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Thanks, Bill. As I said, I did not include all of the possible interrogatories in my example. I just wanted to get across that useful analytics requires deep domain expertise delivered in a simple package, just like TurboTax does for tax filing. I will add both posts to the LI group soon.
Putting More Intelligence in Business Intelligence
In my previous post, I talked about how I thought the reason there has not been widespread adoption of BI/Analytic solutions is that they have not had much intelligence in them. Dennis Howlett did a post partially talking about how alerts and dashboards supported what I had talked about in term...
We will have to agree to disagree. You may also want to look at the follow up post - http://blogerp.typepad.com/hcm_research/2013/02/putting-more-intelligence-in-business-intelligence.html
I think you will see I do not think it is simplistic at all. Big data and associated tools do not necessarily solve the usefulness issue. Also, I think the analogy holds in terms of building domain expertise/intelligence into the tools themselves.
TurboTax and Business Intelligence/Analytics
Dennis Howlett suggested that I do a post on a conversation we were involved with on Twitter recently. Basically, the conversation had started out as a discussion about how companies will need data scientists to be successful at analytics. The argument was basically that analytics were too com...
Thanks, Alistair and Mike.
"Back to Front" Ideas
It has been quite a while since I have written a blog post. I will not bore you with "Life, the Universe, and Everything" that has been going on except to say that that quote is a foreshadow for the rest of this post. Most people know Douglas Adams as the author of the "Hitchhiker's Guide to the...
Thanks, Bill. Life has also intervened as we recently bought a new house and moved. So, hopefully, as things settle down, I will have more bandwidth to post.
"Back to Front" Ideas
It has been quite a while since I have written a blog post. I will not bore you with "Life, the Universe, and Everything" that has been going on except to say that that quote is a foreshadow for the rest of this post. Most people know Douglas Adams as the author of the "Hitchhiker's Guide to the...
John,
Thanks for the comment on an oldie, but a goodie. If you look at the official Gartner definition, we say that SaaS requires a single line of code and data definition to be used across multiple customers. So, I guess it depends on how you define customers. You could certainly define it to be internal customers. I have also seen as an example in public sector, a single solution being managed by a central agency with agencies or departments running on the same instance of the application. So, there is definitely precedent.
Clearing Up the Confusion About SaaS
Thomas Otter has expressed confusion about definition of SaaS (or the lack of agreement on the definition). Nicholas Carr provides what Glovia is doing as an example of what SaaS is. We, at Gartner, do have our own definition. The Gartner definition has three requirements: The application is...
Antoine,
I do not think it is marketing hype. I laid out a few facts and what I thought was interesting at the conference (like the customer presentations). As the title indicated, it was a trip report. The post was not meant to be analysis with customer advice. When I do that kind of work, it is published on the Gartner.com site for our clients. This is a personal blog.
Trip Report - 2010 ADP Meeting of the Minds
I spent a couple of days last week attending ADP’s Meeting of the Minds conference. This conference is targeted primarily at National Accounts customers (more than 1,000 employees in the U.S.) though some of the attendees and agenda is dedicated to the needs of multinational customers. There ...
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Mar 15, 2010
Vinnie, you are right. The scale of success for DBS vs. SAP and Oracle is vastly different in all of the dimensions you point out. There have been more successful vendors than DBS and when they stumbled they were acquired (PeopleSoft and Siebel come to mind immediately) and that could certainly happen here. The fall may not be as fast either. I think it is a question of where the center of gravity in the business applications market resides. For more than a decade, SAP and Oracle more than anyone else have been the center of the universe. I am asking the question of whether or not they can continue as the center with this shift. It is certainly not a forgone conclusion.
Will History Repeat Itself?
Any opinions expressed or implied here are purely my own (not an official Gartner research position). Once upon a time there was a vendor who was a dominant player in business applications. It had a large installed base. It had deep functionality. It helped automate business functions and p...
Bill, you are quite right. To be honest, I did not go back and search for the exact dates and figures, but the additional facts support the premise of my argument well. Thanks for providing them. As I said, DBS was a little late to market.
Will History Repeat Itself?
Any opinions expressed or implied here are purely my own (not an official Gartner research position). Once upon a time there was a vendor who was a dominant player in business applications. It had a large installed base. It had deep functionality. It helped automate business functions and p...
Thanks, Jason. I agree with you about the scenarios. They are not going away and they should be business-oriented. I also agree with how easy (or difficult) it is to do scenarios and "sandboxes". It takes work (which is why I posed the question at the end about if it is too hard). There are a lot of ramifications for consulting firms working with clients on selections that I could not explore in a short post. Maybe I will in a subsequent post.
The End of the Scripted Scenario Demo Era
Naomi Bloom's recent posts (here and here) on scripted scenarios were a good memory jog to write this post. I have thought a fair amount recently about the business application software selection process and I think it is going to change significantly over the next few years. First, let me say...
Peter,
Thanks for the comments (and sorry for the long approval time - I just missed it). I think that most people think of SaaS as multi-tenant software. The point of the post was to show that multi-tenant software was not the only way to achieve many of the same benefits. What multi-tenant software has done is enforce a discipline around customization and upgrades that was not there previously and a lot of the benefits (though not all) can be attributed to this. However, it is not the only way to enforce that discipline.
Is the Real Secret Sauce of SaaS Discipline not Multi-tenant Architecture?
There is a prevailing view that I see in the press and blogging world that business application software is moving inexorably to the SaaS model. It is true that you would be hard pressed to find a vendor who started in the HCM software market in the last five years that did not utilize the SaaS...
Good points. There is certainly a marketing challenge. Perhaps, the vendor would set up a separate business unit (even brand). It would not necessarily be for existing customers, just new customers.
Is the Real Secret Sauce of SaaS Discipline not Multi-tenant Architecture?
There is a prevailing view that I see in the press and blogging world that business application software is moving inexorably to the SaaS model. It is true that you would be hard pressed to find a vendor who started in the HCM software market in the last five years that did not utilize the SaaS...
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