Business Intelligence Case Study

The business intelligence (BI) marketplace is teaming with new innovations and struggles for market share. With new technologies and more companies entering the business intelligence landscape pricing for BI processes and tools are decreasing. “The relational database market is around 30 years old. It should be mature by now, but every year there seem to be new innovations in the relational database space. I’m always astounded that there continue to be new entrants” (Beckerle, p. 281, 2008).
Beckerle, p. 282, (2008) states "Now, and throughout the history of data warehousing — going back to the mid-1990s, there was an awful lot of outsourced data warehousing. Lots of companies outsourced their data warehousing to big companies like Acxiom

Bloomberg, (2015) states IBM a Fortune 500 company has a struggling business model due to other providers such as Amazon offering business intelligence tools at a more cost effective rate. Bloomberg West (2015) also states IBM of the past would offer a complete solution with heavy cost due to a large support staff. Companies can now rent Cloud space and utilize Amazon tools to create workable BI solutions at lower cost. However, IBM is a Fortune 500 company and has reinvented itself on serval occasions. Enderle, (2015) states “This made me realize that I hadn 't clearly communicated that this isn 't about technology at all. It 's about understanding how to work with large government organizations — something IBM has been doing for nearly a century — and why process is more important than product. Enderle, (2015) poses a solid hypothesis because the effectiveness of the Amazon tools will derive their success from the IT professionals using them. Does offer a competitive advantage of understanding processes and solutions from beginning to end. With reduced cost and a solid marketing planning IBM could gain control of the BI market as they did with the network solutions in the

Sallam, (2011) developed a survey based on customers rating their BI platform designers. Sallam gathered data on major corporations such as IBM Cognos, Oracle, Microstratgey, and Microsoft to small companies such as Corda and Qliktech to compare end user satisfaction. “With the exception of development tools and BI infrastructure, in general, the satisfaction with capabilities rises along with the prevalence of use. Only reporting is used extensively by most respondents (68%) while six capabilities are extensively used by 25% or less. Use of reporting and ad hoc analysis experienced the most significant decline in extensive use while interactive visualization and dashboard use grew the most” (Sallam, p. 6, 2011). End users utilize BI that is easy to understand and offers them value. Some BI systems may be easy to use but offer no value to the end user or the system could offer value but its complexity reduces efficiency elsewhere muted or canceling out the BI systems