Business Analytics/ Intelligence Solutions

With ERP implementations reaching maturity in most industries, the amount of

data is growing by leaps and bounds, making it imperative for enterprises to

adopt BI and Analytics solutions. In the past few years we have seen major ERP

vendors acquiring or merging with Business Analytics solution providers to

enhance their product offering. So the four giants that populate our Users'

Choice Club this year are Oracle, SAP, IBM, Microsoft, and SAS.

The Users' Choice 2009 award goes to SAP's Business Information Warehouse,

which enjoyed the highest current ownership amongst our respondents, and also

had the highest loyalty relative to other brands. SAP also enjoyed the highest

percentage of other brand owners shifting in to it, thus making it award worthy.

While close behind at second place was Oracle that surprisingly had the highest

top of mind recall amongst our respondents. MS SQL, IBM's Intelligent Miner and

SAS Enterprise Miner were the other brands that were in the league with the top

two brands.

So why should one choose a business analytics brand? We asked existing users

the reason for three brands--SAP, Oracle, and IBM. In case of SAP, the votes

were similar for brand name and product reliability. In case of Oracle and IBM,

it was largely brand name. Next we analyzed responses for those who're likely to

purchase these brands' solutions in the near future. The top reason for SAP and

Oracle again emerged as brand name, whereas for IBM, it was initial price.

In this segment it's interesting to see that one particular brand does not

dominate across all industry verticals we covered in our survey; rather there is

close competition for presence. It's the services and process manufacturing

industry verticals where SAP enjoys a stronghold. Whereas, Oracle dominates the

healthcare, BFSI and education sectors. While in the IT/ITES and discrete

manufacturing industries there is cut-throat competition for dominance by both

SAP and Oracle with both having almost equal number of respondents' votes. Its

surprising to find that in the education vertical, besides Oracle, both IBM and

SAS have some foothold, but SAP didn't even feature. SAS Enterprise Miner has

negligible presence in other sectors barring education and services, where it is

second to respective vertical leader.

Brand loyalty was highest for SAP. Amongst our respondents who currently

owned SAP, a whopping 55% responded that they were planning to stay with the

current solution that they own. While 4% of SAP's Business Information Warehouse

users were likely to make a move to Oracle, and another 4% likely to move to SAS.

The next highest brand loyalty stood with Oracle at 38%, with 5% of its owners

likely to move SAP and another 5% to MS SQL in the near future. SAS should be

worried because only 17% of its current owners showed loyalty for it while 17%

displayed interest in moving to Oracle. A high percentage of Oracle, SAS and IBM

owners (52%, 67% and 65% respectively) weren't sure of which brand to shift to

or had no plans of shifting.

This segment has good news for most BI players as the current ownership of BI

solution amongst the respondents wasn't that high, thus opening up an

opportunity window for them.