Thursday, January 6, 2011

Gartner Says Business Intelligence Will Go Mobile

By 2013, 33 percent of business intelligence functionality used by enterprise workers will be consumed via handheld devices, says Gartner.

Also, by 2014, Gartner expects 40 percent of spending on business analytics will go to system integrators, not software vendors. That would be a significant change.

Traditionally, organizations bought products almost exclusively from software companies and system integrators then helped the buyer to implement them.

However, the growth of user-driven initiatives, external information sources and the integration of unstructured content make this traditional approach increasingly risky and potentially uncompetitive.

Buyers can now evaluate solutions – for example marketing campaign effectiveness in financial services, as total packages, and select a lead provider, often a service provider, to deliver it. That leaves lots of room for changes in the supply infrastructure, with app providers becoming integrators.

At first, mobile business intelligence will largely consist of existing reports and dashboards ported to the mobile device but by 2012, Gartner predicts that organizations and vendors will develop mobile analytic applications for specific tasks or domains.

1 comment:

wearecloud said...

Taking the Gartner predictions into account, I think that they appear to be already well underway, e.g. the use of in memory functions is already pretty widespread. With the fast rate of innovation, any software company that wants to compete in the business analytics market needs to be thinking ahead in terms of technology, and so should be able to implement required changes within the next year or two, if they have not already. Other challenges lie in the way that enterprises choose to use this technology, and the pressure mounts on the software creators to build applications that ordinary people can use and that bring value to the organization.

As an example, this is an aspect we have been working on from the start with Bime (SAAS BI & Analytics tool). Some of the reasons for the creation of the SAAS version are to make it accessible to non-technical people, and to leverage the benefits of the cloud and scalability. This touches on some of the Forrester trends for 2011 - self-service, cloud and scalable analytics - whereas Bime, among other solutions, has been doing it for years. Look a bit closer and you'll find those vendors who are already looking ahead into the future beyond 2011, who are already well versed with the trends above in the hope that they will pioneer the next big thing in business analytics.