Business Intelligence Will Decline

Gartner Says Strong Growth in Business Intelligence Will Decline as Market Flux Continues

Analysts Discuss Shifting Business Intelligence Landscape at Gartner Business Intelligence Summit, 5-7 February 2008

Egham, UK, January 10, 2008 — The days of strong double-digit growth in the business intelligence (BI) market are over as the industry enters a state of flux following vendor consolidation, increasing maturity and price erosion, said Gartner. However, BI remains mission critical for businesses as it turns information into an asset for deriving insight and making decisions. Gartner advised end users to make BI pervasive to business users by making it user-friendly, collaborative and process-driven.

Speaking ahead of the Gartner BI Summit, held from 5-7 February in Amsterdam, Netherlands, Gartner analysts said worldwide growth rates in 2007 are expected to be slightly lower than the previous year, at 12.5 per cent, and will move into single-digits beyond $7 billion by 2011, with a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 8.6 per cent.

Following consolidation among BI vendors, Gartner added that value to users can also increase as a result of mergers and acquisitions in the market. “Consolidation activities by SAP, Oracle, IBM and Microsoft should help accelerate the value derived from BI,” said Gartner senior research analyst and presenter at the Gartner BI Summit, Dan Sommer. “Large vendors will drive increased usage, while new BI vendors will emerge introducing innovative technology and products to demonstrate differentiation and fill the gaps in "mega-vendors'" product lines.”

Competitive edge
Mr Sommer added that increased BI innovation also means that query, reporting and online analytical processing (OLAP) capabilities have reached parity and no longer deliver competitive edge. Most vendors now include these basic BI capabilities in their product stacks, including Microsoft which added more BI functionalities in SQL Server 2005, Office 2007 and PerformancePoint Server. Remaining pure-play vendors can recruit application vendors (not SAP, Oracle or Microsoft) as original equipment manufacturers (OEM) of their BI platform to provide analytical applications, or leverage relationships with value-added resellers (VARs) for domain-specific solutions.

Successful pure-play BI vendors will incorporate emerging areas in BI such as dashboards, predictive modelling, enterprise search, interactive visualisation techniques and in-memory analytics. Hosted BI through software-as-a-service (SaaS) is one new approach being pioneered by a cluster of vendors including Seatab and LucidEra. They can also continue thriving by specialising by industry or geographic region. In addition, smaller and midsize organisations are becoming an important target market for BI vendors, with a large proportion being new opportunities.

Mega-vendor dominatio
The acquisitions by Oracle (Hyperion), SAP (Business Objects, still pending) and IBM (Cognos, still pending) in 2007 were disrupters for the market, which, if they are finalised, will eliminate all larger publicly traded BI companies. Overall, more than two-thirds of the current BI market is now attributed to the mega-vendors. The remaining BI powerhouse vendors SAS, Microstrategy, Information Builders, and more so, smaller BI vendors, such as Arcplan, Panorama, or Qliktech, will need to increase market push to stay visible above the increased noise from the “big four.”

North America, Western Europe and Japan are the most-significant regions in terms of BI spending and will still account for five-sixths of software revenue by 2011. However, "greenfield" opportunities, together with fast economic and structural developments, will fuel double-digit growth in Asia/Pacific, Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and Latin America.

End users
Gartner advises end users of BI solutions from vendors that have been recently acquired to hold strategic investments until a product roadmap has been clearly presented from the vendor. While there is no doubt that the acquired core products, such as Oracle’s Hyperion Essbase, Business Objects XI, or Cognos 8 will remain highly strategic and supported by extensive research and development funding, overlapping products in a vendor’s portfolio may see some defocus in the mid-term.

For more information on the Gartner BI Summit and to register for the event, please visit europe.gartner.com/bi.

Getting Started with Qlikview

You can download the free 15 days evaluation version from

http://www.qlikview.com/download.htm

Installation is simple is quick without any configration.
Open Qlikview from the start menu.
Go to file – New to create an application. Save it.

This is how the interface will look like.

There are two types of options for relational databases. OLEDB and ODBC.Create a DSN and reference it Here. However you can create the DSN from Here also.

