I'll be speaking in Rome (Italy not Texas) next week with Colin White, Claudia Imhoff, Seth Grimes and Mike Ferguson at the International Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence Summit 2008. My topics are a couple of passions in my consulting: "Extending the Reach of Data Mining" and "Achieving RFID Information Excellence".

Only about 10% of BO customers have SAP, but who knows how many SAP customers do not have BO. There is a clear corporate focus on delivering the rest of them to BO. They will do this with a light roadmap, which is to say BO just works on top of SAP. Another focus area is the non-SAP customer, which currently comprises 90% of their customer base. With mostly separated companies, this dual strategy for growth can work.

Also discussed were ...

Other than the fact that by the time I get to the word “service”, half of the time I say “solution” instead of service, what about the viability of SAAS?

First, to levelset, SAAS refers to those set of solutions that are ‘housed’ offsite at the location of the vendor who actually developed the application. If a vendor is hosting all or most of a company’s software, well beyond those applications which the vendor built, that is really an outsou...

The article, Gartner: Business intelligence ROI, value a matter of mind over money, begins with "Determining the return on investment (ROI) and value of a business intelligence (BI) software investment is often an exasperating task, but not an impossible one, according to one Gartner analyst."

I completely agree, but I also feel it's a matter of maturity, and mature BI environments can get there. I also believe it's a best practice to measure ...