Choose a BI Vendor That Is Here to Stay

by Bill Hoggarth, SAS

Ten years into its new life as a vibrant democracy, South Africa is poised to take its place on the world stage. With tourism booming, with the World Cup 2010 on the horizon, and with the leading role that South Africa is playing in the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD), the next 10 years promise to be as challenging and as exciting as the last.

Businesses in South Africa have many tools to address those challenges and to emerge as global players. And many of these companies are turning to business intelligence in their quest for sustainable competitive advantage.

True business intelligence (BI) solutions don’t just provide a way to look at past, or historic, events. They also use sophisticated analytics to help organizations predict the future. Because of the potential impact on your organization, along with the overwhelming number of vendors competing for your business, choosing the right vendor and the right BI solution can be a difficult task.

Which vendor?
With software vendors coming and going, companies would do well to choose their supplier with care. Here are five areas to investigate when choosing a BI partner:

1. Does the vendor offer a comprehensive BI platform upon which to build an entire business intelligence initiative?
2. Does the vendor offer advanced analytics to turn data into accurate forecasting?
3. Is that company strong and stable enough to be there in the future?
4. Will it continue to provide local support?
5. Finally, is the vendor’s corporate strength matched by global reach and customer commitment?

It is important to ensure that the solution can deliver relevant intelligence not only to specific users, but also to a wide audience with various areas of expertise. And it must enable people to make decisions easily and effectively, without creating difficulties for the IT department or training challenges for managers.

The ability to manage the BI solution is also critical. The initial cost often turns out to be a fraction of the total cost of ownership, if managing the system is too cumbersome.

Scalability is vital. As data volume grows and the number of users increases, the software can keep pace and continue to deliver results on time – every time – and without impacting transactional systems. It must scale across everything from storage to processes to bandwidth.

Finally, businesses need the ability to operate as cohesive and aligned units, making interoperability of software an essential. BI systems, therefore, must adhere to all major interoperability standards, including new standards, such as OLE DB for OLAP.

Industry publications, analysts and, most importantly, our customers have validated SAS’ success in all of these areas, especially with SAS®9. SAS is the world’s largest privately held software company, and it is here to stay.