It is evident that with Fine ONE, Chinese enterprises can establish a more authentic, scalable, and less internally competitive intelligent BI system. Moreover, under the umbrella of this inherently data-asset-driven system, enterprises will accumulate valuable data assets.

Author | Dou Dou, Pi Ye

Produced by | Chanyejia

China's BI systems stand at a precipice.

"Today, enterprise data management systems have entered the third stage. If they don't move towards this stage, they are not far from 'death.'" As the General Manager of Product Development at FineReport, Chen Min has personally witnessed a phenomenon: within the past year, the number of internal system tables at FineReport grew from 80,000 to 160,000, doubling in size.

This trend is not limited to FineReport but is prevalent among large Chinese enterprises. In Chen Min's words, continuing on this path amounts to a "countdown to death."

In many medium and large enterprises, as businesses expand, BI systems tend to become autonomous, with IT and business departments each establishing their BI systems. This autonomy poses multiple visible threats to enterprise operations: low report quality, difficult development, and increased costs for IT resource storage and separate operation and maintenance management.

In reality, FineReport's model mirrors that of countless domestic enterprises. Digging deeper, it reflects not just issues with reports but also the disorderly establishment of data assets within enterprises. Within the separate systems of business and IT, inherent data remains isolated, making it difficult for enterprises to consolidate data assets based on a unified labeling system, thereby hindering effective integration.

With the advent of the AI era, if enterprises lack a clear data and asset center, it is widely acknowledged that they will struggle to build AI capability barriers.

What should enterprises, or FineReport, do?

In the first half of 2023, FineReport held a contentious management meeting focused on self-improvement before helping clients resolve issues as an intelligent BI service provider.

"At that meeting, we cut some business directions and decided to reorganize FineReport's entire business and product portfolio," recalls Chen Min.

This marks another "self-revolution" for FineReport.

For many years, FineReport has been a unique player in China's TO B market, choosing not to go public or seek funding while maintaining headquarters in a non-tier-one city. In contrast, FineReport has consistently featured in Gartner, IDC, and other top consulting firms' BI quadrant/reports, with nearly 80% of China's Fortune 500 enterprises using FineReport products.

Whether it's FineBI, FineReport, FineViS, the recently launched FineChatBI, or the underlying FineDataLink, FineReport boasts high market shares across its products, truly earning the title of "individual champion." Now, this bellwether of China's BI market is scaling new heights.

I. The 'Countdown to Death' of BI

China's BI market exhibits a strange phenomenon.

"This year, the most frequent question I've been asked by clients is about integrating tools from different vendors: one for data integration, another or a self-developed platform for metrics, and FineReport for BI and reporting. These three don't work well together. What should we do?" Chen Min told Chanyejia.

Under scrutiny, these issues reveal severe integration and collaboration problems among different data tools. In some cases, there's even duplication of effort among products from multiple vendors.

"Essentially, enterprises lack a unified BI perspective. BI projects often cater to immediate needs, like self-service data retrieval or BI-generated reports for business operations."

From a broader perspective, the development model of separate business and IT systems in China's BI market has become an obstacle for many enterprises. Without a unified BI view, internal BI projects often become isolated islands meeting specific demands.

A Gartner survey on enterprise deployment of data and analytics tools revealed that only 31% of enterprises deploy end-to-end platforms from a single vendor, while 38% build their platforms in-house, 20% collaborate with multiple vendors on assembled platforms, and a staggering 11% rely on siloed deployments from multiple vendors.

This fragmented approach complicates and inefficiently prolongs BI frontend development. Inconsistency in underlying data engineering hinders data reuse among products, making repetitive development the norm.

Issues also persist on the service provider side.

"Only 20% of our clients integrate FineReport's FR and BI products. Nearly 80% deploy them separately," Chen Min told Chanyejia.

This reflects the current state of both enterprises and service providers in China's BI market. For most BI service providers, offering single-point, single-channel solutions, while addressing specific scenarios, lacks holistic coherence. When enterprises attempt to integrate products from multiple providers, they face compatibility challenges in technical architecture, data models, user interfaces, and data interfaces, inevitably leading to siloed constructions.

This irreversible data construction system poses explicit and implicit double-edged problems for enterprises.

Explicitly, as internal report numbers grow, IT expenses like operation and maintenance, storage, and data retrieval costs significantly increase, potentially slowing data retrieval agility and affecting business feedback.

Implicitly, or more fundamentally, over time, enterprises struggle to effectively collect and manage data generated from ongoing business developments. This hinders the establishment of valuable asset systems, negatively impacting data-driven decision-making models and AI implementations.

This is precisely what Chen Min refers to as the "countdown to death" of BI.

In other words, to address these issues, enterprises must build a unified BI system. An ideal model would bridge IT and business demands, constructing a closed-loop data and consumption layer based on a unified data and asset center, enabling a clear and concise BI system on a unified platform.

