When a user of a BI application complains about the application not being useful - something that I hear way too often - what does that really mean? I can count at least 11 possible meanings, and potential reasons:

1. The data is not there, because

• It's not in any operational sources, in which case the organization needs to implement a new app, a new process or get that data from an outside source
• It is in an operational source, but not accessible via the BI application.

The data is there, but

2. It's not usable as is, because

• There are no common definitions, common metadata
• The data is of poor quality
• The data model is wrong, or out of date

3. I can't find it, because I

• Can't find the right report
• Can't find the right metadata
• Can't find the data
• I don't have access rights to the data I am looking for

4. I don't know how to use my application, because I

• Was not trained
• Was trained, but the application is not intuitive, user friendly enough

5. I can't/don't have time do it myself - because I just need to run my business, not do BI !!! - and

• I don't have support staff
• I am low on IT priority list

6. It takes too long to

• Create a report/query
• Run/execute a report/query

My colleague, Holger Kisker, just posted a very insightful blog on the convergence of BI and BPM technologies. Yes, Holger, BPM vendors definitely have some BI capabilities. And so do some search vendors like Attivio, Endeca and Microsoft FAST Search. And so do some middleware vendors like TIBCO, Vitria and Software AG. And so do rules vendors like FairIsaac, PegaSystems. Should I go on? I have a list of hundreds of vendors that "say" they are a BI vendor.

But it’s not that simple. First of all, let’s define BI. In the last BI Wave we defined BI as “a set of methodologies, processes, architectures, and technologies that transform raw data into meaningful and useful information used to enable more effective strategic, tactical, and operational insights and decision-making”. To provide all these capabilities a vendor should have most of the necessary components such as data integration, data quality, master data management, metadata management, data warehousing, OLAP, reporting, querying, dashboarding, portal, and many, many others. In this broader sense only full BI stack vendors such as IBM, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft, SAS, TIBCO and Information Builders qualify.

Even if we define BI more narrowly as the reporting and analytics layer of the broader BI stack, we still want to include capabilities such as 11 ones we use to rate BI vendors in the BI Waves:

EMC announced this morning that it has acquired a stake in Web content management vendor FatWire, one of the remaining standalone major WCM players in the market. With this announcement, EMC has finally admitted what’s been obvious for some time: that its current Documentum Web Publisher product simply doesn’t have the ability to become a marketing tool for ebusiness and marketing teams to achieve business goals in the online channel.

What’s interesting about this announcement is what didn’t happen – the expected sale of FatWire to EMC, which many have speculated about for the past year or so. Now, EMC won’t fully own its prescribed WCM product, and will instead rely on FatWire for that component of its content management suite. FatWire, a leader in Forrester’s last WCM Wave evaluation, has strong customer engagement functionality, better than the Documentum Web Publisher offering. With this deal, FatWire gets an improved distribution platform for its WCM, and opportunities for further integration with EMC products such as its digital asset management offering (which it will also resell).

What’s also interesting is that this marks an end to EMC’s dream of a unified repository for all enterprise content, since FatWire products have their own repository. Many of Forrester’s clients have known for a while that this dream simply wasn’t reality, due to organizational issues as well as technological ones.

EMC will likely make an announcement about sunsetting its current Documentum Web Publisher later this year, though support will certainly continue for several years through current maintenance agreements and an extended paid support period. Right now, if you are a current Web Publisher customer, you’ll have to decide:

Forrester had heard rumors of restructuring at SAP before the announcement on February 7^th that SAP’s CEO Leo Apotheker has resigned with immediate effect.

The return to joint CEOs with Jim Haggemann-Snabe running product and Bill McDermott running sales is likely to help in focusing on improvements in the field to restore SAP's sales fortunes in a tough market.