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Noetix Executive Bloggers Morris Beton and Daryl Orts sat down to discuss the 8 gifts the Business Intelligence Industry received for Hanukkah in 2010.  Click here or watch the video below.

This is a complex topic so I want to handle it with the grace and elegance it deserves. Let’s first start by describing the Turducken.  If you consult the world’s most relied upon source of intellectual property, Wikipedia, you’ll see that Turducken is defined as follows: “… a dish consisting of a de-boned chicken stuffed into a de-boned duck, which itself is stuffed into a de-boned turkey. The word Turducken is a portmanteau of turkey, duck, and chicken ….” It’s very complex so let’s use this as a starting point of reference:On second thought, this picture really doesn’t demonstrate my point that Business Intelligence is the Turducken of software…. It does however allude to the importance of working together.

To really understand the Turducken analogy we need to look at an accurate diagram and draw the comparisons.  The diagram below is an accurate, real-life depiction of a Turducken one might prepare for Thanksgiving. Study this carefully.  It’s essential knowledge that may be leveraged outside the kitchen within the world of enterprise software, to properly design, architect, and build an elegantly engineered Business Intelligence (BI) solution.The next diagram, on the other hand, is a Turducken you may be preparing, as we speak, for your strategic, corporate BI solution:The similarities are astounding. The Complex Customer Requirements and Data are the Turkey. However, in this case, no one even knows what the Turkey looks like.  All that is known is that it’s palatial in size and infinite in its complexity. The natural inclination is to stuff it with something, but what? Well, let’s start with a BI Platform. We know a BI Platform in and of itself does nothing, but you have to get one – it’s simply a requirement. Once you get one no one really knows precisely how it works, but that’s a good thing, because it makes it easier to blame when things don’t turn out as planned. You know – it’s like Thanksgiving. You burn the turkey – what do you say? “That damn oven never works right! Damn it to hellalouya and curse the three wise guys!!!” What do you do? You throw out the oven and eat the turkey anyway. Why? Because it’s done, it’s there, you have nothing else to eat, and you’re hungry.

If you wanted it done right then you should have hired some help – and lots of it. And I mean lots. This is where the “Lavish Amounts of Rich Consulting Services” come into play. Let me put this in perspective. In the BI marketplace, when analysts talk about monetary dimensions, 65% of that market consists of these “Lavish Amounts of Rich Consulting Services”.  So the amount of help and stuffing actually required to construct this Turducken is much, much larger than it appears in the picture.

Now for the Duck – the Duck is obviously IT in this case.  They’re sitting inside, working to keep the delicate balance between supporting their users and supporting the needs of the business.  On top of all that, IT needs to support the de-boned BI platform, which is stuffed inside the complex customer requirements & bogged down with disparate data.  They are also “managing” these rich consulting services, often with a smaller IT team, where burden and responsibility comes without the required bandwidth to succeed. How anyone can manage all this stuff(ing) is beyond comprehension – it makes building the nav system on the Boeing 787 look like child’s play.  And I mean this – it is child’s play.

And look at what’s stuffed at the center of this Turducken BI solution – the unfortunate End User Chicken. They are precisely the reason why this entire Turducken BI solution was built, their needs represent the very core of the BI Solution, its meaning and its strategy, but yet are the last thing that gets attention and visibility. Nevertheless, they are stuffed in with the rest of the mess. And why does the well-protected, innocent End User Chicken so often get overlooked and forgotten? Because they’re the foundation, and for all intents and purposes the ones that started it all. They represent the center of gravity of this Turducken, but too often are overwhelmed by all the “stuffing”, so their needs are squashed and neglected.  But keep in mind – without End Users it would only be a Turduck – an incomplete, meaningless solution.

OK – so now let’s get to the cautionary advice. With respect to your BI solution, don’t make the mistake that so many companies make – DON’T OVERDO IT! DON’T OVERCOOK IT! DON’T OVER STUFF IT!!! The picture is clear – the more you mess with your BI solution the worse it gets. Before you know it, the whole thing blows up on you before you get a chance to eat it.

