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Dazed and Confused - Product Roadmaps, Upgrades and Migrations: BI and DW Trends, 8 for ’08

BI Briefs

This is part of a series of columns on business intelligence (BI) and data warehousing (DW) trends for 2008.

 

Dazed and confused - such is the fate of the thousands of BI customers of Business Objects, Cognos and Hyperion as their respective acquirers, SAP, IBM and Oracle, decide how to shape their future product lines.

 

For the acquirers this future involves integrating the newly acquired products with their existing products and service offerings. But, they also need to determine how to blend in the dozens of other acquisitions they made in the last couple of years. For example, how do Business Objects, Cognos and Hyperion fit within SAP, IBM and Oracle, respectively?

 

It gets even more complex. The acquired companies have been on acquisition binges of their own. For example, how do Applix and Celequest (both acquired by Cognos) integrate with Cognos 8 and IBM’s online application processing (via its Alphablox acquisition)?

 

Acquisitions beget acquisitions. Change is good if it helps you. These changes will certainly help the software titans that acquired these terrific BI firms, but will they benefit existing customers or prospects? Of course, the titans will say yes, but what will others say?

 

For the last several years, Business Objects, Cognos and Hyperion customers lived through product line transitions as each of those companies acquired dozens of companies. Marketing presentations explaining multiple-release, multiple-year product roadmaps became the order of the day. Many customers struggled to keep up with the latest upgrade and product capabilities.

 

The acquisitions by IBM, SAP and Oracle will only exacerbate this situation. Sure, there was that marketing slide showing you the promised software nirvana, but it cost money, time and resources to keep up.

 

The product upgrades were beneficial to the software firm by expanding its offerings and most likely reducing its costs, but what about their customers? More upgrades, more expense and most likely little additional business benefits. No business ROI. In fact, it might even be negative.

 

Without making a value judgment as to whether the end result is worth it, it is clear the journey that existing customers will face just to keep up with the vendors’ product roadmaps and upgrades will be daunting.

 

I understand that software vendors feel that each upgrade offers value to their customers. But they'd get a different opinion if they surveyed the customers, especially the people funding these efforts. Customers continue to extend the time between upgrades for obvious reasons - at least to them and their businesses.

 

Regardless of whatever else happens this year, many BI/DW/performance management (PM) customers will be presented with a product roadmap (with much fanfare) and will be faced with an upgrade to reach the product Holy Grail (as described in those slides). In this era of constrained budgets, putting resources into an upgrade usually means postponing creating new uses of BI/DW/PM.

 

Proceed cautiously.


Rick Sherman has more than 20 years of business intelligence and data warehousing experience, having worked on more than 50 implementations as a director/practice leader at PricewaterhouseCoopers and while managing his own firm. He is the founder of Athena IT Solutions, a Boston-based consulting firm that provides data warehouse and business intelligence consulting, training and vendor services. Sherman is a published author of over 50 articles, an industry speaker, a DM Review World Class Solution Awards judge, a data management expert at searchdatamanagement.com and has been quoted in CFO and Business Week. Sherman can be found blogging on performance management, data warehouse and business intelligence topics at The Data Doghouse.You can reach him at rsherman@athena-solutions.com or (617) 835-0546.

In addition to teaching at industry conferences, Sherman offers on-site data warehouse/business intelligence training, which can be customized and teaches public courses in the Boston area. He also teaches data warehousing at Northeastern University 's graduate school of engineering.

 

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