9 Emerging Trends in Business Intelligence
Posted on Wed, Jun 16, 2010
Kurt Schlegel is a vice president in Gartner Research, where he focuses on business intelligence and its ability to improve decision making and optimise performance. He joined Gartner in April 2005 with the acquisition of Meta Group, where he wrote extensively about the business intelligence market.
At a recent Gartner Summit on Business Intelligence he gave a discussion on emerging trends in this market, I have added my comments to his 9 points
1) In memory analytics: As memory capacities increase and costs continue to fall, it absolutely makes sense for us to use in-memory models to analyse data - it's faster and requires less pre calculation; it's only the software that has been built to take advantage of this technology that gives any benefits. Beyond super-fast analysis, one of the compelling features of QlikView business intelligence and a few other in-memory business intelligence tools is the ability to perform what-if analysis on the fly. For example, users can input budget values or price increases to forecast future sales. The results are immediately available and held in memory. In contrast, most disk-based OLAP tools would require the database to be recalculated, either overnight or at the request of an administrator.
2 ) Columnar databases: This is a discussion that has been rumbling on for decades, and in these days of multi-billion row tables and petabyte-sized systems, you might think that columnar databases make more sense than ever, but not everyone agrees, particularly those who argue that analytics is better through row-based models.
3) Cloud: The Cloud isn't the problem here. The existing players are having trouble moving their pricing models to a SaaS model with the consequent reduction in upfront revenues. So I expect it's the new entrants like GoodData that will start to rise here.
4) Interactive visualization: The right graphics deliver insight faster and deeper than simple pie charts. But can the front line troops really understand a scatter plot?
5) Integrated search: I think the Google interface should dominate here.
6) Mobile Business Intelligence: iPhone and IPad applications are already available from some business intelligence vendors like QlikView.
7) Analytical MDM: Master data management combined with brains and analytics can help solve the multiple version of truth problem plaguing most companies. This is the solution to the data quality morass, but it will take time.
8) Data mash-ups: In an increasingly unstructured world we are going to need solutions that combine internal structured data with an exploding growth in social media.
9) Scenario modeling:. In memory analytics and increased computing power will allow everyone build sophisticated what-if models based on vast quantities of data.
To see how QlikView and in-memory business intelligence works, check out our WorldCup Kick It & Qlik It App.