Analyst: can we still believe these people?

During this Belgian pre-election period, this title may sound like a political statement. Who still believes these people? Although it is not my intention, ... one might consider the parallelism between politicians and analyst for a second.

For a long time during my professional career within SAP, I paid lots of attention to market studies and analyst reports. The external information helps to give a good objective insight in the market share, the relative position, the competition, ... and to complement the internal intelligence or info. Absolute relevant data when preparing market strategies, execution plans and marketing campaigns. Despite the fact that often not all data seemed to be only completely correct, there was always some relevancy in terms of relative position or trends.


Until I started to notice that different analyst seem to have complete other views on the same "reality". How can that be? Is there a reason to doubt about the "political" correctness of analyst market-share info? Is the quality of this kind of reports reliable enough for decision makers?

To illustrate my point, I want to share a very recent experience:

PAC announced a report on the BI market in Belgium (a summary publicised in DataNews) : http://datanews.rnews.be/nl/ict/nieuws/nieuwsoverzicht/2010/03/26/sas-heeft-kwart-van-belgische-bi-markt/article-1194714757619.htm. According to this study SAP/BO is second biggest player with a 16.4% market share (after SAS with 24.4%). The view of Smart Business Strategies, Insites consulting gives SAP a market share of 34%, and SAS only 5% (cfr article below). Help! Who is right and who is wrong here?

Even with a statistical error, there seems to be enough reasons to doubt about one (or both?) reports. This is just one example to show that analyst have complete different views on the world.
I don't know anymore whether we can we still believe these people?

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Consolidatie op BI-markt zal populariteit van tool doen stijgen
In het mei-nummer van CFO magazine kunt u een artikel lezen over de consolidatie in de BI-markt. Die heeft gevolgen waarmee ook u rekening moet houden: u zult de concurrentie minder kunnen laten spelen, moeilijker kunnen overstappen en rekening moeten houden met het feit dat de grote spelers nogal wat tijd zullen moeten besteden aan de integratie van de overgenomen bedrijven en dus minder tijd zullen kunnen vrijmaken voor innovatie. Anderzijds houdt de consolidatiebeweging in dat u zult kunnen standaardiseren en dus ook zult kunnen besparen en dat de populariteit van BI onvermijdelijk zal toenemen omdat spelers met grote namen als IBM, Oracle en SAP er nu echt hun tanden in zetten. Hieronder een overzicht van de marktaandelen van de belangrijkste BI-spelers.
Marktaandeel Business Intelligence in België
Business Objects / SAP 34%
Cognos / IBM / SPSS 17%
Hyperion / Oracle 6%
Informatica 2%
Microsoft 25%
Microstrategy 1%
SAS 5%
QlikView 1%
Information Builders 1%
Overige 8%

Bron: InSites Consulting, Smart Business Strategies, 2009
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