BI in the Cloud

Overall, the Gartner Business Intelligence Summit 2010 was a good conference. It was well organized, offered interesting topics, and provided attendees with enough time to engage with the analysts and vendors. Although I don’t know the official numbers, I’d guess there were about 750 attendees. Of those, I’d estimate that two thirds were from end-user companies (mostly IT and some business people). The others at the conference were vendor representatives, Gartner folks, reporters, and other interested individuals.

While the oddities of Las Vegas were largely kept outside of the summit, inside there were two key issues that were on people’s minds and sometimes explicitly addressed by the various speakers:

1. The tension between IT and business. Given the desire of business users to leverage BI tools to do their jobs and the ability for them to get those tools through alternative delivery models (SaaS BI, In Memory, etc), a burning question was just how IT can effectively work with and support these users. The best quote, paraphrased from Kurt Schlegel, was, “You can’t make it a prohibition, so find a way to work with it.” He gave an example of how to make the IT/business relationship work. He suggested making it a policy to have three categories of reports: personal, shared, and published. Only the published would go through a formal review and approval process.
2. The debate between mega- and best-of-breed vendors. Many companies, particularly large ones, have at least one mega-vendor BI stack (SAP, IBM, Oracle, etc.). However, it’s impossible to ignore that best-of-breed vendors have appealing characteristics, functionality, deployment options, and value props. Companies with the standardized stack were trying to figure out when to use the best-of-breed options. While this topic was talked about quite a bit, I didn’t hear any compelling framework or use case from a Gartner analyst (it sounds like a good idea for an upcoming research note). My view is that these best-of-breed providers deliver real innovation in many areas, and that they can and should be considered as a complementary solution to the big, on-premise stack. Frankly, most BI needs are too vast for any one vendor to provide all solutions, deployment options, functionality, and technological options. 

Interestingly, despite the dominance of IT attendees, the most attended and energetic sessions were those talking about new technologies and fancy interfaces. One vendor representative discussed dashboards, and all his handouts were gone within minutes of his presentation’s conclusion. On the show floor, those demonstrating interactive visualizations had crowds four-to-five people deep, while the technical and database vendors had only a handful of prospects looking over their exhibits. 

What does it all mean? I boil this down to the continuing rise and influence of the business user. The show was filled with IT folks working to find ways to bring value to the business while maintaining their role as both influencer, and to some degree, enforcer, of BI tools and technologies.