The pressures on Business Objects and Cognos

From IT-Analysis.com
Business Objects and Cognos are the most well-known suppliers in the business intelligence space and are perceived to be the market leaders. However, this duopoly is increasingly under threat and it is worth considering the different pressures that these suppliers are under.

The first element of competition is, of course, from other direct competitors, of whom one would historically have thought of MicroStrategy and Brio (now part of Hyperion) but also Panorama, ProClarity and a number of others. However, arguably the biggest threat in the traditional OLAP space is coming from SAS, which is a bigger company than either Business Objects or Cognos, and which is making a determined (and apparently successful) attempt to challenge Business Objects and Cognos in their heartlands.

Then there is also IBM, which is pushing its BI credentials with products like AlphaBlox, which competes (though it is a toolkit) with the analytic applications provided by Business Object and Cognos.

Then there is reporting. Let's think out of the box for the moment and about application development. There are, today, basically only two development environments: Microsoft Visual Studio and the open source Eclipse framework. If you want to develop reporting as a part of an application within a Microsoft environment then your default choice is to use SQL Server Reporting Services. That was okay for Business Objects and Cognos because they could still expect to win some business in the Windows space and they had UNIX all to themselves. Not any more they don't. Actuate has just announced formal availability of BIRT (Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools) which is the Eclipse standard for developing reporting applications (or parts thereof) within an Eclipse environment. How many developers are going to licence Crystal (part of Business Objects) or Cognos ReportNet when they get a free download of BIRT? And if they need some support because they want to embed the software then they can get that relatively inexpensively from Actuate?

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