Welcome to my blog on the UK Business Intelligence Network. It seems strange that I should be writing a UK blog from Italy! Rapallo, to be precise. What can I say, if it's Friday and you can't figure out why your ETL job is not working or if your metrics won't calculate correctly on your OLAP server, just leave it, get out of the office and come to this stunning place for a weekend. You won't regret it. Just fly to Genoa and get a cab - it's about a 30 minute drive

Anyway, I hope to help you stay in touch with hot topics and reality on the ground in the UK and European business intelligence markets and to provide content, opinion and expertise on business intelligence (BI) and its related technologies. I also would relish it if you too can share your own valuable experiences on the discussion forums and surveys. Let's hear what's going on in BI in the UK. If you've got a gripe, let's hear it. If you think a product is cool, let's hear that too, and most of all, let's hear what your using BI for in your business and what you want to see covered. I'll try to explore established and newly emerging technologies in BI including data integration, BI platform tools such as reporting, OLAP, dashboard builders, predictive analytics and performance management software such as scorecarding and planning. I'll also look at data warehouse appliances, data visualisation, portals and operational BI and at BI applications.

I'll start the ball rolling by looking at the platform market. Consolidation is upon us in the business intelligence market with large BI vendors and software giants battling it out for market share. Business Objects, Cognos, Hyperion and SAS are the largest of the independent BI vendors competing with IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and SAP for the BI platform crown in most enterprises. Of course, there is plenty of action elsewhere from may other BI vendors. An example of that is the increasing number of data warehouse appliance offerings on the market from start-ups and established BI vendors including (in alphabetical order) Calpont, DATAllegro, Greenplum, IBM BCU, Netezza and SAP BI Accelerator - with more to come I am sure.

Much talk over the last few years has been about the move to single vendor BI platforms. In the UK, I hear a lot of talk about it. Companies building BI systems for the first time are definitely going for single supplier BI platform solutions. However, companies with long established best-of-breed BI systems still need to be convinced but will most likely slowly move to fewer suppliers if there is value in doing so. I think the impact of Microsoft in the BI platform market with SQL Server 2005 BI platform tooling (SQL Server Integration Services, SQL Server Analysis Services, SQL Server Reporting Services, SQL Server Notification Services and SQL Server Report Builder) appears to be having an impact on BI platform pricing. Certainly many companies talking to me have been raising the issue of pricing. Emerging open source BI initiatives (e.g., Jasper, Pentaho, BIRT and Palo, to name a few) are also bound to add to that pricing pressure forcing BI platform pricing down over the next 18 months. If this does happen, it is obvious that vendors will compensate by shifting the value to performance management tools and applications, vertical BI applications and the explosion of interest in data integration and enterprise data management.

Enterprise data management seems to be taking on a life of its own with data integration now breaking free of the BI platform and going enterprise-wide. Here we have ETL, data quality, EII, data modelling and metadata management all coming together into a single tool set. Much is being written about EAI, ETL and EII (or as I like to call it EIEIO !!), and I'll look into these areas in upcoming blogs and articles.