Q&A: Information Builders' CEO talks about BI, outsourcing

Gerry Cohen also talked about consolidation in the business intelligence industry

By Marc L. Songini

November 4, 2003 12:00 PM ET

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Computerworld - Gerry Cohen, the CEO of Information Builders Inc. for the past 27 years, has seen his share of ups and downs in the industry. The head of the business intelligence software vendor spoke with Computerworld about the BI market, outsourcing and the current state of his own privately held firm, which is based in New York City.

Is business intelligence still a healthy place to be? I think it will be a healthy segment for 2004. Not only is it moving up the stack but moving down the stack to midsize and smaller companies. The big companies on one hand are picking an enterprise solution, and midsize and smaller ones are getting into it, and it's growing across the whole market. I think the last couple of months there's been a little relaxation in budgets. I think optimistically.

There have been recent buyouts in the BI market. Will that consolidation continue? There are not that many players. The reason why it's accelerating is that each player is trying to fill up the stack of enterprise solutions. Business Objects was not in enterprise reporting, so that's why it bought Crystal Decisions (see story). Crystal Decisions was not in ad hoc querying. In some senses, Hyperion bought Brio to bring Brio to a wider audience. People are just kind of broadening their offerings.

You've been talking about business performance management. Can you elaborate? A user thinks, "With better technology we can save money by improving an existing process." Then there are things that can just be made more efficient with a new process, so the user looks into it to find out how. The third area is competitive advantage: "I'm going to get a jump on competitors and possibly find a new revenue stream." The new area of business performance management is in the second category, where we are looking for ways to improve efficiency.


Gerry Cohen, the CEO of Information Builders Inc.

What's coming from your company? In a few weeks, visual online analytical processing. It's nifty. This will let you look at multiple dimensions at one time vs. what we have today, where you see one dimension and drill down and go across to another dimension. We'll have it all on one panel in one shot. For instance, when you look at quality [control], you can see that quality in a California plant is down. That's an effect. When you have an effect, you have to see what's the cause. That's where OLAP comes in -- it lets you look

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