“I believe that embedded/integrated BI will be one of the most visible changes in BI 5 years from now. Moving from information delivery to application platform is an essential step towards readying Actuate for the BI needs of the future”.

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1. What is Ventana Research, the company all about? What is your core area of business?

Ventana Research is the preeminent research and advisory services firm helping organizations maximize stakeholder value with Performance Management. Putting research in a business and IT context, we provide insight and education on the best practices and technologies that enable organizations to leverage assets to understand, optimize, and align strategies and processes to meet goals and objectives.

2. What is the company's role in the development of Business Intelligence as an area of technology? How do you see BI technology 5 years from now?

We provide thought leadership and guidance to the evolution of business intelligence through our understanding of current customer needs and by identifying where BI and other technologies need to evolve to meet the new customer imperative of implementing an overall Performance Management strategy.

Implementing Performance Management as a business practice throughout an entire organization is essential for companies that want to excel in the new economic environment, and BI technology is a critical component.

Specific capabilities that will be required from BI technology to enable effective performance management include integration, contextualization and collaboration. BI systems will need to become even more integrated into transactional systems, into desktop tools and into operational processes. Users will leverage analytics within the conduct of their every-day jobs. As an integral component of Performance Management, BI will become even more operational than it is today.

Along with this embedding or integration, we’ll see a merging together of both quantitative information and textual information so that analytics will have far more context than we see today. Analysis is the art of comparison, and providing more context will enhance decision quality and trust.

Collaboration during the decision making process is currently done mostly in traditional forums such as meetings or phone conferences. In the future, software will play a larger role in decision making itself.

3. How is Ventana Research planning to focus on the Global 2000 companies and other packaged application software vendors who have a proactive strategy to reach customers, prospects, partners, and employees using the Internet especially in a global economy that has not yet shown signs of picking up from the slump it has been in for the past two years?

<This is an ambiguous question to me. Can you explain further?>

4. Ventana Research offers a comprehensive suite of consulting services to assist companies in achieving the operating efficiencies required in today's rapidly changing business environment. What do you think has been your role so far in promulgating the benefits of BI tools especially when there are big established players already dotting the BI landscape? What are your future plans?

Our primary role is that of a customer advocate. We provide objective analysis and insight on vendors. On the flip slide, we hear directly from the customer and consequently vendors listen to us to help guide their direction to meet customer demand. Now other analyst firms may claim that they do the same, but what differentiates us is that organizations are beginning to awaken to the notion of Performance and that as time goes on this will be an essential practice of every viable company in order to compete. Everything we look at, including BI, is analyzed from the Performance Management perspective.

A key differentiator for Ventana Research is our focus on Performance Management. We are the only firm that has successfully provided insight and education from both the business and IT perspectives, and actually work to align the two to achieve Performance Management. Unlike other firms we don’t simply give our clients a technical report on new software, Ventana Research starts with a business-centric focus on needs and processes then work towards a technology recommendation.

As for spreading the good word on BI, we believe that it is essential for successfully implementing a performance management process. Consequently, this is a major focus for us.

Because our analysts have been advocating a performance management perspective on IT investment for 5+ years now, long before many other industry advocates expressed views on the concept, we have established our expertise and credibility while others are scrambling to understand it. Our plans for the future are to maintain this focus and continue to provide credible and objective insight, education and direction to our clients.

5. You have been working as VP & Research Director of Business Intelligence (BI) and Analytics at Ventana Research and have established the company's agenda for these areas and conducts research across the entire landscape of BI platforms, tools, and technologies. Do you think the company has been able to make a difference to BI as a technology?

Absolutely. With our years of experience as BI technology users, developers marketers and analysts, we’ve seen just about the whole gamut of what works and what doesn’t work. We’ve applied this experience and its resultant insight to help leading companies such as Actuate optimize and evolve their strategies to better serve their customers. Our adherence to our performance management vision is a key example, with more vendors reflecting our opinion on the subject in their positioning every day.

6. What do you think about the release of Actuate 7, which has meant that Actuate has now moved from being an information delivery platform to an information application platform? What is the significance of this release for the wider global developer community?

Ventana Research sees the Actuate 7 positioning movement as a natural evolution that reflects the maturation of business needs in the marketplace today. As I said above, I believe that embedded/integrated BI will be one of the most visible changes in BI 5 years from now. Moving from information delivery to application platform is an essential step towards readying Actuate for the BI needs of the future.

Evidence of this repositioning can be found in Actuate 7’s new information object technology. Information Objects are a core technology that will enable Actuate to move from information delivery to information analysis and beyond. Combining information objects with existing Actuate capabilities, one can see a highly-flexible, yet administration-friendly application platform emerging.

7. Where do you think should BI go from here? What do you think should be the key area of focus in the coming years?

We find performance improvement and optimization a leading concern for many businesses today. BI will play a crucial role in performance management initiatives. To fully realize its potential, BI’s emphasis must be less about data and more about users and aligning to business requirements. And I don’t mean giving users easier access to data or applications, I mean better enabling users to do their jobs and be personally successful. The subtlety is around how users actually gain consensus and initiate action. If you visit our web site (www.ventanaresearch.com) you will find some positive analysis about Actuate’s movement in this direction!

About Eric Rogge

Eric Rogge is Research Director – Business Intelligence and Analytics for Ventana Research. As head of the Business Intelligence Practice, Eric has established the company’s research agenda for Business Intelligence (BI) and Analytics. With more than 20 years of industry experience, Eric has substantial knowledge of the technology and software vendors in the analytic applications, enterprise software, and database software segments. Before joining Ventana Research, he held key positions in firms including WhiteLight Systems, Inc., Sybase, Inc., and NetLabs, Inc.

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