The BI Survey 7, The Carling Cup and Off To Prague

Well, I'm guessing that I'm the only person in the blogosphere with a posting title taking in the Carling Cup final and Nigel Pendse's latest BI Survey, but as ironically I've ended up missing Spurs' first cup final appearance in eight years through having to catch a flight over to Prague (and I missed the 5-1 demolition of Arsenal on a flight coming back from Prague, now there's a co-incidence), I thought I'd take a moment during the flight to to take a look at an early preview copy of of The BI Survey 7. Though many of you may have heard of Nigel Pendse's OLAP Report (and the rather good website that accompanies it), the BI Survey is an annual survey of BI tools users and customers carried out around the world that's independent of vendors and sponsors. I was given early access to the final copy of the report as a thank-you for posting a message earlier on in the year encouraging Oracle BI tools users to take part in the survey, other than that I've got no links with the organization behind the report (although I do exchange the occasional email with Nigel about what's going on in the OLAP world)

Anyway, taking a look at the report, there's some good information about what organizations make the most use of BI tools (telcos, insurance, banking and retail), and which vendors are strongest in which markets (Microstrategy in retail and healthcare, Business Objects in insurance, Hyperion in telcos and insurance, Panorama (a Microsoft Analysis Services front-end tool) in banking. For organizations with large budgets, their primary buying influencers were industry analysts, their existing deployments and strategic relationships, whilst organizations with average to smaller budgets did most of their research via the web, via webinars and similar.

There were some interesting general findings about what in general were the primary reasons for buying a particular tool. For users, functionality was the primary reason (41%) followed by query performance (19%), price (15%) and corporate standards (14%), with data scalability coming in at just 10%. Interestingly, each vendor's eventual buyers had different skews in their priorities, with Essbase buyers being primarily driven by query performance whilst SAP B/W buyers were primarily driven by corporate standards. Talking of SAP B/W, another interesting statistic was that their implementation cost was around 3 or 4 times the implementation cost of other vendors solutions, not having done a SAP B/W implementation myself I can't say authoritatively why this is the case, but I guess the implementation alongside the SAP system plus the general complexity of delivering BI on top of SAP (and maybe an overly-complex toolset) may have led to this.

There were some other useful non-vendor specific findings in the survey:

• Business goals were most often met when projects were led by end-users or specialist BI/OLAP consultancies
• Implementation times made a big difference, with the most successful projects going live within 3 months and those that took over 2 years faring extremely badly
• "Soft" benefits, like faster or more accurate reporting and better business decisions were more likely to be achieved than "hard" bottom-line benefits like reduced costs and headcounts, with the benefit least likely to be achieved being reduction in IT headcount
• Query performance was cited as being one of the biggest determinants of project success (strongly by users, less so by vendors and implementors), other key factors were data quality, the degree of internal politics, the level of interest by the end users and the ability to resolve changing requirements.

Funnily enough, Oracle didn't come out too well in the survey, with take-up of OBIEE appearing limited at the time of the survey and usage of Discoverer and Oracle OLAP dropping away, and a surprising lack of take-up of Oracle's BI tools by customers of the Oracle database. Essbase came out of it relatively well, scoring well in terms of query performance, I guess it'll be interesting to see the survey next year when the 10g version of OBIEE will have been out in the market for a while and Oracle's acquisition of Hyperion will have had a chance to reach the market.

Finally, there were a few UK-specific figures in the survey, one of which was the win-rate for various BI tools in multi-vendor evaluations. Worldwide, Essbase had a win-rate of 66% compared to 33% in the UK, Oracle OLAP had a win rate worldwide of 45% compared to 30% in the UK. For Discoverer and OBIEE though the figures were reversed, with a worldwide win-rate of 30% for OBIEE compared to 50% in the UK, and a worldwide win-rate of 39% for Discoverer compared to 50% in the UK; obviously Oracle is stronger in it's BI tools in the UK than in the OLAP sector, it'll be interesting again to see in particular how the Essbase figures change in the UK following the acquisition and it's positioning as part of the BI technology stack.

Anyway, that's enough on the BI Survey now. All that's left to say is - I thought it couldn't get better after beating Arsenal 5-1 in the Carling Cup semi-finals, but beating Chelsea 2-1 in the final, and after having gone down to a Drogba goal earlier in the first half, what can I say?

Next stop the UEFA cup final, let's make it three in a row for Mr Ramos.