We Couldn’t Get the Answers

This week the very funny Bubble 2.0 video was removed from YouTube for copyright reasons. In honor of the video, which was based on Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start the Fire, here’s my tribute to the business intelligence market. Note, I’m no poet and it’s Friday! Thanks to The OLAP Report for lots of great market materials. Anybody want to shoot a video?

“We Couldn’t Get the Answers”
HP Lune, EF Codd, Chris Date, Stonebrake
APL, Express, Forest and Trees.

Comshare, Pilot, Metaphor, watch out here comes some more:
OLAP, ROLAP, HOLAP, MOLAP now my head hurts.

Ingres, Sybase, DB2, Informix, Oracle, Tandem too
Relational, ODBMS, how about we call it DSS?

EIS, client server, bring on the Web and SQL Server
OLAP for the masses, gents? No, let’s call it business intelligence.

We couldn’t get the answers
The tools took too much learning
For simplicity we’re yearning
We couldn’t get the answers
IT couldn’t find them
But they kept on buying them

MetaCube, Lightship, Beacon, Pillar, Holos, I’m starting to weaken
OLAP Services, TM1, Pablo, Wired, and Crystal fun.

Zambonini, Liautaud, Michael Saylor still unknown
Codd again, Netz bros, Kimball, Inmon, then Arbor goes.

Ad hoc query, data mining, information I’m still not finding
Data warehouse, what the hell! Just don’t forget about ETL.

Balanced scorecards, GIS, analytic apps, extranets
BI portals, real-time, dashboards and visualization look fine.

We still couldn’t get the answers
The tools took too much learning
For simplicity we’re yearning
We couldn’t get the answers
IT couldn’t find them
But they kept on buying them

Panorama, Andyne, Pilot, WhiteLight what a find!
Maximal, Gentia, and Next Action Technologies.

Sterling, Platinum and IA eventually all go to CA
Showcase, SQRIBE all get imbibed and don’t forget OLAP@ Work.

Comshare, Brio, AlphaBlox, Crystal’s on the chopping block
Siebel goes to Oracle, would Hyperion be the next vendor culled?

BOBJ on a shopping spree, Acta, Cartesis, SRC
Gartner bandwagon of CPM leads Cognos to Adaytum.

We couldn’t get the answers
The tools took too much learning
For simplicity we’re yearning
We couldn’t get the answers
IT couldn’t find them
But they kept on buying them

SOA, MDM, running out of acronyms
ERP, FASMI, MDX, and BAM

Still searching for the one truth, data silos hard to remove
Consolidate, standardize, “trough of disillusionment” lies.

Competency centers, shelfware, disparate data everywhere
Pay and pay, day after day, there has to be a better way!

We couldn’t get the answers
The tools took too much learning
For simplicity we’re yearning
We couldn’t get the answers
IT couldn’t find them
But they kept on buying them

Oracle buys Hyperion, SAP is on the run
Outlooksoft and Pilot go, now they’ve joined Netweaver’s show.

Waldorf / Paris HQs unite, “business users” told to delight
IBM buys Cognos too, what’s next for the SAS and MicroStrategy crew?

Open source, on-demand, innovation from a brand new land
Infrastructure, integration, what happened to my business question?
Gartner quads, Forester Waves, so many analytic predictions made
On-premise platform wars, will the SaaS model even the score?

We couldn’t get the answers
Will this business challenge go on and on and on….

posted by Darren Cunningham at 6:21 pm

---

James Taylor

Posted on 17th December, 2007

The original video was a riot and your follow-up is great. It’s terrifying to see all those products lined up like this…
A business question, or a decision, should be the key. Start there and work back to the data you need, the decision making process involved, the accuracy required and so on.
JT

Darren Cunningham

Posted on 26th January, 2008

Great news! The original video is back: http://youtube.com/watch?v=I6IQ_FOCE6I