Earlier this week, Endeca (a search provider) made two announcements relevant to BI:

1. A partnership with Informatica that lets Endeca customers access and use standardized data integration functionality, and
2. the integration of Xcelsius dashboards and SAP BusinessObjects intelligence search within Endeca’s current platform.

The traditional way of looking at BI and search involves the use of search within BI applications.  This may include the ability to search text strings or for reports that have been created but that might not be easily accessed.  By turning the tables and embedding BI and data integration within an overall search platform, the ability to gain value out of information expands exponentially.  Instead of being limited to BI related content, search solutions can give organizations access to internal, external, structured and unstructured data sets.  This creates more of a unified approach to data visibility and gaining overall insights into business. As BI continues to mature, its use will become more complimentary to operational and other analytical applications creating a more holistic approach to how data management and visualization tools are applied within organizations.

After a couple of weeks on the road, I just arrived back from Teradata Partners last night.  My overall impressions were very positive about the event and about some of the initiatives that we’ll see from them in the coming months.

However, while being away I wasn’t properly able to advocate for the family pet…and he obviously needed me to save him from this:

So aside from heavy workloads, a lot of research related to how mid-market companies can best measure TCO, and planning the 2010 research agenda, pet advocacy will be in my job description for the next couple of weeks – at least until Halloween!

This week I am attending Teradata Partners in DC (well, more adequately National Harbor, MD).  This morning the keynote featured Don Tapscott – author (Wikinomics as one example) and visionary on information technology and the information age in general. His talk centered around the changing workforce, collaboration, and how new grads and entrants to the workforce will help drive changes in the way we conduct business. Web 2.0 and the need to integrate data on varying levels creates the need to look at things differently. How this relates to business intelligence is that people are looking for ways to make faster decisions and get better insights into their information. Consequently, not only is information power, but the ability to collaborate on broader levels and gain operational insight into what is happening on a daily basis increases the overall importance of collecting valid data.

Obviously, the data part is where Teradata comes in.  James Vollmer, the presting of the Partners Steering Committee and Lead Architect at Enterprise Holdings discussed the speed at which business is changing and the requirements to address this change. Enterprise car rentals provided an example where Teradata was used to integrate data from external sources (such as insurance related data) in order to speed up orders, leading to lower wait times and happier customers.

In addition to this example, Michael Koehler, President and CEO of Teradata tied business intelligence and data warehousing together by discussing the reasons companies use BI and data warehousing together :

1. to gain better intelligence
2. to make faster decisions
3. to lower costs

Although this doesn’t always seem realistic to companies struggling with their current BI projects and business issues, the reality is that the insights presented today at the keynote session can be achieved by organizations looking to accomplish these same goals.

The archive of the first BeyeConnect chat was just posted today. The format was a 15 minute presentation/overview and then questions from the audience.  It can be found at either link below:

• Mid-Market BI Group
• BeyeNETWORK.com

The next chat is scheduled for Monday, November 9^th at 9am PT | 12 pm ET.  The topic will be the real costs of “free”, which is a nice expansion on the last topic because it relates to the development and maintenance costs that were touched on in relation to on-premises vs. SaaS.  Please click here for more information and to RSVP to next month’s chat!

For those of you who have visited my Website over time, you may have noticed that the site look and feel has been revamped.  Along with the new site, I am planning to blog more often, provide an analyst newsletter, as well as additional research and services.  The two key focuses will be mid-market BI and data visualization, but the general BI market and software solutions will also be covered.

The overall goal of WiseAnalytics is to provide you with the research and information you need to make better and more informed BI decisions. So, if you get the chance, answer the poll or feel free to email me with research or content you’d like to see, questions, comments, and the like.  The only way to provide research value is to have research initiatives driven by the people working in organizations and using business intelligence solutions.

Tomorrow a new WiseAnalytics research report, in conjunction with Dashboard Insight will be released.

The goal of the report is to help organizations navigate through the data visualization market and understand the business value of the solutions available.  Instead of the regular end user surveys, 26 vendors participated in a survey to identify high level of features, functions, positioning, key differentiators, etc. Some of the high level goals of the paper are to help organizations:

• Understand dashboards and how they are applied within organizations.
• Learn how dashboards fit within the world of business intelligence.
• Identify the business value of using dashboards.
• Identify the types of solutions available (and the main players).
• See how these solutions differ from one another at a high level.

Later in September a Webinar will follow that includes the ability to interact with the sponsoring vendors and ask them questions you want to know regarding their offerings – they are Dundas, InetSoft, Klipfolio, and QlikView.

Last week I spent most of my time at TDWI in San Diego getting caught up on the latest from vendors attending the show. Aside from a lot of information (most of which is under NDA, making the details I can share fairly vague!), I was impressed with the increasing focus on the mid-market companies – and a realistic one at that. Meaning that as vendors continue to target mid-market companies (generally those with revenues under 1B but with Teradata targeting companies from between 1B to 5B within their mid-market portfolio) there is an increased focus on identifying the unique requirements of these companies – whether this means differing IT infrastructures or the benefits of having a more agile environment based on corporate structure.

Only time will tell — what is happening, however, is that BI is slowly shifting so that smaller organizations or organizations with a small number of BI users to access and develop their own solutions for limited or no cost.