Podcast: Big BI Vendors Facing Big Challenges

Have a listen to this discussion


http://www.it-financeconnection.com/...ig_challenges/

[Steve Bennett]

Here is the article mentioned.

Pendse publishes an annual survey of BI. I participated in the survey and was sent a high-level summary of the findings. To get the full report is a lot of money, but if you are about to make a big decision about what tool to use perhaps it is worth it.

Go to the original article to listen to an accompanying podcast - but I didn't get much additional value beyond the article text.

Podcast: Big BI Vendors Facing Big Challenges

March 23, 2009

By Nigel Pendse

Much of the problem stems from the wave of consolidation that swept the BI industry over the last few years. For example, both Business Objects and Hyperion had product lines that had originated in at least ten different companies, before they themselves were acquired by very large, non-BI vendors.
Listen to the Podcast:
The bigger BI vendors had found that they could not sustain their previous organic growth and so they resorted to regularly buying smaller, specialist BI vendors to compensate. They generally overpaid for these acquisitions, and so had to cut costs, both in the acquired companies and in their own core business. It cannot be a surprise that the worst support was reported by customers of these two vendors.
One area that was often a target for cost cutting was product support, which was sometimes outsourced to India. The over-worked support people were expected to support a wide range of products, rather than specializing in just one, and the quality dropped. They also lost any direct link to customers, often dealing electronically with customers on the other side of the world.
At the same time, these bureaucratic consolidated companies became pre-occupied with merging and streamlining their geographically dispersed, lumbering organizations. These internal priorities meant that they became much less customer focused.
Very often, there were big reorganizations, which meant that even surviving sales and support people were no longer dealing with the same customers as before, so the personal relationships were lost. The staff became inward focused, as staff looked to maximize their career opportunities in the new organizations, and so became oblivious to growing customer dissatisfaction.
Within product development, the main theme moved from innovation to integration. So, instead of delivering previously promised product enhancements to existing customers, product releases came out late and the highlights were the new connections to other products owned by the vendor, but which were probably not used by the existing customers. In other words, product development was driven by the priorities of the vendor, not the customer.
To add insult to injury, maintenance charges were often increased as well. So existing customers had to pay more to get less. They also had less influence over the future development of their products.
In some cases, support is being phased out from minor products that overlapped other products in the enlarged portfolio — for example, SAP and Business Objects had several overlapping products, as did Oracle and Hyperion. Users of these doomed products will have to migrate to different products, possibly even those that they had previously rejected. Even if no license fee has to be paid for this, it is still disruptive to customers.
This probably explains why the customers of the smaller, one-product vendors are so much more satisfied. They have fewer product complaints, and are much happier with the product support they receive. For example, we found that 41.5% of the customers of small vendors reported excellent customer support, while only 13.4% of customers of large vendors felt the same.
This is the eighth year Nigel Pendse has written the BI Survey. Learn more about Pendse’s report.