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In our benchmark research on the relation between business intelligence (BI) and search capabilities, Ventana Research assessed overall trends and the maturity of 322 organizations. Research participants expressed concern about the difficulty of integrating BI, text analytics and search components, yet only about 20 percent said it is very important to get all components from a single vendor. Thus, getting heterogeneous products to work together will be a challenge for organizations. At the same time, our research found that their requirements are broad – so broad that a single technology vendor would have difficulty meeting all of them.

Regarding search vendors, we found that Microsoft’s products are used most often (by 63 percent), followed by those of the consumer provider Google (48 percent), Oracle, IBM and dedicated providers Open Text and Autonomy. Microsoft also led in use of BI tools (53 percent), followed by Oracle, Business Objects and Cognos. Respondents named a completely different set of technology vendors for text analytics and mining; SAS is used by a third (34 percent) of organizations, while none of the other specialized vendors garnered more than 12 percent.

User organizations should expect that fulfilling their various needs will require products from more than one or two vendors. Integration thus will be a primary issue. Ventana Research advises organizations to compare the offerings of technology vendors for both BI and search with the goal of finding and using information more easily to advance their decision-making effectiveness.

About the Author

Mark is responsible for the overall direction of Ventana Research, and drives the global performance management research agenda, which covers both business and technology areas. He researches the specific areas of Workforce Performance Management and Business Process Management. He is also the Director of the Intelligent Business Performance Management Conference and the community editor of IntelligentBPM.com, the industry's first independent forum for information, news, and discussion about business performance management. An industry veteran with more than 17 years of industry experience in business and technology, before founding Ventana Research, Mark worked at companies including SAP, META Group, Oracle and IRI Software. Mark can be contacted at mark.smith@ventanaresearch.com.