Guest author Dr. Rado Kotorov is chief innovation officer at Information Builders.

The challenge of making business intelligence (BI) easier to use and more pervasive has been widely debated for the last five years. During that time, BI has stalled at an estimated penetration of between 10% and 20% of enterprise users. Every year sees a new analytical technology, a new analytical tool, a new process that promises more analytical power to the business analysts, but none of them have been able to move the needle toward widespread adoption, or "consumerization" of BI.

How Many Business Analysts Do We Really Need?

But is it reasonable to expect more tools for the business analysts to increase Business Intelligence's enterprise penetration? How many business analysts does a business really need?

Instead, we should be thinking about delivering BI to operational employees, suppliers and partners. For every business analyst, there are thousands of other employees who could benefit from the timely information BI can provide. To jump beyond BI's current adoption rate, the needs and skills of those stakeholders must drive BI's technology and the usability considerations.

Apple vs. Microsoft And Apps vs. Tools

When we look at BI through the eyes of end-users as well as business analysts, we can see two different approaches centered on two different philosophies, roughly comparable to the differing philosophies of Apple and Microsoft. While Microsoft has always tailored itself to the business world, Apple aimed its software to the consumer, creating an epic battle between tools and apps.

Microsoft offers a relatively limited set of tools packed into its Office productivity suite. They were designed to satisfy every business need. But of Excel's approximately 30,000 different functions, guess how many the average Excel user utilizes? Most use less than 5%. Only a few know how to use Pivot tables, and IT departments have to build thousands of macros to simplify Excel templates.

Apple, meanwhile, created an app store with 500,000 mostly single-purpose apps designed to meet the broadest possible set of wants and needs, many of which you didn¹t even know you had!

When asked whose paradigm is better, the vast majority of BI stakeholders would likely agree that their end-users would prefer apps over tools.

Fighting Functionality Overload

This is because knowledge workers suffer not only from information overload, but also from functionality overload. End-users are not analysts. When individuals need to check the weather, they do not perform a detailed analysis of the weather patterns. They trust what the weather app says. Similarly, business users want apps that deliver them the trusted information they need to do their jobs.

From this perspective, the consumerization of BI can only be driven by technologies that turn the classic enterprise BI portal into a BI app store, where end users can go and select targeted, specific apps that address their concrete questions.

Two Kinds Of BI Tools

Of course, the simplicity of end-user info apps should be complemented with higher-end tools to help professional analysts learn to perform new and more complex analyses and derive even better business insights.

Rather than striving to turn end-users into analysts, we have to give those users info apps that let them focus on their primary job skills. And vice versa: Rather than making simplistic BI tools for analysts, let's help them learn new methods and methodologies to maximize the insights they can derive. Analysts are coping with new data sources, new types of data and new forms of interaction with consumers, all of which provide plenty of opportunities for analysis, but also requires significant skills development.

How to "consumerize" Business Intelligence may not yet be completely clear, but one thing is certain: It's pretty clear that a one-size-fits-all approach won't do the job. BI-related apps could meet the varying needs of end-users more efficiently than the all-encompassing tools analysts require, and help make BI a core part of enterprise decision making.

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Guest author Indus Khaitan is a co-founder of Bitzer Mobile.

Classical sales models are an artifact of the assembly line economy. Manufacturing builds parts; assembles finished goods, ships them to a warehouse and relies on sales and marketing to bring in revenue. This is how cars, medicines, beauty products, books, food and beverages, and many other things have long been built and sold.

Applying the classical model to enterprise software is doomed to failure.

The 3 Components Of Classical Sales

Territories, quotas and commissions are the three components of the classical sales model:

1. Territories were created to increase customer coverage based on how far a sales representative can drive, meet a customer and be back home in the evening.

2. Quotas further divide a territory between multiple individuals or simply create a target number to help assess how much a territory could add to company revenues.

3. Commission plus a fixed monthly retainer constitute the total compensation. If the sales numbers are above the agreed quota, commissions may be higher.

Why It Doesn't Work For Enterprise Software

The buying process of enterprise software is fundamentally different today, making the classical sales model obsolete:

1. Buyers are informed. Thanks to Internet, people know about the product before they start a conversation with a software vendor. As a result, few buyers are willing to spend time with classical sales professionals. Instead of a sales pitch, they are looking for thought leadership, education and the advice of a trusted partner. The new rule is, “show me how you’ll solve my problem," not “tell me about your product.”

