posted 12/15/2010 by MarkGStacey - Views: [1441]
I've recently started doing the round-up for IT Web's BI newsletter (http://www.itweb.co.za/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=34797&Itemid=219), and (with permission), I'm cross-posting the content here for those who don't subcribe:
As a tumultuous 2010 comes to a close, this is a good time to take a look at what is expected in business intelligence in 2011. The biggest growth trend, coming on the back of the explosion in tablets, will be in mobile BI. Since the release of Apple’s iPad in April 2010, millions of people have bought these devices, and with Samsung’s Galaxy and Blackberry’s Playbook also competing, 2011 is definitely the year of the tablet. In BI specifically, Microstrategy has already launched a mobile offering, and SAP has purchased Sybase to break into the mobile market. The other players won’t be far behind….
2010 in many ways was the boom year of in-memory & column-store BI - two technologies that are different but complementary and hence are often combined. The power of these technologies to be deployed on desktop machines meant that in 2010, “in-memory” was often a euphemism for desktop and user driven BI - in 2011, expect a consolidation of these technologies into enterprise BI, with new technologies and methodologies to move analyses from the desktop to a shared and collaborative environment.
The final place that I see big changes in 2011 is the penetration of BI skills and techniques into non-traditional markets. The last few years have seen an explosion of info-graphics in journalism (and the birth of the term “data-journalism”), and the expanding use of analytics within marketing, brand monitoring and the newest field, social media monitoring is becoming more about social media analytics than just monitoring. The skills learnt by BI developers and analysts will prove invaluable in this space.
BI in 2011 will be more an evolution and consolidation than a complete revolution - in the mobile space, BI will an evolution of the mobile and tablet revolution rather a revolution of its’ own.
I couldn't agree more about the emergence of mobile BI as a pivotal player in information delivery. Common implementations of reporting are akin to documents in a briefcase a few decades ago. Vital information which is great when you have access to it, but if you left that briefcase at your office, you were out of luck. Mobile BI will continue to bridge that gap and bring actionable data into our instant-access-anywhere-anytime world and put the data people need in their hands.
I, for one, am looking forward to it.
Good stuf Mark, and I love the new pic. It actually looks like you now.