Take an example from the Turducken Blog. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,176174,00.html. The advice is clear, and I quote: “Seriously, do not deep-fry the Turducken. The inner birds – the chicken and the duck – will shoot out of the turkey and it’ll be like that really gross scene in Alien, except instead of extraterrestrial fetus blood, you’ll be covered in boiling hot oil, which is probably less fun.” Sound familiar?? Indeed it does. Deep-fry your Turducken BI Solution in oil, that is, take too long writing custom SQL, either by you or by the bottomless pit of consulting services, and before you know it your IT Duck as well as your End User Chicken will shoot out of the Expensive BI Platform, burn everyone in the area, and all the Complex Customer Requirements and Data will go up in flames along with everyone else.

There’s a clear lesson here: the Business Intelligence segment of the industry is the Turducken of Software. It’s one thing stuffed into another and then once again stuffed into something much bigger surrounded by a lot of hard work and complexity. It’s big, expensive and hard to swallow, and if you do it wrong, you get badly burned. So for this holiday season, if you’re thinking of big BI projects, Bon Appétit!

Click here to watch the Turducken debate.

I hope to Blog again.

Oracle’s OpenWorld conference was huge this year. With all the acquisitions, Oracle has truly grown out of San Francisco; however, I hope they don’t do something crass like move the event to Las Vegas. Oracle is a massive success – in my opinion they’ve leveled SAP and Microsoft and are closing in on IBM and HP. That’s impressive – I genuinely love and admire this.

But, enough of this – let’s have a little fun: Just some superficial, nonsensical impressions and observations before getting serious. This year OpenWorld spilled far out of Moscone – they even had JavaOne tents as far away as Union Square. The Sun people must have felt like Gulag prisoners. Then there were the multiple exhibit halls – those places were zoo-like, almost distasteful – “Sans-culottes“, as the French might say.

For example:

HP had a Magic show. One company was giving away a Tesla – I didn’t even notice this company’s name let alone what they were selling, but who cares?  I mean, how does software compare to a Tesla?

Accenture had a sign saying “high performance delivered” which I read as “high performance divorced” – most likely a Tiger Woods thing.

BlackBerry had a caption reading “Experience Oracle Applications on BlackBerry.” Fat chance unless they’ve recently announced iPhone emulation.  I can’t experience the web on my BB let alone Oracle Apps, and I can barely take a picture of the sign – this is my BB experience. Imagine what an Oracle App would look like!

KPMG went with the golf theme this year – don’t they read? Dell had a juice bar, Brocade had some guy spinning plates and juggling. Idhasoft was giving away a Lexus, but I just kept thinking they had some really cool potato app and wanted to see a demo. Best Software had an off road racer, and Groupware had a craps table. The only thing missing was Cirque du Soliel.

On the serious side, Oracle announced Fusion Apps for the fourth year in a row. This is massive and should be very cool – think about the undertaking: over $4 to $5 billion rebuilding more than 100 existing applications written on top of Oracle (BEA) middleware. That’s impressive. Existing EBS, PeopleSoft, and Siebel apps will still continue, so the customer can choose to go “old wave” or “new wave”.

The DB, Apps, and Middleware groups are the big bucks winners in this game, and the trailers are riding their coattails. On the business intelligence side, Fusion Apps are now “BI driven” and will include “Oracle Transaction BI” (OTBI), consisting of “BI View Objects” – this complements Oracle BI Apps. The BI View Objects are ADF (Oracle Application Development Framework) middleware components which in turn query the database – they are not DB views. The BI View Object component can be used by the BI Composer – a new ADF-based BI authoring tool – and can also be exposed to OBI Answers by integrating with the BI Server’s metadata repository (RPD). This may sound complex but keep in mind that Oracle relies on their customers to pull this together and make it work – it is the customer that has to ultimately make EVERYTHING work.

In any case, this doesn’t come out until 2011 so there’s plenty of time to implement the recently released Oracle BI Apps 7.9.6.2, but beware, the 7.9.6.x BI Apps won’t be integrated with Fusion Applications or even OBI EE 11g.  A new version of the BI Apps, called Oracle BI Apps 11g v1, is expected to support Fusion Apps and OBI EE 11g.  Strategically, customers would want to implement Oracle BI Apps 11g v1 since that is the go forward BI Apps code line, BUT Oracle BI Apps 11g won’t be integrated with the Applications Unlimited product lines (old wave) until Oracle releases Oracle BI Apps 11g Patchset 1 late 2011 / 2012.  There also doesn’t appear to be an automated upgrade path from Oracle BI Apps 7.9.6.2 to 11g.  11g utilizes a new data model and corresponding set of ETL maps that extract data through the BI View Objects.

