So what is this posting about? It seems, after the wide-spread publicity of the open discussion with Talend here on this blog (thanks again for the many responses), other open-source providers apparently want to jump on the bandwagon and voice their dismay about not being recognized, or not being included in a magic quadrant, or not being taken seriously by Gartner analysts, or whatever. Now, there are multiple ways of engaging a Gartner analyst: a simple briefing request, an equally open discussion with the facts on the table, or, and that alternative seem to be sometimes preferred, start kicking and screaming.

The latest in this series is Patrick Beaucamp (what is it with these French open source guys?), who is responsible for Vanilla, another open-source BI project. On his blog, Patrick takes out a shotgun and fires away at everything that moves, and some shrapnel came flying my way. The title of the post is “10 reasons to launch Vanilla BI platform”, but the content more looks like a random selection of insults. I will not spend any time here to comment on most of those, but I will respond to the bitching directed to Gartner or myself.

7) to be certain not to be listed in Gartner’s annuel Quadrant (see Talend comment on Gartner) or my post on decideo.

I don’t get this. You are launching Vanilla “to be certain not to be listed” in a Magic Quadrant. Weird, particularly when I continue reading through the next sentence, in which you complain that Gartner wouldn’t be tracking you.

Honestly, people from Gartner … please, last year you missed the Big Crunch in commercial BI and you wrote Open Source BI was not mature enough … how can you put under silence platform such as Talend and Vanilla ?

Honestly, Patrick, I don’t think you’re making any sense. We missed what? The “Big Crunch”? Oh please, do you make this up? I’d suggest that you’ll be a little more specific next time. And to your point, Open Source BI sure is mature enough for many things, just not for everything. Btw, this is not new, we’ve been saying this for a few years. Finally, we are “putting under silence” Talend and Vanilla? First of all, there is an obvious difference between the maturity of Talend and Vanilla. Talend has some traction in the market, decent brand recognition, (Yves, are you reading this?) and we sure didn’t put any mufflers on the company. On the other hand, Vanilla is largely irrelevant (at this point in time). So if it’s too silent around Vanilla for your own taste, don’t blame Gartner for that fact, as it is your own job to get the word out. You guys don’t even have a real website and we are not your marketing department. So before you start blaming others, I’d suggest you do your homework first.

to read answer to Talend post from Gartner analyst … Is this man really aware of what he wrote ? are we leaving in the same world ? For those who just read this just, please note that Pentaho and JasperSoft – 2 american companies – entered Magic Quandrant just 1 year after the launched their solution …

“This man”, I am assuming that would be me. I can confirm that I was aware of what I wrote. Still am, in fact. Got that? However, it sure seems as if we are living in different worlds. In my world, both Pentaho and Jaspersoft have not entered the Magic Quadrant (for BI Platforms), not one year after launch nor any other year. Again, do your homework and stop distributing nonsense, Patrick.

… to be in an Analyst study, it’s very easy : you just have to pay !

As far as Gartner is concerned, I would qualify this as a “Bold Statement”, or B.S. for short.

One final comment: It is clearly everybody’s right and own decision to select the most appropriate way to start a dialogue. The “Vanilla way” would not have been my preference, as it comes across as rather unprofessional. I always welcome a proper discussion about technology, markets, opportunities and the like, and I’d never shut out small start-ups, but I have no interest in a dispute a la Vanilla. Take your pick.

P.S. I like Rimsky-Korsakov.

Sure, the BI market has enjoyed consistent growth, has seen a lot of action on the M&A front, technology has advanced significantly (I remember when gigabytes were considered wild), and yet we are still discussing same old business intelligence. I keep hearing vendors announce that the next version of their tool will be able to address that untapped market within their customer base, growing penetration beyond those 10-15% that are using BI today. I heard this 5 years ago already, but what has changed since then? Not much.

So the tools have a nicer UI, can scale up and scale out, are interactive, and can be mashed, and so on. And yet, BI licenses are not really flying off the shelves because of all the new cool stuff that is available. So the vendors started buying up and down the stack, into performance management, data integration, master data management, data quality, etc.  Technology advanced towards in-memory analytics, data warehouses grew into petabyte range (not many yet, but still quite the accomplishment), Web 2.0 technology allows to build mashups from Google Earth and heatmaps and alerts and visualize the whole thing on an iPhone. What does it all help if people think what they want are “reports”? Ugh.

Here’s the thing. We have done Integration (or at least we are underway): IBM integrates Cognos, Applix, Ascential, DWL, Unicorn,.. SAP integrates Business Objects, Pilot, Firstlogic, Fuzzy, Outlooksoft, Cartesis,… Microsoft integrates Stratature, Datallegro, Zoomix,… Oracle integrates all the rest, Siebel, PeopleSoft, Hyperion, Sunopsis, BEA.

We have done Innovation. Compared to the old days of “management reporting”, new available technology is to die for, from wildly scalable data warehouse appliances, to predictive modeling and mobile BI, all based on SOA, then delivered through software-as-a-service, or through open source license models.

