Last time I talked about the trends in the BI space. Let’s look into one of those trends - M&As and how it is shaping BI as we know it.
A recent BusinessWeek article claimed the end of the best-of-breed approach to BI with the demise of the major pure-play BI vendors like BOBJ now owned by SAP thanks to a friendly takeover or Hyperion acquired by Oracleor the latest - IBM’s acquisition of Cognos. While it is true that some of the major players have been acquired by the bigger businesses, there is no reason as to why the mid-size companies should go out of business.
By definition Business Intelligence (BI) has been about making decisions based on information obtained from meaningful data. At one point of time we had terms like decision support systems (DSS) to define technology which has finally evolved into BI as we know it now. Or has it? Somewhere along the line, we became entangled in the technology aspect of it and with all the buzzwords of data warehousing, data mining, dimensional modeling, data marts, CRMand SCMit is not difficult to see why. It is only of late that the focus has moved back to the “decision making” aspect of BI rather than focusing on the technology per se.
This blog is going to have a series of posts about trends and recent happenings in the BI space, some theory on data warehousing and BI - classical as well as newer approaches. It will also feature some tutorials on some technologies and implementations I have worked with as well as useful links.
