Business intelligence and analytics platforms are hot items across enterprises this year for many reasons. There’s unrelenting pressure on businesses to compete on analytics and to be able to anticipate customer needs and trends ahead of the curve. There is also a drive to cut operational costs to a bare minimum, which requires data to determine what is and is not working.
There is disruption coming from tech-savvy companies—such as Uber or Airbnb—which run purely on data connected to apps with little else in inventory. Lastly, there’s the burgeoning Internet of Things (IoT), which only has just begun to appear on most corporate radar screens, based on delivering data from interconnected sensors, devices, and systems.
Against this backdrop, enterprises are looking to expand BI and analytics capabilities as far and wide as technologies and budgets will allow them to go. The continuing advance of analytic capabilities across the enterprise has reached a “tipping point,” according to Dan Sommer, senior director and market intelligence lead at Qlik, a visual analytics software company. The market “has gone from reporting-centric BI with some analysis, to analysis-centric BI with some reporting,” he said. And, in the process, “every business person is becoming a data analyst,” added Satyen Sangani, founder and CEO of Alation, which provides an enterprise data accessibility platform.
Analytics vendors have been embracing the dramatic changes to this market, moving their solutions from closed systems—accessible to only a few analysts—to more open, network-driven approaches. “The new-age technologies and associated solutions are equipping businesses with visibility from data like never before,” said Krishna Thiagarajan, vice president of enterprise information management for NTT Data, an IT services provider. “The trough of unavailable information is shrinking, and the quality of decision making is improving.”