Why Profitbase?

Managing Director of Harvey Jones, Keith Jones, explains why his company chose the Profitbase product, and describes the considerations leading up to the decision.

-- By KEITH JONES MD, Harvey Jones

There have been significant shifts in the business intelligence and corporate performance management markets in the last 18 months, with more to come. The dust has not yet settled, and while the recent spate of acquisitions and software releases has left the four main players – Microsoft, SAP, Oracle and IBM – owning the lion’s share of the market, there is still some uncertainty as to how this is going to play out in the future.

The Chinese have the saying “May you live in interesting times”, which is actually a curse and not a blessing. Indeed, the last few years have certainly been interesting; in fact, they have been somewhat of a rollercoaster – and as the rollercoaster slows down, there still exists some movement. The software market is being commoditised, which always happens when the mainstream players enter, and it will respond to different stimuli going forward.

For the last decade, Harvey Jones has been a leading player in this sector of the market in South Africa, and the company was one of the leading ProClarity distributors globally before it was acquired by Microsoft.

Our job is to spot the trends before they become mainstream and to ensure that we are ahead of the curve. We have to see where the market is going and make sure we continue to lead the way. There were a number of trends we identified as being the major areas of progression:

• Business IP
  – offering best practice
• Quick deployment
  - reduced time to deliver
• Value in the data
  – true costing and profitability analysis
• Skills shortage
• Hosting

The first three trends are market drivers, and the fourth one is a result of the commoditisation that is currently occurring. I will not focus on hosting, as it is a way of reducing costs and leveraging best practice and usually getting a quick deployment into the deal. I will cover the other four areas in more detail:

• Business IP – best practice. The main issue any BI practitioner will tell you, is that businesses usually do not know what they want. “I’ll know what I want when I see it” is a common refrain, which leads to iterative prototyping as the safest way to deliver. What users are looking for are business solutions, not six-week analysis phases. Business IP allows the common drivers for an industry and market sector to be identified and pre-built. We always need data, and it should be clean; these are givens. What the market is looking for now is best business practice based on months and years of analyses performed in relation to its specific needs without the delay, the pain of investigation or the corresponding price point.
• Quick deployments - The software market is being commoditised, but all of the main players will recommend the same approach to building a BI solution. The analysis/ design/ETL/DW/OLAP/report/analyse cycle is the same for all vendors. It is expensive and time-consuming, and it usually misses the mark. Quick BI, our response, is all about packaging both the technical and business IP into a solution that allows you to produce results within a fraction of the time. We consider this to be the next area of the market that will come under pressure.
• Value in the data - This comes from making the right decisions and knowing, without doubt, that the data you are viewing is not failing to acknowledge any aspects. It usually means applying costs at a low granular level and getting true customer and product profitability figures out.
• Skills shortage - Good BI skills are now hard to find as the market has grown. The simple question is “How can I do more with less?” We need to build any number of cubes and roll them out for the enterprise, but cannot find the people to execute the operation. The first two items will go a long way in solving this problem.

- Keith Jones tok turen fra Sør-Afrika for å delta på Profitbase sin Brukerkonferanse. I artikkelen forteller han hvorfor man bør velge Profitbase.

Which platform? We have always been focused on the Microsoft market, but did not let that influence us in deciding where to go. The momentum is with Microsoft, without a doubt, and with its footprint, route to market and pricing model, it was easy to see it would dominate the sector.

It was also interesting to see the shift in the market. For
years Microsoft had been lambasted for an incoherent BI
strategy. Now it appears to be the only player in the market
that has a clear vision of where it is going.

So, we were looking for a solution set that could leverage the Microsoft stack to offer packaged business best practice, rapid deployments and value in the data. We chose another product to offer the costing value in the data, as this is a specialist niche area of the market, and not required by everyone.

We came across Profitbase through a referral from the ProClarity team in the Netherlands. The business templates offer the packaged IP the market is looking for. The Profitbase product offers us quick BI with the packaged connectors and easy-to-use single point of entry user interface, and the openness of the product and ability to combine data from multiple sources ensured that we could customise the product to meet every customer’s needs.

It was not an easy adoption within the business. We have a team of diehard best-practice BI practitioners and a highly experienced technical team. We had many heated discussions around Ralph Kimball, Bill Inmon and the failings (or lack thereof) of Visual Studio. Some argued that best practice was meeting the client’s needs quickly. This was countered with issues around star schemas, which were countered again with the point that these are technical issues and should not be used to confuse the business issues at hand.

The net result was that we banned best-practice discussions in the offices while we were doing the product evaluation. After a couple of highly successful deployments and a number of proofs of concept, the team is converted and strongly believes Profitbase has a leading role to play in the future of the BI market.

The product delivers on its promise. It delivers scalable, flexible, best-practice solutions in a fraction of the time compared to other products on the market, and it does so by fully leveraging the power of the Microsoft stack.

We are excited by the possibilities and see this as one of the main driving factors in market commoditisation: A business intelligence solution that delivers business value in a couple of weeks. That has to be a market changer. And it really works!

* * *

Nytt fra Harvey Jones i Sør Afrika:

– Vi har nå solgt Profitbase i litt over ett år og det har vært en fantastisk tid med full fart, forteller administrerende direktør i Harvey Jones, Keith Jones.

Harvey Jones går nå i gang med selskapets største Profitbase SAprosjekt hos SAB-Miller, og de har fem dedikerte konsulenter som skal bygge opp en komplett BIløsning på seks uker (fase 1). Den endelige løsningen vil lese salgsdata fra SAP og prisinformasjon fra tilpassede regneark i Excel. Disse er kombinert i komplekse matriser og SQL-rapporteringsrapporter. Prosjektet skal være ferdig i starten av desember 2008.

– Vi er også i gang med et nytt prosjekt i helsesektoren. Den mest spennende delen av dette prosjektet blir en spesialtilutviklet front end/ grensesnitt i Adobe Flash.

Leveransen skjer tidlig i 2009