Enterprise applications Toolkit

The 'dirty little secret' of business intelligence

Tags:
Sale,
Business Intelligence,
Suppliers,
Objects

Colin Barker ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 22 Oct 2007 11:46 BST

...simple spreadsheets to their first experience in business intelligence. It was a wizard that would have the step-by-step guide to building reports, or adding dashboards. We have a catalogue of the different types of report.

So these things are really point-and-click and suitable for people who are not very technical at all. Now the price point is between 50 and 70 percent less than the enterprise [product]. In fact, for the standard edition, it starts at £14,000, as opposed to £70,000 or so for the enterprise product.

What is nice is that business intelligence used to be for the privileged few. This is almost like business intelligence for the rest of us.

This may be a simple question, but what are SMEs using it for?
Well, they are using it to create reports — but not only for reports but [also] for creating dashboards. Which product lines are selling well and which are not? What geographies are selling? Which customers are most important? Those sorts of questions. They are looking at revenue forecasts based upon historical information. Marketing will use it to create marketing campaigns. We see human resources using it in terms of attracting and acquiring talent. If I lose people, why am I losing them?

Business intelligence used to be for the privileged few. This [product] is almost like business intelligence for the rest of us

Todd Rowe, Business Objects

Which industries are they coming from?
Financial services is the second largest market and manufacturing is our largest — and that is both discrete and process manufacturing. Financial services is more retail banking and insurance and not as much brokerage services and commercial banking. Third would be the public sector at the council level.

Which countries do you do well in?
Europe is about 30 percent of the revenue of the SME product line, of which the UK is by far the largest [customer]. If you just look at Europe, 26 percent of the revenue comes from the UK. We have over 25 partners in the UK selling mid-market and they are primarily systems integrators or solution providers. If you look at distributors or resellers, we have another 150.

Presumably a lot of them are coming from the ERP side of things and most of them will be using SAP. If the deal to sell to SAP goes ahead, would that make integration easier?
Indeed. What is interesting is that we estimate we have 37,000 customers in the mid-market globally, of which 17,000 have some form of ERP. So we tell them that, since they have some form of ERP anyway, they will want some insight into the data they have. So business intelligence becomes a logical extension of ERP, be it from SAP or otherwise.

How big is the mid-size business now?
Last year it was 30 percent of the company in revenue; this year we should be at 37 percent. Our goal is that, by 2010, it becomes 50 percent of the company.