Yellowfin discusses Consolidation and its impact on the Business

The past year has seen a huge amount of activity in BI Tool
consolidation. We have continued to comment on this activity but now
at last we have the release of a Gartner Report that comments on these
changes and spells out what this means for the industry and BI
customers as a whole.

According to Gartner the business intelligence (BI) market is in a
state of flux. Whilst they see this as a threat to the long-term
existence of a separate set of vendors in the market, it's also an
opportunity for BI to deliver more value to users. As companies
incorporate BI into their eco-systems by making BI more strategic and
pervasive, and increasingly embed BI functionality into their workflow
and business processes, the case for BI as a mission critical
functionality increases.

Gartner's Key Findings

The purchases by SAP, Oracle, IBM and Microsoft have consolidated big
portions of the stand-alone BI market. These purchases will
accelerate both industry understanding of the value of BI and also the
value derived from BI by end users.
Innovation will be driven by new vendors who will start by filling in
the gaps in 'mega-vendors' product lines.
BI platform revenue will grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR)
of 8.6% during the next five years.

Why the Consolidation?

According to Gartner the main reasons for the level of acquisition
seen in 2007 included:

IBM, Oracle, Mircrosoft and SAP are increasingly looking to control
access to organisational information by locking customers into their
technology stacks.
Increased revenue, both by growing product license revenue, and also
by reaping current maintenance revenue.
Embedding analytics directly into workflows and processes, both from
an application and middleware perspective, is a capability that is
gaining increasing significance.

What does this mean for the customer?

Interestingly not a lot of commentary by Gartner on what it means for
existing customers but if we look at the recent announcements by SAP
then we can get a sense of what is to come. SAP have announced:

A rationalisation of their Business Objects / SAP product set - by
either wholesale removal of overlapping product sets or integration
into a single product. Not great for those customers that have a
significant enterprise investment in now redundant products.
Increased prices for Business Objects - in an attempt to recoup their
$7 Billion investment. Consolidation (reduced competition) and
"ownership" of data accesses is reducing price pressures on Vendors.

What does this mean for the independent Vendors?

With recent consolidation, remaining stand-alone BI players will have
to accelerate innovation to maintain their leading edge. Some emerging
areas in BI are predictive modelling, enterprise search, interactive
visualization techniques and in-memory analytics. Independent Vendors
can also continue thriving by specializing horizontally,
geographically or vertically. Embeddable BI tools will become more of
an option for OEMs and custom business application developers as they
seek alternatives to products that may be owned by their competitors.


About Yellowfin Business Intelligence
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At Yellowfin, we are making Busienss Intelligence easy.

Yellowfin is regarded the most easy to use and integrate, embeddable
BI solution on the market. Yellowfin works closely with leading
international Software Vendors and System Integrators throughout
Asia, North America and Europe.

Yellowfin's Business Intelligence suite is an innovative and flexible
100% web-based solution for reporting and analytics. It provides a
full range of data access, presentation and information delivery
capabilities that can be easily integrated into any third party
application or delivered as a stand alone enterprise platform.

Visit Yellowfin's home site to take an online tour or request a demo,
you will see how Yellowfin will improve the efficiency and
profitability of your organization.

www.yellowfin.com.au