October 2009, Part 2 – BI Analytics for Dynamics CRM

At the October meeting of the Dynamics CRM User Group, I followed a presentation by C360 on their Core Productivity Pack with a session of my own on the BI Analytics add-on. I consider myself an “educated layman” when it comes to BI, which made me all the more impressed with how much business intelligence I could glean from using BI Analytics with only about five hours of learning time. (Impressed with the tool, that is!)

I recorded the session, and here’s a link to it: http://www.imginc.net/images/stories/videos/dcrmug/Richards_BI_Analytics_Demo.wmv

This is a non-trivial add-on: it’s powerful, complex and justifies a much more comprehensive write-up than I have time to do now. On the other hand, I’ve been asked by a couple of attendees to get the recording posted, and I hate to post a recording with no context, so here’s my executive summary on C360’s BI Analytics add-on for Dynamics CRM:

• I think this application is excellent, and I wish I could run it on my production system. (It only works currently with the on-premise edition of Dynamics CRM 4.0, and my production system is Dynamics CRM Online.) 
• BI Analytics is developed by a firm called Strategy Companion. Their flagship product is the “Analyzer”, which is a general purpose Business Intelligence application that can integrate information from lots of different data sources. BI Analytics runs on top of the Analyzer, and is specifically designed as an add-on for Dynamics CRM 4.0. C360 is the exclusive reseller of the CRM-specfiic BI Analytics.
• The installation process is relatively complicated and should not be performed solo by an ”educated layman”. I had to run through it a few times to get it to work, and required the help of the folks at Strategy Companion.
• Once installed, using the application can be done without heavy-duty BI or technical expertise. As I mentioned above, I spent about five hours familiarizing myself with it. Strategy Companion has some video tutorials on their web site that are helpful.
• In my view, the two barriers that will prevent some organizations from using BI Analytics are:
  • Availability. I already mentioned that it’s currently only for on-premise. I wish they’d come out with it for Online!
  • Price. The license fee is $4,000. My understanding is that gets you a license for one “designer” — that being a single person who has the ability to create reports. Users who consume the reports can do so for free. More designer licenses each cost an additional $4k up to five of them, after which the per-designer fee drops somewhat.       

A note on price, which is a general one that could fairly be made about any add-on that a) saves you time, and b) costs money: If you need the kind of functionality BI Analytics contains, trade off the time it takes you to implement it from scratch, against the $4,000 license fee. My guess is that very few organizations can implement the functionality available in BI Analytics with anything nearly as small as $4,000 worth of effort. And a large organization with lots of potential report consumers will be able to justify the investment a lot easier than a smaller one. If you’ve got 100 users, a $40/user one-time might not seem too high, compared to the BI value you’ll realize.