A Business Intelligence Black Eye for Cognos
“So-called “business intelligence”" got a bit of a black eye today on the front page of the Boston Globe -$13m software deal is called unnecessary.
The article outlines many of the issues that plague both enterprise software and traditional on-premise approaches to business intelligence. It turns out that Cognos, an IBM company, won a huge government contract for 20,000 state users who apparently lacked the skills needed to use the complex software. Here are a few statements from the article that definitely pack a punch (not to mention the details of the deal itself):
“It is certainly not a tool for everyone in the organization. It requires a level of sophistication to use it and understand the results.”
- Theodore Grossman, professor of technology operations and information management at Babson College
“Specialists said such a plan [for 20K users] makes no sense for two big reasons: It unnecessarily inflates the price of the contract, since the cost is dependent on the number of people who are licensed to use it, and it is likely to lead to wasteful use of the software.”
SAS and Oracle actually come out smelling like roses - their bids were only $7M and $5M respectively.
Ouch!
posted by Darren Cunningham at 5:03 pm
Comments
Dhiren Gala
Posted on 3rd July, 2008
Traditional BI within an organization is only for few expert users. Operational BI is to democratize BI and bring it to masses. Traditionally BI was complex, difficult to implement, architected for selected analysts and hard to use.
Affordability doesn’t sound glamorous; But that’s what it matters in enterprise roll outs: Implementing BI with few experts is easy, but rolling out to 000’s of users within the enterprise & beyond is a different story. Traditional BI systems are expensive, open budget projects.
Information is not just for bosses anymore. BI was considered once a domain of statisticians & analysts; not anymore: Earlier, only the elite had access to business intelligence. High cost and manageability issues restricted enterprise-wide BI roll-outs. Open BI to masses for enterprise-wide empowerment. Accommodate 000’s of users with affordability without prohibitive licensing, implementation & training costs.
Ken Rudin is the VP of Market Development at LucidEra. He co-founded the on-demand business intelligence company in 2005. Ken is a veteran of the rapidly growing software as a service industry with over 7 years of experience as an executive with leading on-demand software vendors. These include roles at Salesforce.com, at Netsuite (as an advisor), and at Siebel's on-demand division.
Darren Cunningham is the Director of Product Marketing at LucidEra. Prior to joining LucidEra he was the Category Director for salesforce.com AppExchange Analytics and Data Management. Before joining the on-demand world, he spent over 7 years at Business Objects.
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