The BIG Blog

I always look forward to the reports on BI from the Aberdeen Group to get a global perspective of how BI projects are being deployed and how well users are engaging with BI tools. The latest April 2010 report focused on TCO, in particular the cost per BI user. According to the report, during the previous 12 months, the average total expenditure per BI User*:

• Best in Class – $357
• Industry Average – $968
• Laggard $ 3,321

So just what is behind this significant variance in expenditure, what is it that best in class are doing at a lesser cost than other BI initiatives. According to other findings in the report Best in class BI teams:

• Had a clearly defined BI strategy – including a strategy for BI data management
• Had standard processes for gathering end user BI requirements
• Were 2.9 times more likely to formally develop BI knowledge and skills amongst users
• Were 1.8 times more likely to track BI project costs to budget
• Were 1.7 times more likely to automate the creation of reports.

The overall message is that BI TCO is not only about the technology. It is largely impacted by the transformational efforts made to define a BI strategy, manage BI project roadmap iterations, and to educate users on how to extract more value from their BI tools.

You can find copies of this report on the aberdeen.com website.

Four open-source and proprietary vendors have forged a new partnership resulting in a cloud-based BI stack.

1. Jaspersoft - open-source BI
2. Talend -  data-integration
3. Vertica - analytics database
4. RightScale - management software for cloud-based application deployments

Whilst the contractual relationship between the vendors may be tight, unfortunately the same cannot be said for customers. Customers need to form contractual agreements with each vendor. Each vendor will also be responsible for supporting their own technology. To ease the pain, the group has created a seamless sales that supports a ‘pay-as-you-go’ pricing model inherent in cloud computing.

Such an offering will not only attract smaller enterprises; departments in larger enterprises frustrated at the lengthy delay of BI deployment and the complex Capex business case sign off will find value in such a one-stop infrastructure to advance their use of data from spreadsheets and canned reports into an operational BI application. The stack will also provide an ideal ‘sandbox’ for enterprise IT teams wishing to experiment with BI analytics.