2. Inbound Marketing is trumping outbound marketing. Prospects discover a product or a company via influencers, search engines and other channels before they start a conversation. Website content, videos, product literature, blog posts and so on enable customers to understand the product before they meet a salesperson. Inbound marketing helps them self-select or eliminate a product.

3. Enterprise software is assembled after buying. Software does not work in isolation; it gets orchestrated with pre-existing pieces. An enterprise solution is a sum of individual parts a company may have bought from multiple vendors. A database, a middleware server, an identity framework, an application builder, a security appliance… the list goes on. Fast-paced innovation is creating companies that are good at one or two things and enterprise customers may be looking for a collection of best-of-breed products.

4. Multi-functional teams work for closing deals. As the complexity of software grows, product management, R&D and sales must work together to create a “solution” before a purchase transaction is made. The days of individually “shrink-wrapped” software is over; even ordinary enterprise apps are produced using a variety of enterprise tools working together, each serving its own purpose.

5. Buyers are distributed across geographies. In today's connected world, a lead in the sales funnel may originate from New York, but the decision makers are based out of Washington DC while the implementation team is based in India.

In the new normal, enterprise software buyers increasingly seek solution white-boarding sessions - not sales pitches. Traditional sales models simply can't cope with the changes, but effective replacements have yet to appear. Until a solution is developed, enterprise software vendors - and buyers - will find themselves under increasing pressure.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

1. Hire A Good UI Architect – Now 

2. Hand Out A Free Download 

3. Offer A SaaS Option 

4. Get Out Of The Way 

Guest author Kevin Prendeville is a global managing director with Accenture’s Product Lifecycle Services practice.

The tables have turned on many large high-tech companies - market leaders have become followers while followers have become leaders. What’s behind the seismic shift? The ability of those former followers to leverage investments in product development processes to deliver more innovative and successful products. These processes, known as Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), extend from idea gener¬ation through product launch to product retirement.

An analysis by Accenture has found that large high-tech companies can spend $1 billion or more per year on Product Lifecycle Management in hopes of substantially boosting revenues and cutting costs. But Accenture also found that many C-suite executives view PLM as the engineering department’s black box - a critical enterprise business process poorly understood, measured or managed.

Today’s competitive business environment requires that top management see PLM as a strategic corporate asset, a cross-functional, enterprise-wide business discipline that augments innovation, helps drive revenue growth, and reduces costs of everything from engineering rework to regulatory compliance.

What Is Product Lifecycle Management (PLM)?

PLM integrates a multitude of critical cross-functional activities, such as:

• product strategy
• portfolio management
• product management
• idea and requirements gathering
• product design
• product engineering
• product validation and compliance
• product costing
• product quality
• direct material sourcing
• manufacturing
• after-market services product retirement

PLM capabilities support PLM activities to drive activities, decisions and data within the end-to-end PLM process. Examples include

• intellectual property management
• product structure and reuse
• engineering changes
• stage-gate approvals
• ideas and requirements
• software configuration
• quality tests and defects
• product costs
• development project status

For global enterprises to maximize the business impact of PLM, they need to examine two dimensions: effectiveness and efficiency.

Large high-tech companies are making substantial investments - often 5% to 25% or more of revenue - in PLM. But according to Accenture’s analysis, nearly half of PLM ends up wasted on products that do not meet market needs or timing. High-tech enterprises have thousands of highly skilled and well-paid designers, scientists and engineers working inside global PLM processes across hundreds of current and future products. But due to lack of central coordination, prioritization and integration of processes, systems and data, they’re often working on essentially useless or redundant tasks. That means there’s a huge opportunity for improvement.

Technology can help improve PLM – if it’s implemented with an integrated plan focused on a distinct business process. Most global companies have deeply fragmented PLM systems comprising 20 or more applications. PLM software vendors provide powerful and field-tested applications – but not the kind of end-to-end business process coverage available in leading customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications. Most high-tech companies use three or more PLM vendors to span the various PLM capability areas.

