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The BI market has seen some changing dynamics, with three software giants, IBM, Oracle, & SAP acquiring the Business Intelligence market leaders, Cognos, Hyperion, & Business Objects.  The integration of these new products into their existing BI & Data Warehouse offering is not trivial.  It’s also further complicated by previous BI & Data Warehousing product acquisitions – both by the software giants and the BI market leaders.  Adding to the confusion is the likelihood of more acquisitions in the future.

Simultaneously the Business Intelligence market is maturing with the expectation of BI Applications that will deliver out-of-the box solutions.  The markets ability to meet this expectation varies by vendor and functional area.  Also the BI applications are often designed to work with specific ERP source systems.  While they can work with other systems that will certainly increase implementation complexity and possibly decreasing functionality whittle down the value proposition.  

As a result customers in the BI market today are faced with some significant challenges, not the least of which is navigating a path forward.  They want to be sure the technology they select will not be sunset or be a legacy technology and they want to prevent the wasted time and money of technology conversions they could have avoided.  Equally important is the need to minimize their development timeframes, workload, and cost by leveraging the pre-built solutions of BI applications and do so without introducing entirely new technology stacks.

Understanding how to do this is not a trivial task, so it’s important that companies searching for BI solutions engage a partner that can help establish a roadmap based on where they are today in terms of business and technology, and where their business needs to go. 

In a few more years the BI market will mature significantly and the risks will decrease accordingly.  However, current state of the BI marketplace indicates the glaring need for a BI roadmap.  Now more than ever. 

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