GIA Newsletter 1/2007
What's Up in CI?
Recent developments in the field of Market Intelligence
Gartner: The EMEA BI market to grow 10% to EUR 1.5 billion in 2007
According to Gartner, Business Intelligence (BI) platform revenue will grow 10 percent in Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) in 2007 to reach 1.5 billion Euros. BI platform revenue will grow at an annual compound growth rate (CAGR) of 9.7 percent to reach 1.9 billion Euros in 2010. Gartner said that while increasing investments in BI present good opportunities for software vendors, the market will get tougher in 2007 with increased competition from the major software vendors such as Oracle, SAP and Microsoft. It predicted that BI revenue from these 'mega vendors' will grow three times faster than revenues from the BI pure-play vendors in 2007.
Gartner stated that as companies put a more strategic focus on BI, they are also taking steps to reduce the number of vendors and tools deployed in their organisation. BI vendors were warned that price pressures, increased competition and consolidation spell tough times ahead, predicting that BI revenue from the 'mega vendors' will grow 20 percent in 2007 compared to 6 percent for the pure-play vendors. In 2006 the 'mega vendors' had just over 20 percent of the global BI market and Gartner sees this will increase to more than 30 percent by 2010.
(Abstracted from CRM Today, 1 February 2007)
Skimping on market research can prove a fatal flaw for many technological innovations
The Boston Globe reports that Andover marketing consultant Ralph E. Grabowski has pointed out that there has been many technology gems that were business failures, mentioning familiar names such as Polaroid, Wang and Digital Equipment. Each of these companies capitalized on their innovations to enjoy a temporary competitive advantage they couldn't sustain.
According to Grabowski, all the companies had neglected "front-end marketing," a much-undervalued discipline that includes not sales and promotion but market research, competitive intelligence, business-model building, and payback analysis. He has created a "marketing/engineering investment ratio" to measure a company's relative outlays in both areas. The metric has recently bubbled up on the agenda of many managers seeking a framework for setting strategy.
(Abstracted from The Boston Globe, 14 January 2007)
Business intelligence activities still in their infancy?
A recent survey of 741 IT and business pros by the Data Warehouse Institute found that 81% of respondents still are suffer from inaccurate data reporting, 78% by arguments over which data is appropriate for "master data" repositories, and 51% by bad decisions based on incorrect definitions. On the operational side, data warehouses are still too hard to build and manage, especially for companies that can't afford the specialist expertise.
The IT industry and profession are said to be emerging from their adolescent years, but data/content management and business intelligence are still in their infancy. Continuous learning is considered the most critical factor in developing them.
(Abstracted from Intelligent Enterprise, 6 January 2007)
Best Practices LLC presents its study for achieving competitive intelligence power in pharma industry
To aid CI leaders in search of excellence, specific CI best practices are revealed in Managing the Competition: Turning Competitive Intelligence into Strategy, a compelling benchmarking study conducted by Best Practices, LLC.
The study presents provocative sharing compiled from surveys and in-depth interviews with 29 top CI executives at such world-class companies as AstraZeneca, IBM, Merck, GlaxoSmithKline, Kodak, Eli Lilly, Abbott Labs, Progress Energy and SAS.
Interviewed class participants offer informative case studies and best practices that speak to such key CI processes as collection of competitive information, synthesizing findings into critical action steps, disseminating data to key stakeholders and integrating recommendations into strategy
Source: Best Practices LLC press release, 15 December 2006