Information Builders - BI Software
Unlike most of its competitors, who already excel at providing self-service reporting and analysis against a data warehouse, but are only now providing operational reporting capabilities, Information Builders is doing the opposite. Already well-established in the operational reporting space — bolstered nicely by its iWay Software subsidiary — Information Builders spent 2006 building out its end-user reporting and analysis capabilities. In particular, it released Power Painter, its first true ad hoc query tool, and heavily promoted the report wizard, Active Reports, and Visual Discovery features of WebFOCUS. In addition, Information Builders improved its process-driven BI vision — going beyond just operational reporting — by focusing on its partnerships with key analysis vendors, particularly SPSS, to deliver predictive models.
Information Builders also released a visual workflow modeling tool that improves a BI architect's ability to insert information directly into the steps of a workflow process. Information Builders demonstrates its ability to execute, particularly in very large extranet applications, with the highest number of 10,000 plus seat deployments in the industry. To move into the Leaders quadrant, the company must bolster its sales-channel strategy and prove that its analysis capabilities can be successful in the market. It has a strong, energized sales force, but it is about half the size of those of other leading BI platform vendors.
Furthermore, Information Builders lacks a strong channel presence with systems integrators and value-added resellers (VARs), as offered by some of its direct competitors. Strengthening its sales channels would help drive Information Builders' deployments globally, which today are heavily concentrated in North America.
Furthermore, Information Builders needs to go beyond its "sweet spot" of operational reporting and information delivery and show a large number of successful deployments where WebFOCUS is used for analysis.
Source: http://mediaproducts.gartner.com/reprints/oracle/145507.html
12 January 2008
Business Intelligence Software Vendors - Information Builders
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1 Comment:
Thanks for mentioning us! I just noticed this post, and thought I should add a few words. I want to specifically target this section:
To move into the Leaders quadrant, the company must bolster its sales-channel strategy and prove that its analysis capabilities can be successful in the market. Furthermore, Information Builders lacks a strong channel presence with systems integrators and value-added resellers (VARs), as offered by some of its direct competitors. Strengthening its sales channels would help drive Information Builders' deployments globally, which today are heavily concentrated in North America.
Furthermore, Information Builders needs to go beyond its "sweet spot" of operational reporting and information delivery and show a large number of successful deployments where WebFOCUS is used for analysis.
This year Information Builders has shipped thousands of WebFOCUS licenses through IBM as a result of our System i partnership: they OEM a version of WebFOCUS as "DB2 Web Query". We have both longstanding and new relationships being built up, and we have made this a focus of effort for our company. We also have a superb market opportunity with the consolidation of BI tools into software stack vendors.
This year we substantially expanded our overseas channel, adding agents in Russia, Finland, South Africa, and other locations. We are continuing to build momentum outside of North America.
Moving to the leader quadrant would involve getting a higher score for "Completeness of Vision". The criticism of our channels operations should, in my opinion, be overshadowed by our innovations in our technologies. Clearly Gartner disagrees :) but consider the things we have put out that no other vendor has: Active Technologies (self-contained analytic dashboards and reports that can be used in a disconnected mode -- without cubes or client software), transactional search, Mobile Favorites, and much more.
Our technical vision sometimes gets criticized as you (paraphrasing Gartner) did here:
"and prove that its analysis capabilities can be successful in the market."
I'd just like to point out that we do query and analysis all the time, but our emphasis tends to be different from Cognos, BO, and others. If you only make tools for the power user then you won't get that. We know that everyone makes decisions, so we promote our ability to reach thousands of users with intuitive information. Thousands of people at Ford dealerships are analyzing how they're doing vs. other dealerships on warranty claims, for instance. And getting that information into the hands of lots of users, instead of keeping it in the back office, makes a difference -- tens of millions of dollars' worth of difference.
Now, admittedly, that's not what the analysts want to think about. But we're driven more by what our customers want than by the analysts. I think that's healthy -- and I think, frankly, that the analysts are coming around. Who, five years ago, thought that "operational" and "BI" should describe the same applications? We did; others are just starting to catch up.
Thanks for letting me talk a little bit.
Regards,
Jake Freivald
VP, Information Builders
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