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Consolidation among BI vendors has made product selection harder than ever.
Business Intelligence has gotten bigger, with everyone from executives to casual users having an opinion on the company's BI strategy. As reported on InformationWeek, all four mega vendors (SAP, IBM, Oracle and Microsoft) have recently released major new versions of their products, forcing assessments of whether to upgrade or whether to switch.
"Some upgrades are more painful than others. Any reassessments should also consider the success of your current deployment. I never recommend changing vendors for change's sake or for minor feature improvements. Vendors will continue to leap frog each other in particular areas, but their visions, execution, and philosophies are profoundly different.
"The most successful companies continually monitor the effectiveness of their BI tool standards and reassess their portfolio every couple of years. According to BI Scorecard's 2009 Successful BI Survey, 57% of organizations now have a predominant BI standard. The key word here is predominant. I have never bought into an idea of an exclusive BI standard, yet it seems CIOs in particular want this simplistic, one-size-fits-all approach."