Standardisation the key trend for 2006

I think standardisation is a trend that's key in business intelligence for the coming year, and we've seen that trend pick up later last year. It's not just vendor push. It's also customer pull. Standardisation was something that this year all of the vendors started to discuss, but customers are looking to create the standard.

Reducing complexity

A lot of the reason is that they're trying to reduce the complexity, they're trying to get more value for their business users, and they're trying to reduce costs. But one of the key technology drivers that allows them to do that is that vendors like Cognos have a single architecture that you can standardize on to get all of the products you used to get as point solutions.

Web services are obviously maturing, and service-oriented architectures. From a technology perspective, both are things that people are starting to use, work-with, have practical usages for.

The smaller vendors tend to have niche areas that they focus on, and because of the breadth of offerings that the bigger vendors now focus on, I think it becomes harder and harder for them to get any traction, because unless you're talking about very a narrow niche, they don't meet the requirements. They tend not to have the global reach, the support for multi-byte, the sales organizations, all of the things that allow you to have a global organization.

Most organizations have multiple vendors that they've bought point solutions from, and as they look to consolidate, some of those vendors will not have a business in the future.

Two decades of change

The past two decades have seen a number of technological shifts sweep through corporate enterprises. In the 1980s, data warehousing was touted as the only way to deliver business critical information to top management in order to facilitate strategic decisions.

The 1990s saw executive management teams opting to implement massive ERP systems to automate and standardise company-wide business transactions, integrating systems in order to streamline - amongst other things - the flow and collection of company information.

In reality, many companies have already rolled out a BI system some years ago. Currently the trend is towards standardisation and implementing one BI system across the whole company - in every department, in every country. That's when the true value of the data collected by businesses daily will be seen.

According to an IDC report, the UAE and Saudi Arabia lead the BI market, which is worth US$25 million. So we're looking at probably US$32-33 million for the Gulf currently. Early adopters making use of BI's analytical features are engineering much of its double-digit growth in the region.