By 2012, emerging technologies will make it easier to build and consume analytical applications lessening IT’s role in building these applications, according to Gartner, Inc.
Much of the innovation in the BI space will come from emerging technologies that will make it easier for users to build and consume their own reports and analytical applications. In particular, five technologies -- interactive visualization, in-memory analytics, search integrated with BI, software as a service (SaaS) and service-oriented architecture (SOA) -- will help drive mainstream BI adoption.
Interactive visualization will be quickly accepted during the next two years as a common front end to analytical application, driven by the ubiquity of rich Internet applications. This technology trend will make reports and analytic applications easier and more fun to use. With its attractive display, it should be more widely adopted by users who aren't accustomed to the grid style of analysis and reporting offered by relational databases and spreadsheets. By definition, interactive visualization enables users to perform typical BI tasks, such as data filters, drill down and pivots, with little training by interacting with the visual, such as clicking on a pie wedge, or circling the dots on a scatter plot.
Because BI explores huge amounts of data, it has traditionally relied on IT to build aggregate and summary tables to optimize performance on disc-based data storage. This requirement to build a performance layer impeded self-service BI. Falling memory prices and the prevalence of 64-bit computing is making in memory analytics a more attractive alternative. With this approach, business users no longer require IT to build a performance layer.
Many BI systems hold thousands of reports in a complex hierarchical structure. Users find it easier to find reports with search technologies backed by sophisticated relevance rankings instead of a folder navigation structure. Search will make it easier for users to find data for ad hoc queries although it will not help with related tasks such as formatting reports consistently.
Smaller companies that lack the base of investments in BI systems will increasingly turn to service companies to deliver services that integrate, analyze and report on data from numerous systems. Wider adoption of SaaS business models will make analytical applications more widely used, particularly among midsize companies. However, even large companies with full BI and data warehouse teams will embrace the SaaS model for some aspects of BI. The best example today is in Web site analytics, where business users — typically in marketing — can access very sophisticated reports and analytic applications of Web site activity with virtually no need for IT by leveraging a software as a service provider. The increasing trend toward business process outsourcing and cloud computing will only accelerate this trend, enabling the delivery of BI-related information and analysis for particular subject area domains via the SaaS model.
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