Collaborative Business Intelligence...we have a leader!!

I'm pretty critical of most business intelligence solutions that claim to be collaborative or socially driven. While the industry is taking small steps to enter the space most attempts to date have fallen short. More often than not companies struggle in 3 main areas:

1. Full integrated into workflow and processs - Users don't want to leave the BI environment where they make decisions then be forced to jump into a separate application just to be collaborative. Also adoption fails when you have to use multiple platforms. And its difficult to create the proper climate to grow the meritocracy culture that drives social networking and engagement.

2. Strong collaborative tools - Hanging a "thumbs up" or "star icons" on your report repositiory is not social business intelligence...its window dressing and generally an indication that you don't really get the culture of social networking in business intelligence. Successful applications need to allow for ratings, commenting, instant messaging, live interactive dashboards, decision and data traceability, blogs, easily added images and video, security as well as access to outside sources and commentary. The ability to bookmark and create your own work space are also important features that should not be missed.

3. Easy enterprise data integration - all to often I see so called social business intelligence platforms that can't reach beyond data from CSV files or Excel or worse yet they only allow an image file of the report. They are seldom tied back to the enterprise data source and are not dynamically updated. Collaborating doesn't make up for bad data it just produced highly collaborative bad decisions. You should run away from a system that doesn't make data access easy.

I was quoted today in a press release as saying "Lyzasoft has taken the next step beyond accessorizing business intelligence solutions with social networking tools to fully integrating those features into the new version of Lyza, creating the culture, tools and the work process necessary for an effective solution," added Shawn Rogers, president of Analytic Response, which focuses on the analytics, social media, business intelligence and Enterprise 2.0 markets. "With Lyza, users no longer have to exit out of their BI processes to leverage the social media aspects of the solution, creating and facilitating a culture of sharing and collaboration into the standard BI workflow." 

I happily stand behind the quote and my review of Lyzasoft. It hit the nail on the head, executing on all 3 of the pitfalls I mentioned above and by moving well beyond them in scope and features. The lauch of Lyza Commons sets a new standard for the big stack business intelligence companies to catch up to. Plus Lyzasoft CEO Scott Davis didn't miss the importance of pricing and has set the bar exactly where companies can adopt the technology without heavy risk. 

The new version of Lyza is available immediately for Windows, Mac and Linux. It is priced at $400 for a single machine, one-year subscription with unlimited online support and complimentary product updates, or $2000 per user for a perpetual license and one year of support. 

Lyza Commons runs on Microsoft Windows and is priced at $4,000 per workgroup for an annual license including maintenance and $20,000 per workgroup for a perpetual license and one year of support. There are no per-user fees for Lyza Commons, and there are no limits on the number of users in the workgroup.

Bottom line, Lyza and Lyza Commons have set a new standard for bringing collaborative business context to enterprise data.