This is very complex – so to do a short recap, OTBI only works with Fusion Apps and Oracle seems to not have a plan to offer a similar product for EBS customers.  In addition, Oracle is introducing another new version of Oracle BI Applications with Fusion Applications that won’t integrate EBS data until the end of 2011 or 2012, and existing Oracle BI Apps customers are apparently unable to migrate.  Customers are expected to re-implement the new Oracle BI Apps data warehouse.

Let’s take a look at our Oracle BI life history as far as I can discern it:

1999 – BIS
2001 – EDW
2003 – DBI
2006 – OBI EE & Oracle BI Apps
2010 – OBI EE 11g
2011 – Oracle BI Apps for Fusion

As a customer,

If you developed BI apps for BIS, you need to rewrite
If you developed BI apps for EDW, you need to rewrite
If you developed BI apps for DBI, you need to rewrite
If you developed BI apps for Discoverer, they’re in limbo and you need to migrate and rewrite
If you bought Oracle BI Apps for Oracle EBS you will need to re-implement when you upgrade to Fusion Applications or upgrade to Oracle BI Apps 11g
If you haven’t bought or implemented Oracle BI Apps 7.9.6.x you may want to consider waiting for Oracle BI Apps 11g PS1.

Let’s see what all this might look like graphically — you know, the big picture:

Like I said at the beginning, Oracle is a great company that I highly admire and respect, but the BI direction has been plagued with product HD-ED (High Definition – Evolution Dysfunction). Now new leadership has entered the picture and this is a good thing. There are solutions to this, and I am hoping that new leadership will take the opportunity to deliver what the customers want and need. As a customer you have to examine this and decide. This is not religion – you don’t have to believe to be successful.

As I said – this is very complex so I welcome your feedback and comments – particularly from those of you who attended the event. I am trying to get the facts straight so I look forward to writing another version or two of this. Oracle’s roadmap is fluid, and can change based on customer feedback.

I hope to blog again.

My last Blog dated 8/3 had to do with my theory on why SAP acquired Sybase. The post was largely based on Oracle’s Lawsuit and the SAP/TomorrowNow allegations. I was really surprised to read the Wall Street Journal article on 8/5 that SAP accepted liability in the Oracle lawsuit. Great timing!

I wanted to say a few words about this. I thought the Oracle lawsuit had tremendous merit. My sense was that even if Oracle was 10% right about the allegations, SAP was screwed. I was just imagining all the depositions, the trial with a bunch of SAP witnesses, appearing one by one telling their story about allegation after allegation, having to concede to wrong doing upon wrong doing. What a mess!  And what a victory for Oracle. What an interesting setting for the jury to deliberate upon and a great set up for a huge hunk of the $1 billion Oracle claim. Imagine the jurors going for the full amount just on principal and of course, for the sport of it.

Well – SAP’s acceptance of liability was a brilliant move – it totally sucked the wind out of Larry Ellison’s sails. All the drama is over, just like that. No stream of witnesses testifying of wrong doing. No long drawn out endless diatribe of unwilling, extracted admissions of misconduct on the part of SAP.

It’s over – all there is to talk about now are the damages. Larry claims a billion, SAP claims tens of millions, and it’s up to Oracle to demonstrate damages. There’s no talk about “…corporate theft on a grand scale…” It’s just about damages, and Oracle will be hard pressed to demonstrate a billion in damages.

Great chess move SAP! However, you won’t be able to sit around dreaming that you’ll get away with a “tens of millions” slap on the wrist. My prediction in my last blog was that you’re in for a quarter billion dollar citation – so get the checkbook out.

I hope to blog again.

I’ve been meaning to write about this – SAP’s $5.8B acquisition of Sybase that is.  There’s been a good bit written about it – excellent and relevant comments as well. Look at the excerpts:

Forrester: “With Sybase Unwired, the mobile apps can be written once and deployed on multiple mobile platforms.” This “…gives SAP the opportunity to develop new types of business applications for mobile devices… .”

Yankee: “…the fusion of cloud computing, application mobility and social media to transform the enterprise mobility space.”

