The Future of Business Intelligence - What's On The Horizon, And How CIOs Can Prepare For It.

T he Future of Business In telligence

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Market Dynamics
Profound changes in the BI industry and in the marketplace compelled us to take a hard look
at how we should evolve to continue delivering superior value to our customers. This was our
commitment when we started the company nearly fifteen years ago, and it remains a bedrock
principle for us today. We recently decided that it’s a good time to share our thinking publicly.
The most important changes (at least for us) have been
with our friends at Microsoft and the evolution of the
SQL Server product line, one of their most successful and
profitable ventures. A few short years ago, SQL Server
and companion products such as SQL Server Reporting
Services (SSRS) were sold “à la carte”. Customers would
choose from a complex and sometimes confusing array
of products.
Today, SQL Server is sold as one of three all-inclusive
bundles: Standard, Business Intelligence and Enterprise,
plus a smattering of specialized offerings such as

Azure-based SaaS products. It’s now very clear which
capabilities each bundle includes; and like everything
else in our universe, you get more when you pay more.
Enterprise is truly a superlative offering – there’s probably
nothing else your company would ever need. But can you
afford it? If not, can you even afford the lesser “Business
Intelligence” bundle, also a worthy offering? From our
perspective, the costs associated with the licensing
schemes are truly jaw-dropping.
Regardless of cost considerations, most prognosticators
believe that SQL Server products will continue to be very
successful for years to come. We agree.
In contrast, Crystal Reports – an indispensable reporting
facility in the IT industry for decades – has not been
evolving in a significant way. But maybe it doesn’t need to.
It’s focused on doing certain things really, really well, as its
legions of devoted loyalists will attest. Crystal Reports is
hard to replace, and in general customers don’t want to fix
what isn’t broken. Equally important: It doesn’t break the
bank when you use it.
This means Crystal Reports will be around for a very long
time and will continue to be a staple in many IT shops.
But it also means fewer opportunities for us to add value
and help SAP extend Crystal Reports beyond its traditional
market segments.
What else is interesting for us? Mobile platforms, real-
time or on-demand business intelligence and process
automation float to the top of the list. Those areas
certainly aren’t new, but the priorities certainly reflect an
accelerating environment that rewards speed and the
reduction of business process friction. Some of today’s
requirements could not have been imagined a decade
ago. “Only the strong survive” is evolving gradually to
“only the fastest survive”. ChristianSteven Software has
always understood this and will continue to make client
businesses operate faster and more efficiently.
As part of our strategic planning process, we spent a lot
of time talking to our customers and other CIOs to better
understand what’s on their minds. More than anything
else, their concerns will drive our future direction.
Below we recap the major themes gleaned from those
conversations.
only the
fastest survive

CIO Top Priorities
CIOs are accountable for managing all kinds
of IT-related risks pertaining to business
continuity and limiting liability – it’s not just
about fending off hackers, protecting privacy
and other topics that enthrall the media.
Risk
If business intelligence distribution is the lifeblood of an
enterprise, its absence is the equivalent of strangulation.
It’s not just about producing the right stuff; it’s about
getting that stuff to the right person at the right time.
And the right person may very well be someone outside
the boundaries of your enterprise with whom you have
contractual obligations.
ChristianSteven Software’s products have always been
designed from the ground up to mitigate business
continuity risks. Yet our customers ask us frequently,
“What will you guys do in the future to further mitigate
risk?” We need and want to do more in this area.

Security
Security is daily front page news. Our customers tell us
repeatedly how important this is, so our leadership team
thinks about it constantly. We understand there is no such
thing as perfect security because that depends on perfect
human behavior. But we have always provided facilities
and mechanisms to maintain privacy, guarantee content
integrity and ensure the authenticity of recipients.
We will always continue to add new capabilities to
strengthen security. The IT world is evolving quickly,
and we will avail ourselves of new technologies and
methodologies.
Equally important: Our professional services consultants
are trained to point out security gaps and weak links in
client environments during consulting engagements.
We don’t make money by doing this, but it’s the right
thing to do. We’ll continue to upgrade relevant security
skills and knowledge for our consultants.
ROI
ROI is a tricky subject, although it’s a well-understood
concept. Almost every customer talks to us about this,
even after they purchase products or services from us.
We’ve come to understand that the approach to
investment decisions vary widely and often depend on
company size, sophistication and culture. At one end of
the spectrum is a “show me the numbers” approach based
on quantifiable net gains within a fixed – and sometimes
arbitrary - time period (e.g. one year). At the other end
of the spectrum are enterprises that use algorithms such
as specialized rates of return, multiple payback periods,
opportunity costs and the time value of money.
Our professional services consultants are
trained to point out security gaps & weak links

