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January 1, 2003

Companies to Watch 2003

Intelligence | Integration | Infrastructure | Collaborative Commerce

Intelligence

by Justin Kestelyn

This list proves it: Visibility, transparency, predictability, and collaboration are the "four horsemen" of strategic IT's Intelligence category. Business performance management (BPM) has clearly replaced CRM as the lodestar for BI and analytics vendors in 2003.

Adaytum Inc.

Founded: 1990
HQ: Minneapolis

After spending years developing linked spreadsheets for financial departments, since 1996 Adaytum has used collaborative modeling technology originally developed at IBM to fashion a lucrative enterprise business planning niche. Intense interest in performance management will only sharpen Adaytum's edge in 2003. (Update: On Dec. 19, Cognos Inc. announced the acquisition of Adaytum for $160 million.)

Brio Software Inc.

Founded: 1989
HQ: Santa Clara, Calif.

Brio Software was among the first BI tools vendors to board the BPM bandwagon, aggressively rebranding itself as the business performance software company. The company got it right: Brio Metrics Builder, which is carefully marketed as a BPM enabler, not solution, has inspired imitation among competitors.

Cognos Inc.

Founded: 1969
HQ: Ottawa

In a year when positive news was scarce, we could rely on Cognos to deliver it: In August, Gartner Dataquest ranked the company the revenue and market share leader in the BI industry, which we can primarily attribute to Impromptu's and PowerPlay's enduring popularity. In 2003, interest in its new analytic apps and Series 7 enterprise BI framework should accelerate.

Crystal Decisions Inc.

Founded: 1984
HQ: Palo Alto, Calif.

Thanks to a knack for forging blockbuster partnerships as well as sound product management instincts, Crystal Decisions emerged from the Seagate Technology turmoil with one of the most valuable brands in the business. If the company can diversify beyond its successful reporting suite, its impressive growth will continue.

E.Intelligence Inc.

Founded: 2000
HQ: Minneapolis

E.Intelligence, founded and led by serial BI entrepreneur Richard Tanler, combines Web-based data warehousing technology originally developed at Information Advantage and forecasting models licensed from SPSS Inc. (also an investor) to bring predictive analytics and collaborative planning to the demand management process. Its agenda looks prophetic in 2003.

Fair, Isaac & Co. Inc.

Founded: 1956
HQ: San Rafael, Calif.

Thanks to its surprising acquisition of HNC Software in 2002, Fair, Isaac could become the dominant force in decisioning solutions worldwide; the company claims that its analytic engines drive more than 14 billion decisions annually. If the merger generates the synergies that inspired its execution, the combination will be formidable.

Hyperion Solutions Corp.

Founded: 1991
HQ: Sunnyvale, Calif.

Interest in BPM has healed the internal schism between Hyperion's OLAP and financial management app constituencies: Now, few people question that BPM will fuel most of its growth this year. The company's ability to offer integrated solutions spanning financial-operational and analytic systems should keep it a step ahead of pure-play BI software rivals in that space.

Information Builders Inc. (IBI)

Founded: 1975
HQ: New York

IBI is one of the oldest companies in the BI industry, and having mastered the scalability challenges of enterprise information delivery, it's now working to simplify the deployment of template-driven, self-service BI applications that cross the firewall, especially in financial reporting. In 2003, IBI's experience in creating large-scale information transparency will be an advantage.

MicroStrategy Inc.

Founded: 1989
HQ: McLean, Va.

MicroStrategy isn't unique in its new financial transparency evangelism, but considering its financial travails, few companies will be more attentive to the implications of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. The latest version of MicroStrategy7i includes new financial analytics and reporting features, and by early 2003, will run on AIX and Solaris.

ProClarity Corp.

Founded: 1995
HQ: Boise, Id.

The fastest-growing private company in BI, ProClarity has crafted a customizable analytic framework based on Microsoft Analysis Services that carefully balances the needs for customization and quick deployment. Its advanced, OLAP, and Excel interfaces make it equally attractive to power and business users, and the new release 5 adds a business logic repository for sharing analytic best practices.

Siebel Systems Inc.

Founded: 1993
HQ: San Mateo, Calif.

Does Siebel's new "dramatically expanded" relationship with Microsoft presage an acquisition? It's hard to say, but the company still deserves watching. Siebel Analytics, which fell out of the 2001 acquisition of nQuire, deserves respect from pure-play BI companies and may help insulate the Siebel installed base from their incursions.

Spotfire Inc.

Founded: 1996
HQ: Somerville, Mass.

Spotfire DecisionSite, which offers a winning combination of data mining and visualization, is now turning heads with new collaborative analysis functionality. The company has gained most traction in the pharmaceutical and life sciences industries, which also happen to be deep reservoirs of potential analytic application customers.