On May 13^th, Forrester analysts Boris Evelson, Jim Kobielus, Gene Leganza, Holger Kisker and Noel Yuhanna joined me in hosting a data management TweetJam on the topic “What BI is Not!” using the hashtag #dmjam. (You can still see the results and ongoing conversation if you search the hashtag.)

During this one-hour TweetJam, we asked the following questions, leaving 10 minutes of Tweet-time between each question:

• Do you prefer the broad or the narrow definition of BI? Should ETL, DQ, DW, MDM be considered part of BI?
• How should we differentiate BI and analytics?
• What’s the difference between business intelligence and other forms of “intelligence” like competitive intelligence, market intelligence?
• Is convergence of structured and unstructured information hype or reality?
• Is BI looking only through the rear-view mirror, or should historical and predictive BI be one and the same?
• How will social media impact traditional BI?

The response to this event was extraordinary, and we have a large community of data management and BI thought leaders who joined the conversation to thank. During that single hour there were over 360 Tweets with 65 unique Tweeters actively joining the conversation (not including those who only listened). If you include Tweets leading up to the event and the continued conversation after the event, we’ve seen over 480 Tweets and over 100 Tweeters … and growing.  

But what did we accomplish (aside from providing an entertaining distraction for a number of people)? Below, I’ve summarized a sampling of the takeaways that were shared by some of our participants on each question:

1. Do you prefer the broad or the narrow definition of BI? Should ETL, DQ, DW, MDM be considered part of BI?

SAP’s acquisition of Sybase was one of those deals that just makes sense on so many levels for both parties. 

SAP is of course one of the dominant brands in enterprise applications, and it also has strong business intelligence (BI), data integration (DI), business process management (BPM), and service-oriented architecture (SOA) offerings. But, until this bombshell announcement, SAP had been lacking some key solution components that it needed to compete more effectively with the other dominant IT brands—specifically, with Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft. 

Unlike these rivals, SAP had been lacking an enterprise-grade database management system (DBMS) product of its own (no—the open-source MaxDB doesn’t qualify). Likewise, SAP has had no complex event processing (CEP) tools for truly real-time analytics and transactional computing. Furthermore, SAP had been lacking any in-database analytics features that would allow partners and customers to execute data mining, text analytics, and other advanced analytics features in its data warehousing (DW) platform. Also, though SAP has mobile access middleware in its NetWeaver platform, it has not been able to offer customers a truly world-class mobility-enabling toolset. 

Enter Sybase, a venerable and diversified IT brand that brings all of these key capabilities—and then some—to its soon-to-be corporate parent. This is as important an acquisition for SAP as Business Objects was two years ago. It will prove just as pivotal a move for fending off aggressive encroachment by Oracle into SAP core accounts. 

When preparing for our upcoming Forrester Data Management Tweet Jam (May 13^th, 2-3pm ET) -“What BI is Not!”- I got together with a few of Forrester’s data management and BI analysts to discuss some of today’s key BI questions.

The question on the table was, “How will social media impact traditional BI?”

Here’s a snapshot of what we talked about:

Jim Kobielus: (Twitter: @jameskobielus)