The demand by the finance function for business intelligence (BI) to make sense of the massive amounts of data pouring into the organization has not slackened much despite the ongoing economic slowdown. Gartner projects 7.0 percent CAGR through 2012 for stand-alone BI. Single-digit growth for sure, but quite respectable given the economy. The reason, according to Gartner’s 2009 Business Intelligence Magic Quadrant report, is clear: “BI is a vital competitive tool of increased importance in an environment where doing business more smartly, in order to maximize share of the reduced revenue in circulation, is a necessity.”

In 2008, however, the BI industry clearly had paused. The three market leaders from the previous year all disappeared into acquisitions. Oracle bought Hyperion, SAP acquired Business Objects, and IBM absorbed Cognos. Microsoft, the low price leader, was still around, but it never got the respect the high-end BI players did. With its Excel spreadsheet, by far the most commonly used product for BI and financial analysis, the best Microsoft could do was claim to be the people’s BI, the IT finance version of the late Princess Diana, the people’s princess.

However, as we move into 2009 and look ahead to 2010, BI promises to become exciting again. In October 2008, Microsoft preannounced a new BI initiative, Project Gemini. At the announcement, a Microsoft executive reportedly declared, “If you know how to use Word and Excel, you’ll be able to use our BI.” So easy, it seems, that any executive should be able to do it.

This truly promises to be the people’s BI. Project Gemini works in conjunction with the Microsoft tools already widely deployed — Excel, Word, SQL Server, SharePoint. All those power users, quants, and PhDs who labor behind the scenes to build multidimensional analytical cubes for use by both senior executives and the unwashed line-of-business workers can be sent to the unemployment lines. Everybody will just take their low-cost Microsoft Office Suite, fire up Excel, and start analyzing data under Project Gemini.

Well, maybe not so fast. Prerelease views of pieces of Project Gemini won’t be available until the end of 2009 at the earliest. The actual product set won’t ship until mid-2010, most likely. And these won’t be just any version of Excel. Organizations will need to:

· Upgrade to the latest version of Office and Excel

· Upgrade to a new version of SQL Server (code-named Kilimanjaro)

· Upgrade to the latest version of SharePoint, to facilitate the sharing of all these BI analyses

These products may be cheaper than the high-end BI offerings, but widespread upgrading is not cheap at all. (If it’s cheap BI you want, consider open-source BI tools like Jaspersoft.)

And after the organization has gone through all this software upgrading, it still isn’t clear if the era of widespread BI for everyone will finally be upon us. IBM, through Cognos, already offers TM1, a BI tool that leverages Excel and offers in-memory analytics, which Project Gemini promises, too. Oracle offers TimesTen, an in-memory database that can be used for BI. Yet, these tools haven’t sparked any mass adoption of BI.

The truth is that BI is not just a question of tools. Yes, better, faster, easier, more intuitive, less expensive tools are greatly desired by finance organizations everywhere. But what will still prevent the masses from performing effective BI is the need to ask the right questions in the first place. Not everyone can do that. ###