Business Intelligence Companies To Watch

With the two leading BI players, Cognos and Business Objects being acquired over the past year, it's now time to keep a close eye on the next generation BI disruptors in the market. Companies including Qliktech, Oco-Inc, SeaTab, and Lucid Era have an opportunity to capitalize on the changing landscape in the BI market. Why?

1. Low cost, fast deployment - Most of these disruptors offer a SaaS based BI solution at a much lower cost and with faster deployments. Oco-Inc has several customers that have replaced their current  BI solutions with the Oco-Inc SaaS based offering. These customers include juice maker Welchs, Dunkin Donuts and Casual Male. Seattle based Seatab has a very impressive list of customers including REI, Brooks, Birkenstock and CarToys.

2. Easy to Use, Less Complex - Qliktech is a standout when it comes to ease of use and flexibility. You might think of the Qliktech product called Qlikviews as "Rapid Analytics". No OLAP or complex schema to deal with. The analytic application design environment is very intuitive and provides the BI professionals with the ability to rapidly navigate, slice, dice and drill down on analytic data without the complexities typical found in hard core OLAP systems. Qliktech has the added benefit of being an In-memory solution which results in rapid response times for analytic results.

3. Small and Nimble - Although these companies would be considered early stage, I would hesitate to call them "pure startups". They are well funded and seem to be delivering products releases at a much faster clip that the larger acquired players.

4. Great customer service and response times - Its just much easier to pick up the phone and speak to the CEO's of these companies than it is with the larger players who are in the midst of their respective acquisitions. Great customer service will also be a differentiator for these companies.

5. Easier to influence future capabilities - Although growing pretty rapidly when it comes to bringing on new customers, being an early customer means you  have strong influence when it comes to driving new capabilities into these products. This is normally the case for most early stage companies but with a SaaS based approach that some of these companies are taking, the new feature might show up the next day.

6. No need to deal with product rationalization and integration - When IBM acquired Cognos, they also ended up getting Applix (acquired by Cognos),  Temtec (acquired by Applix), Celequest (acquired by Cognos), Adaytum (acquired by Cognos). The most recent being Applix. Above and beyond the acquisition integration efforts, seems like a great deal of product rationalization will need to get done over the course of the next year. These BI players simply don't have to deal with these complexities.

We will see lots of analysis over the next few months on the acquisitions that have taken place in the BI space and no doubt we will see plenty of mention of Oco-Inc, SeaTab, Qliktech and LucidEra.

Comments

[Ken Rudin]

Bob, thanks for the mention. We're very excited about the strong positive reaction we've been getting from customers about our solution. Now that most of the traditional players have been acquired, I agree that we'll be seeing all the future innovations coming from the newer generation of analytic companies. The analytics market has been stagnant for a long time, and I'm glad to see that there are finally a few new players who are bringing innovation back to the market.