posted on 1/11/2011 1:25:59 PM
Vendors from different corners of the business intelligence software market announce new capabilities, and Oracle spars with SAP over a rich vein of BI customers.
The business intelligence software market was abuzz this week, as competitive moves roiled the high end of the market and new functionality made its debut from an open-source upstart.
Oracle, which helped vault itself into the pantheon of high-end business intelligence providers with its 2007 purchase of BI specialist Hyperion, sent a shot across the bow of BI competitor SAP, whose own Business Objects takeover in 2008 cemented its BI credibility. This week, the Redwood Shores, Calif., company launched Oracle Financial Analytics for SAP, a business intelligence tool meant to be used by customers of SAP’s ERP applications in lieu of SAP’s own BI software.
Oracle Financial Analytics for SAP is a module within version 7.9.7 of the Oracle BI Applications suite. The software helps front-line departmental managers review revenue and expenses, Oracle said, through KPIs, role-based performance dashboards, and more than 200 pre-packaged reports.
The SAP-targeted app includes a pre-packaged, ABAP code-compliant adapter, and is certified with Oracle Data Integrator Enterprise Edition to integrate SAP Financial Accounting data with the BI application, according to Oracle. The extract, load, and transform (ETL) function for data to be analyzed comes from Oracle Data Integrator Enterprise Edition, the company said.
SAP’s response to Oracle’s competitive incursion sounded much like the classic answer to the question, “Why rob a bank?” Oracle’s announcement “highlights both the size of the SAP financials customer base and the opportunity that SAP is already realizing today by delivering packaged analytical applications dedicated to the finance line of business,” said James Fisher, SAP’s senior director of marketing for finance solutions, in a statement. SAP, he said, “has more than twice the share of Oracle in core financial applications.”
While the high-end business intelligence players duked it out this week, a relative upstart looked to steal some of their lunch with the announcement of a new version of its open-source BI product. Jaspersoft 4 is a BI suite with a fully Web standards-based user interface, company officials told Managing Automation.
“BI is widely recognized as a great, powerful tool for businesses to improve decision-making, but the…paradox is that the adoption of BI is paltry,” said Mike Boyarski, senior manager of product marketing at Jaspersoft.
With that in mind, developers at the open-source company sought to create a more adaptable UI that “BI builders” could tailor to their needs, even embedding it within the enterprise applications their businesses use. They did that, Boyarski said, by separating the UI’s presentation layer from the content layer. As a result, the UI can be customized by users through markups in cascading style sheets (CSS), and those adjustments will be carried forward when user move from Jaspersoft 4 to future releases of the products.
The BI suite itself provides a full range of business intelligence capabilities, according to company officials, from back-end data integration, to data analysis with ROLAP capabilities, to in-memory analysis, to various levels of reporting.
Oracle, SAP, IBM, and Microsoft are the company’s biggest competition, Boyarski said, and while Jaspersoft covers much of the functionality that the established players do—80%, he estimated—it does so at a sharply lower price point, courtesy of its open-source model. Most Jaspersoft deployments begin at $30,000, based on two CPUs and unlimited users.
Jaspersoft counts nearly 1,000 commercial customers of its software.