Reporting in from Gartner on Current BI trends
by Rachel Shortt
Fresh from the Gartner BI Summit in Chicago last week, I wanted to explore some of the key themes we witnessed. Primarily, the focus was about future trends and the idea of 'Pervasive BI' which we feel at LogiXML is the Next Generation of Business Intelligence.
This next generation of BI represents a movement toward easier, more collaborative, more integrated, and more interactive BI that will help you deliver useful reporting and BI applications that users really want and that they’ll really want to use. And, it is focused on doing it cost-effectively.
After attending various sessions on Future Trends, Market Dynamics, Real-time Business Intellignce, and Performance Managements with Gartner analysts Betsy Burton, Donald Feinberg, Bill Gassman among others, a number of key themes became apparent. These were a few of the interesting concepts:
- The idea of Business Intelligence actually converging with everyday business applications so that it is transparent to the user and the idea of more process-driven integration which is best for time-sensitive requirements. This will even give rise to a new type of role--a 'process architect' who will have to coordinate both BI and application needs.
- BI vendors will need to componentize BI and break the different pieces apart and let the customer put the pieces together as needed.
- Historic and traditional types of reporting will never go away, but these realtime/embedded BI services into Business applications.
- SOA will change the landscape of BI more dramatically with the idea of more Business Intelligence services, e.g., Search Services, OLAP Services, Reporting Services, Transaction Services, etc.
- In-memory analytics to support performing ad hoc queries on the fly
- Search was a hot topic as well as the concept that users are now driving BI requirements. In alignment with those concepts, more Google-type search UIs for BI will come into demand. In the Google era, we're actually training ourselves to use this style of interface.
- Aligning business strategy with key metrics will become increasingly important with many mainstream companies implementing performance management strategies by 2010.
I was very excited when it became clear that LogiXML and our recently released Logi 8 platform is well on (and sometimes ahead of!) the predicted and recommended path with such key features as AJAX-powered dashboards, a fully 'integratable' BI layer that consists of powerful components to support the convergence of BI and business applications, advanced security based on roles and types of information, and simplified BI for the everyday 'knowledge worker.'
Abstract