microscope investigates what the future holds for bi...

Microscope investigates what the future holds for BI resellers

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What the future holds for BI resellers

Contents

BI roundtable – Intelligence gathering

BI market posing reseller challenges

BI specialists in pole position to gain big data rewards

BI roundtable – Intelligence gathering Simon Quicke, Editor, Microscope

Attendees: Nick Felton, head of business analytics, Advanced Business Solutions Conor Shaw, vice-president general business and partner ecosystem, SAP Phil Davies, channel and alliances director, EMEA & APAC, Pentaho John Sands, product sales enablement manager, Qlik Edward Smith, technical director, Intuitive Business Intelligence Mike Hallett, alliances and channels director, Oracle

The business intelligence (BI) market has evolved over the past three decades. In the 1980s, BI was really just about reports, which were given to everyone, focusing on what’s happened in the past.

In the 1990s, vendors recognised that there was demand from customers to go beyond reporting and drill into the data to work out why things happened and the way they worked – and that is when a lot of desktop reporting tools emerged and Excel became the premier BI took in the marketplace. The past couple of years have seen the addition of visual discovery tools. In the 2000s, vendors realised that giving ‘power users’ tools was not delivering much value, so they ushered in the era of dashboards to address the larger audience of casual users, so more people could use data. It was also not just looking in the rear-view mirror but looking at how things were working at the time and how

they were tracking to plan. Then in 2010, the industry switched from looking to the past and present to using all the data it had been collection and applying it to mathematical models to predict what could happen.

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In the past three decades, every 10 years the market has shifted focus, just lick clockwork, to another part of the BI market. Vendors have flipped from focusing on the traditional power user – between 5% and 20% of the tradition audience for BI tools – to the casual user, the executive, the manager and the front-line workers who use information to do their jobs but are not hired to crunch data.

Reporting is the world of casual users and the solutions are more IT-driven, allowing people to see their key indicators, at a high level with the option of drilling down. The market has a history of change, so do you see that continuing right now and what sort of changes are you detecting in the market? Conor Shaw: The machine is doing what was previously done by the human. In the 1980s, analysis was being done by the analyst or manager looking at a data dump. But then technology improvements came along that meant they only had to look at certain things, so then it became monitoring. Automation of monitoring of processes

frees up users to use the tools to explore and analyse the data in ways that they would previously not have had time for, such as predictive capabilities. John Sands: It is about making predictive analytics available to the user and making sure that not just the casual user, and not just the power user, but everyone right at the very edges of the business can get that analysis. It’s about making sure that these complex algorithms that run in the background and do all of this predictive analysis are being made available to all users. They don’t have to know how, but they do need to know the answers. Data scientists are a rare breed and not every customer has one, but the algorithms they

create can be available for all organisations. Shaw: It is about user trust because at each stage of the market development, the user trusts the technology to do analyses that they

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previously did themselves. If you take prediction, at the moment predictive analytics says that if you do nothing, this will happen, but you can start to say, “I would like these outcomes”, and then find out what factors are the most influential in arriving at the desired outcome and hence understand what you need to change to reach that outcome. Users are looking for this level of predictive capability and even using the automation available through “machine learning”.

Phil Davies: If you look at financial services and trading, the machines are already making all the decisions. They are just using BI and the growing volumes and types of data available to make smarter decisions automatically based on established rules. The next step is about execution. Where do you think the channel partners and customers are in terms of the sale and adoption of the latest BI technologies?

Nick Felton: We have such a vast range that some partners are still in the 1990s, but others are at the cutting edge.

Sands: A lot of customers still want the reporting and want that PowerPoint presentation on their desk at the end of every month.

Felton: There are variations because it depends on which part of the business you are dealing with.

Sands: The systems integrator channel is much more advanced, like Atos and Capgemini, and they are looking at the future and are very much there and are selling it, particularly into the public sector.

Shaw: I would look at our traditional partners – they have a lot of legacy systems and installed base to deal with. However, some new emerging partners are embracing the new, innovative technologies. In this industry, if you don’t change, you die. If our partners are not getting up to speed on Hana, mobile and predictive analytics and if they are not executing on the cloud strategy, then they need to think

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about building those capabilities and we will have a conversation with them to help the change be accelerated.

