Echoing many of the predictions by Marcus Borba, an article in ComputerWorld predicts that self-service business intelligence, SaaS-based business intelligence and real-time analytics will be top of mind for enterprises in 2011. James Kobielus, an analyst at Forrester Research, notes that although these are not new trends, their adoption will increase in 2011 as some enterprises look for ways to reduce the burden on IT departments and put more data analytic capability in the hands of end users and organizations more experienced with business intelligence begin to focus on real-time data analytics.
At many organizations today, it’s difficult for end users to utilize information on a timely basis in the course of performing their daily jobs. Because these users typically rely on the IT department to generate reports for them, the information is not usually available “on demand.” And because reports are typically standard or generic reports, they don’t always help end users answer the specific questions or solve the specific problems they encounter at a particular point in time. To change this, enterprises are increasingly looking for ways to put data and data analytic capabilities directly in the hands of end users. Kobielus says that tools such as Tibco’s Spotfire provide end users with querying, reporting and data visualization capability that will allow them to generate reports on demand, and to create reports that are more meaningful and specific to the question or problem at hand.
Kobielus also predicts that companies which are more sophisticated or experienced with data analytics and business intelligence will turn their attention to real-time data analytics during 2011. These organizations will be looking for in-memory processing and other leading-edge technologies found in products such as Tibco’s ActiveSpaces® Suite, which will allow them to more quickly process large volumes of data in order to make decisions in real-time.
Not every organization will want to create the infrastructure to support business intelligence in-house. For these companies, Kobielus says that SaaS-based business intelligence will be at the top of the list. With applications such as Tibco Silver Spotfire, companies that choose the SaaS route can now leverage the power and convenience of cloud computing to quickly deploy and begin using sophisticated data analytic tools.
It looks as though 2011 will be a year for companies to even further build their capability for data analytics and business intelligence!
