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Introduction

This article looks at some of the current trends in software development and the way in which OBIEE is being shaped by these trends. Put succinctly, there are growing pressures to develop software that is “modular”, “collaborative”, and “adaptive”. The good news is that these changes will benefit those large organizations who are significant consumers of IT by offering more flexibility – the ability to select different products from different vendors on a “pick-n-mix” basis.

Collaboration, not Domination

Not too many decades ago, the strategy of the major IT vendors – the likes of Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft – was that of domination. The objective within a particular organization was to supply all of that organization’s IT needs and to oust any competitors who already had a “foot in the door”. In the past most large organizations were rather inflexible, based within a particular region, and subject to only moderate pressures for change, and within that environment the objective of becoming a sole supplier was both achievable and profitable.

While this “top predator” approach can still work in the SME marketplace, it doesn’t work at present, nor will it work in the future, when it comes to larger organizations (excepting, perhaps, centralized government procurement). In more recent times, where acquisitions and mergers are frequent events, the IT infrastructure mix of large organizations is continuously changing – a new acquisition brings with it new hardware and software. Consolidation around a single vendor’s products is no longer practical due to both the cost of the consolidation and the pace of change within the organization. So the objective for the IT boards of today’s large companies is to find modular solutions that allow hardware and software from many different vendors to work together.

We can see this trend in hardware in terms of the development of grid computing – start small, but deploy a flexible, SOA-based architecture that allows your organization to easily add or reconfigure hardware to meet changing needs. And as a software vendor in today’s marketplace, your best chance of getting a “foot in the door” with a new client is if your product can offer “seamless integration” with the company’s existing product set.

Now to OBIEE. It’s essentially a consolidating reporting tool: take data from disparate sources, use some clever mapping software to integrate it together so that it seems to come from a single source – a single database table with a large number of columns – and then construct reports based on this unified semantic view of corporate data. Then if your organization acquires a new business with data that is served by a different software vendor, all you have to do is to amend the mapping. With that change in place the new data is merged in seamlessly to your existing set of corporate reports.

The flexibility inherent in OBIEE can be used in other ways. It cleverly separates the collection and consolidation of data from the presentation of that data. The presentation of data, performed by OBIEE’s Presentation Services component is only very loosely coupled to the collection and consolidation of data, performed by OBIEE’s Server component. The industry standard ODBC interface that the BI Server presents to the world can just as easily be used by a reporting tool from a different vendor. So we see an absence of the “vendor tie-in” that we’ve been so accustomed to in the past. And it’s to your advantage: defining a unified semantic model for your business data is something you want to do once, and having done so it’s subject to incremental change; however, you may well wish to change the way that data is displayed or processed as new reporting tools come on the market. For example, while OBIEE’s Presentation Services component offers good basic business graphics, if you want to use technical graphics, statistical analysis, or visualization software then you’ll have to look elsewhere. But if you can find suitable software that supports the ODBC standard then you can plug it into your BI Server and “off you go”. You’ll be leveraging the investment you’ve made in your unified semantic model – you won’t be re-inventing the wheel.

Preserving Brand Value

Do you like Oracle, or IBM, or Microsoft? Depending on your past experiences with these vendor’s products and services you’ll have an opinion. It’s almost as though each vendor “leaves a certain taste in the mouth”, be it “nice” or “nasty”.

Just as the users of IT software make acquisitions, so too do the suppliers of this software. When the acquisition is a small, relatively unknown brand, purchased for the “behind the scenes” technical quality of its implementation, then it makes no difference when the brand disappears from the scene. But what if the brand is a large, well known name? The early 2000s saw a buying spree by the likes of Oracle, IBM and Microsoft, and many of the acquired companies where major brands that cost their new owners billions of dollars – for example, brand names like PeopleSoft, Siebel, and Hyperion now belong within the Oracle stable. As the owner of newly acquired software should you quickly integrate it into your existing product set? Even if the acquired software provides much the same functionality as your existing product set, what are the business implications of destroying the brand? The goodwill associated with a recognized brand is a valuable asset, and preserving it, at least in the medium term, is often a far better business strategy.

Now it’s common in other industries for a single holding company to own many different brands, say, fashion brands, that are essentially the same in terms of the range of goods sold. Owners of multiple brands can still achieve economies of scale by buying from the same suppliers, and by consolidating management and back-office services. To serve the needs of the different brands all that is required is to vary the design of products and premises, and to target different market sectors in advertising campaigns.

We are beginning to see the same trends at work in IT. The move to a SOA-based architecture means that it’s possible to build several superficially different software products around the same set of common modules or services, and to provide brand differentiation by using different end user layouts and skins. This is the approach that the major vendors are taking when it comes to converging acquired products. For example, take Oracle’s OWB product and the Data Integrator product that it acquired from Sunopsis in October 2006. Behind the scenes these products are exchanging modules in much the same way that viruses exchange genes. Both products become fitter and offer new functionality as a result. Now, while in this case Oracle’s roadmap is to integrate the two products into a single product in due course, another option was also available. Oracle could have merged the underlying functionality, but could have retained a different interface for each product, giving each a different look and feel. The brand value of Data Integrator does not make this approach worthwhile in the present case, but it may well do so, or may well justify a prolonged roadmap to integration, in the case of some of the “beefier” products in the Oracle stable.

In order to minimize the ease with which a product can be given a new look and feel, the design and layout of the user interface needs to be “soft-coded”. We can see this trend at work in the BI Answers, BI Dashboards, and BI Delivers component of OBIEE. The interface is specified by means of thousands of XML messages, and it’s built dynamically from these messages when the Presentation Services process that acts as a server is started up. The advantage for your organization of this trend in “soft-coded” interfaces is that – when they’re exposed, as is the case with OBIEE’s custom XML messages – you too can make substantial changes to the interface to meet your organization’s requirements.

Summary

The current trend is for software from different vendors to become more modular, more interoperable, and for each module to become more tailorable. There was a time when a bespoke IT application was built from scratch with many lines of 3GL code – at a high cost in terms of both corporate “blood and treasure”. In the future, hardware and software vendors will be vying to sell you highly tailorable modules that will fit together with the ease of “Lego” bricks, and from those modules you’ll be able to construct the bespoke system that you might have built in the “days of yore”, but you’ll do so far faster and at a fraction of the cost. So, when it comes to current procurement, try to pick those products that exemplify this trend – and you’ll find that OBIEE is a very promising contender.

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