Under the microscope

Top Cognos adversary, Business Objects, is also urging partners to mix and match BI functionality. The vendor's managing director, Rob Wells, said there had been an enormous amount of interest in BI within the last 12 months thanks to growing awareness amongst senior management and the IT department, two previously separate fiefdoms.

Answering the call to link business processes, the technology has matured into an end-to-end enterprise tool, ensuring a much more direct connection with business solutions.

"There's enormous pull from the user community to link BI with ERP, CRM and financials," Wells said.

Niche Markets

With a view to integration, partners can dish out a number of integrated solutions including: Extract, transform, load or ETL (formats used to get the info into the data reporting environment); data cleaning tools; reporting and analysis tools; and analytic applications like budgeting and forecasting.

"We want partners who work in niche markets and are strong in certain industries," Wells said. "Resellers can develop a software licensing business and consulting business."

While suitable across a broad range of markets, top verticals included government and telecommunications, he said. To these and other markets, partners can pitch BI's ease of use and new and improved ways of data visualisation, the latest technology advancement to crop up in the BI arena.

"The technology takes the data from Excel, integrates it, and displays it on a dashboard, presenting what-if scenarios, and then lets users play around with the data through an interactive tool," Wells said.

Honing in on mid-market opportunities, resellers and integrators could play a lead role in getting the message out about integration, SPSS Australia manager director, Tim Macdermid, said.

As part of the BI kit, partners can provide a host of functions like data integration, query, reporting, and online analytical processing tools.

With a background in predictive analytics technology and services, SPSS segments into four categories: statistical analysis tools; data mining solutions (Web mining and text mining); predictive claims, marketing and call centre applications; as well as enterprise feedback management solution.

With the myriad of tools, partners could help a company use the information, share it and make decisions, Macdermid said.

"Understand, predict and act are top BI features," he said. "What's happened in the past, determine where we are, and use the predictive part to predict outcomes based on different strategies -- and then act."