Forrester research just published a report titled "BI Belt-tightening in a tough economic climate". In it Forrester Analyst Boris Evelson discusses the role of business intelligence in tough economic times.
"As an economic downturn becomes a sobering reality, enterprises look for various ways to increase revenues and reduce costs. While overall IT budgets become targets for cost cutting, business intelligence applications and infrastructure need not fall into the same category. Smart information and knowledge management professionals are leveraging BI as a corporate asset to continue to survive, compete and thrive…"
There are two takeaway messages:
1. Don't panic: business intelligence is here to stay
2. Consider low cost alternatives to complement an existing BI stack
One of the low cost alternatives to complement the existing enterprise BI stack is, of course, SiSense. We're very glad to be under Forrester's radar.
Evelson's analysis of why small BI vendors are sometimes the better choice goes as follows:
"Traditionally, mainstream BI vendors have catered primarily to IT target audiences. Even though these large vendors will disagree with such an IT-centric label, one look at their complex architectures, multiple layers and components, and integration and support requirements, reveals that these are indeed IT tools…. On the other hand, smaller BI vendors… pitch simplicity, flexibility, lower license cost, and little or no reliance on IT".
He then lists the key things that small BI vendors need to offer:
- Data integration function to build an analytical data model
- Production/operational reporting for pixel perfect mass report distribution
- Ad hoc query tools for quick answers to business questions
- OLAP tools, for when business questions are more about the "whys" than the "whats"
- Dashboards for an interactive, visual UI – not reporting or analytical tool by itself
- SDKs
Congratulations to the team
Adi
