This blog is dedicated to all my friends and associates at GrayMatter who have been part of our long journey earlier and continue to tread the path of collaborative innovation leading to best-in-class analytics solution for global adoption. The Business Intelligence Trends, BI and Analytics industry has suddenly burst into the mainstream today with large and medium scale organizations trying to derive business value from it. This business value is synonymous with driving higher revenues, reducing costs, improving compliance and enhanced customer satisfaction. The BI industry gradually evolved over time today with multiple tools and technologies to fulfil specific needs such as reporting tools, dash-boarding, OLAP/MOLAP based ad-hoc analysis, what-if modelling, predictive analytics and data warehouse appliances. This gradual evolution has come with challenges to manage multiple technology stacks for successful BI implementation projects and it has been tough to drive business intelligence trends value which was expected from a BI project. We see, this market changing rapidly and the 5 most prominent BI trends will be as follows:
1. No one will buy BI tools, people will buy BI industry specific applications (like no one buys ERP platform today, people buy industry specific ERP systems)
2. Multiple tools and technology will merge into single technology platforms (BI specific database server for data warehouse, Reporting and dash boarding for historical data analysis, Data mining for predictive analysis, what-if modelling, in-memory computation for high performance, ETL tools for data integration, BPM tools for workflow processes) to build industry specific BI application
3. BI application will not be just analytics or reporting, they will merge with operational system and drive organizational decision making workflow processes. Organizations will drive standardization of decision making process for most commonly occurring business problems
4. Decision critical Information should be accessible to all devices at all time anywhere in the world instantaneously and this will become possible.
5. Big data will be a reality, as information is exploding everywhere from multiple machines, systems and sensors in every business, but it is still 2-3 years away, before we see real industry specific use case scenarios emerging
The day is not far, when the BI & Analytics trends will shift from the current pure play BI tools to BI applications. You will see this happening very soon in mature markets like US, Europe and UK followed by others globally. We all know what happened with ERP in early 2000’s , something similar will happen with BI around 2015-17.
