Oracle Continues to Lead IDC's Analytics Pack

The analyst firm ranks the vendors by revenue and market share, and finds SAS Institute and Microsoft continue to make inroads. Oracle remains the leader of the business analytics market, according to the latest forecast report from research firm IDC, as other vendors, such as SAS and Microsoft, continue to make inroads. On top in terms of both revenue and market share, Oracle is nevertheless closely followed by (in descending order) SAS, SAP, IBM, and Microsoft, according to the report.

IDC's definition of business analytics software comprises performance management applications and data warehouse platform software -- specifically, solutions used to access, transform, store, analyze, model, deliver, and track information to enable fact-based decision-making. According to the report, Oracle's analytics offerings took in nearly $2.8 billion in 2006, controlling 14.2 percent of the market. The software giant was followed by SAS, which earned $1.6 billion and had 8.2 percent of market share. Microsoft recorded the strongest growth of all the leaders, increasing its business analytics revenue by 24.6 percent.

While SAS was second behind Oracle, it was noted as the only vendor of the top 5 that focuses almost exclusively on business analytics, ranking at the top in 3 out of the 11 segments of the business analytics market. That, says Dan Vesset, program vice president of IDC's Business Analytics research, "strongly contributes to its number 2 ranking on the solution diversity scale." Finally, SAS had the third-highest momentum in the market in 2006, growing 14 percent.

According to IDC, the business analytics software market reached $19.3 billion in 2006, an 11.2 percent rise. Vesset expects continued growth over the next five years, though at a compound annual growth rate slightly beneath that level: 10.3 percent. Furthermore, IDC made the following predictions about the future of business analytics:

* Business analytic solutions will increasingly incorporate functionality for unified access and analysis of structured data and unstructured content, business process management, collaboration, and workflow management.
* The use of these tools has matured to a point that organizations are beginning to consider business analytics not just as a set of reporting functions, but as a means to gain competitive advantage through better decision management and process optimization.
* As consolidation among the leading business analytics vendors continues, a new generation of software vendors will target specific market segments with innovative new solutions. "These solutions will include not only functionality innovation but also business model innovation," Vesset says, specifically citing open-source and software-as-a-service (SaaS) business analytics.


The report also suggests that a new wave of business analytics deployments will materialize over the next decade and will be focused on addressing two primary demands:

* More data. As awareness increases reagarding the potential of business analytics to influence performance, the need to combine structured transactional data -- with various other forms of rich media content and unstructured and semistructured data -- will become more acute.
* More users. Traditionally, the business intelligence tools market has addressed the needs of business and quantitative analysts, with less attention paid to managers and supervisors, Vesset says. To achieve pervasive BI, organizations and vendors will have to rethink their approaches to technology deployment: They'll have to take into account expectations that users have by embedding business analytics functionality into operational applications, such as CRM and ERP systems.


At the same time, Vesset says, a shortage of IT developers and analytics experts continues to be a problem. "The number of these professionals doesn't seem to be keeping pace with the increased demand from end users. The widening gap between supply and demand will need to be filled with automation, external services firms, hosted/SaaS solutions, or outsourced business analytics solutions."

Author: Colin Beasty @ destinationCRM.com

Read more ...

Oracle highlights Enterprise 2.0 efforts

Company cites its WebCenter platform as ideal foundation for bringing Web 2.0-style collaboration to businesses and organizations. Oracle officials during a Web conference Tuesday cited collaborative benefits of Enterprise 2.0 and cast the company's WebCenter platform as its product offering in this space.

Enterprise 2.0 from Oracle's perspective brings the benefits of Web 2.0-style collaboration to the enterprise. Other elements include the ability to build mashup applications. While there has been confusion as to what exactly Web 2.0 really is, it has been equated to blogging, AJAX-style development, and even Google, said Sonny Singh, senior vice president of the Industries Business Unit at Oracle.

"The truth of the matter is there are probably as many definitions of Web 2.0 as there are technologies associated with it," Singh said.

"[Web 2.0 is] really about how users can connect and work with each other through the Internet," said Thomas Kurian, Oracle senior vice president of Server Technologies Development. "It's fundamentally about users sharing information with each other, using Web-based social software technology to fundamentally transform how they get access to information and how they work with each other."

But Oracle is looking at Web 2.0's relevance and benefits in the enterprise world, which formed the basis for discussion on Enterprise 2.0 during the Web conference.

"Enterprise 2.0 is basically integrating these Web 2.0 technologies and capabilities with enterprise information systems and applications to transform how we work within the enterprise, as well as across enterprises and with people outside the enterprise," Kurian said.

"For me, Enterprise 2.0 is the use of freeform social software inside organizations," said Andrew McAfee, an associate professor at Harvard Business School and a featured presenter wired into the Oracle event. Rather than being concerned with how software is developed, Enterprise 2.0 is about how software gets used, he said.

Enterprise 2.0 brings new modes of collaboration, McAfee said.

Oracle's strategy for the new generation of Internet computing is to fuse Enterprise 2.0 capabilities into Oracle products, Kurian said. The Oracle WebCenter platform takes center stage in the company's Enterprise 2.0 strategy.

