The opening paragraph states:

“In 2010, business users had greater influence over BI buying, often choosing data discovery vendors as an alternative to traditional BI tools. But megavendors continued to hold the majority of BI market share, despite ongoing customer dissatisfaction, by selling the stack into their installed base.”

Which obviously mirrors what we have being seeing in the BI market with the emergence of Mega BI Vendors via the acquisition and consolidation of BI vendors and products over the last few years.

They also state that a lot of the Mega Vendor value statements are around the “Stack” rather than functionality or ease of use, boy does that remind me of my Oracle days some 13 odd years ago when we pushed the “Oracle Apps Stack” hard!

The Quadrant this year looks like:

What is amazing to me os the rise of Microsoft, from entering the market in 2000 they have risen to the top of the quadrant, almost google-esk!  Again Gartner states:

“ In the Magic Quadrant customer survey, more Microsoft customers cited TCO as the No. 1 reason for selecting Microsoft as a BI vendor, while cost was cited less frequently as a limitation to wider deployment for Microsoft than most other vendors in the survey.”

So goes to show that the cost of BI software really does enter into the purchasing decision, not a surprise really I suppose.

I remember when Google purchased the Urchin Web Analytics product and made it free as a hosted Google Analytics offering, effectively killing a large number of previously profitable Web Analytics companies in one foul swoop.

Imagine if Google brought an up and coming BI vendor and did that to the BI market?

Found the 2009 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Campaign Management over here:

Magic Quadrant for CRM Multichannel Campaign Management – 2009

Interesting to see SAS has moved to the left of the leaders quadrant compared to the Magic Quadrant for CRM Multichannel Campaign Management – 2008 and Teradata has moved up the leaders quadrant.

I still think Teradata and SAS need to stop competing and merge before they get swallowed by the behemoths of Oracle, IBM, SAP and Microsoft. I that note heard a rumour that IBM was about to buy SAP, thenover the next coffee heard Oracle were goign to buy SAP (cant see them getting commerce commision approval for that).

Anyway when it comes to SAS Marketing Automation I like it as a product. Things I like:

• It uses SAS DI to load data
• Data can be stored in multiple RDBMS using SAS/Access
• Its integrated with SAS Enterprise Miner to give powerfull embedded analytics
• Information Maps are used to expose data to business users
• It uses Web Report Studio/Viewer and SAS Portal to deliver information

I think of all these the integration with Enterprise Miner is the most powerful feature. The ability to create a campaign based on a statistical based Segmentation, Churn, Upsell, Cross Sell or Retention model makes it able to dliver positive return on investment (ROI) relatively quickly.

Its also interesting to note Gartner mentions SAS is offering a Software as a Service (SaaS) offering for M, which combined with the Enterprise Guide, K12 and Strike Iron data quality hosted services means SAS is finally moving into the SaaS space.

Given the large data center they are building in Carey (not to mention the solar panels to power it) im guessing SAS OnDemand is becoming a stronger strategy for the future (as it is for the other behemoths)
Will be interesting how this will work from a revenue point of view, because although SAS has a large renewals revenue stream, there is still a very strong focus on first year license sales to fuel growth, which SaaS may canabalise. But then again on the positive side SAS donat have a large partner base who are reliant on resale margin like some vendors so SaaS should be less of an issue for them.

Now that was a few topics in one post, should probably run EM across it to do a cluster analysis, but then I might wait till EM 9.2 is available…