– In Part 1 last week, I discussed the rise of Microsoft’s OLAP market share and how this was beneficial by educating the market on the benefits of business intelligence and Business Performance Management (BPM). This week I discuss our decision to embrace Analysis Services including our research findings and the enormous opportunity we saw for BPM applications on Analysis Services 2005..
In 2003, we began a “from the ground up” development of our BPM application powered by Analysis Services 2005 (SSAS). Our product CALUMO is the result of these efforts. The development brief was to build a sophisticated BPM application at least equal to or better than what we had done in the past (SPF Plus on TM1 OLAP Server). It also had to be better than the solutions offered by our competitors (Cognos, Hyperion, Outlooksoft etc).
A standout item of research that illustrates the opportunity we saw is the chart below which correlates OLAP Market shares (per the OLAP Report) against the BPM Applications market shares (per IDC).
Note that Hyperion has almost precisely the same OLAP and BPM market shares, yet Microsoft has nearly 30% OLAP market share, but only a trivial BPM share. This is an enormous gap of nearly 25%. Although there are other 3rd party players who leverage Analysis Services filling some of this gap (eg about 2% each from Outlooksoft and GEAC, plus others which were not tracked by IDC), our research showed that most of these customers needs were not being fulfilled. They were either:
- Not using Analysis Services (ie they were using SQL Server, but the OLAP module was shelf-ware), or
- the applications were very simple and could not be classified as BPM.
- In some of these cases the gap was or is being filled with a non Microsoft solution for both the OLAP and BPM components (eg Hyperion, Cognos or TM1).
We believed that providing for and filling the Microsoft BPM Applications gap was the most significant and neglected market opportunity at the time. For us, it has been about being first to market with the latest technology on Analysis Services 2005. It’s also about providing a more sophisticated application than Hyperion, Cognos and our other competitors on a unified platform.
Software development is never easy, but our decisions and efforts so far have been more than vindicated:
- Analysis Services 2005 has proven to be a dramatic improvement on 2000,
- and, because we built CALUMO from the ground up, we don’t have any legacy code, or integration issues with multiple products. Everything is .Net2.0 and we are not trying to support customers on both MSAS and SSAS.
- Also, the subject matter expertise we have from our previous 10 years of BPM software development, has allowed us to design what we consider to be a complete, sophisticated and functionally rich application (for Web, Excel, Reporting, Analysis, Write-back and predictive analytics on one unified platform).
Looking back, we achieved what we set out to do, but how do we continue on this path of judicious serendipity? In light of PerformancePoint and other Microsoft BI initiatives, we’re now even more excited about leveraging Microsoft technology and our ability to build software that could fill the 25% BPM applications gap.
– In Part 3 next week, I will discuss our BPM vision and product roadmap and explain in some detail the CALUMO Microsoft Partnership where we’re embracing elements of their BI platform whilst applying our subject matter expertise to provide a more sophisticated and complete offering..