I have already created a DSN ‘SH’ and after selecting provide the username and password. Click on OK. A connection string will automatically appear on the screen.

Now click on Select button.

Select the correct owner. The table and columns available will appear.

Select the table required and columns. To select more than one table use ADD button.

Select table and click ADD. Again select another table and click ADD and so on.

Also check the Preceding load button just above add button.

You can see the script generated on the left pane.

Click on OK once completed.

The scipt will appear like this.

Save the application and click on Debug to see the effects. The fields with the same name will be joined automatically. Lets see the results.

Check limited load and let the rows be 10 only.

Click on Run button.

The script is run and finished. Click close.The fields will appear like this.

Click on OK. And save the application.

Click Ctrl+T. The relations will appear like this.

This relation is perfect hence no need to change any joins. Click on OK.

Now we will reload the application with complete data. Click on Reload button which is next to the edit script button. After reload is complete click on OK and save the application.

Now we Will try to create a sample report of country wise sales.

Right click on the window . Select New sheet object- chart.

Give window Title as Country Sales. Select the type of chart. This time let it be bar chart only. Click on Next.

Select Country Name as the Dimension.

Click on Next

Write this expression as shown.

Click on OK

Click on Finish to see the Raw report.
Now there are lot of options available to make it look more relevant and beautiful. But your report is made. With some few more changes it will look like this.
Play with it. Its a wonderful tool and you can make quick reports out of it.

Good Luck.

Qlikview Vs Others

Hi,
I have worked on Qlikview version 7 and 8 for one year and now presently working on Oracle BIEE(Siebel Analytics) and Hyperion Essbase system 9. Have done dozens of POC and implementations and Qlikview has gained the same respect everywhere. Personally I just love this tool.

I have mentioned some of the important areas where Qlikview is lacking and you will notice that in the coming releases, Qliktech will try to touch all these areas showing some improvements.

I would like to share some pros and cons:
1. The biggest disadvantage is the amount or size of data. If you have data huge data in hundreds of GB, then qlikview may not be a good choice.Qlikview was having alimit of 2 Billion rows in a table to be loaded before the release of version 9 but now in version 9 it is not there and the size of data directly depends on system RAM. But even now I did not see a guide telling the RAM requirements for a specified amount of data and how does it increase as the amount of data size grows.
still there are some workarounds in certain cases. Design OLAP cubes or Data Marts in your database and keep the logic simple in Qlikview. Rather than creating a huge application, divide into smaller applications and use navigation. But if a single Datamart is huge, Qlikview is not for you.

2. Now speaking for small data sizes, I have observed that it is not the not the pill which cures a patient but it is the diagonosis of a doctor. Dont rapidly start making applications. They may be ready in few days but to manage them could be very difficult and time consuming. plan your needs, take some time to think on it and discuss. when plan is clear in your mind, start working on it.
3. For organisations having data growing rapidly, give a thought to create a datawarehouse with marts designed as per your needs. this will have two advantages. Your qlikview application would be simple and if tommarrow you plan to implement some other BI tool, this will be of great help.
4. few days back, I just heard about Qlikview providing alert capability. i am not sure if alerts can be sent to hand held devices and cell phones. Also check if these alerts can be designed by business users using some wizard or interface. If alerts can be created using API programming, it will really not be useful. I have seen a wizard based alerts available in Qlikview to define an event and sending the content via email.

5. Proprietary files -Another major disadvantage with all the tools storing data in their proprietary files like Qlikview, Essbase and Cognos. Tomorrow if you plan to have another tool for some reporting or if you plan to have another application talk to these cubes(Qliktech may not like to refer its files as cubes which I beleive is nothing else), then there could be a seroius problem. Major vendors generally provides connectors for major Multidimensional sources like Essbase and Cognos but for tools like Qlikview, it Could be difficult.