Mike Hallett: Some people have failed to retire what they were using in previous decades, so they have ended up with an estate of legacy stuff and a lot of silos. So, some want to be forward-thinkers looking at predictive analytics, but many still have old reporting procedures running in the background. What we are seeing is a trend for partners

to help people to modernise and integrate the silos. Casual users and power users make up the audience for BI and require different types of tool. Casual users like to use dashboards and reports, and power users are using discovery tools to find insights. The two biggest segments are the visual discovery vendors and traditional online analytical processing (OLAP), which is used by casual users. Where will the visual discovery market go? Will it keep growing and where will it sit in the market? Shaw: There is a shift and big data is enabling operational analytics, competitive maintenance and that sort of new thinking. Customers want to start to put that into products out of the box. The CFO or CMO running their business will start to put that back into the organisation. With the Hana platform, we can process data very quickly, so you can make informed decisions with the data that is produced in a time that is useful. Big data analytics is going to explode. The casual user will want to know and you can’t leave it with the data scientist. They have to provide the infrastructure for the manager or user to utilise and interrogate. The casual user will want to use their iPad or mobile to find out if the weather is going to change tomorrow so they need to order more ice-cream, or whatever they need. The way the reports are delivered is down to personal preference. Felton: At the moment, we have customers that are looking for fore-casting and the planning elements. The BI element, the dashboards, have largely become a commoditised piece in terms of software. Most companies we talk to have many different versions, but the key

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differentiator is around the forecasting and plans they can execute to have an immediate impact on the business. Also, people in back-office operations want to look at sales, inventory and stock levels and to get a view of what that does from a P&L perspective. Many people have not reached this stage. They are still looking at the P&L with Excel and have some of the dashboards, but haven’t got that bit to be able to execute.

Davies: Visual discovery will continue to grow as analytics platforms support more types of data. However, it will always be constrained by earlier stages in the data “production line” where data cleansing, storage, preparation and blending take place – and this can get very complex. The “eye candy” in reports and dashboards always helps to sell BI, but these are no good if the data behind them can’t be trusted. Channel partners have a huge opportunity to help customers set up and manage the whole data management production line. When we asked people what types of applications they were using for predictive analytics in 2006, it was marketing intelligence about cross-sell, upsell and campaign management. Today it’s budgeting, and that’s the dominant application.

Hallett: No one knows what will happen in the future, so we need plans to say what could happen and what should happen. If you ask most business people where their targets and business objectives are modelled, many today would still turn to something in a spreadsheet. So, we have partners helping the business adopt better collaborative planning and budgeting applications.

Shaw: It is about adding the context around big data. Some people have gone in with traditional discovery tools but had to rip them up because they have not been delivering. Big data is great and many people are talking about it, although not many know what it is. But without any context, knowing that you sold 1,000 blue t-shirts on a Tuesday is not much good.

Davies: I asked one of my partners what his definition of big data was. He called it “speed data”. It goes back to that idea of giving the casual

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user the power to make decisions quicker. Speed data was a very apt description. Do you think partners need more help understanding what big data is and what the opportunities are around it? Have your partners worked out what it means to them?

Davies: Partners have a tendencyto confuse big data with “a lot of data”. When we talk to some of our partners, especially the smaller ones, they say they do not sell big data. But when I learn more about their projects, I can see that many have been selling big data solutions for the past couple of years. A lot of the confusion arises from marketing and not the technology.

Sands: A lot of buzzwords get thrown around and partners can get thrown off because they worry that they don’t have the skills in-house to deal with that.

Felton: We still have the same challenge that we have had for years. Big data has to be driven by business outcomes that add value to the business and people still don’t know what that is. People will continue to struggle with big data if it doesn’t appear to add value. We are at an inflexion point with the internet of things and the growth in data that means there will be more demand for business analytic tools that can process unstructured data to integrate it. Are your partners starting to specialise to deal with these opportunities? Sands: We define partners by technology, so some will focus on customer relationship management (CRM) and big data. Not all are segmented, but many are, and if you are talking about technologies like this, then you have to specialise.