Sometimes ROI involves factors that are less tangible
and harder to measure. Although counterintuitive, we’ve
learned that it’s not always about money.
We realized we need to categorize ROI analysis styles to
have more meaningful conversations with prospective
customers. Some organizations value all quadrants of this
matrix. Others focus on only one of those quadrants.
Although a majority of our customers do experience
very short (months) payback times after an
implementation, we need to do a better job of using
our expertise to recognize prevalent client values and
tailor our analyses for their needs.
Implementation Success
Some of our clients have a reoccurring nightmare:
the purchase of a great software product followed by
a disastrous implementation or poor support. We find
it interesting that they share this fear frequently, even
though they reassure us that ChristianSteven Software
has been outstanding in this regard.
We strive for intimate, long term relationships with our
customers to ensure that our products deliver their full
value throughout their lifecycles. Superior planning,
deployment, maintenance and support have always been
top priorities for us because they differentiate us clearly
from larger, less focused competitors.
We’ll do more to expose the value of our professional
services. And we’ll do a better job of making sure
existing and prospective customers understand that
ChristianSteven Software will be around for a long time
and continue to be a reliable partner and advisor.
Reuse
CIOs stress constantly that preserving and fully exploiting
existing investments is an absolute requirement. For
us, it’s always been a foundational principle. We add
incremental value by extending and strengthening existing
tools and solutions. We never displace anything (except,
perhaps, an unwieldy homegrown report distribution
process that no one knows how to maintain).

We’ve been told repeatedly that maintaining this principle
is critical as we evolve our offerings. We have no plans to
change our approach.
The CIOs who run SQL Server in their companies are
most vociferous on this point. They typically spend a
king’s ransom to purchase and run that software. No
vendor can even begin a conversation with those folks if
there is any hint that any piece of an existing architecture
would be displaced.
Another twist on the notion of reuse: most enterprises
recognize that employees and people outside the
enterprise use personal mobile devices extensively to
access company resources and information. Security
managers everywhere shudder, but it’s a fact of life in all
but the most rigidly managed organizations. This means
business intelligence delivered by any ChristianSteven
Software solution must render flawlessly on every mobile
platform. Individuals and companies will not spend
money to upgrade personal devices to meet any minimal
technical standards required by our company (or any
other company, for that matter).
Borderless Enterprise
Business processes obviously don’t stop at the boundaries
of a company. Over the years we’ve been nothing short
of amazed at the uses customers find for our solutions.
One of them really stands out: the use of our products to
deliver business intelligence and documents beyond the
walls of the enterprise (e.g. customers, partners, suppliers)
at a scale that cannot be matched by other solutions,
including giants like Microsoft and SAP.
We received unambiguous feedback about the need
to preserve existing capabilities and to augment them
with additional features to increase efficiency across the
borderless enterprise. And it goes without saying that
these capabilities must be secure and guard privacy.
Software solutions
must render
flawlessly on every
mobile platform

Action for Actionable Intelligence
Reliable delivery of business intelligence is great, but
integrating that process with the rest of the enterprise
is even better. ChristianSteven Software solutions
have always supported threshold monitoring, process
automation, workflows and embedded data update
capabilities as natural product extensions.
Some customers worried that our commitment to these
capabilities would wane as we introduce new business
intelligence distribution solutions. Or they worried that
we would not focus on enhancing these capabilities in
the future.
Nothing could be farther from the truth. We recognize
very clearly that business intelligence by itself is
worthless unless a mechanism or a person responds to
it (if required). We will always strive to incorporate
superior features that promote task automation and
enable users to take action from within business
intelligence delivery solutions.
What we need to improve is our clarity about this topic.
These features are core capabilities of our solutions, not
afterthoughts.
BI itself is worthless unless a
mechanism or a person responds to it!

A Bright Future
Focus
We’re borrowing a phrase from Scott McNealy (“all the
wood behind one arrow”) to take advantage of the
burgeoning SQL Server market. We want to seize a
number of interesting opportunities in that space to
enhance and extend that platform. We will build on the
extraordinary legacy of SQL-RD and our other solutions
that have augmented SQL Server for many years. At
the same time, we have no intention of abandoning or
otherwise ignoring our existing products, all of which
provide significant revenue streams for us.
One Solution
We’ve had a vision for some years about creating a single
business intelligence distribution solution that would
service all needs on the Business Intelligence Continuum,
a spectrum of distribution and format possibilities for
specific needs across the borderless enterprise. It will be
“galactic headquarters” for the management and distribution
of actionable business intelligence, while at the same time
hiding complexity and offering end-users unmatched
ease-of-use. We believe this engine will be nothing short
of a revolution for business intelligence distribution.
Our leadership team has a crisp strategic
BI Product roadmap. We’re incorporating
what our customers told us; and we’re using
our own vision to establish these additional
guiding principles.

