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Thursday, January 22, 2009

Gartner BI Magic Quadrant 2009

Yesterday just got a chance to look at Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Business Intelligence 2009.
I am really happy to see Qlikview almost touching the Leaders Quadrant Boundary and may be by next year Qlikview will join the leaders club.
So that's a good news for people who have invested in this technology.
This would be really interesting to watch how Qlikview will compete with the leaders. The strong points mentioned by Gartner are OK but I love to look at the weak points because thats the only area where you need to put more efforts and will eventually decide on your success.
1. Lack of statistical and predictive modelling: Thats the key area where Qlikview needs to improve heavily to be able to compete with other leaders. At present, Gartner named some of the competitors as Tibco and some other small products and while doing that it says it is behind them as well. If Qliktech fails to address this quickly before getting into leaders quadrant, it will become very difficult to move forward or maintain its position.
2. The fear of Qliktech being getting acquired will have some impact on the prospects. The prospects will get more cautious and may look for other options which are more certain and safe.
Prospects do not want to suffer from the change in policies, product names, re-architecturing etc and want to play safe wich is fair enough.
3. Gartner feels Qlikview still requires more examples of Large BI deployments and stressed on saying that it has not moved further in this area as compared to last year. I feel this will remain a challenge until Qlikview make some improvements in the architecture to deploy on large environment.
4. The last point may be very dangerous for Qliktech. People who were involved in large deployments understand the importance of Metadata management. making quick reports and good reporting capabilities are good but metadata management is the second pillar on which the deployment stands. If Qliktech fails to address this soon, it will definately be very difficult to get large deployment examples.

You may also want to read Qlikview vs Others which has some discussions on the pros and cons.

This was about Qlikview, the tool which I personally love.
The other interesting things which Gartner mentioned is inclusion of some open source BI tools like Jaspersoft and Pentaho. I hear a lot about Pehtaho and would love to include a review for this in my blog soon but before that I would like to try my hands on that or read some technology information whitepapers.
Now with the inclusion of open source BI, these tools will get some acknowledgement and people will have a choice to look at them as well.
Other open source which I am hearing a lot is Jaspersoft.

Another thing which Gartners mentioned is the SaaS(Software as a Service) BI tools. This may be good for products based on some properitery technology to store the data which has a potential risk of migrating the complete application if customer chooses to shift to a new technology or if the vendor plans to de support or does not provide a way to integrate with other technologies. In that case, customer has absolutely no choice other than to competely rebuild the entire application on different platform which I think will not be an easy and economical task.
I really dont have any idea how SAAS vendors make sure customers investment is not affected if anything of such sort happens. If someone can provide an insight would be helpful.
The new names which I never heard are Pivotlink, Lucid Era and Oco.
to be continued....

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

hi manohar
i need these answres urgently pls

1)When do delete one member from the outline what will be status of the block?

2)What is Fact Table ? What are supporting Dimensions?

3)What is your Fact Table in Cube?

4)How does Essbase consolidates the Data?

i hope u will send immediately
bye
thanks in advance

Manohar Rana said...

Hi,
1. when you delete or modify a member, the blocks affected are marked as dirty and the cube needs to be restructured and recalculated. Deleting sparse member can set many blocks dirty and restructuring will have more overhead.

2. Fact table contains values which can be measured. These generally contains some mathematical functions like sum, count or average etc. The placement of a fact table in a star schema is at the center and is surrounded by Dimensions tables.
Generally fact table takes values from details tables like sales details.

3. same as 2

4. Essbase consolidates data based on the information availabe in the outline.

Regards
Manohar Rana

Anonymous said...

hi
thanku manohar for ur reply

i faced thes questions in one interview pls send soon

i need these answres also
Q)How many instances are using for your client?

1Q) How to work on different instances?
2Q) How to add one more extra column in the report, with out changing the outline?
3Q) what is the outline size
4Q) how u will get task from ur head?
5Q) >time for each task/if u r not reached within the time reasons for not reaching the task?
6Q) what is level 0 data size
7Q) wt r operational performance metrics?
8Q) In the web forms how to give access for total (top to bottom) i.e. edit permission..? For particular cell?

9Q) How to add different charts in the single report?

thanks
bye