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Do you see some tension between selling enterprise tools compared to something more specialist for a departmental customer? Hallett: It depends on the company culture. Technology is perhaps not the main issue here; it is more about good collaboration between IT and the business departmental customer. The right enterprise tool provides for IT governance balanced with user self-service analysis. Sands: Some vendors have an enterprise and a departmental solution and can take an approach to have a portfolio to address the customer. Edward Smith: It can be a personal thing and it is possible to have a large data warehouse and bring discovery tools into that to share the data with a lot of people. But that hasn’t happened because not enough people have good enough data warehousing and some of the vendors have sold the tools to departments to bypass the enterprise requirements, so it can be a political thing. Felton: It depends how high up in an organisation someone will champion BI and you can find that you can get driven down to a departmental level because at the enterprise level, people haven’t got that visibility and ownership. Culture will vary from company to company and sector to sector. Shaw: The very large customers will have in-house BI, but in the area that the channel dominates, the customers do not. That gives the channel a chance to become that trusted adviser. The cultural point can be valid because the CEO might be someone who wants a PowerPoint on the desk every Monday or will they get more involved or will they be micro-managing it? Some of our VARs have become very strong trusted advisers. Sands: Some partners have a long-established relationship with the customer, covering products including Microsoft Word and Excel to the BI technologies, and they are truly trusted by the customer.

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Felton: The reason for that is that you can pick on an area where the customer has a passion and budget and start there and then work your way across the rest of the business, but there is no silver bullet. Shaw: We would predict the separation of BI from the operational data and that will see a big shift in how the enterprise and departmental relationships work. The data warehouse is coming to an end because with the Hana platform, we can now analyse operational data in real time and that is a big shift. Users often look for “agile BI” – self-service exploration and visualisation rather than fixed scheduled reports. Hallett: There may be some reluctance, because of security, to open up some data across the enterprise, and there may also be challenges for the casual user in understanding all the data they are looking at. The organisation learning process can be enabled if you release some data in a sandbox environment to trusted users, so they can just start to use it. Smith: The VAR often has the knowledge of the transactional system, and it is possible, with some of the latest technologies, that they could supply their customers with tools and data to do BI. The time is coming when the channel can catch up and take a lead on BI initiatives. Hallett: Your existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems have structure and this is valuable for good analytics. You then want to connect this with other [unstructured] information in a way that can be easily analysed by a business user.

Shaw: Your ERP data is structured, but companies look to enhance

this with data coming in from other places, such as social media, which is not structured in the same way. If you want to find out how many blue t-shirts you sold, then yes, that is an easy answer, but if you are trying to find out what the buyers of those blue t-shirts thought about them and how they reacted to them, then that is all unstructured stuff that isn’t in your ERP and you want to use that.

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Top BI challenges – big data, cloud and mobile – are perhaps at an early stage, but do you see demand for those technologies and are you preparing your channel for them? Davies: When I look at channel partners, I look at them by geography and industry, so I am looking at specialists. Mobile is a good example. Some industries are just not interested in it, but in verticals like consumer goods and retail, mobile is essential. With big data, we see a lot of companies out there preparing their IT architectures for it, even if they aren’t doing anything today. We are helping our channel partners prepare as well, by offering training, conferences, technical materials and case study materials. Hallett: Our customers are exploring these new technologies and our partners are already working with them. Shaw: We, the industry, have to educate again. We didn’t understand network computing and now we have invented the cloud, but it has been around and there is an opportunity to make it very clear what we mean. Smith: Although there has been a lot of noise about big data, not enough people in the UK have a genuine user case for the technologies. In the US, there is much greater adoption since the organisations that have a need for these approaches – for example, tech and internet-based firms with global customer populations – are commonly based there.

Hallett: The business desires to do things differently and wants more self-service and so there are changes happening. There is also more

demand for analysing a wide variety of data together: that is challenging for customers with older tools. This demand to handle data variety is creating opportunities for partners because they can help customers adopt newer tools that can cope with the new content that is being generated.

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This source variety is driving more of a data first approach. You do need the right tools, and that is the business we are in, and we can reduce any skills barriers so companies can digest this variety and innovation. And, yes, we are helping our partners to learn these new skills. Sands: If you are a partner working in a consultative way and you are not advising customers about innovation, then you are not going to retain that trusted adviser position. Felton: Your customer is still going to have the appetite to move and you might be driven by compliance, but you are still driven by the customer and their desire to use something different. Will cloud BI sales grow? Sands: We hear that security problems are a major concern, along with people not wanting to put data into the cloud. We hear people pointing to security all the time. Shaw: It is taking 10 years to become an overnight success. A shift will come and we are going through it now and it will be massive. Davies: I expect cloud spending to grow in the next 12 months. We don’t see so much demand for BI in the cloud, but most of our OEM partners that embed our technology in their software applications are deploying them as a service. Hallett: If your application is in the cloud and your data is in the cloud, then your BI will move into the cloud. How optimistic do you feel about the ability of your channel partners to move from selling legacy options to embracing all the changes in the market?

