In mid-February SAP acquired Pilot Software, which helped define the term business intelligence and now specializes in performance-management applications based on its BI/analytics platform, PilotWorks. More recently, in early March, Oracle made an offer to buy Hyperion. If the deal goes through, Oracle will muscle up its portfolio with the addition of Hyperion's Essbase OLAP server and BI tools. More importantly, however, Oracle will assume the market lead for performance management tools and financial applications. Market analysts predict more mergers and acquisitions to come.
If these commercial packages are out of your league, open-source BI is becoming a player, as are new data-warehouse appliances that promise analytical power at an affordable price. JasperSoft and Pentaho, two of the better-funded open-source start-ups, help develop BIRTs (BI and Reporting Tools) for Eclipse, the popular open-source development environment. This is no flash in the pan: BI veterans Actuate, Business Objects and Cognos are also BIRT developers.
Finally, BPM and rules-engine providers are in the hunt. BEA Systems with Fuego, as well as Fair Isaac, Savvion, TIBCO and WebMethods, all boast of activity monitoring, embedded analytics, decision management and business information integration in their products. These technologies will be critical to next-generation BI.
Let The People BI
Although BI tools are becoming somewhat easier to use, they remain a challenge for most nontechnical employees, especially if the suites require deep knowledge of underlying data models, schema and metadata. It takes some training before an end user will know how to drill down and discover why, for example, a BI dashboard is showing that labor costs are high in comparison with sales in a particular store.
