Improvements in Business Intelligence Tools: Part II

by John Harney

As noted in Part I of this series (Vol. 5, No. 17), the prevalent dynamic in the business intelligence (BI) industry is the increasing competition to incumbent BI suite vendors from both small specialty shops and major platform vendors. The specialty shops offer finished applications that address specific business problems, while the major platform vendors offer low-end BI functionality as part of their enterprise applications, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), and a technology stack upon which to deploy various BI applications in a homogenous environment so all BI data can be accessed through one enterprise application. This is consistent with many organizations' plans to standardize on one BI product and merge/purge others in order to have a more homogenous BI layer.