he business intelligence software market is one of the hottest areas in technology today. Companies are clearly getting on board: so many corporations have so many different systems, all with data that, if sliced and diced correctly, could (hopefully) lead to real business insight.
Not surprisingly, many vendors serve this market, including the larger companies that you would expect, along with smaller players that have unique offerings and value additions.
Let’s take a survey of some key offerings in the business intelligence space, their claims to fame, and what they have to offer.
SAP BusinessObjects
SAP BusinessObjects XI 3.1 is the latest version of SAP’s flagship business intelligence suite. It boasts a suite of common services that helps an administrator deploy and manage BI tools on both the desktop and the server, including query tools and analysis programs for “self-service BI” (where a users can query and pull up reports themselves without relying on pre-programmed results).
Additionally, the Enterprise Information Management (EIM) module provides a foundation for querying and analysis using techniques like extract/transform/load (ETL). SAP BusinessObjects also integrates the venerable Crystal Reports product, used for years in businesses worldwide to create reports.
As you might expect, SAP has also stepped into the cloud with a software-as-a-service (Saas) offering, called Business Intelligence OnDemand, hosted entirely on the Web by SAP.
IBM Cognos
The Cognos family of products has been through several acquisitions and rebrandings, but the core suite remains intact now within IBM’s Business Analytics division. Cognos stretches into the midsize business arena with IBM Cognos Express, introduced in late 2009 to be a one-stop BI center with tight integration and targeted features for smaller enterprises.
The full enterprise suite of IBM Cognos 8 includes financial reporting, business intelligence, and extended mobile functions.
Within the BI arena, the Cognos offering is comprised of the following: Report Studio, a Web-centric report designer; Query Studio, a product designed to produce on-demand reporting with an instant preview function; Analysis Studio, a multidimensional cube analysis tool; Metric Studio and Metric Designer, which allows you to create, query, and report on key performance indicators (KPIs); Event Studio, which helps to design, and then send, alerts to business decision makers based on certain scenarios becoming
