For years, forward-thinking companies have aimed for “business intelligence for the masses,” embedding the power of analytics into the process of the business users to ensure they can rapidly gain actionable insights and infused them into operations.
This trend, however, required a new type of analytical tool, one that allowed a typical business user – without the aid of an IT shop – to seamlessly explore data through a visual and intuitive interface.
This is how data discovery tools – designed to bring analytics to more end users through better user interfaces featuring easy-to-use visual designs – were born.
These tools have since dominated the market. In fact, data discovery was the top area of new BI purchases in 2013, with ease of use ranking at the top of purchase criteria, according to Gartner Inc.
The rise of big data – with volumes of data from more diverse data sources – is now driving companies to seek to layer data discovery tools on top of their larger, enterprise business intelligence (BI) tools.
This is creating the need for “governed data discovery,” platforms that are easy to use for business users but have the governance, administration and scalability that enterprise IT demands, Gartner notes.
“It is very likely that 2014 will be a critical year in which the task of making ‘hard types of analysis easy’ for an expanded set of users, along with ensuring governance, scale and performance for larger amounts of diverse data, will continue to dominate BI market requirements,” according to Gartner. “At the same time, the ability to bridge widely proliferating business user silos with enterprise deployments will be a crucial challenge for IT and BI vendors.”
This trend will drive a resurgence in the importance of IT to ensure that these increasingly complex data sources can be tapped via data discovery while still serving up insights that business users can easily access.
Spotfire 6.5, for example, allows parameterized SQL queries from these big data sources so the data analyst can interact directly with data sources in the most efficient manner, while hiding the complexity from users.
Gartner notes that Spotfire is “aggressively laying foundations for a BI and analytics platform capable of collecting and monitoring events, analyzing trends and exceptions, predicting, optimizing and prescribing actions, and sharing insights and comments, all with a simple-to-use information exploration interface.”
And IT gets its day in the sun to help nurture data discovery as it grows up.
Next Steps:
- We invite you to watch our complimentary, on-demand webcast, “What’s New in Spotfire 6.5.” In this webcast, you will discover how Spotfire version 6.5 allows you to build analytic applications that use the power of specific data sources without exposing complexity to end-users.
- Subscribe to our blog to stay up to date on the latest insights and trends in big data and big data analytics.
