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Business intelligence: PivotLink v SAP, a tale of two worlds

by Dennis Howlett on September 1, 2009

While UK readers will have been wending their way home from the bank holiday weekend (or in the case of Leeds based people, enjoying carnival) and US readers will no doubt have been gobsmacked by Disney’s acquisition of Marvel, I had business intelligence on my mind. It’s a topic that’s been important to me for many years in large part because of the implied promise that one day I might be free of spreadsheets.

Earlier in the day I was ruminating on an article that appeared in Information Week, extolling the value of saas-based BI and PivotLink in particular:

Some consider SaaS a stopgap to on-premises BI software deployments, but not Ken Harris. The CIO of health and beauty products maker Shaklee taps SaaS wherever he can to stretch his small IT staff and budget–RightNow for CRM, Omniture for Web analytics, and PivotLink for BI.

The company uploads its sales and financial data into a PivotLink-hosted data warehouse each night, and employees use Web-accessible report and query tools to evaluate sales, marketing campaigns, and financial performance.

That Web access makes it easier for Harris to massively expand PivotLink access: from 50 employees to, beginning this fall, as many as 5,000 independent businesspeople who sell Shaklee products.

Watching the PivotLink demonstrations, I couldn’t help but think that this is a company that has made much of what BI as about easy. Couple that with the ability to deploy to 100x the number of people that would usually use this type of tool and you start to get a glimpse of how powerful ‘intelligence on-demand’ can be and at a fraction of the per user cost usually associated with this type of technology.

Compare that with the SAP Mentor webinar I attended later in the day entitled: ‘Public SAP Mentor Monday BusinessObjects for SAP Practitioners with Ingo Hilgefort.’ I counted 97 people on the call, a good turn out but oh boy was the content dull. Unless of course you’re a technical BI specialist who builds reports based on SAP systems then it was full of fascinating content. And therein lies the difference. I usually ask questions on these calls but as I listened to others my question was clearly answered: unless you’re an expert in SAP data warehouse and/or a BI specialist then the learning curve is going to be horrific. Don’t get me wrong – BusinessObjects is powerful stuff if you’re manipulating millions of records but who really does that? Why can’t vendors like SAP make life easier for the business analyst? The answer they say lies in Xcelsius. Maybe I could combine with Crystal Reports but then look at the pricing? Better still, why not take a leaf out of PivotLink’s playbook and make it ridiculously easy for business users to create and consume information at modest cost?

SAPpers will say: ‘Ah but, we’re handling complexity at an order of magnitude greater than services like PivotLink.’ True. My riposte? ‘What about the 60,000+ SMBs you count as customers who don’t have the complexity issues to which you allude?’

I am of course over simplifying the case but there is a real point here.

BI has been a Cinderella software category for more years than I care to remember but at its heart, it should help all of us make sense of row and column information. It should especially help the business user who doesn’t understand the arcane world of row and column. When done well, it should encourage most of us to dump our flawed spreadsheets. Yet, it seems, that in the big, mature systems, little progress has been made to make life easier except for all but the most die hard ‘expert systems’ users. Is it any wonder then that vendors like PivotLink are starting to get attention?

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  • Vijay
    Have you checked out cognos? I think powerplay from cognos is one of the most flexible BI tools that an analyst can use.
    ( And I am an SAP BI guy, who works for IBM )
  • @vijay - please tell me that Cognos' ETL is better than the disgusting dog I remember from the late 90's.
  • Vijay
    I don't know cognos as well as I do SAP BW. However, with what little I have played with it -it is a lot more flexible on the actual reporting side. And yes - it has improved a lot in past few years. Cool SOA foundation too.
  • I suspect the call you attended was focused on larger organizations. The closest equivalent to PivotLink in the SAP BusinessObjects product line-up would be the on-demand solutions at http://crystalreports.com: free to try, "professional edition" at $29.95/user/month (including Xcelsius), with the ability expand up to a full on-demand solution. Also check out http://explorer.ondemand.com to get a feel for the new BusinessObjects Explorer interface, now also available on-demand.
  • @Timo - John Schwarz mentioned this when we last met and I do need to get around to looking more closely at these things and yes, of course the BOBJ call was meant to be for larger enterprises. I did say in the post: "I am of course over simplifying the case..." but even so I still think there is a case for learning that could be applied in the enterprise. Compromises notwithstanding.
  • Timo

    With all due respect CRDC (crystalreports . com) is not the equivalent of www.pivotlink.com. Far from it. The CRDC website clearly says "Crystal Reports (sold separately)". You create a report in desktop software called Crystal Reports (if you get past the 600 page manual) and then you upload it to CRDC to share so that end users may not have to install Crystal Reports on their desktops. CRDC is just a report sharing service and not a full BI stack - which is what you allude to when you mention the other "Full on-demand solution".