Part of the Oracle Fusion Middleware platform, WebCenter integrates enterprise services in providing a context-aware Web application. Featured capabilities include mashups, tagging, RSS, wiki, VoIP, and discussions; search and community components are offered as well.

One of the basic beliefs around WebCenter, Kurian said, is that the way to build an enterprise application, portal, and Web site is converging. The line between what is a Web site, an enterprise application, or a transaction system is gone, he said. WebCenter provides a standards-based framework and integrates into an application development framework.

Oracle also is bringing Enterprise 2.0 capabilities to its On Demand applications. Information such as what a customer has purchased can be shared with a network of salespersons and others, he said. Also, the next version of Oracle's collaboration suite will include Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 capabilities, Kurian said.

To drive home its point about Internet-based computing, Oracle showed a video of a company using a mashup to compare worldwide shipping costs of FOLED (flexible OLED) systems.

Oracle competitors also are latching onto concepts such as Web 2.0. BEA Systems, for example, offers a social computing suite for ad hoc collaboration and participation-based experiences.

Putting a damper on Oracle's festivities, however, was a questioner in the audience who said Oracle needs to update its existing "Web 1.0-based" licensing model. Oracle currently bases its licensing on the per-processor or named user methods.

"We have certainly had discussions on that," Kurian responded. The company is trying to gauge interest from the user community about this issue, he said.

Author: Paul Krill @ InfoWorld.com

Read more ...

Oracle's Name Game

The latest Siebel CRM On Demand highlights the software giant's interest in the on-demand market and underscores the strength of the Siebel name.

When Oracle announced the general availability of Siebel CRM On Demand Release 14 on July 25, it marked the company's first major Siebel Systems software-as-a-service (SaaS) release since completing the purchase of its former adversary in January 2006. The release itself -- the 14th in three and a half years--is particularly noteworthy: It's the first installment to run entirely on Oracle's native infrastructure, and it delivers buckets of integration, usability, customization, and administration features. Apart from the functionality enhancements, however, are signs that the product's branding was set for a facelift -- a facelift that never came about.

Release 14 includes prebuilt integrations to Oracle programs such as Oracle E-Business Suite. Also, process-level integration with Siebel CRM On Demand's workflow capabilities automatically triggers cross-application processes based on changes to information, while data-integration enhancements via Web services enable merge-record operations. In addition, the release draws on technologies such as AJAX and in-line edit to simplify user tasks. Release 14 also includes home-page customization, expanded search-configuration tools, mashup support, industry-specific editions, a built-in virtual call center, embedded analytics, and a prebuilt data warehouse for real-time decision-making.

The latest release represents the first formal announcement of the availability of a new Siebel CRM On Demand product since the April 2006 announcement of version 10. Oracle subsequently rolled out Releases 11, 12, and 13 without any formal press announcements.

With Release 14, however, it appears Oracle was planning to switch to the Oracle brand. In fact, according to an industry insider requesting anonymity, a notice was sent to members of the analyst community stating that Oracle was dropping the Siebel name from the SaaS product. "Then I guess somewhere in the organization, [it was decided to] stick with Siebel, but they didn't send out a subsequent email," the pundit says. "So they are sticking with the traditional Oracle Siebel CRM On Demand nomenclature, and they appear to be planning to stick with that for the foreseeable future." (See "What's in a Name? Oracle's Mixed Message With Siebel CRM On Demand," for more product information.)

It's important to note, however, that Oracle uses "Oracle On Demand" (not "Oracle CRM On Demand") as an umbrella term to describe the company's portfolio of services it delivers in its role as an application service provider (ASP). Some of these offerings include subscription applications (Siebel CRM On Demand) and managed applications (Oracle On Demand for Siebel CRM; PeopleSoft Enterprise On Demand; JD Edwards EnterpriseOne On Demand and JD Edwards World On Demand; Oracle Collaboration Suite On Demand; and Oracle E-Business Suite On Demand).

"The Oracle On Demand infrastructure has a whole host of services...that allow Oracle as an entity to take advantage of its understanding of the application, the database, [and] middleware," says Anthony Lye, Oracle senior vice president, CRM On Demand. "I've never had a customer tell me, 'I don't know which [product] to buy.' Oracle On Demand offers customers a huge benefit from a cost of ownership [perspective] and from an overall initiative and business strategy."

Lye's experience notwithstanding, some headscratching on the part of buyers is to be expected. "They use 'on demand' to describe the ASP model as well as the true SaaS version -- so customers do tend to get a little bit confused," says Rob Bois, a research director at AMR Research. "The more they can distinguish the true SaaS product [Siebel CRM On Demand] from the traditional ASP version [Oracle On Demand for Siebel CRM] would certainly help."

Overall, though, Bois contends that it's good to see Oracle continue to put an emphasis on the on-demand product. "SaaS is driving the future growth of the CRM space," he says. "When you have one of the biggest CRM vendors continuing to push that, it's good for the industry. The customers end up winning in all of this."

Author: Coreen Bailor @ destinationCRM.com

Read more ...