Use of business intelligence solutions among small and midsize businesses (SMBs) is expanding rapidly. Organizations are deploying increasingly sophisticated reporting and analytical solutions.
Applications that involve collection, distribution and interpretation of information have become one of the fastestgrowing areas of the SMB IT world. This trend is being driven by two factors. One is that high-performance business intelligence tools have become increasingly affordable. The second is that, as organizations deploy these tools, they tend to discover an array of new informational applications that increase business efficiency and create competitive advantage.
A similar shift is occurring in large organizations, where the same factors are driving deployment of business intelligence tools for departmental and specialized applications. Among both groups, however, new opportunities have led to new challenges.
User demand for business intelligence capability has raised costs and put pressure on IT skill bases. All too often, expectations that “commodity” solutions would prove simple and inexpensive have been disappointed. These problems can be solved. But to do so, users need to better plan for management and support of business intelligence solutions in their organizations. And they must revise their expectations as to what vendors should supply.
This report deals with these issues. Specifically, it compares experiences with and costs for Microsoft SQL Server 2005 solutions employing Analysis and Reporting Services with IBM Balanced Warehouse C1000 and C3000 offerings.
