If you are planning a Business Intelligence solution, it is well worth being aware of the current trends so that you can gauge an idea of where the market is heading.
Once of the biggest trends in recent years is one of vendor consolidation. In early 2008, two of the largest pure play Business Intelligence vendors were acquired by larger software companies. Business Objects was bought out by SAP in a deal worth $6.8bn and Cognos was bought out by IBM in a deal valued at $5bn.
Smaller niche players are not immune either – Spotfire was acquired by Tibco, ProClarity was acquired by Microsoft, and Panorama, although still independent (good for them!) is working closely with Google on some exciting online analytical tools.
This rapid pace of consolidation is due to the ever growing Business Intelligence market. Business Intelligence is on the radar of many CEOs and CFOs. With the vast volumes of data being collected by these organisations, they identify a clear need to process this information into meaningful information. Proper analysis of your underlying data can literally save an organisation millions of dollars. The large software houses are aware of this, and ever eager to get a peice of the action, have been snapping up the Business Intelligence players.
While this may disappoint many, solace can be found in the quality and innovative nature of some of the products being developed by the smaller Business Intelligence vendors.
Consider data visualization. Although not the panacea for the BI industry, it provides a visual way to process many thousands if not millions of data points. Key developments in these areas include heat maps, sparklines and more recently animation or animated graphs.
Another trend is that regulatory requirements is driving the need for accurate and reliable reporting. No more pulling data from multiple Excel data sources and Access databases. Organisations today need to be absolutely sure where their data is coming from (data lineage), what has been done to it, and where it is ending up. The also need to ensure their data is clean and accurate (read data cleansing tools), and delivered promptly to the people that need it – be it business users or regulatory bodies. This requires a clear Business Intelligence process system.
Many Business Intelligence vendors are beginning to move their products away from a full client based reporting product to a web enabled product, reducing the client footprint effectively to zero. This can be seen with the Business Objects Web Intelligence product. Panorama and Google are taking this a step further by working on a cloud based approach – in these cases you don’t even need the hardware. You simply access the software via a subscription based internet service.
And finally, there is much more of a focus on data quality. This area is improving, but more needs to be done. It is shocking at the quality of data being held in corporate databases today. Whether this relates to incorrect addresses, multiple customers due to incorrect spellings, missing data, etc. these all add up to extra cost, time and effort on the part of end users. Often considered something that ‘users can live with’, data quality is now being seen as an important element of a
Business Intelligence solution.