some of the features where Qlikview lacks are:
1. Alerts- Capability to create alerts and delivers it to not only Email but blackberries, hand held devices, mobile phones etc. In version 9, I heard something for this has come. Also Qlikview do not have any integration with BPEL.
2. Multi user development environment- This feature allows multiple developers work on a single project and the utility synchronises the peices of project each developer is working with the main project.Qlikview completely lacks this feature and until version 9, I did not hear anything about this feature coming up.
3. Connect and extract data from multi dimentional objects- I guess for SAP BW, the connector is available but not for Hyperion Essbase, Cognos Cubes and Microsoft cubes.
4. Export data or metadata to XML- The reports cannot be exported to XML format which is one of the major disadvantage. We can use the XML reports as a data source with another softwares which understands XML.
5. XBRL- Qlikview does not support XBRL. Those who do not understand what is XBRL and why it is required and useful, please read this http://www.xbrl.org/WhatIsXBRL/
6. Seperate component for operational reporting or production reporting or Popularly known as Pixel perfect reporting (for example Printing Salary Cheques) and report bursting like BI publisher(previously XML publisher) or SQR reporting in Hyperion Essbase. But we can argue here in the sense that Qlikview is an analytical tool and is not made for such needs but definately it restricts you somewhere and do not provide you with an option.
7. Integration with Microsoft Office tools- Qlikview just exports the data into an excel file or exports a report object to a png file or using OCX you can do something to make it work with MS office tools(I never tried this). It nowhere stands in comparison with Hyperion Add-In or Cognos Add-In. This is one area which is very important from business users point of view and developing this feature may not be that easy for Qliktech.
8. Support for advance features like embedded browser(available in hyperion Interactive reporting), flickers(rolling messeges) etc as an standard options.
9. Metadata Management- There is no concept of Physical model, Business Model and Presentation Model. There are no subject areas. The End users had access to all the tables loaded to the Qlikview and the matter becomes difficult when you have large number of tables involved. For end users to create a report themselves, they need to identify the tables and columns from this long list which can make things difficult for them. The solution to this could be to create a seperate Qlikview document for every subject area. This greatly effects managebility and reusability. Those who have worked with Oracle BIEE BI Administrator or Cognos Framework manager or Business Objects Universe will understand the importance of subject areas or Packages.
10. Impact Analysis- If you want to make a change in the Qlikview script or datasource and want to know the impact of this change on report objects beforehand, you could be in problem and may have to check each and every report manually and document it.
11. Alternate Hirarchies- No concept of Alternate Hirarchies.
12. SQL Generation- If you want to see the SQL generated behind a query, you can not see that in Qlikview whereas other tools like OBIEE, Cognos, BO and Essbase allows you to see the SQL/MDX generated for a query. This feature may not be relevant to business users but for developers this helps a lot in their day to day activities like debugging or data validation.
13. Resolving circular loops and traps: The only way to resolve circular loopes in Qlikview is to create an alias table wheare as in BO and Cognos you can define contexts which allows you to resolve the circular loops without creating any alias table. When it come to resolving traps like Chasm and Fan traps, Qlikview is helpless.
some more issues -
1. Security- Qlikview does not have a graphical interface to create roles, users and privilages assigning to roles. Also can users be allowed to log in on certain weekdays only. Also can users change their passwords themselves using some interface. Does the password expires automatically after certain no of days and user will be asked to change it.
2. I am not sure if Qlikview can use user directory for external authentication like LDAP database or NTLM. Also can it be used with existing SSO(Single Sign On).
3. Does Qlikview has feature to automatically end the session if it is not being used to avoid any session hacking.
4. Is there any graphical interface to monitor the sessions in use. Check the queries they have fired, previous requests, kill any current requests, monitor time etc.

There are some good features in Qlikview as well:
1. The ability to consolidate the data coming from various sources(databases and flat files) which is in a common format in the data cloud(Qliktech uses this term). this is fantastic. In other OLAP tools sometimes it becomes difficult to join and RDBMS and a flat file data.

2. Many people criticise Qlikview for its associative logic which says the feild names with same names are joined automatically but the designer has the liberty to remove or edit those joins. Even Siebel analytics makes the joins automatically in BI Administrator and Hyperion Essbase sensing same field names.
It helps the designer to see the qualified members for joins and make amendments after verifying them.


Another post regarding Gartners BI Magic Quadrant 2009.
Any comments on this.