Key Drivers for Business Intelligence Making the Move to the Cloud

Cloud based Business Intelligence (BI) is widespread today and is being used by many organizations globally. It is a revolutionary concept of delivering business intelligence capabilities “as service” using cloud based architecture that comes at a lower cost yet faster deployment & flexibility. Software as a Service (SaaS) BI is also being used by many small and medium sized enterprises who seek to speed up their businesses with BI and analytics tools.

According to a recent 2012 Wisdom of Crowds Cloud Business Intelligence Market Study of 859 respondents, there is a current strong investment in cloud based BI and growing interest in tapping into the cloud’s benefits; while a Gartner survey throws the fact that almost one-third of the BI platform users surveyed (27 percent, to be exact) are using or planning to use the cloud / SaaS model to expand their business intelligence capabilities in the next 12 months. These statistics strongly suggest that cloud based BI implementation is on an upswing among organizations.

On the other hand, past few years has seen not as much of BI adoption in the public cloud when compared to other applications. Business managers in some organizations fail to see the value of cloud. But this might not always be the reason behind delay in adopting cloud BI. Simply put, it might even be issues related to data integration, visualization and security in cloud BI as these are some considerations frequently cited when moving on cloud. While the market is still confused about the Cloud and SaaS offerings, understanding why businesses adopt cloud for BI might help make wise decisions.

According to a recent research by Gartner, there are three major drivers for cloud BI adoption among organizations which are as follows:

Time Saving

Cloud based BI is deployed faster and provides insights and value in lucrative ways. It comes much adaptable for those enterprises whose IT expenditure runs on inadequate budget or higher workload.

Cost Concerns

Companies that seek Business Intelligence to save long-term operational expenses must go with cloud BI. These solutions might not be cheaper when compared to on-premise non-cloud models and might need huge capital investments; however on a long term, they help organizations in reducing operational costs, IT support expenses and much more.

Expertise Backing

If there is any lack of IT expertise in business that needs assistance in managing BI and analytic systems, companies may choose third-party BI apps on cloud that come along with cloud and tech-savvy professionals who can help deal with skill shortage issues.

Many small organizations in the current scenario perform their work on cloud and develop their business sooner, which consecutively becomes a huge threat to larger organizations. With major advantages that cloud BI has to offer, we can see that many companies will implement cloud BI strategies to make comprehensive analysis. Businesses already using cloud BI must come forward and share their experience along with upbeat and negative feedback naming process efficiency, effectiveness and advantages gained compared to competitors and other benefits.

In the end, are you planning to take your current business intelligence and analytics on cloud? If yes, what’s your consideration for implementing cloud BI?

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Key Trends Shaping Next-Generation Business Intelligence

2012 has emerged to be a promising year for Business Intelligence (BI) with several notable trends, which will continue to dominate the future. With technological progress and proliferation of data, today’s BI and analytics apps are built to access the data faster and for its easier consumption by the business owners. Here is a list of some top trends, which will impact BI and its users in the coming years. Holding a deep understanding of these trends and applying them to business will update the business to stay an edge over the competition.

Top Trends That Will Impact Business Intelligence

Mobile BI and Accessibility

The hype around enabling smartphones & tablets for BI is increasing rapidly as they help the business managers and decision makers to make decisions much faster, anytime anywhere. Mobile BI is identified by the industry analysts as one of the fastest growing trend which gives the business users access to their dashboards and critical business information on their handheld smartphones and tablet devices. This empowers an improvement in sales and services.

Cloud Based BI

With the whole of IT world embracing cloud computing technology, Business Intelligence is no exception. Cloud based BI helps enterprises save IT costs and access data much faster that puts data analytics at ease. However, cloud based implementation of BI requires a defined and secure strategy for its success.

Big Data

Big Data is growing faster as volume of data increases in the organizations and assists businesses to make critical decisions in near real-time. Most of the BI projects use Big Data as part of their data landscape for the value it delivers.

A recent survey conducted by Harris Interactive reported that small businesses are moving faster than larger competitors to leverage Big Data—28 percent identified Big Data as the massive growth in transaction data, while 24 percent said that it is the new technology that addresses volume, variety and velocity challenges of Big Data. The surging information from social media, mobile devices and machine-generated devices was cited by 18 percent as their definition of Big Data, while 19 percent characterized it as the requirement to store and archive data for regulatory compliance. The survey also indicates the awareness of SMEs on the benefits of Big Data—over 70 percent expects the ROI on Big Data within a year. 59 percent of organizations quoted that efficient business operations as primary benefit, and capable to boost sales by 54 percent, 50 percent says higher savings on IT costs, improve business agility by 48 percent, and attract and retain customers by 46 percent.