Four Ways To Improve PLM

True enterprise PLM requires building an end-to-end framework that spans multiple solutions and accom¬modates business processes and data from marketing, design, product portfolio management and more. A one-size-fits-all answer does not exist, but Accenture has identified four best practices to get the most out PLM:

Step 1. Create an enterprise-wide framework to define PLM capabilities. Define what is and is not PLM, then formally break down and re-evaluate current PLM capabilities. Review all processes, applications, metrics, organization and data that underpin product development process flow from initial concept to product retirement. Then examine the performance and maturity of each as objectively as possible. High-performance businesses structure PLM as a hierarchy of capabilities that span the process, represent various organizations and competencies, and connect all corners of the PLM landscape with each another. Most companies that go through this exercise are surprised by how disjointed and fragmented their overall PLM approaches are and by how many gaps and redundancies they uncover. And they are often alarmed to find how few metrics and how little docu¬mentation supports their PLM activities.

Step 2. Link the PLM framework’s capabilities to key corporate and product priorities. Settle on five-to-ten business metrics that track the effectiveness and efficiency of innovation and product development outputs, transcending any one department or function. They might relate to pipeline throughput, cost of engineering, reuse of platforms or components or resource use. For instance, if plans call for more new products to be developed in lower-cost countries, the PLM framework would link that objective to the corresponding capabilities and metrics.

Step 3. Use the prioritized PLM framework As An investment planning tool. It is relatively straightforward to turn the results of these exercises into a powerful tool for ongoing planning activities. The organization’s varied constituents can more easily analyze trade-offs, guide investments in product development improvement projects, and measure the impact of those projects over time. For example, one high-technology company used this framework to concentrate its future PLM focus and investment to improve software product development processes rather than mechanical design. Basically, the firm chose to improve the productivity of its thousands of software designers instead of its hundreds of mechanical designers.

Step 4. Establish a group to own and update the PLM framework and corporate roadmap. As with CRM, ERP and supply chain management, there has to be a single, formal organization to advance and support PLM. That organization should have visible, unambiguous sponsorship from a senior executive. This helps ensure PLM becomes part of the company’s innovation fabric rather than a one-time project.

Three PLM Success Stories

Using these best practices, several high-tech companies have made significant progress with their PLM strategies:

1. One version of the truth. A provider of servers and storage equipment re-designed its business processes to better leverage PLM technologies. The firm created “one version of the truth” for a single engineering change process for all its hardware products including several from large acquisitions.

2. Integrating hardware and software. A provider of electronic gaming equipment developed new processes, data models and a central application to manage the relationship between its hardware designs and corresponding software designs, as they evolved through development and change processes.

3. Increasing re-use. A global consumer electronics company implemented a streamlined portal and graphic user interface - providing a fast and visual way for designers and engineers to search, find and re-use components, solutions and information stored in its PLM databases.

The good news is there are many cross-industry cases proving the merits of improving PLM. The better news is that many industries have already blazed PLM trails, providing proven strategies, lessons learned and methodologies for high-tech companies to leverage.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Guest author Anthony Smith is CEO of Insightly.

You may have read a lot of articles last year about why the so-called "freemium" model doesn’t work for most consumer-oriented companies. And it’s true that offering a base-level product for free to gain visibility and marketshare and then converting a subset of users to a paid, premium version is not a viable strategy for every business.

However, depending on the product you’re offering, the freemium model can work well for business-to-business (B2B) companies, and especially well for B2VSB (business-to-very-small-business) companies.

(See also Why Free Is Bad: Businesses Should Be Happy To Pay For Key Services)

Here are six questions to ask yourself if you are entertaining a freemium model for business customers:

1. How big is the target market? For a freemium model to work, you need to make sure your audience is extremely large, since typical conversion rates range from 3% to 10%. According to the Small Business Administration, in 2009 there were almost 28 million small businesses in the United States. (The SBA defines a small business as one with fewer than 500 employees). Let’s say your business captures 2% of all the small businesses as free accounts, and 3% of those convert to paying customers. That’s almost 17,000 paying customers. Based on your business model is that enough to sustain and grow a profitable business?

2. What is the value of a free customer? By offering your product for free, you run the risk of cementing that value in the minds of customers. The flip side of this is that when you’re trying to build a brand and a user base, the freemium model makes it easier to get exposure, a base of quality leads, the potential of high virality and a built-in sounding board for essential user feedback.

