Despite the billions of dollars being spent each year on BI (business intelligence) software, the tools remain largely the province of power users and business analysts who know how to wring useful results from them, but that's bound to change, an analyst said.

"There's more awareness that analysis should be pushed out to more people, helping to expand accountability for the decisions being made [in a company]," said Dan Vesset, an analyst with IDC. "The next 10 to 15 years is about providing more people access to BI. The question is, how it will happen?"

Amid a wave of consolidation in the space, large vendors like Microsoft have talked about BI for the masses -- a goal also referred to as "pervasive BI" -- for some time. Meanwhile, smaller companies are fine-tuning their marketing approach, refreshing their user interfaces and releasing BI products specifically aimed at SMBs.

Wayne Eckerson, director of research at The Data Warehousing Institute, said vendors have a compelling reason to get BI into the hands of more workers.

"The tools are too complex for people to use, so there has been shelfware," he said, "At the same time, the BI vendors want to sell more licenses. If they're only selling to power users, they're not making those enterprise deals that are growing the top-line revenue for the company."

The third version of open-source BI vendor Jaspersoft's Business Intelligence Suite, set to launch Wednesday, has a new Web 2.0-style browser interface and functionality that enables business users to make ad-hoc queries in point-and-click fashion.

"If you're getting out into [the midmarket], those organizations don't have big IT staffs and lots of [database administrators]," said Nick Halsey, vice president of marketing at Jaspersoft. "In a resource-constrained organization, it's really easy to get this out into the hands of users who've never had this ability before."

Supply Chain Consulting of Richardson, Texas, is licensing Jaspersoft's technology as part of its CarbonView application, which organizations can use to track their carbon footprint.

It is "vitally important" that the company's software be easy to work with because of the variety of workers it serves, said Jay Baker, director of product architecture for Supply Chain Consulting. Some end-users of the software perform more advanced analytic roles, while others focus on collecting and entering data, such as a fleet manager who is inputting his monthly fuel and mileage usage, he said.

There are also many ways to "slice and dice that and aggregate" the information, he said. "Depending on your role, you might have more of a regional perspective. If you have another role you might be more concerned with a process level, what processes are generating my CO2," Baker said.

He praised the customization features in Jaspersoft, saying they make it easier to tinker around and get those desired views: "You want to empower users to see things the way they want to see it, and they don't want to submit a help request ticket to get that done," Baker said.

Taking that idea to the extreme, a new offering called Widgenie from LogiXML is conceivably something an enterprise user could actually buy and use without IT's involvement. Users of the new hosted service can upload data from various sources, such as an Excel spreadsheet or CSV file, and quickly create visualizations of the data by customizing prebuilt charts and graphs in drag-and-drop fashion. The resulting "widgenies" can then be shared with others.

The service will be offered in a free, ad-supported version, as well as a US$50-per-month edition that enables users to turn off the vendor's branding, said Bill Kotraba, director of sales and marketing for LogiXML's new LogiOnDemand division. He said this level of pricing makes it possible for individual users, such as a sales manager who wants to deliver data to team members, to buy the service and bill it to their expense account.

Still other vendors believe there's a niche in catering to customers that have broader needs, but aren't ready to move wholesale to a BI platform.

Datawatch of Chelmsford, Massachusetts, is putting Monarch BI Server into beta. It takes data from static reports and business documents, such as PDFs, and pushes it into spreadsheets, summaries and charts. The company positions the product as an alternative for enterprises without the resources or desire to deal with more complex BI implementations. Pricing will start at $10,995.

"For SMBs, the IT department can barely keep up with spam e-mails, than take on an entire new BI infrastructure," said John Kitchen, senior vice president and chief marketing officer of Datawatch.

Monarch BI Server is based on an existing product, Monarch Report Mining Server, but the company has simplified the installation process and lowered the price, Kitchen said.

But while some BI tools might be getting easier to use by more people in the enterprise, they won't replace the heavy-duty tools, IDC's Vesset stressed.

"One hundred percent of employees are not going to sit there and do deep analysis. Others will just be consumers of it, of information," he said. "The vast majority of what is being done with statistical tools is beyond your average user."

IDG News Service

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