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December 11, 2009
Trends for 2010
The holiday season is upon us and while it might be nostalgic to think over how the year went, here is a sneak peek into our glimpse of the future. Well, at least, of the trends that we believe will impact the BI world in 2010. A quick disclaimer before we start (you can never have enough of them these days): these trends are forecast from a practitioner's view-point (based on Marlabs' experiences with our clients) and we hope they help organizations plan their budgets and roadmaps for the year ahead. So without much further ado (cue trumpets and drum-rolls), here are our 5 trends for 2010.
1. iBI Systems: The only thing that can match the raw excitement of watching yet another contestant fall flat in Takeshi's castle is having the power to coin innovate monikers for seemingly unrelated stuff. iBI is one of those. Perceive the subtle italicization of the "i". iBI is the collective noun for those innovations in BI that are brought about as a consequence of the internet age and the technology innovations that have affected it. These include the hotter-than-molten-lava trend of cloud computing as well as much cooler stuff like mashups and advanced visualizations. 2010 should see all of these adapted into the BI mainstream.
2. Very Large Data Warehouses: I remember a time while I was merely old and not senile that any DWH in gigabytes would give me goose-pimples. Now terabytes are passe, petabytes give you something to think about and exabytes and zettabytes are where the goose-pimples start to emerge. (No, I hadn't heard of zettabytes before, either; but check this out). To cut a long story short, traditional relational databases are about as effective in handling these data volumes as pigeons were in carrying urgent information from one kingdom to another. Appliances, columnar databases and distributed applications like hadoop (and other variants of the map-reduce algorithm) are the way ahead in 2010 for organizations that perforce have to handle huge volumes of data. (think online organizations, telecom providers and energy/utilities players who have implemented smart-grids)
3. Mobile Analytics: I was tempted to name this mAnalytics but decided that trying the same gag twice in one page might be stretching it. With the ever increasing adoption of mobile phones and with every man, woman and dog having at least 3 of them (business, casual and sports), cell phone as a delivery mechanism for BI was more inevitable than death and taxes. Well, at least death. At approximately 3.5 billion mobile devices, the phones population is in a neck and neck race with human population, the latter leading only because they have longer necks. All leading commercial BI vendors now have a way of delivering nearly full-functionality reports over smart phones. This delivery mechanism is bound to see an exponential growth in adoption in 2010. In addition to this, GPS enabled smart-phones, will help bring "location" based intelligence into BI helping make it more "event-based"
4. Embedded BI: If your drew an organizational pyramid in white and shaded the people who use BI in black, it would probably (very loosely) resemble a polar bear - vast acres of white and a black nose. (Interesting polar bear fact/myth). Most of the people who use BI today are those who pull out a report for compliance/regulatory/statutory reasons or the people who frame organizational strategy. In other words tending towards an infinitesimally small percentage of the organization. Embedding BI in applications that line-of-business decision makers use, will help them make better data-driven decisions and increase BI adoption. One of the biggest factors that influences this trend is the growing maturity of open source players. 2010 shall see OEMs and SaaS providers embedding BI in applications that a vast majority of the organization uses.
5. Re-defining the boundaries of BI: Finally 2010 shall probably be the year when BI stretches and re-defines its boundaries, like Napolean Bonaparte did all those years ago. Emails, documents, videos, voices and my 3-year old daughter's scratch book shall all come under the purview of BI as unstructured data becomes increasingly important. We shall also see BI being less of an IT activity and more driven by the business user as self-service reports and mash-ups become more common. Increasingly innovations in BI will be driven not by technology, but by business.
So, that is our vision of 2010. While not quite 2012-esque yet, radical changes next year could make it one of the defining years in BI history. This is, as I mentioned upfront, only a sneak preview. If you want to read a more detailed white-paper on these trends, add a comment to this blog and you will get it totally free - not just free of cost but free of the cheap gags in this blog as well.
Posted by Rajesh Ramaswamy at December 11, 2009 6:45 AM
Comments
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Posted by: coetsee at January 25, 2010 11:02 PM
• Lightweight technologies like Gadgets and Widgets have become increasingly popular on the public web. In 2010, enterprises will more intently use them to build tactical solutions ("quick wins") and then slowly migrate to more strategic options. So portal vendors will not only support these frameworks but also will start providing a roadmap for moving from Gadgets to Portlets, and vice-versa.
Posted by: jimmy at January 26, 2010 5:44 AM