    That said, this "full on-demand solution" is exactly what AccMan complained against - the same Business Objects product - just hosted. PivotLink has production customers doing heavy duty BI modeling billions of rows of complex data from multiple sources and presenting self-service ad-hoc report creating and sharing capabilities to hundreds of business users - with enterprise grade security. All On-Demand. Check out the REI case study (http://www.pivotlink.com/customers/rei) as an exmaple.
  • Aaron Mittler
    Ajay ~

    With all due respect, to classify Business Objects BI OnDemand (the "full solution" that Timo references) as the "same Business Objects product, just hosted" is a gross mischaracterization.

    BI OnDemand was specifically created to address the challenges to which Dennis refers. I.E. ~ making BI simpler, faster, easier and less costly to deploy.
    Furthermore, Business Objects OnDemand is leading the way in SaaS BI with many paying customers.

    Yes, BI OnDemand does leverage our best of breed, industry proven B.I. tools for certain components. But our approach is to offer the best of both worlds: Industry proven, best of breed B.I. capability delivered via the SaaS model. Our customers have chosen us because we can offer them the long-term stability of an industry leader with the cutting edge benefits that SaaS provides.

    Dennis ~ You may be interested to know that, while many of our BI OnDemand customers are SMB's, we have also deployed BI OnDemand at some very large companies. In my opinion SaaS B.I. can be a fit in organizations of any size. I'd be happy to arrange for a presentation of this solution if that is of interest.

    Full disclosure, I work for Business Obects in our Ondemand group.

    Aaron Mittler
  • I discussed a related topic the other day on LinkedIn..as to the chief reasons someone buys SaaS BI vs. traditional.

    http://www.linkedin.com/answers?viewQuestion=&a...

    Over time the SaaS BI tools will rival Cognos and others in terms of having very hardcore capabilities. I know that we already have some of those functions at AnalytixOnDemand.

    However, we are being very cautious (as are our competitors) on how we construct our interfaces to try and keep them as simple as possible.
  • Great post AccMan. Let me introduce myself. I work at PivotLink. Previously I worked at SAP BOBJ and before that at LucidEra and Siebel Analytics (now OBIEE). Companies like SAP that rely so heavily on services revenue and the IT people that rely so heavily on SAP to create complexity and job security, have created this monstrosity we now call BI.

    My experience working with customers over the last decade has been that business users still struggle with simple challenges - like creating their own reports or their own calculations. The traditional BI vendors have buried simple capabilities in complex interfaces, have created thousand page manuals and expensive training programs. It is not just the mid-market that needs simplicity - users in big companies need simplicity too.

    That is why we are terming our service Business Analytics to get away from the stigma of BI. When it comes to aggregating data, presenting and sharing the analysis, we do the job simply, affordably and quickly. Our users love us because we offer self-service capabilities and unburden IT from mundane tasks and help them refocus on important issues like data quality, secure access and cross-departmental coordination.
  • Fahed Ismail
    @Ajay, I think your opinion in this matter is likely biased considering your role with PivotLink. Also in regards to the BusinessObjects "full OnDemand Solution" it is not exactly what AccMan is complaining about, as he stated that he did not participate in a call pertaining to that solution and stated the following
    "John Schwarz mentioned this when we last met and I do need to get around to looking more closely at these things"
    Also speaking to the 600 page manual I would consider the difficulty and risk associated in trying to find PivotLink professionals compared to Crystal Reports professionals. Should it really matter if you use a desktop product to create your analytics? (I mean from a Business Value perspective).
    Also Dennis mentioned the following "BusinessObjects is powerful stuff if you’re manipulating millions of records but who really does that?", so assuming your statement is correct that the "full OnDemand Solution" is just Business Objects hosted, then the value of the following statement "PivotLink has production customers doing heavy duty BI modeling billions of rows of complex data from multiple sources and presenting self-service ad-hoc report creating and sharing capabilities to hundreds of business users – with enterprise grade security" is likely lost, as a customer could select the Business Objects OnDemand solution and have the same capabilities and more leveraging, world class business intelligence from a proven vendor that has had success with over 43,000 customers worldwide.

    Disclaimer: Also with Business Objects OnDemand
  • Bob Jones
    Great post, accman. I am a big SaaS BI proponent. I have evaluated and used many of the tools you are familiar with and I must say putting applications like BO or Cognos in the cloud is a bit like putting lipstick on a pig. What impresses me about PivotLink is their data storage architecture, which gives you great flexibility and short implementation times.

    Companies like Greenplum, Neteeza and Asterdata are eating into Oracle's and Teradata marketshare, in the same way that you have seen the open source apps, Jaspersoft and Pentaho gaining inroads vs. Microstrategy, BO, and Cognos. I suspect with PivotLink's 100% SaaS approach you will see this trend continue as fatigued IT execs scramble to move from under the burden of their existing BI contracts and more importantly, their resource abusing BI platforms.

    Fahed: I think you make Ajay's point when you say "difficulty and risk associated in trying to find PivotLink professionals" as PivotLink does not require a "professional" to administrate or operate. I am looking forward to this paradigm shift in BI. Bring it on!

    Bob Jones,
    A twice burned BI deployer
  • Check out www.edificeinfo.com for a hosted BI service tailored to the retail industry.
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