Open source business intelligence vendor Pentaho today announced that it has received a $23 million round led by New Enterprise Associates with participation from previous investors Benchmark Capital, Index Ventures and DAG Ventures.
That's why the majority of business intelligence vendor revenues actually come from support, consulting and services – i.e. customizing models and data extraction, transformation and loading scripts for each customer.
(Walk-ins may in fact be mentally disturbed persons, intelligence vendors, fabricators, provocateurs from hostile intelligence services, or persons gathering information on behalf of terrorist organizations).
Competitors include traditional business intelligence vendors such as SAS, SAP BusinessObjects, IBM Cognos and so forth.
Check Point created an alliance with several threat intelligence vendors to merge their feeds.
Additionally, business intelligence vendors are moving their systems to the cloud in order to provide services which offer companies cost-savings, better performance and faster access to new applications.
All that said, Wave is a graphical tool for viewing business analytics in an attractive and visual way on mobile devices and larger PC screens, but like many of Salesforce's services it will be rolled out slowly over time, and according to Forrester Analyst Boris Evelson, while it's impressive in its own way, it has ways to go before it can compete with established business intelligence vendors.
For example, Novation, a healthcare contracting services company, developed VHA PriceLynx (based on the mobile application platform of business intelligence software vendor MicroStrategy), a business intelligence app to help health care organizations manage its purchasing procedures more efficiently and save money for hospitals.
"The group was the target of a cross-industry initiative known as Operation Blockbuster earlier this year, which involved major security vendors sharing intelligence and resources in order to assist commercial and government organizations in protecting themselves against Lazarus".
With solutions like these, traditional legacy marketing vendors simply become commodity-like delivery vehicles and repositories, while the intelligence layer provided by these vendors will increasingly occupy the strategic mindshare of the CMO.
Vendors of Business Intelligence (BI) software have recently started extending their systems by features from social software.
