Matching Google’s speed
“Corporate performance management incorporates business intelligence and other processes in order to do this.”
Business intelligence tools provide the means to analyse corporate data to measure performance. While enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions allow transactions to be processed more efficiently, business intelligence and performance management solutions allow a business to be run more efficiently and effectively, says Jones.
Companies need a combination of these solutions, preferably from the same supplier. The market has become more competitive and it is more feasible to standardise on one supplier, which is good news for customers says Jones.
“It reduces administration costs and the interoperability between software solutions becomes the supplier’s responsibility.”
Even if the solutions do not integrate that well right away, the supplier can tell their customers when it will happen, says Jones.
He says it is in Microsoft’s interest to drive down software costs in line with its strategy to get everyone to use its products, whereas SAP has primarily focused its efforts on high-value customers.
“Microsoft’s strategy is good for customers because it has started a price war.”
He says the company is bent on extending its dominance of software use at the user level to all areas of the organisation.
In the business intelligence and performance management arenas, market dominance starts with ownership of the user interface, which gives control and visibility of the business from any user device. To this end, suppliers are now incorporating search-engine capabilities in their business intelligence solutions, says Jones.
But while Google searches in a fraction of a second and is free, business intelligence solutions can take between five and 30 seconds or longer to produce a result and can cost R1m.
He says the performance of these tools has to be ramped up to meet the expectations of users who are used to Google response times.
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