"As a general rule, the most successful man in life is the man who has the best information."
- Benjamin Disraeli (1804 - 1881), British Prime Minister
We are in a transformational time for Mobility and Mobile Business Intelligence, with lots of innovation happening in both hardware and software. Factors such as declining data plan prices, improved broadband availability, software investment, and widespread access to Smart Phone applications will continue to drive market acceptance as barriers to adoption fall away.
Taking a channel partner view of the market, this chart shows what SMB Channel Partners (50%+ Revenue from SMBs) are hearing from their customers: overall 60% report that customers are asking for Mobile Solutions, including ~80% of ISVs, 54% of VAR/Sis and 47% of Service Providers.
One of the trends in BI overall is a large increase in embedded BI functionality into software applications. This arose through the enterprise-level dashboards and reporting capabilities that SMBs saw with Salesforce.com functionality and quickly become must-have features for serious software applications, especially those delivered as a Service (SaaS). On premise and SaaS versions have been updated through development of new internal code or OEM arrangements and open source code from players like Pentaho and Jaspersoft.
Enabling BI mobility is accomplished by moving existing functionality to a mobile environment, using the new technologies on top of the old, which is more complicated than starting from scratch in many cases. The larger companies such as Oracle, IBM and SAP are approaching this through acquisition of smaller companies and integrating them into existing products. But in a classic build vs. buy fashion, smaller companies offering SaaS BI services have been building new offers from the ground up, directly employing the newest technologies like HTML5, iOS and Android for delivery to Apple devices, smartphones and the burgeoning number of tablets in the market. Smaller providers in many cases have gained a timing advantage; using native technology brings existing mobile functionality to bear on the problem; instead of simple links to server data, the presentation of the information can immediately be rich and interactive using screen manipulation, i.e., pinch and squeeze or geo-location awareness, as part of the data exploration and visualization experience.
Other features of “true” mobility integrated with “true” BI include the ability to interact with data objects on the screen, such as search, filters, check-boxes, drill-down and drill-through to the record level and other interactive functionality. Of course, then being able to use the built-in device communications capabilities is also important once the information has been isolated – SMS, email and forms should be available for manipulation and dissemination of the information.
Many use case scenarios present themselves from the low end retail – such as immediate revenue and profit reporting from the new generation of card swipers into QuickBooks or MS Dynamics and received on a smartphone, to a mid-market electronic component manufacturer checking inventory turns in the Singapore distribution center using SAP Business Objects or IBM Cognos 10 through a Samsung Galaxy Note Tablet.
Among the pure-play SaaS Mobile BI firms to have emerged in the last few years is Exxova, based out of Atlanta, which we chose as our Cloud Vendor Pick of the Week. We chose Exxova because they have a unique value proposition: although they use some of the most powerful back end analytics technology – SAP, Business Objects, Oracle, etc., they have managed to simplify this technology and allow administration of database structure and reporting by literally dragging and dropping fields in a web-based interface, creating new groups and calculations, and having the results delivered immediately through mobile devices running iOS and Android as described earlier. Having separated the reporting layer from the analytical engine allows them to provide deep BI capabilities to end users without the additional cost of licenses for all the back end tools, while at the same time allowing Flash and Flex to be delivered in original format to the Apple environment.
We interviewed their President Mark Hillam, a BI industry veteran and former Business Objects executive for this post. In response to how Exxova reduces complexity for the users and administrators of Mobile BI, Mr. Hillam replied:
“Every report, dashboard, and analytic is rendered with perfect fidelity to the original source. All of this is accomplished without any modification or changes to the Enterprise BI platform or the existing content. Even full report editing is capable from the mobile platforms.”
Exxova offers a strong example of true Mobile BI functionality which is relatively easy to administer and use at a good price point. There are others in the market such as SAP, Microstrategy, Oracle and IBM, who also have strong mobile solutions. For the SMB marketplace there will always be a balance between cost, complexity and functionality to be taken into account before long term commitments are made, Exxova seems to fit this space well. For more information, see it in action below.
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On Wednesday this week, we attended a Channel Expert Hour webinar (sponsored by IBM) and produced by Nine Lives Media, Inc. It made our Pick of the Week for three reasons:
- Very clear statement of IBM’s Addressed Market
- Very clear statement of IBM’s Three Tier Mid-Market Cloud Offers
- Very clear statement of IBM’S SMB Channel Partner’s Opportunity
The format of the webinar was informal, with ongoing Q&A by channel partners and users. We started off with an overview of the SMB move to the cloud by VP Joel Raper of Azaleos, Inc., a 300+ employee, Seattle-based Service Provider focused on Microsoft UC&C Stack Managed Services (Cloud, Design, Deployment and Lifecycle Management) to the Mid-Market.
