What do you think about the uptake of Business Intelligence in the corporate community?

Business intelligence solutions are commonplace in most large organizations. They commonly range from transactional reporting to sophisticated analyses with fewer actual BI users as the complexity of the analyses grows. Ease of use, applicability to solving business problems, and transparency of such applications is key to widespread adoption.

How is the Oracle’s platform doing in the corporate space from your perspective?

Oracle is continuing to grow market share in the key areas mentioned in the previous response. Most of Oracle’s revenue in business intelligence and data warehousing is derived from mid-sized to large corporations (and large government entities). However, Oracle is building solutions to address all markets.

How far can you go in BI innovation, are there only so many sensible ways to deal with data sets?

There is still plenty of room for BI innovation. Business intelligence applications are continuing to grow in terms of business areas addressed, KPIs displayed, and pre-built ETL that is bundled. Much of the early focus at Oracle has been in building solutions for horizontal business areas, though verticalized solutions are emerging. Manageability of the entire business intelligence infrastructure continues to improve, especially in areas such as advanced security. Business intelligence will become more pervasive and transparent within organizations, even for business people who don’t have classic BI tools, through the use of alerting infrastructures and automated business process flows.

What about the open source applications, like Pentaho? Are they a competitive threat in the BI market?

Such open source vendors will provide a threat to other vendors who fail to grow beyond offering just a portion of a total BI solution. As noted previously, Oracle is taking a holistic approach offering an end-to-end solution (though also offering best of breed database, BI tools, and BI applications for companies that prefer to mix vendor technologies).

Microsoft is dipping more than its big toe in the BI market. What sort of threat are they to both the niche and established players in the market?

Microsoft is definitely a threat to the niche players and can claim some success due to the presence of Excel on so many desktops and its use as a BI tool. However, most major vendors (such as Oracle) have extensive Office integration strategies. Microsoft also competes in other levels of the BI stack, so they will likely be a major threat to vendors who fail to differentiate across the stack.

What can you tell us about any new features you are excited about BI?

The most exciting capabilities I can point to here are the increased levels of integration we are seeing between traditional BI tools and database solutions. These include better analysis capabilities via OLAP and data mining in both middle tier and database products and an increased degree of flexibility enabling organizations to better optimize their infrastructures. Enhanced security and database information lifecycle management are also enabling companies to keep more data online and make it accessible to wider audiences. But, I believe the growth in applications is probably more important than feature lists at this point, because the applications solve business problems.

What sort of future do you see for BI?

Most BI will be deployed using applications within 5 years, not custom built solutions. This will result in more predictable performance and eliminate some of the frustrations that often exist between IT organizations and lines of business today. Though initially primarily in horizontal areas (e.g. finance, marketing, sales, etc.), pre-built applications will also extend into vertical solutions (e.g. for banks, insurance companies, retail, healthcare, etc.). Everyone in organizations will have access to this intelligence, whether through traditional BI tools, email alerts, automatic changes propagated in transactional systems, or other devices. Some custom BI work will continue in large organizations in building extractions from custom transaction processing sources and building high-end one-off analysis systems peculiar to a specific business.

About Robert Stackowiak 
Robert Stackowiak is Vice President of Business Intelligence in Oracle's Technology Business Unit. He is recognized worldwide for his work in business intelligence and data warehousing. His papers regarding business intelligence and computer and software technology have appeared in publications such as President & CEO Magazine, Database Trends and Applications, and The Data Warehousing Institute's publications. He also co-authored several books that cover Oracle technology including "Oracle Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence Solutions" (1st Edition published January 2007, Wiley). 

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