By Boris Evelson

A number of clients ask me "how many people do you think use BI". Not an easy question to answer, will not be an exact science, and will have many caveats. But here we go:

1. First, let's assume that we are only talking about what we all consider "traditional BI" apps. Let's exclude home grown apps built using spreadsheets and desktop databases. Let's also exclude operational reporting apps that are embedded in ERP, CRM and other applications.
2. Then, let's cut out everyone who only gets the results of a BI report/analysis in a static form, such as a hardcopy or a non interactive PDF file. So if you're not creating, modifying, viewing via a portal, sorting, filtering, ranking, drilling, etc, you probably do not require a BI product license and I am not counting you.
3. I'll just attempt to do this for the US for now. If the approach works, we'll try it for other major regions and countries.
4. Number of businesses with over 100 employees (a reasonable cut off for a business size that would consider using what we define as traditional BI) in the US in 2004 was 107,119
5. US Dept of Labor provides ranges as in "firms with 500-749 employees". For each range I take a middle number. For the last range "firms with over 10,000" I use an average of 15,000 employees.
6. This gives us 66 million (66,595,553) workers employed by US firms who could potentially use BI
7. Next we take the data from our latest BDS numbers on BI which tell us that 54% of the firms are using BI which gives us 35 million (35,961,598) workers employed by US firms that use BI

At the 15 March press and analyst Q&A by SAP co-CEOs Jim Hagemann Snabe and Bill McDermott, new middleware boss Vishal Sikka shed more light on the company's intentions for NetWeaver. Many of SAP's business applications customers use NetWeaver, both as a foundation for SAP's applications and to extend those applications using integration, portals, and custom developed apps. For about a year, the question has been how much additional investment SAP will put into NetWeaver.

Sikka made two comments that indicate how he's thinking about the NetWeaver portfolio.

1. In response to my question about whether SAP is concerned that Oracle's ownership of Java will put it at a disadvantage, Sikka started by highlighting SAP's work on Java performance, but then noted the availability of good open-source Java software to support the requirements of SAP customers.

Early last week, I attended the first annual “Canonical Model Management Forum” here in the DC area. A number of government agencies as well as several of the major banks, insurance companies, credit-card operators, and other private-sector firms attended the meeting. There was one vendor sponsor (DigitalML, the vendor of IgniteXML), and the meeting was hosted at a CSC facility. There were a number of presentations by the attendees about their environments, what had motivated them to establish a canonical model, how that work had turned out, and the important lessons learned.

But What Is A Canonical Information Model?

In the first day of sessions, I heard a number of definitions of canonical modeling, but most were similar to Forrester’s:

A canonical information model is a model of the semantics and structure of information that adheres to a set of rules agreed upon within a defined context for communicating among a set of applications or parties.

We don't normally draw attention to things like this (changing our underlying platform technology), but in this case, there are some key differences in capabilities, that you need to know about so you can benefit from them. As you already know if you've been following the Application Development & Program Management blog, we have a team of analysts who are already active bloggers. But in the past, it may have been challenging, if you were particularly interested in following the posts of one analyst, to do that in amongst the posts from the rest of the team.

So I'm thrilled that we now have individual blogs for all the analysts on the team, too. Everything blogged by the team also rolls up into the team-level blog, which is a good place to hang out if you're following several analysts on the team, have more eclectic interests around application development and delivery, or just want to be tuned in to what's going on across the team.

Another great innovation (for you) of our new platform is that blog pots are now presented with only summary information showing in the initial view. Only after you choose to drill down on a post do you see the whole thing. This makes it easier to look through several posts, whether on an analyst or team blog, and find just the stuff you care about.

And now for a few words from Cliff Condon, the Forrester exec who leads our social computing initiative of which this new platform is a part, on Forrester blogs and what it means for you:

• Everyone’s welcome here.  Forrester analysts use blogs as an input into the research they produce, so having an open, ongoing dialogue with the marketplace is critical. Clients and non-clients can participate – so I encourage you to be part of the conversations on Forrester blogs.