This was followed by an overview of the IBM Mid-Market Cloud Partner Program, by Ed Bottini, a Cloud Ecosystem Program Director at IBM Global Services. As mentioned, within three or four slides, it was clear where IBM saw the opportunity, what offers were available to address it and what partners could do to take advantage of IBM’s resources to sell into the market.
IBM’s Addressed Market
In typical IBM fashion, this graph represents the big picture very well: They believe half the Opportunity is SaaS growing at a compounded 25% rate, three-quarters is XaaS, compounding at ~25% - IaaS is growing at 35%. The remaining is ~25% Private Cloud and Non XaaS, growing at 20%.
This is not an acknowledgement of the IBM estimates, the point is that they see huge opportunity growing very rapidly in their base and it comes through when they talk about it. This answers WHERE REVENUE opportunity is for SMB Channel Partners.
IBM’s Three Tier Mid-Market Cloud Offers
IBM’s Cloud Solution Stack includes the Foundation layer of Servers, Networking, Storage and Secure Data, using a virtualized environment of IBM hardware, software and networking including PureFlex and Bladecenter Foundations for Cloud, along with IBM Cast Iron to integrate different clouds and applications.
On top of the Foundation is the Infrastructure as a Service layer, SmartCloud Services, which includes Pay-as-you-go Managed Backup Services, Tivoli System Management and Cloud Automation “middleware”, Managed Security Services, and IBM SmartCloud Enterprise, which according to IBM delivers "enterprise-class public cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS)—delivers secure and scalable hosted IT infrastructure with on-demand access to virtual server and storage resources."
The top layer is the Applications Tier, Software as a service (SaaS), SmartCloud Solutions, "a software model with applications centrally hosted in a cloud computing environment and accessed by users over the Internet." As described in the first section, IBM has identified SaaS as half the opportunity growing at 25% CAGR; this is where the rubber hits the road. IBM has never been known as an Application Software vendor, preferring to invest in Systems Software, Database Technology, Tools, Middleware, etc. – which they have done very successfully. In addition, acquisitions over time have steadily been used to both plug holes and repurpose for gaps in applications - Cognos, CoreMetrics, SPSS and Unica being examples in Analytics, along with Sterling for e-Commerce, Merchandising and Supply Chain Management. The bold decision (at the time) to fully embrace the Open Source movement in the '90s and leverage it with their tools like Websphere to participate in the rapid growth in web-based computing has also had a positive impact (i.e., SugarCRM). This answers WHAT SOLUTIONS offer the opportunity for SMB Channel Partners.
IBM’s Five Mid-Market Cloud Options for Channel Partners
The approaches SMB Channel Partners can choose to work with IBM is next, and is evident in this chart. Ranging from Tools, to Infrastructure, to Cloud Building, to SaaS Application Providers, Partners have a variety of options from which to select. This chart is pretty self-explanatory, so we won’t go into redundant detail here. This third leg of the stool is a clear view of HOW the Opportunity can be addressed by Partners.
This is not meant to be an endorsement for IBM - they are not the only Systems Vendor that 1) has a strategy, 2) has an integrated solution stack and 3) has a Cloud Partner Program. As a firm that helps companies sell more effectively into the SMB space, what appealed to us was the simplicity of the message and the ease with which the story was communicated and re-enforced using credible, robust and tested Enterprise-level offers. In our opinion, IBM sounded a lot more like a young SaaS start-up than a hundred-year-old East Coast manufacturing company.
Postscript: When thinking through how the industry has consolidated around a few major system vendors, we wonder whether Cloud Computing strategy and execution have impacted confidence in the company?
This is the second in a series of BI-related posts and it deals with what platforms are being selected and what objectives are being served with SMB Business Intelligence customers. Despite a much shorter history than packaged BI, our survey found a higher level of Cloud-based than packaged BI applications within the SMB respondent base. You may want to open it up to full size as the charts are a little crowded.
This is a snapshot of data from the recently-completed "SMB Business Intelligence Solutions - Adoption and Trends".
Coverage includes SMB Primary Research conducted in US, UK, Germany, Australia, China, India to understand the current and planned adoption of business intelligence solutions, types of solutions including cloud-based, features desired, as well as barriers to adoption. This data only covers a slice of the US market. Click through - detailed charts are best viewed full screen:
SMB Business Intelligence Importance from Techaisle on Vimeo.
