What’s in a name?

You can contact Nigel Pendse, the author of this section, by e-mail on NigelP@olapreport.com if you have any comments or observations. This page was last updated on August 5, 2002.

Everyone wants to be (or at least look like) a winner, and this is at least as true of the dozens of OLAP vendors, as it would be for any other competitive group — so they all try to be perceived as leaders or pioneers of their chosen niches. They work hard to come up with distinct positioning statements that can make them appear to dominate significant portions of the market. This requires them to define ingeniously subtle variations on common themes, because there aren’t enough suitable descriptive words to go round. This self-generated classification system makes the vendors’ marketing people feel good, but the results can be very confusing for buyers.

The phrases business intelligence and decision support crop up most often, but performance management seems to have replaced the short-lived EBI or e-BI fashion. OLAP is used much less often than might be expected, and the old EIS term appears almost to have disappeared. The most popular self-descriptions are pioneer and world/global leading (or leader). Some even claim to be the “only” providers of their type of offering. Ironically, however, few of the largest vendors use grandiose words like these to describe themselves.

However, one change since we began monitoring slogans is that vendors have become more cautious in calling themselves “world market leaders”: fewer of the obviously small companies now make this outlandish claim (in fact, few of these vendors even make it into our market shares table). Presumably lawyers now check more press releases, particularly in the public companies?

Someone who attempted to classify the products into competing subgroups would have real trouble doing so if their main source of information was vendors’ press releases. For example, Brio, Business Objects and Cognos are all direct competitors (and cannot all be the leader of the same segment), but this is hardly apparent from their favored descriptions of themselves.

Another problem is that industry watchers all have their own contrived categories and each refuses to use classifications coined by others. The smaller vendors often try to curry favor with whichever industry analyst they currently regard as most influential and therefore adopt essentially meaningless descriptions like “enterprise business intelligence”. Several quite different products that are in no way competitive with each other can therefore apparently fall into the same category, whereas direct competitors might opt for quite different analyst groupings — none of which helps the buyer.

The result is that someone who wishes to select suitable OLAP products cannot even begin the search by using vendors’ own classifications of themselves. If, for example, a site wants to implement typical OLAP applications like a management reporting system, a budgeting and planning system or front-end software for a data warehouse, a text search of press releases and Web sites looking for these words is likely to produce a very unreliable list of suppliers.

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