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Hallett: Absolutely yes. We have partners varying from the very large to the relatively small and nimble, and most are moving into these specialised areas and adopting the newer technologies fairly quickly.

Smith: We are moving into a world where the channel plays a larger role in BI projects. That wasn’t always the case in the past – it was often the IT department – but VARs and other partners can now pitch those services and there have been technological advances. Sands: Last year we had a 60/40 split with partner sales and direct sales and we are looking to push that. It is all about making sure they are enabled. We are also trying to put a spotlight on the top partners – they are the ones that are adopting the technologies – to make sure they are enabled and they are able to get the most out of the marketplace. Davies: Some partners are still selling product and they will still be successful, but I see the real push into big data from those partners that understand the bigger picture, selling user cases assigned to the business, not just to the IT department. That’s where the focus really needs to be with those partners that understand the bigger picture. Shaw: Our progressive partners are moving rapidly into it. We are also seeing some new and emerging types of partners coming in and they are setting some of the standards of the future. They are all looking and asking about what they need to do to get advice and training on what they need with the emerging technologies.

Felton: From our perspective, we are keeping on top of the emerging technologies and working closely with our partners. We are also driven by our customers and the opportunities that come with them.

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Simon Quicke, Editor, Microscope

Resellers specialising in business intelligence face a challenge navigating the different demands of customers looking for solutions that can deliver to data analysts and casual users.

With the technology getting to the point where real-time data analysis can provide data to forms looking to ensure they get maximum sales and make the right investments the stumbling block could be a cultural and political one for channel players trying to boost their BI sales.

Not only are their differences between 'power users' that want to mine the data and use the high-level functionality offered by BI applications and the 'casual users' that simply want to exploit the information, but there are also splits at an enterprise and departmental level.

"It is about making that predictive analytics available to the user and making sure that not just the casual user, and not just the power user, but everyone right at the very edges of the business can get that analysis," said John Sands, product sales enablement manager at QlikTech.

Mike Hallett, alliances and channels director at Oracle, said that company culture was a factor in influencing just where a reseller might make a successful BI pitch.

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"Technology is perhaps not the main issue here and it is more about good collaboration between the IT and the business departmental customer," he said.

"There may be some reluctance, because of security, to open up some data across the enterprise and there may also be challenges for the casual user to understand all the data they are looking at," he added.

Edward Smith, technical director at Intuitive Business Intelligence, said that resellers were in the prime position to help customers develop a coherent BI strategy.

"The VAR often has the knowledge of the transactional system, and it is possible with some of the latest available technologies they could supply their customers with tools and data to do BI. The time is coming when the channel can catch up and take a lead on BI initiatives," he said.

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Simon Quicke, Editor, Microscope

Resellers with business intelligence skills should be well placed to be among the leading beneficiaries of the growth of big data as more users start to look for real-time analytics.

With vendors now delivering tools that allow greater analysis of unstructured data that is changing the demands from customers and putting those that have kept on top of their game with the chance to reap the rewards.

On the flipside those BI players that are happy sticking with legacy support face the market slipping away from them as customers finally start to put relying on spreadsheets into the past.

Speaking at a recent MicroScope roundtable on BI issues the consensus was that big data was starting to present some real opportunities for the channel.

"Some new emerging partners are embracing the new innovative technologies. In this industry if you don't change then you die," said Conor Shaw, vice president general business and partner ecosystem at SAP.

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"With the Hana platform, we can process data very quickly, so you can make informed decisions with the data that is produced in a time that is useful. Big data analytics is going to explode," he added.

Phil Davies, channel and alliances director, EMEA & APAC, at Pentaho, said that big data was all about providing the users with information that was quick and gave the user, "the power to make decisions quicker".

But there were warnings that unless the sales pitch and technology solution met and delivered on customer needs then there were going to be challenges for the channel in taking advantage of big data.

"Big data has to be driven by business outcomes that add value to the business and people still don't know what that is. People will continue to struggle with big data if it doesn't appear to add value," said Nick Felton, head of business analytics at Advanced Business Solutions.

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