It’s convenient that SAP rolled out the welcome mat for SAPPHIRE NOW in Orlando, not far from the Magic Kingdom. Like its acquisition of Business Objects, buying Sybase puts business intelligence users on the monorail loop back where they started, wishing for greater returns from their BI investment.
While industry pundits debate the announcement’s implications for mobile computing, the untold story is what SAP isn’t saying about BI to those CIOs with hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in their software. As customers, partners, analysts and media enjoy SAP’s confab in the Sunshine State, here’s what I’ve been thinking about.
The acquisition validates PivotLink’s approach
I applaud SAP for acknowledging the limitations of old approaches to analytics, and for recognizing that BI innovation lies not in cubes, but in columnar data storage, in-memory processing and schema-less data models. PivotLink pioneered this approach nearly a decade ago. The news is a sign that old world companies continue to slowly accept the new realities around SaaS and Cloud computing, as customers look to tap SAP and non-SAP data anytime, anywhere. While acquiring Sybase may not reflect a singular focus on BI, the merger may give customers hope that SAP is heading in the right direction.
PivotLink’s platform is powering BI analytics for SAP customers like REI, Our365.com, Novell and a well-known West Coast apparel manufacturer and retailer. These companies, and new customers like a premium outdoor clothing manufacturer, chose PivotLink’s market-leading SaaS BI platform over SAP BusinessObjects and SAP Business Warehouse to tap data from any Cloud or internal data source.
While PivotLink innovates, SAP will integrate
The reality is the market has moved to a new BI model. While the old guard offers product roadmaps and the possibility of integration, PivotLink, and our partners, will extend innovation even further. Its good database and mobile platform aside, Sybase is also widely known as the company that thought a lot about BI, but couldn’t perfect it.
The market’s embrace of PivotLink’s SaaS BI solution, and the company’s burgeoning growth, is clear evidence of this juxtaposition between the old guard and new guard.
The shift away from legacy systems is one of five key BI trends we highlighted for 2010 and was the focus of Quentin Gallivan’s recent post about the “Wisdom of Crowds” Business Intelligence Market Study™. The landmark study showed that SAP’s IT and business users found a lack of innovation coming out of Walldorf, Germany and experienced diminishing returns during the past three to four years.
Howard Dresner, author and BI über-analyst, suggests this new wave of BI innovation is something the industry should closely watch:
“The ‘Wisdom of Crowds’ study is a unique perspective for measuring BI vendors and products based on users voicing what actually happens in the real world. It reveals the inflection point that has occurred and is driving a surge of innovation and adoption in the ‘Emerging’ segment. As BI 3.0 unfolds, the market should keep a close eye on ‘Emerging’ companies that are a great source of innovation in the market.”
This brings me to the point BI aficionados should consider:
Customers will shoulder the cost of SAP’s indecisive BI strategy
SAP’s BI strategy has been a long, convoluted road for its customers to endure over the last decade. SAP Business Warehouse was intended to be the final word in BI. In 2002, NetWeaver, acquired from TopTier Software and renamed, became the face of SAP BI. In 2006, SAP acquired Business Objects. In 2008, SAP addressed performance issues with Business Warehouse by purchasing in-memory accelerator technology that required racks of expensive, dedicated database blades.
So SAP will pay $5.8B for Sybase, on top of the $6.8B to acquire Business Objects and time spent reconciling its products with NetWeaver and Business Warehouse Xcellerator. Now CIOs can look forward to adding Sybase ASE and Sybase IQ to the mix. So is this what BI customers are really asking for? Will SAP produce a BI architecture that makes analytical applications quickly deployed, easy to use and headache-free for IT? It remains to be seen whether business value will ever trickle down to SAP customers.
In the meantime, we will continue serving SAP customers who want PivotLink to augment (read, fix) BI systems that can’t deliver the insight they require.
Let me know what you think.
You missed the point. The aquisition had almost nothing to do with BI or database. It is the focus on mobile that caused SAP to do this.
I do agree with your point about large software vendors. They tend to integrate ideas that come from others. Also SAP has shifted strategy in a few major areas to the detriment of customers.
Thanks Eric,
Your point isn’t lost on me. I recognize that the value of Sybase mobile technology is a valuable addition to SAP’s mobile technology. I guess I look at the world through a BI lens.
My concern is really around BI customers being aware that there are great alternatives on the market. There have been so many cases of BI customers buying the SAP demo. They were hoodwinked, and I think it reflects badly on the promise of BI.
I think the BI software industry needs to focus on the time to value and cost of creating relevant metrics that empower business users to get the most insight from internal and external information. To that end, I think we need to look at the bottlenecks in the current BI deployment process and attack those first. SAP is not doing that.
Mobile delivery is important and it will become more so in the future. That said, if we just stack mobile reports and graphics onto the backlog of other BI reports, have we really created something of value or just added another level of complexity for the customers we want to empower?
Here at PivotLink, we strive for robust, end-user self-service that complies with enterprise governance and security, which I feel delivers on the true promise of agile and pervasive BI.