Building Business Intelligence Is Not Selling It
Thoughts Inspired By Information Builder’s WebFOCUS
If the cover art bores you, I feel you. It bores me too. Although at least it doesn’t have any tin cans…
The map above is a fairly robust and mature model. In many ways, it subscribes to my myriad of rants on Business Intelligence over the last few days. It is very much in line with the M.O. of Information Builders. These guys get it. Can they deliver on it? I don’t know. I have never used them.
Notice, I didn’t say that I haven’t used their platform. That is because their site seems more geared to sell their service. Their platform WebFOCUS seems to be just a piece of it.
I also haven’t heard much about it, from actual customers. WebFOCUS has been on our BI Madness list before, but almost no one voted for it. It did manage to beat out Power BI in the first round of our inaugural season, but Power BI was only 6 months old.
Perhaps our readers aren’t in the right industry? That seems to be a theme for some of these tools. But maybe, that is the crux of it. In my humble opinion, Information Builders isn’t selling a tool. They are selling a service. So unless this article starts swirling the halls in Arlington, Virginia (their office), there may not be that many people confident enough to vote for it.
The tools that resonate best in BI Madness tend to be those which empower individual analysts. Often they don’t scale. They don’t facilitate discipline and truth. They are shiny objects (thanks Greg Anderson).
Information Builders has deftly avoided these pitfalls only to leap into relative obscurity. As a privately held company with an estimated $340 Million in annual revenue — that may be just the way they like it? Obscurity has its privileges… well, maybe.
At least one online review I found, that compares WebFOCUS to Qlik — appears to give it the edge. This is just one review. Gartner, on the other hand, ranks them quite far apart. We would need to dig through the criteria to understand this better. But most of these rating companies don’t share their thinking…
In the end, building BI is not selling BI. At least not in the short term. Sadly, long term is fairly irrelevant in this age of high technology, acquisitions, and quarterly reports. Not all BI is about empowering analysts OR educating the masses. Most solutions can only do one well. BI isn’t even Analytics, if you are mindful of the nuance.
Does WebFOCUS belong in our Final Four? That is ultimately up to you, but with only a few days remaining… no one has voted for it. But, if you are in the market for a BI platform — they deserve a look. That is not an endorsement, just an objective observation. Corsair’s Publishing is not currently compensated by any of these Business Intelligence providers. We are happy to change that.
Thanks for reading! Be sure to vote in BI Madness 2018. We lock the Final Four on March 23rd.
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