deal," says AMR Research analyst John Hagerty, calling user-unfriendly BI software a major "blocking factor" to wider adoption.

About half of Madrona's projects involve installing Dynamics CRM and building a BI system that analyzes the data it generates. But in other cases, the customer already has the CRM apps in place and BI is the core of the work. Finken says compliance with regulations such as Sarbanes-Oxley is one reason management needs better visibility into operational data. "The ability to predict where their business is going is the other big driver," Finken says.

Some of Madrona's implementations involve building real-time links between dashboards and CRM applications. Linking BI with operational data is a big change from traditional BI practices that analyze historical data collected in off-line data warehouses. Analysts say real-time BI is a significant business opportunity for solution providers with the right know-how.

Applying BI to both structured and unstructured data, the latter including text documents and images, is another area with growth potential for solution providers, Forrester's Evelson says.

Another interesting trend: Some channel partners are adopting an onshore-offshore strategy, says Rich Luciano, senior director of channels at Cognos. Solution providers work with customers on-site to determine their BI needs and develop report specifications, then contract with offshore developers in India or Eastern Europe to handle the grunt report development work.

But Sherlock Holmes, president of Cognos reseller Genware Computer Systems in Lincoln Park, N.J., is skeptical about how effective that approach can be given that BI requires close work with customers. "You need to be there in real-time to work with the users," he says.

NEXT: Caution -- vendors merging.