Business intelligence - the information powerhouse

Business intelligence tools aren't just for enterprise anymore. They're becoming de rigeur for SMBs in today's competitive market. Brian J Dooley looks at what some vendors are offering resellers in this competitive space.

By Brian J Dooley, Auckland | Tuesday, 30 August 2011
Business intelligence (BI) and analytics are emerging as key interest areas as companies attempt to cut costs, make processes more efficient and better understand their customers. Capabilities once found only within the large enterprise are migrating down to the SMB and SME sectors, and new technology is emerging that is expanding the range of analytics and making it more accessible to a much wider range of users.

According to IBM NZ business analytics manager Nick Carter, “Enterprise class solutions are now available at a SME budget – allowing them to optimise decision making. BI provides visibility of what is happening within a business. This in turn allows them to make better, more informed business decisions and has the potential to lower costs and increase revenue.”

IBM provides its Cognos Express range of solutions, providing traditional BI, financial analysis and reporting, scenario planning, “what if” analysis and contribution-based forecasting in a pre-packaged SME solution. This is designed to be fully capable enterprise software priced to meet the needs of SMEs.

“IBM has seen significant growth over the past two years for solutions targeted at this market, and it is a key focus for IBM software solutions,” says Carter. “Customers are keen to move away from spreadsheet-based distribution and report creation. They are looking towards creating consistent views and structured information for decision making.

“Many SME’s are now seriously looking at analytics to keep their business competitive in a tough market environment. They are realising that the ad hoc or cobbled together manual solutions that were good enough in the past, don’t have the ability to provide the information they need today. The market remains very price sensitive however.”

Organisations of every size are facing many of the same drivers towards improving their BI and analytics capabilities. These include rapid increases in the volume of data being produced or becoming available and lack of time to manually analyse this information. This is all within a difficult market, resulting in increased pressure on the accuracy of business decisions. In a volatile market, decisions may have significant impact, so accuracy of information for decision making is extremely important.

“The problems solved by BI are as varied as the customers,” says Carter. “Solutions deliver KPI dashboards, financial reporting, financial analysis, budgeting, planning, real time metrics, supply line information, sales forecasting, “what if” scenario planning, logistics and many others. Knowing this is a critical requirement to delivering effective BI in an organisation. The deployment must look at the critical factors of each business, based on their industry, market, existing systems, data and business problems.”

IBM provides resellers with training and requires certification in both sales and technical areas, before a reseller is able to sell our software solutions. This ensures they have access to the information and skills they need to be successful.

Microsoft has been involved in the BI sector for a long time, with a number of products — starting with its Excel spreadsheets. “At the SMB/SME level Office 2010, SharePoint and SQL Server 2008 R2 are providing comprehensive BI solutions with technology that information workers are already familiar with,” says Azure and Server Business Group Lead, Steve Haddock.

“New cloud-based solutions, like Office 365, further enhance the flexibility and mobility of a modern workforce. Some of the key products and capabilities leading this area include self-service BI, dashboards and scorecards, collaboration enabled by SharePoint Server, reporting enabled by SQL Server Reporting Services, analytics with SQL Server Analysis Services, predictive analytics and data mining and data integration/data warehousing.”

Uptake in New Zealand has been high, and BI is now a hot topic. “We are consistently overachieving our attendance expectations at BI related marketing events around the country,” says Haddock. “High-level trends include self-service BI, dashboards and scorecards, collaboration and cloud based solutions, as well as big data.”

“We break down the BI market into three key categories from simple query reporting and analysis to advanced analytics and finally real time operational intelligence, says Craig Richardson, managing director of Christchurch-based Jade Software . “Increasingly Jade is seeing advanced analytics and real-time operational intelligence being accessible to the SMB market.”

Jade’s user and operational intelligence products are currently in prototype in Australia and New Zealand and due to market later this year. They constitute the JOOB family of products, which includes JOOB Intelligence for real time operational intelligence; JOOB Mobile which extends JOOB capabilities and connects any business system to any mobile device; and JOOB Data Store, which enables high performance data management.

“We are seeing a high level of interest in the areas of financial services, retail, law enforcement and real-time marketing intelligence,” says Richardson. “We are seeing large pushes towards context-aware computing, mobilisation of existing and new business systems, cloud computing and computational intelligence. These technologies have become more accessible and more affordable to SMBs.”

Businesses are looking at BI more and more to solve problems around customer intimacy, speed to market, consumer experience and driving consumer productivity. One area of current interest is in mobility.

