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The State of Business Intelligence: Page 9 of 11

Just as data-warehousing appliances could clean up the gathering and preparing of data, BI appliances hold promise in simplifying the "downstream" OLAP for use in exception reporting, alerting and other operational BI chores.

Celequest, acquired in January by Cognos, made a name for itself by offering tools for BAM, which focuses on detecting patterns in processes, events and other activities. In late 2006, the company began to market an in-memory, behind-the-firewall appliance for operational BI and performance management, with SAP installations as a target market. It will be interesting to watch how Cognos, already prominent in performance management, plays its hand with the Celequest technology--and how competitors, including application providers Oracle and SAP, will respond.

Whether appliances or not, BI tools and analytic applications are racing to exploit 64-bit processing platforms that can support big, in-memory and data-intensive applications. These platforms will let users rely less on IT and perform more extensive and complex queries without having to retrieve data from disk. Appian and QlikTech are the most prominent specialized vendors in this realm, while SAS, long known for its deep analytics, leads the pack of established BI platform providers.

Paradise By The Dashboard

If empowering business users to measure, monitor and manage business performance is the end game for BI, then performance management is an area where vendors must excel.