Where lies the solution?

II. Behind Fine ONE: From Point to Line to Plane

Back to FineReport's internal debate in 2023, two new consensuses emerged amidst the tension: a customer-centric and value-driven approach.

These consensuses gave birth to Fine ONE. Unlike FineReport's past "individual champion" products, Fine ONE represents a new BI view for enterprises, integrating various BI applications and data nodes involved in actual business operations into a comprehensive framework. This framework ensures clear designs for business-IT integration, data flow across business and IT, and end-to-end operation and maintenance.

"We prioritize building the asset center and underlying unified operation and maintenance platform," Chen Min explains. "With these in place, enterprises can operate efficiently."

The asset center within Fine ONE further refines data assets into finer-grained labels and sets corresponding application permissions, ensuring data is used and governed scientifically post-consolidation.

The underlying platform management and operation side resemble a brand-new BI end-to-end "diagnostic" mechanism. It abstracts services from previous products into a shared base, ensuring independent fault isolation and upgrades. Furthermore, unified management and comprehensive monitoring alerts are facilitated on this platform.

Compared to past siloed or semi-autonomous modes across enterprise nodes, IT, and business, Fine ONE provides a holistic tool offering services from a global and end-to-end perspective.

Within Fine ONE's data center setup, businesses and IT departments only need to build metrics based on the data center, eliminating duplicate retrievals and siloed constructions, enabling true data engineering for enterprises.

"We encourage enterprises to choose products suitable for their current needs. As they grow, we'll offer updated products to ensure prior investments aren't wasted," Chen Min notes. "For incompatible products, we'll help enterprises plan phased project implementations over the long term."

With Fine ONE, enterprises can tailor their BI and data product selections based on needs and development stages, avoiding incompatible market offerings. They can now access Fine ONE's "BI buffet," leveraging FineReport's individual champion capabilities and seamless platform integration for future compatibility and end-to-end scientific BI capabilities.

III. FineReport: Scaling New Heights

"This journey is incredibly challenging," recalls Chen Min. "In a way, it signifies a shift in FineReport's future business model, involving extensive adjustments in business, technology, and personnel."

FineReport is addressing potential issues proactively. For years, its internal mantra has been the market-familiar "individual champion," striving for top-three or even first-place positions with each product launch.

This philosophy has granted FineReport strong market influence and competitiveness. Products like FineBI, FineReport, and the no-code platform Jiandaoyun rank highly in their respective segments in terms of user base and usage.

However, this dominant culture also poses hidden risks. "Some of our products have unclear boundaries when facing clients, leading to unhealthy competition," Chen Min observes.

Supply issues stem from demand. While Chen Min and FineReport's decision-makers recognize this model reflects domestic enterprises' unclear BI paths and strategies, FineReport's "Great Leap Forward" approach has also led to internal resource waste and inefficiencies.

After heated discussions, the aforementioned "two consensuses" emerged.

Yet, even with consensuses in place, progress remains challenging. Many breakpoints exist among businesses, IT, upper-layer applications, underlying data, assets, and operation and maintenance management. Fully bridging these gaps seems impossible for enterprises. For FineReport, managing these diverse modules within its ecosystem is also a mammoth task.

"We've been sorting out product boundaries since last year. It wasn't until April this year that we clarified the underlying product logic and will now push product functional interfaces," Chen Min shares with Chanyejia.

Chen Min has a clear execution plan. "First, complete the asset center and underlying platform. Once accepted, gradually advance to the most complex businesses, clarifying product boundaries to form an integrated whole."

FineReport has its advantages in this process. "If not every product were an individual champion, achieving excellence, the refined BI framework and system would hold little value," Chen Min notes.

Leveraging past individual champion products, FineReport can develop China's premier end-to-end BI data solution, enabling enterprises to establish the most suitable and future-proof data systems.

With Fine ONE, Chinese enterprises can establish more authentic, scalable, and less internally competitive intelligent BI systems. This inherently data-asset-driven system will also accumulate valuable data assets for enterprises.

Moreover, FineReport's FineChatBI is being integrated into real-world usage scenarios within Fine ONE's overall view. "We'll consider incorporating AI capabilities for asset or data queries," Chen Min adds.

Regarding AI, Chen Min and FineReport exercise restraint. Ensuring sustained user adoption is FineChatBI's primary goal, followed by accuracy. "We aim for an 80% accuracy rate this year, striving for 95% next year," Chen Min shares. To date, 24 enterprises have collaborated with FineReport on FineChatBI product co-creation.

"The domestic BI market is overly competitive. We should focus on expanding the market together. In the long run, the value of BI far exceeds money. Enterprises will eventually recognize this," Chen Min insists.

In 2024, FineReport is scaling new heights once again.