BI at the center of the universe

Although the usual suspects continued to dominate the new 2007 Gartner Magic Quadrant for business intelligence platforms, changes are afoot that may shake up the status quo.

Several trends seem to be conspiring to re-write the BI vendor landscape:

• The convergence of BI and corporate performance management
• The convergence of BI and content management
• The convergence of enterprise search and BI
• The convergence of BI, EII and SOA
• The decline of the pure-play BI vendor

Notice a pattern here? Is there a “next-generation” BI emerging that is much broader in scope?  (No, I’m not going to invent a soon-to-be-hackneyed phrase like “BI 2.0″!) As the industry continues to move beyond basic reports and metrics toward process- and strategy-driven BI, can the pure-play vendors survive competing against the large platform vendors such as Oracle, Microsoft and SAP?

On the one hand, of course they can — if they can adapt and innovate faster and release higher quality products. Or they could just buy innovation, as Cognos’ purchase of the BI appliance vendor Celequest recently showed.  On the other hand, Oracle could then just buy Cognos…

Given the huge spending in BI systems now, the stakes are being raised and the outcome is uncertain. However, if BI continues to morph into the essential cog in an integrated enterprise architecture machine — as Oracle is driving at with their recently-announced Oracle Data Integrator (ODI) – then the large platform vendors have the clear advantage.

Cheers, Tim