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BI Fruits Drive SOA Adoption

A Ventana Research study of 488 companies indicates that a majority of companies plan to implement some type of BI service in the next 12 months. But a preponderance of those respondents believe they lack expertise in SOA to make those plans a reality. While 81 percent of respondents said that SOA is important “to […]

Written By

Michael Hickins

Nov 28, 2006

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A Ventana Research study of 488 companies indicates that a majority of companies plan to implement some type of BI service in the next 12 months.

But a preponderance of those respondents believe they lack expertise in SOA
to make those plans a reality.

While 81 percent of respondents said that SOA is important “to some
degree” for BI, fully two-thirds said they don’t have the right resources to
make this happen.

Among the most prevalent barriers to adoption of BI, 53
percent cited a lack of general knowledge about SOA, and 48 percent said
they would have problems identifying the internal IT resources required to
migrate to and support SOA.

“Companies believe SOA is important for BI and plan to implement BI services
across all functional areas of their business within the next year,” said
Dan Everett, research director for business intelligence at Ventana
Research.

That said, “the research [also] reveals a lack of technical understanding in
many organizations and an acknowledgment that outside help will be required
for initial implementations,” noted Everett.

The actual number of companies planning to implement some type of BI
application “depends on the different types of BI services,” Everett told
internetnews.com.

According to the study, 53 percent of companies said they plan to implement
query and reporting software, while 40 percent plan to implement analytics
and data mining applications.

On the back end, 53 percent plan to implement data source connectivity
applications, 47 percent plan to implement data transformation and data
integration software and 45 percent are planning on installing data
cleansing and data quality tools.

Customer operations (43 percent) and finance (32 percent) are among the top
business areas slated for early deployments.

Companies also said they intend to integrate BI with a plethora of other
enterprise services, including corporate portals (44 percent); business
processes (35 percent); enterprise security services (33 percent);
transactional applications (28 percent); search (24 percent); and composite
applications (18 percent) — all within the next 12 months.

That’s where the need for SOA really kicks in, as the framework helps
companies gather data from applications built on different code bases and
then view them in centralized dashboards or reports.

Everett said that respondents already have preconceptions about which
vendors are best able to meet their needs.

He said they put Cognos (Quote) at the top of their
preferred BI vendors, followed by Oracle (Quote), SAP (Quote), Microsoft (Quote), IBM (Quote) and
Business Objects (Quote).

Vendors, for their part, have
taken the hint, making acquisitions and new product announcements to take
advantage of this burgeoning demand.

For instance, Cognos recently announced a new application making BI data more accessible to mobile
workers.

This article was first published on InternetNews.com. To read the full article, click here.