Intelligent Enterprise

Better Insight for Business Decisions

RSS
Webcasts
Whitepapers
Subscribe
Home

January 1, 2004

Happy New Year!

Editors' Choice Award selections tell us that 2004 will bring innovation, recovery — and lots of BI.

by David Stodder

And so, we turn the page to a new year. Yes, a new year: pressures remain strong to drive down costs, but economic indicators point to growth, giving momentum to a more positive environment than we've experienced recently. The challenge of responding to tough times and global competitive pressures has brought heightened awareness to the importance of using data-driven smarts to improve business efficiency and effectiveness. Organizations that have honed these skills enjoy major competitive advantages. Those that have not will have to leap-frog ahead and take advantage of the latest technology.

Thus, for the Intelligent Enterprise community heading into 2004, signs are good. IT infrastructure providers are responding to customers' desire for lower total cost of ownership by implementing autonomics and manageability smarts inside servers, storage, and networks. More computing power with lower demands for maintenance is just what organizations need as the foundation for sophisticated analytics and data mining, and to realize goals of enriching business processes with more intelligence.

"Integration" has become the obsession of both enterprise application providers and the software development community. And in the eyes of their customers, not a moment too soon: Integration problems are a huge, expensive burden, preventing businesses from realizing higher return on investment from applications, databases, supply chain, manufacturing, and other systems. Also driving interest is a growing realization that, especially in the Internet Age, application, data, and process integration are key enablers for new information-based products and services that build high-value, collaborative customer and business partner relationships.

The Envelope, Please

This issue carries Intelligent Enterprise's annual Editors' Choice Awards: our selection of the 60 top IT solution providers that are leading their customers to the promised land of an intelligent enterprise. To determine which companies to highlight, we focused on four areas that, in our editorial wisdom, are the "pillars" of an intelligent enterprise: intelligence, integration, infrastructure, and collaboration. We identify 12 "Companies to Watch" in each of these areas. Then, forming a sort of supreme council of influential IT solution providers, we present The Dozen.

More than ever, this year's Dozen reflects current interest in business intelligence. Perhaps this comes as no surprise: As readers know, we have always covered the "intelligence pillar" rather intensively, from BI through data warehousing and into more specialized topics such as data mining and customer analytics. We agree with industry pundits who view the coming 12 months as decisive for the BI industry. The argument about whether to have BI is largely over; now, companies are in the midst of deciding which BI solution will be the enterprise platform for reporting, performance management, and other strategic activities.

Rate This Article

Comments:

Optional e-mail address:

BI is a critical enabler of business innovation, the subject of Stewart McKie's feature series that begins in this issue ("Let Innovation Thrive"). "Growth now depends on the ability of businesses to innovate," McKie states. No doubt, 2004 is going to be a year of innovation. May your new year be wonderful: We look forward to providing 18 issues full of insights that help you achieve your objectives.