It is thus evident that companies understand the benefits Big Data can offer their businesses and realize the competitive advantage it can hold. 

Self-Service BI

Today, BI has grown more than a technology as companies around the world demand for relevant and faster access of data to take swift decisions. Self-service BI grants access to non-technical professionals who can create their own dashboards as per their specific needs, thus making them less dependent on the IT.

In-Memory Analytics

In Business Intelligence, in-memory analytics is a methodology that helps to save time in accessing analytics. It works by increasing the speed, performance and reliability of the BI system when querying data. It thus provides its users, faster answers when compared to the disk-based system.

Open Source BI

The top reason why companies often choose open source Business Intelligence is its “lower costs”. It also provides an easy access to all of the enterprise’s projects in progress. The open source BI is gaining momentum in the current trend and is being implemented by small, medium and large companies.

Social Media BI

Most business houses today, have official Twitter accounts and Facebook pages where they promote their brand. With social media’s significance in businesses escalating drastically, companies collect and analyze the data of their customers and other users where BI plays a vital role by obtaining social media stats and analysis reports.

Collaborative BI

With social media getting more prominent in businesses today, BI with social capabilities is yet another emerging platform where users can now share information and work more collaboratively. Social integrated BI solution helps the enterprises to provide their workforce a collaborative platform and increase their productivity.

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Top 5 Myths About Mobile BI that Enterprises Need to Watch

In the last post we were discussing about Business Intelligence of leading-edge organizations goes mobile and how mobile BI helps the businesses and today we will discuss about “Mobile BI Myths” in this article.

Mobile dashboards and BI are among the hottest topics in the industry and justifiably so: mobile access to data is a critical tool for decision making.

Today we will examine the five common myths associated with mobile business intelligence and uncover the facts about cost, implementation, and capabilities. We will also explain why companies should move forward with their mobile business intelligence projects.

#1 Same Mobile BI to All Users

Mid-sized and larger companies would find themselves hard pressed to move their entire mobile workforce onto the same device – making the successful widespread use of mobile BI nearly impossible.

In the past, most of the companies originally deployed their BI applications on Blackberry devices because they were it was most popular among business users and provided the easiest way of accessing corporate information. That has changed with the introduction of the iPhone, Android-based devices and the iPad, mobile users expressed a preference for iPhones and Android-based phones. In addition, web browsers have become device-independent, allowing them to deliver BI content to almost any device.

#2 Each Mobile Device required a Native Application

Most business intelligence tools on the market these days lack the ability to exploit each device’s native capabilities, therefore require companies to build custom reporting and analysis applications for each type of device in use.

With thousands on mobile users of different versions of difference mobile devices will be using mobile BI in an enterprise. With the wrong mobile BI platform in place could be an obstacle that IT simply cannot overcome.

There are a few rare, advanced solutions designed to eliminate the time and effort associated with creating and maintaining multiple versions of various BI assets for each mobile platform.

#3 Mobile BI is only consumed on mobile phones and smartphones.

Few years ago when the majority of mobile BI consumers used BlackBerry and Palm devices, then came iPhone, Android based phones. Devices such as the iPad eliminate the shortcomings of iPhones (mostly related to small screen size) and are actually driving the trend toward large-scale BI adoption for obtaining a high-level view of business operations,.

#4 Mobile Users Are Always Connected

Many mobile BI solution vendors aren’t including features that allow users to perform reporting and analysis when disconnected. There are times when Internet connections – particularly Wi-Fi – may be rather slow. This can frustrate users, forcing them to disconnect from the web, but they may still need to gather important intelligence on their way to a meeting or a customer visit.

It’s important to make sure that capability is included in a mobile BI platform and empowering them to work in disconnected mode.

#5 Mobile BI users can’t perform ad hoc or deep analysis.

Many companies shy away from mobile business intelligence because their users need the ability to interact extensively with data from their smartphones and tablets. Some of the more advanced platforms can deliver advanced reporting and analysis tools without the need for specialized software by leveraging the native capabilities of any mobile browser “to empower mobile workers with analytic functionality that can be applied to virtually any data from any enterprise source.”

In spite of the abounding myths, mobile business intelligence doesn’t have to be expensive, hard to implement, or difficult to use. In fact, companies that chooses the right solution, with the right capabilities, will realize low TCO and rapid ROI, while empowering their mobile users with the ability to access and interact with timely, complete corporate information from any smartphone or tablet.

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