Hedley Hurwitz, Magic South Africa

The last few years have shown many changes in the BI landscape, largely driven by cloud

Over the past five years, business intelligence (BI) has changed completely and not at all, says Keith Jones, director of strategic business development for Unison.

“Advances in the back-end, with products like in-memory and column databases, and front-end shifts in behaviour driven by cloud, social media and mobility are nothing short of revolutionary,” he says. “But large businesses continue to find themselves mired down in the operational reporting, data integration and data cleansing issues that have plagued the BI market since its inception.”

As such, Jones believes users are ready for a refresh of the approach to BI, starting with the strategy, looking at the key metrics and using the new technology stacks to deliver value on these issues in relatively short timeframes.

“The market needs to focus on the resulting action, and not the technology and data itself. This approach is nothing new, but what is different is that the technology now exists that can support this.”

According to Hedley Hurwitz, MD of Magic South Africa: “The dependence on experienced BI architects has increased dramatically [over the past five years]. In addition, the development and deployment mindscape has matured radically as in other spheres, such as ECM and CRM, where building solutions is quicker and cheaper than it used to be.”

However, he points out that one cannot avoid the need to contract in up-to-date skills that understand the nuances of the particular BI platform; thus, development and improvements to the platform still rely on the core vendor or local representative.

“Over the last five years, there has been more of a revolution than evaluation; most major vendors have introduced at least three major versions upgrades with functionality that includes things like mobile and in-memory offerings to their solutions as well, as priority has been placed on ensuring that solutions include analytics and improved data visualisation, which are now part of standard offerings and not add-ons,” explains Craig Stephens of SAS Institute. “I foresee these trends to continue where vendors will be forced to ensure that analytics is standard, as well as adapt their solutions to address the challenges of big data and ensure they manage to exploit the likes of open standards, which will hopefully lead to competitive pricing to improve business value.”

According to Gary Allemann, MD at Master Data Management, the BI environment has evolved in two radically different directions. “On the one side, users are driving the requirements for simple, easy-to-use dashboard-type applications, requiring very little technical expertise,” he explains. “On the other side, the environments from which these applications draw the data are becoming increasingly complex. This is due to the fact that they have to deal with numerous new sources such as master data applications, cloud-based solutions such as Salesforce.com, and the increase in social media and spatial data.”

MOBILE ON THE UP

In the last year or so, there has been a concentrated focus on the possibilities and advantages of mobile in the BI space.

Keith Jones, Unison

Paul Morgan, MD at Asyst Intelligence, says there has been an increase in the requirement for mobile BI. “Companies need their employees to be able to access information from anywhere and at any time,” he says.

Anton van Heerden, GM at Altech ISIS, says companies want to improve the customer experience and want BI to supply the information of “what the customer wants, when, and how to get it to them before they need it”.

“Mobilisation continues to be a big factor when it comes to behavioural shifts,” Jones explains. “When this is combined with cloud offerings and the impact that social media is having, the result is an awakening of interest around the value of information and the possibilities available. There is definitely a heightened interest from business users as to how information can be extracted, manipulated and leveraged in their particular role.”

However, according to Hurwitz, mobile BI adoption has not been smooth sailing. “There has been a fortune of hype around the mobile environment, but not a lot of practical adoption by clients. Many are adopting a wait-and-see approach and the mobile environment is where the opportunities are,” he says.

Stephens explains the trend that “BI is a commodity” still continues, and hence large organisations continue to evaluate different vendors on a feature/function basis. “Through continuous change,” he says, “business users are losing the ability to gain valuable insights, as they spend most of their efforts on migrating to different toolsets instead of gaining valuable insights to drive the business forward or correct errors of the past.”

LOCAL BI VENDORS

When it comes to vendor differentiation, most seem to agree that a holistic or all-in-one approach is what BI companies, especially local ones, need in order to compete in the marketplace.

According to Hurwitz: “BI vendors must be able to provide a one-stop BI service for their customer base. “This means they have to be able to provide all aspects and components of a BI solution, ranging from the collating of business requirements to data analysis and integration. Customers do not want to purchase parts of a BI solution from different vendors.”

As Allemann puts it, BI is more than pretty charts. “A holistic approach that incorporates the principles of good data management needs to be incorporated. This will ensure BI solutions deliver contextualised information that is based on trusted data. This also improves the outcome of data analytics,” he explains.

According to Jones, the South African market remains extremely price sensitive. “Differentiation can only be achieved by those BI vendors that are able to illustrate how the massive gains experienced in technology can be translated into lower costs to deploy and improve time to value for their customers,” he says. “Business users of BI are no different from any other corporate consumer – they want to achieve more with less, and in a shorter time.”

Van Heerden says the main thing to do is to solve South African-centric business issues: “We have a unique market in that it is a blend of first and third world economies, so the first thing that we have to do is define, in a South African context, what it is we want to solve. The BI vendor must present itself as either addressing the mass market or a specific niche within the technological space. The ones that stand out are the ones that do not apply a ‘vanilla’ approach, but ones that have adapted their offerings to suit the nuances of the market in which we operate.”

Van Heerden goes on to say the biggest current challenge for local BI vendors is data quality. “Getting the correct data to enable the system to give the desired outcomes is the biggest challenge. This is often alleviated by understanding the technical environment comprehensively and knowing which system supplies what data to the program,” he explains.

Allemann agrees this challenge is significant locally. “This is due to the fact that consolidating and standardising disparate data sources is a significant task and can pose risks for larger BI/data warehousing projects. Inconsistent and poorly documented standards across systems cause flaws in the design of the data warehouse. These issues are frequently discovered during the test phase,” he explains.

Says Hurwitz: “The BI vendor is constantly coming up against the DIY guys or the software opportunists who think they can design and build a BI solution without the requisite background.” He stresses that BI is a specialised game that is best be left to the experts to design and construct. “It’s a pity that customers do not realise this,” he says. “Many of them get burnt by choosing price as a decision point when selecting a solution, and then find out that either the solution does not deliver the required data or they struggle to get adequate solution support.”

According to Morgan: “We require consultants with the relevant business and technology skills that will enable them to complete a successful BI implementation. Vendors and partners accept that there is a significant training requirement when employing people for these roles.”

Finally, a lack of understanding about BI’s capabilities and true value also remains a hurdle that many BI vendors still need to overcome.

According to Stephens, larger organisations still try to standardise on a single vendor to rationalise costs. This leads to a sacrifice in functionality and the loss of the ability to provide business users the capability to defi ne a platform whereby they can add value and insights into corrective strategies that can place their organisations’ directions onto the right path.

This challenge can also be largely budget-dependent, says Jones. “The biggest challenge remains getting the budget to build the right solution to show the value desired. The ‘if I build it, they will come’ market of the past is long gone.

“Fortunately, however, businesses are becoming more articulate in what they want from BI and are more participative in the decision-making process,” he concludes.