“In the past the focus has been on purely mobile analytics,” says Richards. “Our view is that there is an emerging market were companies view mobile as a social probe capable of capturing and delivering user intelligence, which informs customer facing strategies and demand for products and services. The fastest takeup of this has been in the Australian market, but we are definitely seeing interest from New Zealand companies as well.”

For resellers, this area does require preparation. “They need to understand this area is emerging and growing fast,” says Richardson. “Business Intelligence needs to be split into its three categories: Querying , Reporting and Analysis; Business Intelligence; and Real-time Operational Intelligence. It is also important to have a clear understanding of the sector and its application to specific business domains.”

Sanjiv Bansal, BI Solution Manager for SAP ANZ notes that: “Many of the same sophisticated business intelligence solutions that have long been available for large enterprises are now available for SMBs. For example, SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence Edge is designed specifically for the SMB market. This addresses any business intelligence requirement – from flexible ad hoc reporting and analysis, to dashboards and visualisation, to powerful data integration and quality as well as pre-packaged data mart solutions.

“The next level is SAP BusinessObjects BI starter package, which extends the integration with data assets and the islands of information that disparate systems tend to create. And SAP BusinessObjects Business Intelligence provides comprehensive functionality for mid-sized to large-sized businesses.”

SAP sees three main trends in the BI area in this country. They include the growth of mobile devices and BI solutions available for mobile devices; development of BI over structured and non-structured data, including data from transactions, operational performance or external sources such as the internet and social networks; and ever-increasing volume of data and volume of transactions that need to be analysed.

“The drivers we are seeing in New Zealand at the moment include influences of social media, mobility and the need to do more with less following the GFC crisis,” says Bansal. “Customers want to know which products and customers are profitable and should be supported and which areas of their business need to be worked on. There is a drive for business process centred analytics.

SAP is seeing BI used in a wide range of business areas, including identifying profitable customers and non- profitable customers; where supply chain has bottle necks; which inventory items are running low and require replenishment; and customer service levels and how they reduce customer churn.

For resellers, sales in this area require special care. “Often the difficulty is justifying the business benefits and quantifying the tangible benefits customers achieve,” says Bansal. “For example, how do you measure customer service? SMEs have been especially hard hit by reduced IT budgets – but the demand on IT to service the business has not reduced, meaning IT departments have to do more with less. Many small retailers are struggling as more people shop online, which puts pressure on their profitability and margins. “

“Resellers need to get up to speed with mobile solutions and how to deploy them in a quick and efficient manner,” says Bansal. “Also, they need to understand how social media is being used in BI solutions, what the benefits are and how to deliver them to SMB businesses.

“Resellers need to know how to get business outcomes for customers with these solutions. What real business problems are they going to solve for the customer in the shortest possible time?”

Oracle provides BI and performance management applications to suit all market sectors, including SME/SMB. Solutions are complete, prebuilt BI offerings that deliver intuitive, role-based intelligence. “We are seeing an increasing use of enterprise performance management and BI tools for environmental and sustainability reporting,” says applications sales director, Nicholas Glanfield. “As organisations outgrow spreadsheet approaches to collecting and reporting environmental metrics, they are looking to software vendors for special purpose tools, or extensions of existing applications to bring rigour and control to this process.“

Oracle’s BI solutions can be accessed via the web, and more recently, via a portable device like the iPhone or iPad.

“A hot topic and area of focus for many organisations these days is profitability and cost management,” says Glanfield. “For most organisations, aggressive cost-cutting and cost management were critical to remaining profitable while top line revenue was flat or shrinking. However, now we are seeing many organisations taking a more ‘surgical’ approach to profitability and cost management, by accurately allocating revenue and costs to individual product lines, services, customer segments, locations, channels and other lines of business to understand which ones are truly profitable and which ones are not. Based on these insights, managers can make more informed decisions about which products or services to invest in or retire, how to price their products or services for different customer segments, as well as where to focus their marketing and customer service resources.”

BI tools are commonly deployed to streamline the process of creating management reports. Reducing the time and expense of report generation and lowering TCO is important, but using BI in a way that can increase revenues, lower cost, preserve cash, and enable firms to do a better job at acquiring, keeping and growing customers is where the real payback can come from. A key trend in BI today is the growth in packaged analytic applications that provide pre-built business metrics, dashboards and reports, along with integrations based on industry best practices.

“Advances in BI technology are helping to increase user adoption,” says Glanfield. “These include advanced visualisation, integration with search engines, and embedding BI in applications, business processes and desktop applications.”