Self-Service
It boils down to this: companies save money when people
help themselves without assistance from others. We
will help people build and schedule more reports and
dashboards on their own. In effect, we want to manage
the plumbing behind the wall while enabling users to turn
on the business intelligence faucet without assistance.
Flexible Coupling
We’re evolving our thinking about how to best serve the
borderless enterprise while minimizing risk, increasing
security and playing nicely in a world where a host
infrastructure can mean any number of things (some
of which probably haven’t been invented yet). This
means we’ll architect a solution that is coupled flexibly,
agnostically and reliably to infrastructure services, data
sources and applications, regardless of where it lives or
where they live.
Intelligent Scaling
One of our core solution values has always been unlimited
horizontal scalability. We’ll not only continue that, but we’ll
make it better and easier to manage on a more robust
solution.
Value Narrative
This is more about economics than technology. We want
to make an obvious and compelling statement about the
value of a future solution. CIOs and other IT executives
should be able to look at our solution and know intuitively
how and why it’s going to improve business processes and
save money.
We’re very excited about the future. This is an important
moment in our company’s evolution and we are confident
about continuing to deliver superior value to our clients.
One of our core solution values has always
been unlimited horizontal scalability

Introducing IntelliFront BI™
In response to the market challenges and principles described above, we’re very pleased
to announce our next-generation business intelligence distribution solution, IntelliFront BI™
(Intelligence Frontier). It represents a major leap forward in capability, ease-of-use, and cost
efficiency for enterprises that have invested (or will invest) in a SQL Server portfolio. It will, in
effect, supercharge Microsoft’s offerings and deliver unprecedented value for streamlining the
borderless enterprise.
IntelliFront BI™ will be released in the second quarter of 2016.

Here are a few essentials of the product:
●● Designed for SQL Server.
●● A single solution for the enterprise manages
scheduled, on-demand, threshold-driven and
triggered reports; and it has tools for non-technical
users to create real-time dashboards.
●● The product emphasizes self-help facilities for
creating reports and dashboards while continuing
to support centralized management and control
over business intelligence assets.
●● To ensure successful implementations, we are
training our professional services organization
team to be terrific business consultants as well as
outstanding technologists. We feel strongly that the
value of IntelliFront BI™ can be appreciated only in
a full business context that takes into account its
many positive impacts beyond ROI.
IntelliFront BI™ will deliver the following
benefits for enterprise executives:
●● A single, infinitely scalable solution for SQL
Server implementations will manage all business
intelligence distribution requirements for the
enterprise as well as for customers, partners and
suppliers. Additional software tools and custom
development work will never be needed.
●● IntelliFront BI™ will drastically reduce the amount
of manual labor required to administer enterprise
reporting while offering unmatched reliability and
delivery speed.
●● Immediate cost savings and streamlined business
processes mean the ROI payback period will be
short.
●● Advanced security features and a high availability
architecture substantially mitigate corporate risk.
●● IntelliFront BI™ doesn’t replace existing
investments. Instead, it amplifies and extends the
power of SQL Server at a much lower cost than
equivalent Microsoft alternatives.
We invite you join our journey to the IntelliFront BI™ era
by subscribing to our blog, downloading our eBooks and
perusing our website (christiansteven.com) frequently.
The Future of
Intelligence

About Us
ChristianSteven Software brings two
decades of business intelligence expertise
to the table when helping companies to
define, create and implement BI solutions.
We view our engagements as long term
partnerships that are virtual extensions
of clients’ internal capabilities. Our goal
is to remain flexible and available in a
relationship that can scale up or down,
depending on needs.

Key Values:
●● Ensure quick set up and simple use
●● Minimize and eliminate repetitive tasks
and manual processes
●● Reduce costs and cut labor by automating business
processes and reports from one application
●● Improve customer satisfaction through mass
personalized distribution
●● Provide reliable data, and SOX Compliance,
through automated report generation
●● Experience a browser-based Rich Internet
Application interface
●● Leverage existing investments in hardware,
software, email and other applications
●● Sustain low training and implementation costs
●● Deliver low total cost of ownership
Our customers have come to
expect high standards for:
●● Speed
●● Convenience
●● Value
●● Reliability
If you’re thinking about implementing a BI Solution in your
company, let’s chat. We can help you to chart a strategy
that delivers solid business value and reduces costs.
Contact us today for a complimentary
BI Strategy Assessment:
ChristianSteven Software LLC
11020 David Taylor Dr, Suite 317
Charlotte NC 28262, USA
(888) 781-8966
info@christiansteven.com
www.christiansteven.com

The Future of Business Intelligence - What's On The Horizon, And How CIOs Can Prepare For It.

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