A Challenge for Technology Vendors

Our research found that the vendor landscape for combined search and BI technologies is populated by many suppliers. Organizations want search to encompass various BI systems; that will require suppliers to make available the indexes to their own content and to be able to process content from others. The idea of standardizing on one BI vendor is not always practical — nor did most participants in our survey identify it as a priority.

The penetration of search vendors into the business intelligence software market is still minimal. Most organizations in our research use Microsoft-related search technology. Interestingly, Google finished second, ahead of specialized suppliers. There has been substantial adoption of Google's search technology. Some organizations also may consider adopting the basic desktop and departmental elements of Google. For business intelligence, the majority of organizations use Microsoft, Oracle, Business Objects, or Cognos as their primary supplier. In text mining and analytics, SAS was the most prevalent provider in our research, leading others that also provide dedicated text analytics. This vendor diversity points to the reality of heterogeneous technology in the enterprise and the critical need to integrate information from disparate sources.

In addition, we found that organizations have concerns about whether the available technologies can carry out key tasks. For example, the respondent organizations that we rated most innovative in terms of their technology maturity expressed interest in the ability of integrated technologies to perform sophisticated text analyses that link broader information with traditional data found in BI systems. But at the same time they said they doubt whether integrated BI and search technology can do that. The significance of this concern is highlighted by our finding that the most important search components for integration (after indexing) are content management (66 percent) and document management (64 percent). Along similar lines, organizations' number-one concern about using search to find information in previously run BI reports was the integration of search and text-analytics technology.

Even the companies that we found to be the least ambitious technically — those that are focused on basic capabilities of an integrated search and BI environment, such as having a single place to search all content and dealing with words that can have multiple meanings — question how well BI products can accomplish those tasks. Across the board, then, we found data integration to be prospective customers' key concern; it must be addressed to ensure success in combined BI and search deployments.

Likewise, survey respondents expect integration of products from different vendors to be an issue. Despite their concern about integrating BI, text analytics, and search components, only 21 percent of organizations said that it is very important to get all their components from a single vendor (see exhibit 4, below). A larger proportion of respondents (29 percent) said that it is not very important or not at all important. This is just as well, because most organizations' requirements are so broad that a single technology vendor would have difficulty meeting them all. User organizations should expect to implement products from more than one or two vendors, due to the evolving state of this technology.

Although there are cost savings and other benefits to be realized through standardizing technology, effective search of data from disparate systems is more important. Search-related technology should be able to perform indexing across all related data in various BI systems and enterprise applications, as well as to handle data in its various forms elsewhere in the enterprise. Organizations that are considering standardizing on one solution for BI, text analytics, and search capabilities should be certain that their BI vendor's search functionality can access the complete variety of sources the organization wants to access through its BI system — or at least be sure the search capability exposes the metadata and indexes required to search each necessary data repository.

Organizations that are looking into the role of search where it intersects with BI also should look ahead. Already familiar to most users, search technology can help provide access to BI information for more people, in more roles, in the organization. Along with examining search as the potential next-generation query interface, companies should understand that it is leading us back to natural query languages. In fact, the fourth-most-important search-related component, identified in our research as important by 53 percent of organizations, is natural language processing, which today is transitioning from keyword searching to the use of fragments and sentences to find information. Part of being innovative is reaching new levels of efficiency, and search that's well-integrated with BI can deliver efficiency in querying, which can lead to better decision-making throughout the company.

Mark Smith is the CEO and executive vice president of research for Ventana Research, a research and advisory services firm focused on the performance management market. Ventana Research is a premium content partner of Business Finance and Business Performance Management (BPM) Magazine.