It’s no surprise that BI and Analytics is hard to kill; the value proposition is underpinned by a compelling need to understand what’s driving business results and making more informed decisions to improve outcomes. Sage apparently understands this and has followed in the footsteps of IBM, Oracle and SAP by acquiring a BI vendor to complement their ERP and accounting solutions. Gartner is predicting worldwide BI software revenue of around $12.5B in 2012 based on a survey of 2,300 CIOs and this excludes related services (…channel opportunity anyone?). Overall though, BI and Analytics is a bit like advanced technology in cars…first its available in a Benz but then ends up in a Toyota when the costs and complexities come down over time. The SMB space can already benefit from this “commoditization” of BI best practices and there’s a lot more to come.

Blackbaud had a channel which it shut down in a single phone call with no warning several years ago. What makes this different, what says it wont happen again?

It’s interesting to note that the Intuit page at http://enterprisesuite.intuit.com/products/intacct/ you mention places such strong emphasis on the need for financial reporting and analytics. Trend analysis and multi-dimensional reporting architecture even rate a specific mention. Perhaps this is no surprise given Robert Reid’s expertise around the value proposition of Business Intelligence. It does seem to imply however that it’s one of the major reasons companies eventually feel the need to move on from QBES. If so, then many QBES customers might be well served by our solution “BizTools Analytics” - powerful yet easy to use OLAP based Financial and Sales Analytics for QuickBooks and mitigate the need to move off QBES.

Leave it to MS for confusing release names. GP 2010 R2 is nothing more than GP 2010, Service Pack 2. GP2012 (V12) is due out late this year. It really upset a lot of folks for them to name a service pack R2.