A Software Insider’s Point of View:  SAP “…also gains access to the financial services and public sector markets.  On the geographic front, Sybase has strong presence in the China market, an area where SAP sees future growth.”

Forbes: “Sybase is not enough to make SAP entirely relevant in scope and scale (and it goes without saying that in this land of giants, Sybase was not large enough to survive on its own). But it picks up a solid asset, with businesses in financial modeling and mobile databases that are essential for SAP to stay in the game.”

Good stuff – very relevant and right on the mark from my perspective.

I have another theory. I’m sure all of the above is true, but an interesting side thought occurred to me. I kept thinking about the Oracle lawsuit against SAP involving the alleged inappropriate downloading of Oracle proprietary data by SAP. I took a glance at the Oracle complaint. It’s amazing. Take a look at some of the allegations:

“This case is about corporate theft on a grand scale…”

“Oracle brings this lawsuit after discovering that SAP is engaged in systematic, illegal access to…Oracle’s computerized customer support systems.”

“Through this scheme, SAP has stolen thousands of proprietary, copyrighted software products and other confidential materials that Oracle developed to service its own support customers.”

“In late November 2006, there occurred unusually heavy download activity on Oracle’s password-protected customer support website. …The access and download activity Oracle observed on its systems…did not resemble the authorized, limited access to which its customers were entitled. …SAP employees using the log-in credentials of Oracle customers with expired or soon-to-expire rights had, in a matter of a few days or less, accessed and copied thousands of individual Software and Support Materials.”

“…using one customer’s credentials, SAP suddenly downloaded an average of over 1,800 items per day for four days straight (compared to that customer’s normal downloads averaging 20 per month.”

“Other purported customers hit the Oracle site and harvested Software and Support Materials after they had canceled all their support with Oracle in favor of SAP TN (TomorrowNow).”

“…a user on an SAP TN computer signed on as Oracle customer Honeywell International…to access Oracle’s support system and copy literally thousands of Oracle’s Software and Support Materials in virtually every product library in every line of business.”

“…Oracle to date has indentified more than 10,000 unauthorized downloads of Software and Support Materials relating to hundreds of different software programs.”

“…some users logged in with user names of “xx” “ss” “User” and “NULL”. Others used phony email addresses like test@testyomama.com…”

“…one user…appears to have logged in using the credentials of seven different customers in a span of just 15 days – all from SAP computers in Bryan, Texas. All of these customers whose IDs SAP appropriated had one critical fact in common: they were, or were just about to become, new customers of SAP TN – SAP AG’s and SAP America’s software support subsidiary whose sole purpose is to compete with Oracle.”

WOW! This is heavy duty. I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know if all or any of this is true or accurate, but it would seem that if there were even a small degree of accuracy, it would be a big problem for SAP. We do know however that as a result, SAP announced in mid 2008 that it would shut down its TomorrowNow division.

I find this really interesting. SAP requires access to Oracle products and code to develop their products. SAP is actually Oracle’s biggest ISV. SAP Business Apps drag a lot of Oracle DB along with it. So SAP needs access to the Oracle Database Technical Reference material to build its product. A division of SAP, Business Objects, needs access to Oracle Applications to build their products. You can’t build worthwhile SAP BusinessObjects Rapid Marts without knowing intimately, at a programmatic level, what the Oracle Application is doing.

Think about this as well. A year ago or so you could go to the Oracle Partner Network site and see SAP and Business Objects products listed. If you go to that site today you see products from other companies like Teradata and IBM/Cognos that compete with Oracle but you do not see SAP or Business Objects.

If you’re SAP and you’re dealing with a major lawsuit alleging inappropriate and illegal access to proprietary data and you need access to Oracle to build your products, what do you do? Well – perhaps two things:

Plan A) You work with Oracle and try to negotiate some limited access agreement. After all, Oracle does make a ton of money, probably close to a billion a year, from SAP apps customers that use the Oracle database.

Plan B) You have to have a Plan B and it better be better than plan A. Is it possible that Plan B is figuring out how to no longer rely on the Oracle database?  That’s what I’d be doing. You acquire Sybase. You embed it in your cloud offerings. It’s the store for mobile applications. You sell it to every new customer. You bundle it in SMB and mid-market channel sales. You try like hell to convert Oracle database customers (impossible for a ton of technical reasons, performance concerns, and the conversion expense mountain you have to overcome, but nonetheless a noble effort that will rest on the shoulders of some unknowing SAP sales exec who will get shot in less than 12 months.)

