Everyone has likely heard the riddle: Which came first, the chicken or the egg? I do not know what the answer to that question is, and perhaps it is more a philosophical one to assess a person's position on origins...
Having spent a signifiant part of my life in the business development world in the Enterprise Data Warehousing market over the past couple of years, the question is also generally heard but in a different form: "Who takes credit for the ROI on my Business Intelligence project, the data warehouse infrastructure or the analytics/applications that make sense of all of this data?" In the sales world, this is an important question because it determines the strategic importance of a vendor's products. Of course, that strategic importance ultimately determines the vendors' share of wallet with that company and over the long term in the industry. Money talks. Therefore, like a good politician every technology is out there to take credit for the analytical ROI.
For an analytics or application solution like SAS, Retek, Siebel, TRM, i2, SPSS, Microsoft analysis tools, etc... the value is obvious. The deep analytics and decision-making capabilities enable companies to drive to decisions and answers they were not able to reach prior to having those tools and applications in place. Without the decision-making intelligence, no decision, no benefit, no ROI.
However, the database and infrastructure vendors also have a case to be made... especially the MPP (Massively Parallel Processing) database technology vendors like Teradata, DATAllegro, and Netezza. Without the ability that the database engines provide to crunch through terabytes worth of detailed data at the atomic level, the analytics engines that depend on this machinery would not be as effective. Therefore, they may say: "Not too fast, you're delivering that value on our nickel. We should take credit here."
Interestingly enough, only recently the BI market was relatively fragmented. Application vendors, BI vendors (Cognos, Business Objects, Hyperion, Microstrategy, etc.), and the database infrastructure vendors (Oracle, Teradata, IBM, etc.) were all in their own camps. And as such, each vendor sold on the merits of their own tools in this interdependent technical environment. Today, the industry is starting to consolidate where BI and application companies are being bought up by larger infrastructure players (IBM, Oracle, and SAP... who is taking the analytical market more seriously now). As such, it is now possible for a company to get all of their analytical needs met by a single vendor and gain a complete picture of the benefits and returns without necessarily having to ration the cost/benefit among tools offered by different vendors. Of course, this is being said as the ROI evaluation process provided by technology vendors is, at the end of the day, a marketing and sales function rather than a consulting or financial evaluation function. In this world, having a vendor that can offer a single package that will deliver all of the goods will be to your benefit.
However, while there is consolidation in the market, all of the tools are (as far as I know) compatible with all of the major infrastructure platforms. Additionally, the deep analytics powerhouses remain independent (I'm thinking of SAS here) so there will be tension in the ROI credit discussion. Yes, even with all of the consolidation this is a very competitive market... especially with the DWA (data warehouse appliance) significantly lowering the cost for performance for infrastructure which is a great thing for IT staffs with limited budgets.
For an industry poised for growth, and a market ready to leverage those capabiliites, that is a good thing.
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