Last week I had the opportunity to listen in on a Forrester Research Business Intelligence webinar (moderated by Doug Henschen) on the topic of BI competency centers. The question as to who should own the BICC came up at the end of the presentation. One expert's response was: assuredly, the business should own the BICC — business intelligence is all about business, and business ownership brings along business commitment. Another expert disagreed: given the various technical complexities related to business intelligence and data integration, BICC, she thought, is probably better managed by IT.

Normally, following an acquisition, sales decline for the first year or so. Not so with SAP's acquisition of Business Objects, with Poonen claiming sales were 30% higher in the first half of the year compared to 2007. He explained that there is a difference in market dynamics when a market leader acquires another leader versus a niche player. Surprising as well is that company officials estimate half the sales came from new accounts, so the strong performance is not only from Business Objects tapping existing SAP customers.

Actuate also entered into the open source market in 2005 with BIRT (BI and Reporting Tools) contribution to Eclipse and their open source BIRT community. Actuate has bet that the use of open source will be a key component for their future and starting point for developers, where at some point will purchase support, services and then the more robust commercial products. In fact, Actuate open source efforts now contribute 10% of Actuate revenue. This open-source-based approach to commercial enterprise software expands Actuate's reach across the world and deepens relationships with developers. The benefit for developers is that it is easier to download and work with their basic products before determining what is needed for deployments that require support, services or higher-end technology.

To go straight to the source, I first spoke to an ILog exec yesterday who shared this bottom-line assessment of why the timing for this deal: "The market is maturing, and business rules are taking a legitimate position in infrastructure," said Jean-Franηois Abramatic, Chief Product Officer. "It's clear now that business rules are an essential part of business process management/services-oriented architecture platform."

IBM is not new to business rules engines (BRE). WebSphere has a rules component, and IBM has experience with various other rules integration models (e.g. PegaSystems, Haley etc.) as well as with in-house experimentation. Yet, IBM has always lagged in its BRE capabilities. In contrast, ILog is a known market leader with formidable capabilities and established market presence – Forrester ranks ILOG and Fair Isaac as the top two BRE vendors. Pegasystems and Corticon are the next largest competitors, while Haley was recently acquired by Australian company RuleBurst.

DatAllegro has been secretive over the past few years about its customer base, leading some analysts (including me) to wonder how well they're doing in the highly competitive data warehouse platform and appliance market. They have only three customers that I know of, but they say that the largest of these sites are storing hundreds of terabytes. This offers a compelling scalability story for Microsoft once the DatAllegro technology is merged into SQLserver.

MicroStrategy's tech preview was delivered by Mark LaRow, vice president of products, who began by laying out the long-term goal of supporting expected super-scale deployments of the future involving as much as 10 petabytes of accessible data, 100,000 users and 1 million reports per week. That's all brainstorming work that's still in the labs, but LaRow then offered a lot more concrete detail on what to expect in the MicroStrategy 9 release in Q4. The list includes:

For most customers, the issue of not accessing support was one primarily of inconvenience and frustration. As of mid last week, according to Business Objects, about 20 percent of customers lacked the ability to logon to the site to open or track existing cases. However, for some, the disruption in support service meant a delay in production implementations.

The nitty gritty detail — the stuff that legacy customers are most interested in — was delivered last week by Thomas Kurian, senior vice president of server technologies, who explained that that there are two styles of integration. "Essbase can be a source to OBIEE, so you can combine relational, OLAP and ROLAP analysis," he said. "One the financial side, you can source OBIEE relational data into Essbase, so the Oracle BI Server can become a source under Essbase."

Gary claims that James "marginalizes Performance Management as being too narrow." Instead, he (Gary) suggests that "Performance Management and EDM are arguably very similar." James claims that EDM "goes one step further."

"We see businesses going beyond operational excellence they've achieved over the last 15 years and moving on to management excellence," said John Kopcke, senior vice president of enterprise performance management. "The Oracle Enterprise Performance Management System will allow companies to do from the management side of the business the same things that organizations have done from an ERP perspective."

Naturally, there are economies of scale in sharing support systems to track cases, provide searchable content, and so on. If you are a regular reader of my blog, you know that support is one of my hot buttons and one I consider to be a critical factor for evaluating BI vendors. When things go wrong with software — and they will — it's the quality of support that is the difference between success and frustration and failure.

I posted a while back about how Active Endpoints is publishing webinar replays (video) as well as audio podcasts and product release information (PDF) all in an RSS feed that I subscribe to in iTunes, no signup required. IDS Scheer has ARIS TV, also on YouTube. More companies are realizing that blogging is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to new ways to interact with their audience.

I like point out really nutty ideas, even when a lot of people have spent a lot of time investing in them... [BPM] created pretty languages for describing business processes, and we started telling the business that once business processes are described using these languages, then you can push a button and "viola" the process becomes automated. According to the 'true believers,' we can give end users one of our pretty languages (BPMN or BPEL) and they will write their own software, and we can fire all the IT developers.

Unfortunately, the pressure to reduce costs and resources in IT has impacted many organizations' ability to dedicate further attention to BI. The reality is that each organization will have to determine how IT should prioritize budgets and resources for BI and how to respond to this growing need. Business knows the problems quite well, and limitations of existing BI efforts has proliferated further spreadsheet use. And as we all know, the copy and paste function of spreadsheets leads to inaccuracy and hampers quality decision-making.

Teamwork: There aren't many engagements where the success of the operation is dependent on just one player. It's important to organize for success and enhance everyone's contribution in a "whole is greater than the sum of the parts" mentality. That special esprit de corps that develops among small groups provides the energy to keep a difficult assignment on track. And, sometimes, teamwork requires splitting the team up.

• "We have the tools, we have the talent"
• "I love this plan! I'm excited to be a part of it!"
• "Let's split up, we can cause more damage that way"

While some time was given to synergies with IBM's product line, more air time was devoted to what's new in Cognos 8.3, the performance management products, and previews of what's coming. (Oh, and remember my disbelief in an earlier blog of both Cognos and Business Objects being shrink wrapped with DB2? Well, apparently the disbelief was warranted as the Business Objects OEM never materialized.)

In terms of cool factor, a future interactive viewer capability was the flashiest — literally, as it leverages Adobe Flash to provide this appealing interface. Cognos is not the first BI vendor to leverage Flash, and lack of interactivity has been a competitive weakness.