I think this $5.8B Sybase acquisition was a great idea. SAP needs this to survive, but it’s not enough to win. I also think it was worth paying the huge premium.

Total cost of the TomorrowNow acquisition: TomorrowNow acquisition cost + $5.8B for Sybase + $.25B to $1B to settle illegal access suit = about $6.2-$7B.

From that perspective what is the big deal in SAP spending a quarter billion to a billion or so to overcome this issue? The problem is gone.  They further cut, or limit, their reliance on Oracle, they access and open new markets and revenue streams, and most importantly they make themselves more attractive as an acquisition target to IBM, whose mutual mission in life is to kick Oracle’s ass. This is two mints in one – a great idea and a dream come true!

I hope to blog again…

…and, I would really like your thoughts on this theory.

PS:  My personal opinion of SAP:  SAP is a good company. They didn’t, and wouldn’t, engage in the activities alleged by Oracle. However, the company they acquired, TomorrowNow, would. Unfortunately for SAP, they own TN and the liability and potential consequences of the poor judgment on the part of TN.

Let’s first talk about the name: Cogito Ergo Sumatra. In college, I was impressed with Descartes’ brilliant thinking.  I liked that I could always remember him by one famous phrase. He had a huge impact on Western philosophy, but today I actually don’t know what he thought about.

Perhaps something like… “I’m thinking about whether I exist, and wondering if I do, and realizing that if I’m thinking this, it would seem reasonable that I do exist.”  These days it sounds more like a Jackie Mason routine to me than 17th Century philosophy. If you take this thinking a step further, and move from “I think therefore I am” to “I think therefore Sumatra”, then you get down to the kernel at the center of my brain – “I think therefore I drink coffee.”

Yes – that’s what it’s all about. You need coffee in this business. You need something to stimulate your mind, to keep you going.  I’ve been in the software business for a while – there have been major advancements, yet a lot has stayed the same. A lot of reinvention. A lot of re-cooking the same recipe. Of all the facets of this business that I’ve been involved in, the BI space is one of the most fascinating, but not because it’s that fascinating (I’m not that much of a propeller head), rather because it’s one segment of the software business that has such a terrible track record.

In ’08 the business analytics market came in at about $60B. That’s huge! The amazing thing about it is that 60% of this was services. That’s amazing! Does this stuff work? I mean think about this in its most rudimentary form: I buy an iPhone for $400 and it doesn’t work so I hire a consultant and pay him another $240 to make it work. What a beautiful world we live in. There’s no other planet in the entire universe, with the exception of possibly one in the Centaurus galaxy, that affords this level of opportunity.

Unlike most other areas of software, which provide solutions, BI typically provides a platform that lets you build a solution. This is why the BI business is so great.  There are actually very few packaged BI solutions out there. That’s why the services component is 60%.

Now take this into consideration, every time there’s a management change the new regime wants to see something different. Every time the business hiccups you want to see something new. Every time there’s a competitive threat or market change you want to see the impact. Every time there’s a major management review or board meeting there are new requirements. This never ends.

On top of this, count on the fact that when you ask the business side of the house what they want and you’ve built them what they’ve asked for, you have to deal with the rude surprise that you didn’t build what they wanted. This is completely unending and of infinite potential!

Why else do you think that during the most dramatic economic downturn since the Great Depression that BI was one of the only tech categories that grew? Management just had to have more information, data, reports, and analysis to explain just how lousy things were. The infiniteness of the BI opportunity is a beautiful thing! I think we need Stephen Hawking to do some quantum mechanics calculations of just how big this monster really is and what the potential for black holes might be.

I don’t know what it really means to be a blogger, so I’m trying this out. There’s a certain cool aspect to this. I hate to admit I’m really not a web 2.0 guy who’s into social networking and stuff like that. I tried Facebook, but ultimately abandoned it – didn’t like the friend aspect of it. I’m on LinkedIn but only have 3 contacts – the individual who personally asked me to join and the two others who were in the room when he made the request.  After my Facebook experience I was wondering about some antiface.com thing, but then I discovered one already existed. Imagine joining that – I don’t like social networking so now I’m going to network with people who hate me.

I hope to blog again.