My Take on BI Cost of Ownership

On reading Gartner's take on BI cost of ownership below, at first glance the numbers seemed "out of whack". But the pieces quickly fell into place... and the *real* cost began to emerge...

In the Gartner symposium (covered here), analyst Rita Sallam indicated that the five-year cost of a typical, 500-seat BI deployment (covering reporting, ad-hoc analysis and dashboards) ranges from about $150,000 for an open-source system to just over $1 million for SAP BusinessObjects, IBM Cognos 8 or Oracle OBIEE.My first reaction on reading this was: $1 million for 500 users over 5 years? Really? Then it dawned on me that this was only a piece of the overall puzzle.

Here's what the $1 million includes:

Here's what it excludes:

Adding this alone takes the above figure to about $5 million for 500 users over five years. But there's more.

The estimate above also excludes:

Obviously, these are very simplistic, back-of-the-envelope computations, and consider the estimates for the "Big 3" BI vendors (and exclude open source etc.). The cost of a BI solution (and the data warehouse that goes it with) can vary widely, but it shouldn't cost, say, $5 to $6 million for 500 users over five years.

Nevertheless, the message is very clear. Business intelligence capabilities can come at a substantial price, and customers need to take the efforts to thoroughly understand all cost components. If not, BI costs can spiral very quickly.On reading Gartner's take on BI cost of ownership below, at first glance the numbers seemed "out of whack". But the pieces quickly fell into place... and the *real* cost began to emerge...