This one by Cindi outlines a change in pricing for Business Objects. It also mentions that SAP/BO have made Dev/Test environments free, a subject close to my heart at various SAS customers at the moment (and not in a good way).

And Microstrategy have announced a free version of their reporting suite for upto 100 named users (limited to 1 CPU though). There seems to be lots of additional modules you have to pay for, which I would call core reporting capabilty, but then given the number of blog posts about their offering you have to give their Marketing team a HI 5.

First thing that tweaked my interest was the disclaimer you agree to before seeing the content:

“The recipient of this document agrees not to disclose its contents to any third party or otherwise to use this document for any purpose other than an evaluation of MicroStrategy’s business or its offerings. Reproduction or distribution of this document is prohibited without MicroStrategy’s advance written authorization. MicroStrategy does not guarantee the accuracy of any information presented in this document, and there is no commitment, express or implied, on the part of MicroStrategy to update or otherwise amend this document.”

So wonder if I am in breach by posting the link? Well its guaranteed to not be accurate anyway (oops got those words round the wrong way

So they compare themselves to SAS, things I noted:

• They talk about integrated, but then only compare BI/Reporting tools, where is the ETL, Data Quality, Analytic’s and Solutions?
• Single web interface, what about users that need easy reporting or users that need advanced reporting, one tool to rule them all doesn’t do it for me
• Caching = Scalability, enough said
• Metadata, ok got SAS there, in 9.1 at least
• WSYWIG, again bring on SAS 9.2
• Security, does anybody care or need 128bit behind the firewall?
• Personalization, ok prompting in 9.1 is limited, but to me personalisation means more than prompting, no mention of a Microstrategy Portal (by the way we have built a mod that does this prompt based personalisation within WRS 9.1

I could go on, but I won’t. I do wonder if they are going to update it now SAS 9.2 is available.

As an aside one of the interesting things when working for a vendor was whether you should mention the enemy or not. Some say by mentioning the competiton validates therm as a competitor and keeps them in the customers mind.

Most vendors have a “slag sheet” but normally you only get to see it if you are their coach within the customer trying to discredit the competition in a sales cycle. Interesting approach to publish it online.

Me I think they should concentrate on what they do well, which looks like producing a BI Reporting tool.

Interesting post about the Microstratgy conference over at Cindi Howson’s BIScorecard blog

What took my interest was these comments:

“Another interesting take away from the conference in aftermath of recent consolidation was MicroStrategy’s dance partners. CTOs from Informatica (the market leader in ETL) and Teradata (a market leading database for data warehousing), and MicroStrategy united to discuss pervasive BI. These BI/datawarehouse independents all have a commonality in that they:

• focus exclusively on only a portion of the BI market
• don’t compete with one another
• greatly complement each other”

Convergence in the past has tended to a two company dance (although Oracle often waits for one vendor to swallow a few others before swallowing them – aka JD Edwards and Peoplesoft).

So whats the chance that companies like Teradata, Informatica, Microstrategy would agree to merge all at once, and if they did that would they need SAS to round out the offering? I don’t think they would, SAS just has to many competing products for each to them, but adding SPSS to their mix would make sense.

So that would create the following powerhouses:

1. IBM

2. Oracle

3. Microsoft

4. SAP

5. The Consortium

and that would leave SAS really out on a limb, making the HP/SAS merger far more likely.

(it would also provide an interesting grouping of vendores depending on how you look at their product offering, but I will post about that later)

Time will tell.