Business Intelligence Software Technology Landscape

According to Gartner, in 2010 the global business intelligence and analytics software market grew by 13.5% to break the $10 billion mark. Growth was led by SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft as the economic recovery helped drive new IT investment. SAP led the global BI and analytics market with a share of 16.8%, followed by Oracle with 15.6% and Microsoft with 8.7%. All three leaders showed double-digit gains.⁹

In 2010, a number of significant trends in the BI marketplace focused on the ease-of-use, speed, and access to reporting and analytics. This year is likely to see an intensification and extension of these trends, including:

• Increasing social and collaborative BI
• Mobile BI
• Greater demand for location intelligence
• Simpler data visualization
• Continuing growth of SaaS-based BI
• The rise of social media analytics
• Self-service BI
• Better real-time analytics
• Increased adoption of BI by small and midsize businesses¹⁰

Social and collaborative BI applications are growing in importance. The worldwide collaborative decision-making (CDM) software market is projected to grow more than 15% in 2011, driven in part by the application of social media features to business analytics to enable better CDM processes.

The explosive growth of iPad sales is speeding the development of mobile BI. Gartner has projected that worldwide tablet sales will reach 54.8 million units by the end of this year, the overwhelming majority of them iPads. The users of those tablets—an increasingly dispersed and technologically sophisticated workforce—will demand access to corporate data anywhere, via mobile devices. As this demand is met, BI becomes increasingly pervasive. (Complementing the rise of mobile BI is the ongoing development of BI applications for smartphones. Users will not only be able to receive critical reports on the fly, but also comment on and interact with them.)

The demand for location intelligence continues to increase. Because more than three-quarters of the data collected by organizations has a spatial aspect, the ability to map, visualize, and understand geographical data will become an increasingly important component of any BI solution. Vendors are now offering integrated mapping as part of their BI platforms.

As BI becomes more pervasive, increasing numbers of business personnel without technical backgrounds will attempt to leverage the power of data analysis. Therefore, data visualization will become simpler and more intuitive to ensure that analytical information is grasped.¹¹

According to the Aberdeen Group, interest in software-as-a-service (SaaS) based business intelligence has been growing dramatically. For example, in 2009, twice as many organizations used this deployment method than in the prior year. IDC’s findings are similar: The analyst firm predicts that SaaS-based BI will grow by 22% through 2013. One of the reasons for interest in SaaS is that it does not require the sometimes massive upfront and ongoing development costs of on-premises BI applications. Another reason is its faster deployment.¹²

As issues relating to the analysis of data generated by social media platforms are overcome—most importantly, the integration into existing data sets—the collection of social data types will increase to the point of becoming commonplace. As organizations strive to gain greater understanding of target market needs, desires, behaviors, and sentiments toward their brands and those of competitors, they will want to harness the power of modern BI technologies that have the ability to dissect and report on social data. Dissecting data generated by social media interactions will enable immediate access to actionable insights based on consumer attitudes. The conversational nature of social media also means that the insights yielded are likely to be some of the most honest customer service data ever collected.¹³

According to Forrester, self-service business intelligence is the only way to make BI more pervasive, delivering insights into every decision—important or mundane—that drives business. It is key to empowering users while removing many mundane BI development and maintenance tasks from the often-overwhelming IT workload.¹⁴

Self-service BI allows business users to independently build reports and analyze the data within those reports. Key benefits of self-service BI include widespread end-user adoption, faster decision-making, and reduced burden on IT staffs. It shouldn’t be surprising that the Aberdeen Group reports that 67% of best-in-class companies have adopted some form of self-service BI.¹⁵

With the rapid development of communications technologies and Internet-ready mobile devices, the exchange of corporate information has become constant and virtually instantaneous. Demand for reporting and analytics commensurate with this capability will continue to grow. Consequently, beyond mobile BI, the importance of two additional analytical features will rise: the ability to perform federated queries, and the ability to generate reports from an in-memory database.

Federated queries enable users to combine data from two or more data sources to create a single report without having to build a data warehouse. In-memory analytics enable faster analysis, rapid insights, and ad-hoc reporting with minimal IT involvement. They also eliminate the need to store pre-calculated data in the form of OLAP cubes or aggregate tables.

Finally, the barriers to entry are coming down. BI solutions are not only becoming easier to use, but also less expensive to own and maintain. The reduction in the total cost of ownership is allowing many small to midsize businesses (SMBs) to implement BI solutions for the first time. As the global BI market continues to experience double-digit growth, vendors will be able to offer lower-cost BI platforms as they compete for this smaller-scale emerging market segment.¹⁶