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February 27, 2007
Business Intelligence networking in China
I was enthusiastic to see Shawn’s announcement last week that, with Spring approaching, BeyeNETWORK is sprouting new global sites, especially a new portal for China: BeyeNETWORK.cn . Over the last couple of years I have been lucky to be more involved in the Chinese market. There are remarkable prospects there for BI as enterprises develop and mature through business cycles at an astounding rate. However, there are also unique social and cultural differences in the business world that western BI specialists may overlook. The challenge is how to succeed with BI in China with the best technology and practices, without compromising these unique needs.
Meeting this challenge will need a blend of experienced specialists (inevitably trained at first in the established IT world of western commerce), and insightful local entrepreneurs. Fortunately, the BI world is remarkably open and welcoming of new ideas; and local BI vendors in China are specially dynamic and innovative. I have high hopes that BeyeNETWORK.cn can capture that interaction live on the web.
As it happens, I had the opportunity to meet with one of these dynamic BI companies, almost immediately after Shawn’s announcement when I returned from TDWI. Frank Fu from the BI team at U-Soft demonstrated their latest Aurora BI Server. Aurora integrates with SQL Server Analysis Services, and provides a full front-end for business decision makers to browse KPIs and reports in a very interactive manner. For example, in addition to seeing a timeline graph in the dashboard, a user could add various trendlines in the front-end.
Typically, when looking at end-user BI for the western market we think of this analytic functionality as ideally being on every desktop. Frank pointed out to me that in the case of some U-Soft customers, very few end-users (typically only most senior management or officials) might actually use the end user tools. This is one of the differences we need to consider – interactive decision making may still be centralized and quite hierarchical, with only more static reports being delivered to a broader audience. Speaking of reports, Aurora easily handles an issue several BI companies have run into in China – the need to deliver standardized reports in a rather complex, and rather inflexible, government format. (It’s tax time here in the US, of course, so we’re in no position to criticize such forms!)
Another area in which local BI vendors in China are expert is interfacing with regionally specialized ERPs: a rapidly growing market serviced by companies such as KingDee and Langchao who have over 55% of the total ERP market. In other words, as the Chinese economy grows (ignore today’s temporary blip on the exchange!) then perhaps we may see these names become as dominant as SAP, Oracle Apps or Dynamics: at the very least expect them to be as familiar as Sage or Lawson.
Now, please don’t get the impression that all Chinese BI is highly specialized and locally focused. There are BI practices in China which are already delivering great results locally and to US enterprises. A great example is Minesage, where my friend Dachuan Yang’s team not only implement excellent practices for the Chinese market – they also build some beautiful and innovative front-ends for cutting-edge uses, such as predictive analytics, segmentation and cluster analyses for the Microsoft adCenter online advertising platform.
So I do wish the BeyeNetwork team great success in launching their Chinese portal. It’s certainly a market that we in the BI world cannot ignore, and have much to learn from.
再见!
Posted by Donald Farmer at February 27, 2007 10:47 PM
Comments
The BI market in China is definetly growing rapidly. It is also very crowded, with all the internation BI powerhouse landed in recent years. Some of them (such as BO, SPSS) have even established R&D center in China.
Localized features (report formats, Geo, etc.) should be a differentiator for local players.
Posted by: ZhaoHui Tang at February 28, 2007 2:06 PM
