Business intelligence breeds polygamy - buying individual solutions from multiple vendors - Industry Trend or Event - Brief Article

Software Magazine, Feb, 1997 by Susan Mael

The battle is on to be king of the business intelligence market, but customers tend to shop around. Several vendors are pitching themselves as a one-stop shopping source for all query and reporting, OLAP, data mining and forecasting requirements. Companies such as Business Objects and Brio Technology have bundled these intelligence tools in a single offering. Others, including Cognos and Seagate Software's Information Management Group, offer separate products that can be integrated for a complete solution.

Because of the range of technology needs within the business intelligence space, many customers are opting to buy separate products from different vendors. This has led to integration problems when, for example, customers scale an application to a different product.

Robert Moran, director of decision support research at Aberdeen Group, predicts continuing demand for suppliers who specialize in one area of the business intelligence market and consultants who can tie products together.

British Columbia Hydro and Power Authority in Vancouver is one company that fearlessly mixes and matches business intelligence tools. When B.C. Hydro placed an order with Holistic Systems Inc., Edison, N.J., for its Holos OLAP software, the utility was primarily concerned with finding the right software to serve as the front end for their financial data warehouse. B.C. Hydro sought a query tool for its power users and an analysis tool for the rest of its audience.

"It wasn't that important for us that both the power users' query tool and the multidimensional tool be the same product," says Debora Stranaghan, manager of implementation services for the financial data warehouse at B.C. Hydro. She resisted a single-source solution because users of the query and analysis tools had distinct requirements.

"We wanted to ensure that in terms of both those products they best matched the users, needs. And if that meant purchasing two different vendors' products, we were prepared to do that."

B.C. Hydro has put the query tool decision on hold while IS managers implement Seagate Software's Crystal Info report writer to replace their current mainframe-based report delivery system. They plan to use Crystal Info with Holos to deliver information to around 500 users. Notably, in the time since B.C. Hydro purchased Holos, Seagate has acquired Holistic Systems and its OLAP software. Whether that will influence B.C. Hydro's future business intelligence tool purchases remains to be seen.

Although Crystal Info integrates well with other OLAP vendors, Seagate wants to be on the short list when customers shop for business intelligence tools, whether they want a standalone product or a complete solution. So the company is pushing the Q3 release of "BlackWidow" Crystal Info, which will incorporate some analytical pieces of Holos.