What’s missing is Inspiration. It does look like potential buyers are caught in the “reporting web”, users seem to be largely oblivious to the current developments, and so the great potential value of BI is simply missed because of a lack of BI exposure. Of course, it doesn’t help if attendees at said conferences are bombarded with tech talk about the next great feature. But nobody enables the potential BI users to think outside the “reporting box” and answer the question “what would happen if BI could do that?”

I, for one, can’t say that I’m truly inspired by the messages from the BI vendors. But that’s just me.

Exadata… cute. Because Terabytes on Teradata are already out there. Petabytes on Petadata (“Pet a data?”) isn’t visionary enough, so we need another factor 1000, with Exabytes on Exadata. Now this is far out enough. Can you “axe a data”? OK, never mind.

Why all this? I’m assuming that Oracle executives visited many data centers in their careers and never ever saw an Oracle logo on those server racks running their very own DBMS. IBM servers, yes, HP, Dell, Teradata, EMC, all there. No Oracle. That must have been a big sting.

Oracle was already very successful getting the Oracle logo out into the world. No major airport that I go through without an onslaught of banners with Oracle is #1, Oracle serves 19 of the top 20 companies in whatever industry, Oracle, Oracle. Paris Charles de Gaulle airport has turned red because of Oracle advertising.

Next step: data center. Well, Oracle was hardly going to start manufacturing any motherboards, chipsets, or disk drives themselves, since the world wasn’t really waiting for another hardware newbie behemoth, when the whole market is consolidating at the same time. Of course, watching even Microsoft starting to acquire hardware assets (I mean, beyond the Microsoft Mouse) with the Datallegro takeover must have accelerated the decision making process to provide an Oracle-branded box with suitable capabilities, and the 11g DBMS comes to mind. So I imagine a phone call from Redwood Shores to Cupertino, kinda like “Hey, Mark, we’ve been friends for a long time, certainly after you had left Teradata <chuckle>, could we get some of your blades and storage racks and wrap them into a nice bundle with our database, so we both can take over the data warehouse market?” Something to that effect and I am obviously exaggerating somewhat.

Hewlett Packard (the hardware unit, mind you!) smells a big opportunity, as most data warehouses these days run on Oracle, so why not have them run on an HP box? Quickly, a few other components are assembled to make it a nice appliance and as painless to manage for the potential user, a name is found (rumor has it, that Larry Ellison himself is heavily involved in all branding activities), welcome, Exadata, the new enemy of Teradata (and IBM).

Wait… wasn’t HP trying to sell its own NeoView box? What was that again? Oh yes, another highly scalable data warehouse “machine”. (They don’t want us to call NeoView an “appliance”). And wasn’t that targeted as direct competition to Teradata as well? By the looks of it, Oracle just stepped on HP toes, and HP let it happen. Funny, how market dynamics sometimes work. I’m sure, the clever marketiers in both companies have all arguments ready, why this new competition is no problem on either side: “It’s good for the customer, more choices, strategic relationship, yada, yada, yada.” However, when it comes to “our revenue” or “no revenue”, I can guarantee that both Oracle and HP favor the first option, which turns the friendship into plain competition. As we say in German: “Beim Geld hört die Freundschaft auf”. Means something like „Friendship ends where money begins“.

We’ll be watching and reporting on developments. Until then, welcome to hardware land, Oracle.

I recently met with a representative from the education department of a large African city. They wanted to do BI, getting reports on students, classes, teachers, grades, and so on. Now, I learned to be more careful with my advice in places like Africa, as some parts of the infrastructure aren’t comparable with European standards. So I didn’t recommend putting in a big honking data warehouse and some funky BI platform, as I knew (a) the budgets wouldn’t be there, (b) skills would be an issue, and (c) data volumes wouldn’t warrant such an investment.

So I started slowly and asked what kind of reports they’d be expecting to create, what applications and data sources they’d be tapping, how much data, how many potential users, and that sort of thing.

The lady from the education department said they wanted, for example, to get some “teacher reports” and what teachers were more successful, as indicated by better grades of their students. Easy enough I thought. Boy, was I wrong, as there was one problem: There wasn’t any data.

Apparently, the department wanted to know “which teacher is actually physically in the classroom?” or “what topics are those teachers actually discussing in class?”. Kinda different set of problem, compared to the run-of-the-mill inquiries on BI. So I suggested having some employees do regular rounds in the schools to monitor attendance, and create some data by recording their observations in … uh … Excel, at least for the time being. Never thought I would do such a thing. Good reality check.

I asked the same question yesterday afternoon at the Gartner Future of IT conference in Sao Paulo, and, what do you know, more than 10% claimed to have a BI strategy. Still not the number I’d like to see, but significantly higher than in Chicago, Cologne, Copenhagen or Cape Town. I gotta have a closer look at those strategies.