InetSoft Viewpoint |
"The bottom line for enterprises trying to implement business intelligence is that the implementation becomes a lengthy, painful process. It takes a long time to iterate around a repetitive process to get to the ultimate state of successful deployment. Companies go through successive stages of building data access, building reporting and dashboard on top of that, and implementing a lot of analysis on top of that or implementing data mining as the business requirements are successively more accurately defined through this iterative process.
Meanwhile the array of different products needed might have expanded, and the budget tends to expand, much to everyone’s frustration. Along the way people realize a big disconnect between IT and business. IT gets the first set of requirements from the business. They go ahead and build the BI solution, but by the time they are done, maybe several months or year later, the business users have moved on to new business problems and BI needs. Once they got what they were first asked for, the requirements have changed.
So, you see this disconnect between the business requirements and the ability of IT to meet these requirements can be addressed through a rapid agile BI deployment. On the other side of it, we are also seeing some market dynamics that relate to this. You see business intelligence vendors, again some of those BI vendors have grown through acquisitions, they become slow to adapt and innovate, as well. They become bogged down in managing the acquisitions, and as a result innovation seems to have slowed down a lot. The focus in fact these days is mainly on integration with other process of enterprise application suites, and less on innovating the BI technology itself to make it easier and faster to deploy.
That leaves an opportunity wide open for BI solution providers like InetSoft. And to this market environment the influence of the recent recession which has been driving a big focus on cost efficiency. People do not want to pay for additional licenses for existing traditional commercial BI technology. So I think enterprises are much more open to considering more cost-effective alternatives such as ours." - Mark Flaherty, Chief Marketing Officer |