3. How does your product impact the daily lives of your users? Do your users recognize that your product makes their work life more productive, more efficient, more organized or more informed? If so, converting from a free version to a paid version will be a natural progression.

4. Does your product help grow your customer’s business? If your product offers some kind of analytics or metrics that can be used to measure an aspect of the health of the business (i.e., sales, efficiency, productivity savings or gains), then it’s easier to align your product with the growth of the company and easier for a small business to justify spending dollars on it.

5. What is the best conversion metric – transactions or users? Both models have pros and cons. In many cases, users like the transaction model because it’s often pay-as-you-go. However, sometimes a transaction model can be perceived as nickel-and-diming the user. A user license is another common conversion metric, and it may be easier for your customers to swallow as they try to justify the budget to convert from a free account to a paid one. If it makes sense, you can may be able to combine both models (i.e., offer X number of transactions per user license).

6. What is the difference between the free and paid versions of the product? Don’t cripple your free version to the point that it offers minimal value. Remember, your customer’s first interaction and impression will likely be with your free product, so make sure that your free offering is useful on its own terms and not just an obvious stepping stone to a higher-level paid version.

Freemium models should be based on your specific business realities. If the math of the freemium model looks like it will work for your business, your product and your audience, give it a try.

 Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

In 2006, Oracle promised customers it would always support and update its growing portfolio of business applications. By then it had swallowed PeopleSoft and Siebel Systems and it had to reassure customers that their investments were secure. Fast-forward seven years, and Oracle's promise, which it called Applications Unlimited, is coming back to haunt the software maker.

While trying to hold on to PeopleSoft and Siebel customers, Oracle was just getting started on its own Fusion Applications. The company marketed Fusion as its next-generation application suite that would bring together the best of its e-Business Suite and the software it had acquired for billions of dollars. Oracle believed Fusion would eventually spark a mass migration from the older applications to the latest and greatest from its own stable. But a new survey from Forrester Research has found Oracle was wrong, and customers are holding the company to its word and sticking with the older software with which they're familiar.

Oracle's Dilemma

By refusing to switch to the more expensive Fusion apps, Oracle customers are making it difficult for the company to grow application revenue, according to Forrester. "In recent years, Oracle's application revenue growth has underperformed both the overall software market and SAP, resulting from slowing growth in existing apps and too little revenue from its Oracle Fusion Applications," according to the report, entitled "Oracle's Dilemma: Applications Unlimited Versus Oracle Fusion Applications."

Forrester's numbers are sobering. The survey of Oracle clients found 65% had no plans to move to Fusion Applications and another 24% were on the fence. The biggest barriers were Oracle's muddled application strategy and the immaturity of Fusion, which became generally available in November 2011.

At the same time, recent acquisitions of software-as-a-service companies, such as Taleo and RightNow Technologies, are not bringing in enough revenue to take up the slack, according to Forrester. Oracle customers show little interest in trying the SaaS products, with only 11% of survey respondents interested in making the move.

Making matters worse, Oracle is in danger of losing business from some of its customers. Forrester found 29% of the companies it polled were planning to move to another vendor's SaaS product or packaged application. The main reasons for their unhappiness with Oracle were high licensing costs, high maintenance costs and difficulty in upgrading.

Impact on Oracle Customers

Oracle's lackluster revenue growth could eventually have an impact on customers. When revenue from a vendor's products are flat or declining, the company often treats the software as a "cash cow, milking maintenance revenues and cutting back in its investment in enhancing and supporting them," Forrester says.

While there are no signs that Oracle is heading down that path, the company is unlikely to let Applications Unlimited customers stay where they are forever. Oracle has sunk too much money and resources in Fusion Applications to let customers ignore them, Forrester says.

Oracle is expected to step up efforts to get customers to move to Fusion or its cloud infrastructure products. How the company will do that is not known, but it could decide to make life harder for companies that stay with the older technology. Forrester is advising companies to start preparing for the added pressure they will be feeling from Oracle.

For Oracle, Forrester believes it's "make-or-break time" for its applications business. The company's Fusion Applications are its main strategy for growing software revenue and defending against a number of fast-growing SaaS competitors.

Forrester believes that won't be enough.

Oracle is likely to kick-start its growth strategy with more acquisitions, and the likeliest candidates will be fast-growing SaaS companies. In the meantime, Applications Unlimited customers should ponder their next move.

Oracle did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.